Gods of the Morning

by John Lister-Kaye

  Global warming it may or may not, in the long run, prove to have been; a climatic aberration it certainly was. It was a ludicrous extreme, a ridiculous blip, a spike of perfidious deception. And we fell for it. We thought it was the early spring to crown all springs. We thought it would never end; that it would mellifluously drowse into a summer of dreams and the bright remembered days of childhood. ‘Isn’t it great?’ We all nodded.

  *  *  *

  The main road winds up the glen mimicking the meanders of the river. To the north-west the glacial valley is a wall of spiny gorse, hundreds of acres of steep, impenetrable thicket. It’s one of the great delights of spring in the glen. We move in a golden dazzle of coconut and almond perfume. The gorse and broom flowers daub the sun-facing, thousand-foot slope of the valley-side in a blur of gaudy colour. Beneath it lies a dense, umber quilt of winter-killed bracken, the new crozier shoots still to appear in April. At its height in August, unshaded by trees, the bracken can reach over six feet tall. Deer vanish into its jungle in an instant. Wading through is a strength-sapping struggle against rigid, stringy stems and rough, scratchy fronds. When the frosts return in the autumn it pleases me to see it rust away, finally collapsing to a foot-snagging tangle of crinkly undergrowth, where it lies all winter. When the snows cover its tangle, it provides a haven for voles and mice, but it is also where the lissom weasel hunts unseen.

  The snows were long gone. February had been dry and cold, March was now hot, and that beguiling, desiccating breeze had been insinuating its way into the dead bracken for weeks. The gorse sizzled around it, wallowing in its orgy of scent and colour. Both were as dry and crisp as cornflakes.

  Longing for a beer at the end of a long hot day, my son Warwick took off for the pub three miles away. He arrived at eight thirty and at last the pint foamed in front of him. As he raised it to his lips his mobile phone rang – a friend calling from the other side of the valley. ‘Sorry, mate, but do you know your house is on fire?’ Warwick never got his beer.

  We should have seen it coming. We were half asleep in all that sunshine. We hadn’t even put out a fire warning. We all knew the bracken was tinder and the gorse was explosive. We were caught napping.

  For ten minutes mobile-phone signals fizzed from the mast high above us. It was a call to arms. Some of us were in baths, others asleep; some were online, yet more slumped in front of the television after a full day’s work. Glinting in the evening gloom, cars streamed, like frightened fish, the quick mile to Warwick’s house. Thankfully it wasn’t on fire, but the hill behind it had exploded, making it appear that the house was engulfed.

  Something, perhaps a cigarette carelessly thrown from a car window, or possibly even a mindless youth ‘seeing if it would burn’ – something we’ll never know – caused a flame to lick into that roadside bracken. In seconds it was an inferno. The breeze tunnelling down the glen quickly fanned it up the steep slope and into the dense jungle of pyrotechnically charged gorse. By the time we got there it was an unassailable wall of flame and smoke five hundred feet high, stretching a quarter of a mile down the valley towards Aigas.

  Between us and the source of the fire, dotted along the valley, are five houses. These had to be our first concern. The fire brigade, a gang of local Beauly boys, arrived with a tender and immediately radioed for more. An hour later there were eleven. They came from far and wide, their blue lights flickering through the darkness. Their screaming sirens could be seen and heard for miles before they arrived. Once we knew that the brigade boys were stationed beside each house, spraying roofs and gardens, and that the occupants were safely evacuated, we could gather our team of field staff to assess the task ahead. Young ranger trainees and old hands, all nine of us, accompanied by a tender and a professional team of firemen impressively equipped with masks and goggles, breathing apparatus, knapsack sprays and fire-proof suits and helmets, progressed to the moor above the loch, to a downwind position overlooking the fire. What we saw stopped us dead in our tracks.

  A mile away, a cliff of flame and smoke three hundred yards wide was surging towards us as fast as a man could run. It raged through banks of gorse and broom and was rapidly fanning out into the open heather. There was no chance of tackling it in the gorse thickets – the heat was immense – but we could at least slow its progress as it probed and zigzagged out into the heather. Hopefully we could prevent it closing in on our precious native woodlands and forestry plantations.

