The Nature of Winter Read online

  Praise for The Nature of Autumn:

  Longlisted for the Wainwright Prize 2017

  “A delightful meditation.” – Stephen Moss, The Guardian

  “Breathtaking . . . with characteristic moments of close observation, immersion and poetry . . . a delight.” – Miriam Darlington, BBC Wildlife

  “A book that quietly celebrates life, at the very moment life is most quietly celebrating itself.” – Herald

  “Enchanting.” – Sara Maitland, BBC Countryfile Magazine

  Praise for Jim Crumley’s nature writing:

  Shortlisted for a Saltire Society Literary Award, 2014

  “Crumley conveys the wonder of the natural world at its wildest . . . with honesty and passion and, yes, poetry.” Susan Mansfield, Scottish Review of Books

  “Scotland’s pre-eminent nature writer.” – Guardian

  “Crumley’s distinctive voice carries you with him on his dawn forays and sunset vigils.”John Lister-Kaye, Herald

  “The best nature writer working in Britain today.” David Craig, Los Angeles Times

  “Enthralling and often strident.” Observer

  “Glowing and compelling.” Countryman

  “Well-written . . . elegant. Crumley speaks revealingly of ‘theatre-in-the-wild’.” Times Literary Supplement

  Also by Jim Crumley

  NATURE WRITING

  The Nature of Autumn

  Nature’s Architect

  The Eagle’s Way

  The Great Wood

  The Last Wolf

  The Winter Whale

  Brother Nature

  Something Out There

  A High and Lonely Place

  The Company of Swans

  Gulfs of Blue Air

  The Heart of the Cairngorms

  The Heart of Mull

  The Heart of Skye

  Among Islands

  Among Mountains

  Badgers on the Highland Edge

  Waters of the Wild Swan

  The Pentland Hills

  Shetland – Land of the Ocean

  Glencoe – Monarch of Glens

  West Highland Landscape

  St Kilda

  ENCOUNTERS IN THE WILD SERIES:

  Fox / Barn Owl / Swan / Hare / Badger / Skylark

  FICTION

  The Mountain of Light

  The Goalie

  Published by Saraband,

  Digital World Centre,

  1 Lowry Plaza,

  The Quays, Salford, M50 3UB,

  United Kingdom

  www.saraband.net

  Copyright © Jim Crumley 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

  electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without first

  obtaining the written permission of the copyright owner.

  ISBN: 9781910192863

  ISBNe: 9781912235094

  Editor: Craig Hillsley

  For George – one last time – with profound gratitude

  Contents

  Prologue: The White Bird Passes Through

  One: White Walls Weeping

  Two: Whatever Happened to Bleak Midwinter?

  Three: Sweet Medwin Water

  Four: The Well-being of Mountain People Is My Purpose

  Five: A Diary of Early Winter

  Six: Whale Watch (1): The Narwhal in the Sky

  Seven: Solstice

  Eight: Wolf Moon

  Nine: Hark the Herald Eagle

  Ten: Whale Watch (2): The Humpback’s Back

  Eleven: Jay Is for Crow

  Twelve: A Diary of Late Winter

  Thirteen: Insh Marshes: A Waterworld with No Half Measures

  Fourteen: I Went Out to the Hazel Wood

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  The White Bird Passes Through

  The nature of winter is one of simplicities. The wild world is reduced to its barest essentials. It is a self-portrait worked in low light with a limited palette of pastels. Here, for example, is one such portrait.

  You might come across it and think at first glance that you had wandered into the motif for a painting by Monet at the height of his Impressionist powers. Three quarters of the composition is given over to a soft-focus screen of trees at dusk, and this sets the tone, establishes the atmosphere. Individual trees are hinted at rather than rendered explicitly, because between the screen of trees and the viewer there is a second screen, flimsy and translucent, but essential to the startling effect of the whole: it is a screen of falling snow. The remaining quarter of this self-portrait of winter – the bottom quarter – is itself divided into three distinct and shallow horizontal bands. There is first a band of tall grass, which meshes raggedly with the lower parts of the trees. It is a pale, straw-coloured band; it speaks as eloquently as the falling snow of winter, and its shade contrasts sharply with the darkening bluey-greeny-grey of the trees. At the very bottom of the portrait is a slim band of water, pale and featureless and colourless, so the setting is defined as the bank of a river or the shore of a lake. And all these bands of colour – trees, grass and water – stretch from edge to edge as far as the eye can see. There is no vertical emphasis in this self-portrait. All is hunkered down and stretched wide and taut as . . . well, as taut as an artist’s canvas.

  The falling snow has just begun, and as yet it clings to nothing, and there is no wind, for it falls straight down, yet it is the snow and the subdued light which impart the sense of the season and the hour of the day. Winter, at the very moment you stand before this self-portrait, is battening down in preparation for a long and very cold night.

