The Dun Cow Rib

by John Lister-Kaye

  I limped painfully home, cringing with every step. I crept in the back door to the scullery desperate to find Nellie before anyone else saw me. ‘Oh my lordy Lord,’ she cried, wringing her hands in her pinny. ‘I knew you was up to no good.’ Water trickled down my legs and pooled muddily on the flagstones at my feet.

  ‘Please don’t tell,’ I begged. I knew she wouldn’t.

  5

  Ye hunter’s badge

  I can no longer remember when I first became aware of the significance of wildlife. Born into the woods and pastoral landscapes of England, I had gradually become familiar with the existence of foxes and badgers, otters, weasels and stoats, several species of deer and many birds, but no such rarified and thrilling excitement as a wildcat existed either in the cultural heritage of my background or out there in the English countryside.

  The sporting tradition of the eighteenth-century country squire, of huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’, lay at the heart of that heritage. The staring, snapping and snarling relics of the chase adorned many of the Manor House corridors and rooms, an enduring cultural ingredient immortalised in lurid taxidermy. Fox masks with slavering tongues leered as I crept past, otters curled their bristly lips and the mad, goggle-eyes of hares stared out from passage walls, all mounted on glossy mahogany shields, duly dated and referenced on ivory plaques, like gravestones, Killed Paulton Way. 17.11.29, with the initials of the family member who had ridden home rejoicing.

  Other trophies were scattered about the house so that I never knew what was going to confront me as I rounded corridor corners. At first their strange language bewildered me, a codified lexicon of their own, which, to enter the enticing world of conformity, you had to know by heart: foxes lived in ‘earths’ and their silver mounted bushy tails were ‘brushes’; otters lived in ‘holts’ and their thick, tapering tails were ‘poles’; badgers dug ‘setts’, their long-clawed paws ‘pads’; and you didn’t say deer hooves, you said ‘slots’. On white and gleaming frontal bone, red deer antlers possessed their own full glossary – important to know your tines: ‘brow’, ‘bez’, ‘trez’ and ‘tops’; ‘hummel’, ‘switch’, ‘ten pointer’ or the complete, majestic spread of a twelve-point ‘Royal’ stag – or full mounted heads of fallow ‘bucks’ with broad palmate antlers, or roe ‘bucks’ with ‘pearling’, or the freakish malformation of a ‘perruque’, all haughtily eyeing me from on high.

  A whole 38 lb salmon with the glassy eye of a crazed convict stared malevolently from above the butler’s pantry door. In the hall, above a cast-iron umbrella stand bursting with thumb sticks, walking sticks, croquet mallets, ram’s horn crummacks, silver-knobbed canes and old black Briggs’ umbrellas with knobbly handles, something deeply scary called a ‘ferox trout’, all 12 lb of it, with mouth agape and multiple jagged teeth, shark-like, bared for the snap and snatch, floated its menacing grin through the rigid weed of its glass case. All these relict lives were alarmingly life-like; I tiptoed past them as much in awe as in fear that those teeth might still bite.

  At the far end of the smoking-room passage was the gunroom, where immaculately oiled and polished guns and rifles gleamed alluringly from their glass-fronted cases, securely locked away from the prying fingers of small boys, territory from which I was expressly forbidden. ‘Now don’t you let me catch you nowhere near,’ Nellie would wag her finger at me, but that made it a certainty and I sneaked off there as soon as no one was about.

  That long corridor, with its threadbare red runner and squeaky floorboards, lined with bookshelves, also led to my grandfather’s indoor sanctuary, his study, known as the smoking-room, which was always locked if he wasn’t there. I would not have dared even try the brass doorknob. But that corridor held an irresistible magnetism for a small boy. The whole place reeked of antiquity, the irrepressible incense of a past when nothing ever changed: tobacco, gun oil, the tangy scent of cordite, all blended with mansion polish and a whiff of mothballs.

  Every August for most of his adult life my grandfather had taken off to Scotland, in the 1930s it was in his elegant, long-bonneted convertible two-litre Lagonda Tourer, driven by Nellie’s father, West, who performed the triple roles of chauffeur, personal valet and his loader. Top quality English side-lock shotguns came in pairs: Purdeys, Holland & Holland ‘Royals’, Boss, William Powell, Churchill, there are many makes, always in beautiful flat leather cases, embossed with names, initials or family crests, each piece of the dismantled guns – stock, barrels, fore-end – bedded in their own scarlet or royal blue felt-lined compartments. There would also be fitted slots for a small phial of Rangoon gun oil, two steel snap caps, a special ebony handled screwdriver which exactly matched the slot on the engraved side-lock screws, a ramrod with knurled ebony handle and threaded cleaning mops. A matching leather magazine contained the cartridges.