  At this moment came a shock, which, at first, we couldn’t take in. The senior officer in charge of the professional fire-crew told us that he and his men wouldn’t be able to help us fight the fire. They were bound by ‘health and safety regulations’, he explained. After dark they were allowed only to fight fires that were threatening houses and lives. ‘But it is heading towards us, towards our houses and our lives,’ we pleaded. ‘If this wind keeps up it will be on us in less than a couple of hours.’

  ‘Sorry.’ He shook his head. ‘We can’t help, but you can borrow our long-handled beaters.’ It was no good standing arguing. With torpedoed hearts we headed towards the flames.

  I can tell you that fighting a bush fire is a hell all of its own. Armed with shovels and beaters we pitched in. Warwick took charge. He lined up the team a few yards apart and attacked the vanguard of the flames charging towards us like an angry enemy. The plan was to break up the line of fire into more manageable bites.

  A raging fire, a fire out of control, seems to awake some deep primeval fear within us all. For thousands of years mankind has used and abused fire in equal measure. Like water, fire is an elemental component of our lives, echoing back to our long ancestral origins; we welcome it into our homes and we would miss it terribly if we couldn’t. To me a living fire is one of the essential comforts of home; as I sit and stare into the flames it seems to tug at the long leashes of our cave-dwelling past. To have to live without it would close part of me down and gnaw at my soul, denying a fragment of who I am. Yet its control is such a fine line, as anyone who has witnessed a house fire, or even a bad chimney fire, knows only too well. The sight of this blaze lighting up the night sky in a sinister orange glow, which, people told me later, could be seen fifty miles away, filled me with a deep and humbling dread.

  The ranger team pitched in with vigour. Warwick, Brenna, Elspeth, Alicia, Dave, Scott, Duncan, Kate and Sarah surfed into the fray on a gut-clenching wave of adrenalin. They swung and they beat and they cursed the night air blue. They stamped and they flailed their beaters and shovels with all the gusto of rampaging Vikings. They were magnificent.

  The choking smoke blackened their faces and seared their lungs. The oxygen they so desperately needed was being sucked away by the flames so that they had to turn back, coughing and spluttering to gulp cleaner air where they could find it. Their hearts thumped, like military drums, and their arms flailed endlessly, up and down, up and down, relentlessly, urgently, dangerously, often hopelessly. Their eyes, crazed with a mix of fear and tenacity, streamed tears of anguish, exhaustion and stinging pain. Still the fire came on in tireless rushes of snapping and charging flame, and always suffocating heat. No sooner had we extinguished a few yards of heather than we had to rush back because it had sprung to life again. The swirling wind dervishes, born of the sucking heat, seemed to taunt us with ever fiercer spurts of bursting, racing flame.

  There was little I could do to help them. Their young arms and legs and lungs were far better suited to the fight than mine so I busied myself with ferrying water to drink and wet cloths to cool their blackened brows, stamping the embers behind them, boosting morale wherever I could. Lucy and her team of domestic helpers arrived with sandwiches, chocolate and steaming, sugary tea to fuel their energy and sloosh down their searing throats. There was no time to stop: refreshment had to be taken on the job, snatching a bite here and a swig there.

  They kept going long into the night. Just when I thought they must surely collapse and give up, fired by some strange inner strength, they seeme
d to find a renewed burst of power to keep their flailing arms at work. It was heroic and the battle analogy was frighteningly real. Often the enemy wouldn’t die. It took two, three, sometimes four blows to subdue the flame, only to find that it flared up again a few feet away to shouts of ‘Look out! Behind you!’ and ‘Quick, it’s getting away!’ so that they had to turn back and flail all over again. It was as if they were fighting for their lives, calling up feats of endurance way beyond any prior assessment I could have wildly guessed at. As I stood back and watched them, a line of shadowy figures lit like entranced fire-dancing tribesmen in the smoky darkness, I felt an overwhelming wave of pride.