  It may not sound like much of a portrait (for the writer must always come up short when he tries to render the artist’s visualisation with his palette of words), but I have not yet told you about the third horizontal band, the one between the grass and the water. Unlike the other horizontals, it stretches only seven-eighths of the way across the composition from left to right, and it is much shallower than the other bands. Yet the viewer’s eye homes in on it at once with the certainty of moth to flame, which is of course precisely what the artist intended. It shows, hunched against the cold, a loosely-spaced frieze of forty-four little egrets. A forty-fifth glides in to land just inside the right-hand edge. The whole thing is one of the most moving and enduring images of nature I have ever seen, and I have been carrying it around in my head for thirty years now. I was asked by someone in the audience at a book festival what I was working on, and when I said that it was a book about the nature of winter, she asked, “And what does that look like?” I said it was still a secret, but what I could have said was, “A long line of forty-four little egrets standing on the shore of a lake at dusk just as the snow starts falling, and a forty-fifth little egret glides in to land.”

  And it is not a painting by Monet, although the artist has clearly set out to achieve something like an Impressionist effect. In fact, it is not a painting at all, but a photograph. It lies on my oak table as I write, and even on a spring day of bright sunshine it contrives to thrill and chill me in the same instant, as it did that day in 1988 when for the first time I turned a page in one of the most remarkable and downright exquisite nature books I have ever owned, and there it was, and I probably gasped out loud. The book is The White Egret (Blandford, 1988) by a Japanese photographer, Shingi Itoh, and time without number in the intervening years I have taken it down from my bookshelves when I felt fed up or ill at ease or dissatisfied with something I had just written, and I have felt my mood lighten or my sense of perspective readjust to a more even keel in the reflected light of its quite magical aura.r />
  Sometimes when I’m out and alone in the company of nature and the raw beauty of the setting takes over from whatever original purpose had led me there, I think about the elusive nature of what I aspire to as a writer, of the arrogance that underpins the ambition to incarcerate what lies before me within the covers of a book. Then I think of Shingi Itoh and his book, and I reassure myself of the merits of the endeavour, if you put in the work, if you approach it in the right frame of mind. In his preface to what is primarily a photographic essay, he wrote:

  I have taken more than one hundred thousand photographs of egrets . . . the task of capturing the true beauty of the lustrous, snow-white egret on film has been completely beyond my capabilities, although I have continued to take pictures of them. As difficult as this task might be . . . I have felt a need to understand the egret’s movements and behaviour, their enduring existence, and to share what I have learned . . .

  One hundred thousand photographs! And one of these, shot at a pre-roosting gathering of little egrets – in what I imagine were agonising winter conditions for wildlife photography – travelled halfway round the world and fell into my hands by happy accident, and made an unlikely disciple in Scotland of the culture of white egrets (in Japan, the bird is a recurring motif in painting, literature, haiku, song and place names). Thank you, Shingi Itoh, for your work and for your sharing; it is a job very well done.

  About the time that The White Egret was published in Britain, a recovering egret population in France had begun to send emissaries across the English Channel, where they established a pioneering presence along the south coast. The first British breeding record was in Dorset in 1996 and there are now around 700 pairs with more than 4,000 wintering birds. The slow drift northward continues, and solitary travellers have begun to turn up on some unlikely wetlands. For example:

  Loch Leven, on the border between Kinross and Fife, January 2017, the day sunny and hazy, the RSPB’s Vane Farm reserve drenched by a ragged, undisciplined choir of around 200 curlew voices, a gathering rare enough to be thrilling. It is also begs symbolic questions of where our country stands in its relationship with nature. Curlew fortunes are in steep decline right across Britain, numbers have fallen by two-thirds since 1970, and given that Britain hosts more than a quarter of the world’s population, the bird has become a high priority for nature conservation. It is a victim of land use change in particular, the tendency towards commercial forestry and field drainage, the consequent loss of wetlands. In the short term, reserves like this are priceless, for the land is tailored to a perfect habitat for curlews and other troubled species, and it allows people to witness spectacles like this one at close quarters, so that they can watch and listen to nature making its own arguments. Such circumstances create the opportunity for people to see what can be done, and to win new friends for nature’s cause. It is essential work.

  The curlews moved in from the fields in a constant left-to-right drift low across open water, beyond which was a wide grassy mound where geese grazed. Many of the curlew banked round the far side of the mound and came back over its wide crown in a still-winged glide to the shore. As each bird landed it raised its wings before it settled, a heraldic pose of beauty and balletic poise.

  Then one more wave of about thirty curlews came over the mound from the north, and right in the middle of them was a vivid white bird that blazed in the sunlight, and I shook my head in disbelief. Then as the curlews’ wings stopped beating and they began to glide, the white bird stretched out a long neck, which I now realised had been tucked inside its shoulders, and I remembered something:

  To maintain balance, the egret untucks its neck when taking off and landing.

  It was the word “untucks” that had stuck in my mind when I read the line in Shingi Itoh’s book, and I had smiled at the idea of being able to untuck your neck, like pulling your shirt out of your trousers. And here, after all these years of turning the pages of that book with a kind of reverence, here was a wild white egret not twenty-five miles from my doorstep. And of course the next thing that came into my mind was that photograph, which so summarised winter for me by reducing it to its essential simplicities.