  Such English shotguns were then and still are universally recognised as the best guns in the world, nowadays costing more than an expensive car. They are also works of art. Their steel side-lock plates always intricately and beautifully engraved with acanthus leaves or sporting scenes: pointers, retrievers and spaniels, or pheasants, snipe, partridges, duck or woodcock, and the highly polished stocks sculpted from Spanish walnut root. But those guns were also de rigueur, an essential hallmark of class and wealth, a social shibboleth and a passport to the finest sporting estates in Britain. You were expected to own them and to bring ‘your man’ with you.

  While shooting across most of England was principally about pheasants and partridges, in Yorkshire and Scotland it was grouse – the red grouse – one of only two (with the Scottish crossbill) endemic British bird species. Grouse were then and still are shot walking up ‘over dogs’ – pointers or setters – or ‘driven’ toward the guns by a line of flag-waving beaters. They fly fast and low in coveys of up to twenty or thirty birds at a time. To maximise the ‘bag’ requires skilful sharp-shooting with two double-barrelled shotguns – hence the pair – and a loader to stand behind and reload each gun in turn, smooth and well-rehearsed handovers between the two men in rapid succession. Nellie often told me that the expedition to Scotland for six weeks each year was the highlight of her father’s calendar. The entire household turned out to wave them off.

  They were headed for Lennox Castle in the Campsie Fells, north of Glasgow, lying between the Kilsyth, Kilpatrick and Gargunnock hills, the Scottish lair of my grandfather’s greatest sporting ally, Captain Billy Kincaid-Lennox, Chief of Clan Lennox, whose purple grouse moors stretched into the heathery uplands to the north. It was an annual August migration; ‘the Glorious 12th’ an absolute fixture in my grandfather’s diary.

  After the grouse, in September they moved further north to the far-flung borders of Sutherland for more grouse and for stalking red deer in the high hills, sports which, together with fly-fishing for Atlantic salmon leaping upstream to spawn, had defined the Scottish Highlands ever since Queen Victoria and Prince Albert established the famous triad of patrician sports – grouse, deer and salmon – at Balmoral in the 1850s, later immortalised by Sir Edwin Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen and by John Buchan as a ‘Macnab’, when you achieved all three in one day. When Captain Billy and my grandfather had stalked their stags, they turned south again just in time for the partridge and pheasant shooting season in England.

  Heading down through Yorkshire, they always stopped off at our family’s ancestral seat, Denby Grange, where our cousin, Sir Kenelm, ran a celebrated shoot, before ending up at Captain Billy’s home pheasant shoot at Downton Castle in Shropshire. Flicking through the pages of both Sir Kenelm’s and my grandfather’s game books, I see that before and immediately after the Second World War, among the names of dukes, earls and other titled gents who attended shooting parties at Denby are Sir Aymer Maxwell and his brother, Mr Gavin Maxwell, of whom my grandfather observes in his looping copperplate hand, ‘shot extremely well’. Many years later, after becoming a celebrated travel writer and adding ‘global best-seller’ to his name, Gavin would tell me that
the grey partridge shoots at Denby were a cherished feature of his upbringing.

  When so many gamekeepers and estate workers, as well as their officer-class employers, went off to the world wars, these seasonal migrations temporarily halted, but the tradition was deep-rooted and by the time I was born immediately after the war it had begun to pick up again exactly where it had left off. I’m not sure how long my grandfather continued these annual shooting expeditions – he was seventy-three when I was born, and West died in 1943 and was never replaced – but throughout my formative years the enticing echo of those predatory days resounded through the corridors of the Manor House.