  They kept it up all night, holding the fire at bay. Only as the dawn emerged in a steely line behind us did the brigade boys come up and join us with their smart equipment. The knapsack sprayers were a great help and I was glad to call the rangers in, back to our little environmental centre, the Magnus House, where we had set up a command post, a place to eat and wipe charred faces and collapse into a chair after many hours of punishing toil.

  We had done well. Winning? Perhaps not, but we had certainly slowed the fire’s progress and contained it throughout the night. Without their effort it would have reached our woodlands for sure. Elspeth, the nimblest and fittest hill runner in our team, offered to sprint up the half-mile of open moorland to Bad à Chamlain, the trig point on the high peak of the moor, to view the extent of the damage and the direction of the flames. The news she radioed in was deeply depressing. The fight was far from over and a new fire from further up the valley was now heading our way again on a brisk breeze.

  What was clear was that we needed superhuman help. I asked the brigade chief to telephone for a helicopter. ‘We’ll be there in half an hour,’ promised the control room. Helicopter fire-fighting protocols are well rehearsed in the Highlands and I knew what a boon it would be to have airborne support. The aircraft dangles a nylon bag on a long line, dunking it into a loch or river, scooping up a ton of water at a time, then flies straight to the line of flame, laying out the water in a drenching rain just where the fire would like to go.

  We were lucky. The pilot was an ace. Each ton of water came at four-and-a-half-minute intervals, streaming back and forwards between the loch and the fire, the pinewoods between them thudding and swaying with the power of the blades and the downdraught. Neighbours streamed in to help at both ends of the fire. Farmers, crofters, keepers and stalkers willingly piled in, a gang of local men and boys to join the line down in the valley with the pros. Our ranger team had had an hour off, an hour of food and rest, while we took stock in the rising light of the morning.

  As I looked from face to face, the young people with whom I work every day were scarcely recognisable. The smoke-blackened faces and blistered hands, the broken fingernails, the singed eyebrows, eyes rubbed red and streaming, hair in wild tangles, girls’ soft complexions smudged and blotched, the boys’ unshaven, charred and streaked, like commandos after a jungle skirmish.

  When the helicopter thudded into view to tackle the moor, the team leaped to their feet and headed off up the hill once more. They joined the line of pros, now fifteen of us, all fighting the moorland together, Warwick directing the helicopter to douse the new fronts. I was speechless with admiration, a heart overflowing with the gratitude of a people being delivered from a vicious and brutal occupation. I stood a little way off and watched. We were winning at last.

  *  *  *

  It was to be another full day before we could be confident the dragon was dead. The brigade boys stayed with us to the bitter end, then another night just to make sure it didn’t spring to life again. The ordeal was over. We had lost about two hundred acres of scrub and another hundred of moorland, all consumed in Shakespeare’s ‘violent ends’. Twenty-four hours later it rained – the first wet day for six weeks – and as April arrived it snowed.

  We had crashed from the sublime to the absurd and alarming. Winter returned not just to Scotland but right across the UK, with swirling rage and dramatic destruction. On 3 April the Telegraph reported:

  Tens of thousands of homes have been affected by power cuts over the last two days, as companies blamed snow for the disruption. Motorways were jammed as perilous ice and frozen snow forced drivers to slow down, with drifts up to seven feet high on exposed higher ground. Yesterday, a snow plough – sent out to rescue a stranded motorist – came off the road itself and had to be rescued by gritters, while unsuspecting campers woke up to waist-high snow on the North Yorkshire moors.

  Temperatures plummeted. Here at Aigas we recorded –8º Celsius overnight on 4 April. Sharp frost continued for a full week. This was much more than old Dunc Macrae’s lambing storm. It was just the sort of extreme climatic aberration we had been warned would characterise climate change. It was sudden and severe, actually the worst April weather for thirty years. Even when temperatures began to lift, brooding clouds dominated our days. Rain and wind kept our heads down and our collars up. April would eventually record 250 per cent of normal rainfall for the Moray Firth area.