  It landed, not with the curlews, but alone and on a different shore, and in the instant of landing it re-tucked its neck. It walked a few yards, a snow bird on black heron-legs, and sought the lee of a small clump of tall, reedy grass and began to preen. At a distance of around a hundred yards, it looked like a flapping curtain in the wind, until it reassembled itself and became egret again. Then it ran a few steps, untucked its neck and flew down a watery channel and just above its own reflection. I took one photograph, which I will keep until I get a better one. It is over-exposed and out of focus, neither of which was surprising in the circumstances, but the pose is one that is familiar to me. The angle is different, but the attitude of the bird so low over water is uncannily like the forty-fifth little egret in Shingi Itoh’s photograph, the one flying into the picture from the right-hand edge.

  In my own photograph, the wings extend in a straight horizontal line from the head to the “elbow” of each wing, then angle down at about 120 degrees. It is a three-quarters view, so I can see most of the underside of the left wing and, because of a complete fluke of the light, the shadow of the bird’s long, black bill is thrown onto the inside of that wing. One photograph – 99,999 fewer than the Japanese maestro – but it was my only souvenir of the moment when the white bird passed through my life (until I wrote this chapter).

  I was back at the loch in early April and asked about the egret. The RSPB records revealed that there had been long gaps between sightings on the reserve, but that it had been back just three days before.

  In its natural homelands (and, for the moment at least, Scotland is a long way from being one of those) it is a bird that lives in flocks. So why was this single bird so far from other egrets? Where did it come from and how did it get here? And then there is the more troubling question: was its presence here so far north of what I imagine is its comfort zone, and on what was by any standards an unseasonably mild January day, a small but beautifully formed symptom of our warming world, of climate change? Whatever the explanation, I am full of gratitude that our paths crossed and that it let in a little exotic light on my own idea of the nature of winter.

  Chapter One

  White Walls Weeping

  Winter is the anvil on which nature hammers out next spring. Its furnace is cold fire. It fashions motes of life. These endure. Even in the utmost extremes of landscape and weather, they endure.

  Three thousand feet up in the Cairngorms, and deep in the nadir of the wild year, there is danger of a kind in simply being so exposed to the adrenalin of solitude and silence and the primitiveness of midwinter at its zenith. Strange how the season’s zenith and nadir can co-exist in the same place at the same moment.

  There is a brink somewhere just ahead. It is not a thing of the landscape, not a cliff edge or a bergschrund. It is a thing of the mind. Can you stretch the day’s boundaries just a little more? And how much is a little more? How much of this rarefied distillation of solitude can you handle? What do you stand to gain? What do you stand to lose? Look around at the nothing that surrounds you, a nothing saturated in Arctic quantities of snow; surely such nothing-ness is inimical to life?

  But a moment ago, a tiny scatter of movement caught my eye and vanished. I stopped in my tracks, literally in my tracks. There were no other tracks. All I could see was white walls weeping, the white walls of an amphitheatre of snow. Snow in billowing downdraughts, snow so solid you could build it into buttresses, snow so fozy and gauzy it hung on the air like curtains of iced steam. I remember thinking perhaps it should be colder at the winter solstice this high on loveable old Bràigh Riabhach. This is my sacred ground. Here in all the tormented, tumultuous geology of the mountain massif we call the Cairngorms is a piece of such singularly dishevelled ground that some unknown someone some unknown sometime ago christened it (with surely malicious und
erstatement) “rough”.

  An Garbh Choire, the Rough Corrie.

  Somewhere down below, down in the belly of the snow cloud that had squatted on these mountains for a week, was the boulderfield of the Làirig Ghrù, a place of underfoot treacheries at the best of times, and this, you could be excused for thinking, was not one of those. Not unless this is your idea of sacred ground; not unless, over the last forty years, this of all mountains has occasionally commanded you to stillness in its company and revealed to you one of its many secrets, leaving you spellbound and speechless; not unless it has mostly done so in winter and mostly when you have been alone; and not unless you are a nature writer for whom such a moment is the living, breathing definition of the Holy Grail.

  Somewhere up above, up on the mile-wide summit plateau of Bràigh Riabhach, is where the River Dee liberates itself from the underworld of the mountain’s dark red innards into the snow-lit overworld in a single convulsive shiver; and where, when the mood takes them, winter winds shudder and wail at 150 miles an hour.

  Between these two fundamental phenomena of this most fundamental of lands is the corrie someone decided to call “rough”. In that company it’s some accolade. And something fleeting had just caught my eye, and I looked up towards the headwall and all I could see was white walls weeping. And the more I stared, the more I began to wonder if I had seen anything at all. So I stared harder, but the whole corrie was hung with unfathomable layers of snow. The headwall was curtained by teeming downdraughts, lavishly hung folds of falling spindrift. But from time to time, gaps in the curtain briefly opened and these showed momentary glimpses of the snow behind the curtain, snow that clung to the raw stuff of the mountain in blue-grey depths, the pelage of the hoary old remnants of Scotland’s Arctic. That further-back snow had plastered the Rough Corrie worryingly smooth. It looked like far too much snow to cling for very long to something so vertical as the corrie headwall.