  As I grew older and was swept up in the shooting culture myself – I was given my first gun at thirteen – so I was allowed to inspect the game books and to listen spellbound to my grandfather reminiscing with my father about those pre-war expeditions, about their extravagant bags of hundreds of grouse in a day, always, for some arcane reason, counted in ‘brace’. Talk of shooting until the gun barrels were too hot to hold; of blunt and characterful gamekeepers who ruled their estates with forthright opinions; of pointers, terriers and retrievers; of walking up ptarmigan in the highest hills or stalking roe deer in the woods; of crawling through mountain bogs with a tweed-clad stalker to close in on a stag. I was enthralled and longed for the opportunity to travel to Scotland myself, to partake of this grand, glowing Highland tradition.

  At some point during those impressionable years I had found in the library at the Manor House a fine green cloth-bound volume with a gold thistle embossed on the cover, entitled Wild Sports and Natural History of the Highlands (1848) by Charles St John, the younger son of Viscount Bolingbroke. Beside it, also in handsome green cloth bindings in two volumes, embossed with ‘Ye Hunter’s Badge’ of the heads of a red deer stag, a sea eagle, a salmon and a seal, all enclosed within a heraldic shield, was John Colquhoun’s The Moor and the Loch (1880). Both were best-sellers of their day; the acknowledged sporting handbooks of the period, which graced the library shelves of every sporting lodge and country house in Britain.

  Inspired by my grandfather’s tales of the Highlands, I took the books down and studied them wide-eyed with awe. Eventually I would inherit them. Recently I looked them out again, blew the dust from their tops and plunged back into their rough-edged pages. I not only wanted to refresh my memory, but was also on a journey to revisit the old buzz I had gleaned from them so long ago. I wanted to try to figure out just how they would have influenced my formative awareness of the bizarre contradictions and conflicts that then existed – and for many still do – between ‘sport’, natural history and nature conservation.

  It was in those celebrated tomes that I first encountered the Scottish wildcat. Both books contained a chapter dedicated to the species, accompanied by crudely effective pen-and-ink illustrations of what the artist imagined a wildcat should look like. The results certainly look wild, but that is where the resemblance ends – not so surprising since both authors freely admit that the wildcat is very rare, so it is most unlikely that their illustrators had ever seen one. But John Colquhoun and Charles St John certainly had. They both claim proudly to have hunted down and killed many wildcats. More than this, St John openly advocated the extirpation of wildcats as heinous vermin.

  I remember heaving down the weighty two-volume Webster’s dictionary to discover the meaning of extirpate. As a ten-year-old I was shocked. ‘To root out, to destroy totally, to EXTERMINATE.’ Why, I struggled to comprehend, would anyone seek to wipe out such an exquisitely beautiful wild animal? I read on.

  St John insists: ‘the damage they would do to the game must be very great’. He then recounts the demise of one wildcat he happened upon while fishing in Sutherland. Armed with a stout stick he pursued her with his terriers

  until she took refuge in a corner of the rocks . . . As soon as I was within six or seven feet of the place she sprang straight at my face . . . Had I not struck her in mid air as she leapt at me, I should probably have got some severe wound . . . she fell with her back half broken among the dogs, who, with my assistance dispatched her.

  Then in slightly more conciliatory tone he adds, ‘I never saw an animal fight so desperately, or one which was so difficult to kill.’

  Colquhoun, writing thirty-five years later than St John, opens his short treatise on the wildcat by firmly stating, ‘The wild-cat [sic] is now rare in this country.’ He goes on to say, ‘Although I have spent a great part of my life in the most mountainous districts of Scotland, where killing vermin is . . . my own recreation, I have never seen more than five or six genuine wild-cats.’ He then describes them with creative hyperbole thus: ‘the hair long and rough, the head exceedingly broad, ears short, tusks extremely large’ and ‘the great length and power of the limbs’. He builds a picture of a truly fearsome beast. ‘Lambs, grouse, hares, are all seized with equal avidity . . . The female fears nothing when in defense of her young, and will attack even man himself.’

  Much of this is sensationalist baloney, which begs the question whether Colquhoun was exaggerating to excite his readers, or even whether his claim to have seen and killed wildcats was actually true. That question might also be fairly addressed of Gavin Maxwell in the early chapters of Ring of Bright Water:

  Wildcats grow to an enormous size, at least double that of the very largest domestic cat . . . Once I caught one accidentally in a rabbit snare, a vast tom with ten rings to his tail, and that first year at Camusfeàrna I twice saw the kittens at play in the dawn . . . there was no hint of the ferocity that takes a heavy toll of lambs and red-deer calves.