  The fire had been a huge distraction at the end of our heatwave, and it continued to be so as we tried to assess the damage it might have done to wildlife, particularly to ground-nesting birds and, doubtless, invertebrates too, although mercifully the nesting season was barely under way. It would be many more weeks before we could draw any firm conclusions. Now, looking back, we know that, frightening and potentially disastrous though the fire was, it was but a missed note in the bigger opera of that unseasonable heat wave and its abrupt reversal into winter, followed by the soggiest spring for years. None of us had any idea how devastating it would be to so much around us – but that comes later.

  13

  Buzzard

  High, high, buzzard, high

  From scarce moving wings

  Suspended in the sky

  Tear, tear your metallic scream

  From the lava lungs

  Molten through the throat.

  Terror, terror is struck,

  Into the soft gloved ear;

  And the frantic brain

  Spins the limbs to action,

  Or to frozen fear –

  Of the butchering plummet,

  the entering claw,

  Of the sweeping sickle,

  And the ravening maw.

  ‘Buzzard’, J.L-K.

  April normally means buzzard. Wings suspended in the sky, circling high. It is now that they pair off and display, often two or three pairs together in a spiral of reaching pinions, turning, tilting, wings and backs glinting in the bright sunlight between bursts of fizzing showers. I hear their blade-thin cries slicing the new day soon after sunrise. A glance upward tells me that again this year they will nest in the birch wood behind the loch.

  Few birds and sounds so roundly augment this landscape. We have golden eagles and ospreys and peregrines, all iconic species of the wild Highlands, of course, but I see those species as the lofty aristocrats who may or may not deign to grace us with their presence, the occasional ormolu on the satinwood frame of our glens and hills. But buzzards are the yeomen of everyday occurrence, the working tenantry of the land, and a buttress to the fabric of our days. As the robins and rooks are to the gardens, so the buzzards are to the fields and woods and moors. They are a given, expected and required. Our woods would not be the same without them.

  As a small boy of perhaps seven or eight, I was walking through an English wood with my father. We came to a clearing where pheasants had been fed grain from a hopper. There, in a tangle of pale feathers, lay a dead buzzard, recently shot or poisoned by a gamekeeper. I had never seen a buzzard close up before. In fact, even if one had been pointed out to me as a silhouette in the sky, I don’t think I had ever properly imagined what it was like. Now it was here, at my feet. My father wouldn’t let me touch it for fear that it was contaminated with strychnine, the poison regularly used back then, but gingerly he held it up by a primary feather and its broad outstretche
d wings dangled four feet to the ground. The silence and the charged pathos of the moment are as vivid to me now as if it were yesterday.

  In those days buzzards were an uncommon sight in the countryside throughout Britain. They had been persecuted – shot on sight, trapped and poisoned for killing pheasant poults and partridges – to such an extent that they had been driven out of the farmed countryside and survived only in remote and mountainous regions. They are still persecuted in some places today, but the protection afforded them by the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act has enabled a steady recovery to their present status of being possibly the commonest bird of prey in Britain, at around 80,000 pairs. They are also highly visible. Their habit of perching on telegraph poles and other prominent viewing points, their soaring spirals on bright days of lifting thermals and their mewing cry (much abused in television dramas the moment a scene goes anywhere near a forest, a mountain or a moor), all blend to make the buzzard’s presence very obvious.

  Two buzzards,

  Still-wings, each

  Magnetised to the other,

  Float orbits.

  ‘March Morning Unlike Others’,

  Ted Hughes

  So successful has their recovery been that there is now talk from sporting lobby groups of lifting legal protection or even ‘a licensed cull’ of buzzards in and around pheasant shoots, an action that could be technically possible under the terms of the Act, as it is with fish-eating goosanders and cormorants on salmon rivers. There is no doubt that buzzards kill pheasant poults. It is hardly surprising that if thousands of young, inexperienced game birds are released together in one place they are going to create a honey pot of attraction for predators of all sorts. I have some sympathy for gamekeepers who do their best to guard against predation by carefully siting their feeders and release pens and by providing lots of cover for the young pheasants, but I would never support lifting the legal protection for birds of prey and certainly not ‘a cull’ of any kind.