  Although laced with his enchanting lyricism, much of the rest of Maxwell’s anecdotal record rings largely implausible:

  The males sometimes mate with domestic females [entirely true and now a very real problem for the species] but the offspring rarely survives [certainly not true] either because the sire returns to kill the kittens as soon as they are born [highly unlikely] and so expunge the evidence of this peasant wenching, or because of the distrust in which so many humans hold the taint of the untamable [appealing, but sadly also untrue]. It is the wild strain that is dominant, in the lynx-like appearance, the extra claw, and the feral instinct; and the few half-breeds that escape destruction usually take to the hills and the den life of their male ancestors.

  Yes, the pure wildcat is markedly bigger than a large domestic tabby, but certainly not ‘at least double that of the very largest domestic cat’. And it has marginally longer limbs and a broader skull also with fractionally larger canine teeth, but ‘the great length and power of the limbs’ and ‘ten rings to his tail’, ‘the lynx-like appearance’ and ‘the extra claw’ are all pure myth. Now having first-hand experience of many wildcats, both alive and dead, there is no extra claw and I have never seen one with more than six distinct rings to its tail, and many have only four or five.

  Other writers and observers have chosen to perpetuate this feline mythology – the wildcat’s fierceness, its fangs, its untamable reputation, its size and dramatic strength – but much of it is simply fabricated or dramatic exaggeration. The obvious and overriding fact is that the animal is WILD. Of course it is fierce. Of course it is strong. It is a predator and needs a vicious bite to secure and kill its prey, just as do the fox and the badger, the otter, weasel, stoat and pine marten, if you are daft enough to test any of them on soft human flesh. And in common with all of the above, if cornered or attacked by man or dog, all of them will struggle and bite as fiercely and as savagely as any wild animal. I know very well how strong the wildcat is.

  When I first came to live in the Highlands in the 1970s, I had a collection of ornamental wildfowl – ducks, geese and swans of many different species. They were secured in a large enclosure fenced to six feet with stout netting to keep out foxes and badgers. During the first few years I was puzzled to find that birds as big as geese were disappearing without any obvious indication of the culprit; ducks and geese vanishing off their nests but never an
y sign of a struggle. So I set a large cage trap baited with a dead wood pigeon. In the morning I found myself staring into the flaring green eyes of a wildcat. I drove it to Glen Affric twelve miles away and released it into the ancient forest of the Caledonian Pine Reserve. Soon the predation started again. I reset the trap. Again I caught a cat, another large wildcat tom, hissing, spitting and angrily flicking its bushy tail. Off I went to Glen Affric again, marvelling at the strength of a cat that could snatch a weighty Canada goose from its nest and then climb a six-foot fence with the bird in its teeth, leaving scarcely a feather behind.

  As Gavin Maxwell relates of his Highland home in the 1960s, back in those days wildcats did not seem to be rare on the west coast or in the remoter reaches of these glens. On winter nights we would often catch sight of their burning green eyes in our headlights. Gamekeepers on surrounding estates regularly hunted them down. Every year we heard of wildcats being shot or snared. In the 1970s, a local keeper known only as ‘The Blue Charm’ (after a much-favoured salmon fly) told me that in snares and gin traps he killed ‘ten or more wildcats every year’.

  As a child and well into my teens I barely questioned this gratuitous killing. It was what was done – the norm, part of the accepted culture of sporting estates the length and breadth of Britain – together with trapping, snaring and shooting of every hooked beak, every weasel, stoat, polecat, pine marten, hedgehog, otter, badger and fox, even herons and gulls; every creature, in fact, that might have the temerity to take a game bird, or its egg or its chick, as well as many innocent species that didn’t. It was killing that those gamekeepers were specifically employed to undertake, their success displayed on macabre gibbets, totems of murder, where the wind- and rain-shrivelled corpses of ‘vermin’ were proudly arrayed. To quote Maxwell again, ‘the estate . . . had long waged war upon the wildcats, and a tree . . . was decorated with their banded tails hanging like monstrous willow catkins from its boughs’. I had seen many such gibbets in the woods around my English home and was drawn to them out of morbid curiosity, astonished by the numbers of birds nailed there: rows of jays, crows, magpies, sparrowhawks, owls, kestrels, merlins, hobbys and buzzards, among the hapless weasels and stoats in their dozens.