to be a hawk, I could be a hawk here.
I keep well back from the burn and settle myself against one of the boulders. The rock is limed with merlin droppings and I think, of all the things that draw a merlin down onto a particular bank of heather, these white-splashed boulders, like runway lights, must guide the birds in, signalling that this is a good place for them, signalling to the birds that generations of merlins have bred here.
Then – my notebook records the time – 10.30: ‘Heard male merlin calling and turned to see him just above me. He gained height and then flew fast, dropping to ground level and skimming out across the bog, a smear of speed …’ I try to keep up with him but he is rushing so low against the ground, eventually the haze and fold of the moor fold him away. I try to pick him up again, but the vast acreage of sky, the speed of the tiny bird … I have lost him.
That was the pattern for much of the day. There were long absences when the merlin was hunting far out on the flow. I caught the occasional flash of him through my binoculars when he glanced above the skyline, followed him as he tumbled downwards and levelled out over a great sweep of the bog. Sometimes I was impatient to follow him out across the flow, to try to intercept him out there. But I knew that would be hopeless, I could never follow a bird so absorbed in its own speed. Gordon would have kept still and waited. Rowan would have kept still; I thought of William Rowan, his night-long vigils in the cramped hide on Barden Moor, buried in tall bracken, so close to the merlins’ nest that, when he lit a cigarette to help ward off the flies that infested his hide, the smoke drifted over the female merlin, parted round her, making slow eddies of itself as the falcon bent to feed her young.
You have so little time to take in what you see of merlins. Their world is glimpsed in snatches of blurred speed. I was lucky on Orkney to have spent time beside a merlin who paused long enough for me to notice the russet plumage of his breast. But the merlin seen rushing past you in a bolt of speed is just as beautiful. At times, from my perch above the burn in the Flow Country, watching the male merlin coming and going, it felt like I was in a meteor storm. Always I heard him calling first, then scrambled to pick him up just in time to glimpse his sharp-angled wings and his low rush up the burn. On one approach, I heard the male call and the female answered him, a high-pitched cheo, cheo, cheo. As she called (still out of sight) I noticed the male suddenly jink mid-flight as if he’d tripped over a rise in the moor. Then it looked as if he had grazed, scraped something – another bird – because there was a small explosion of feathers beneath him. And just at that moment I saw a second bird rising from under him and realised it was the female (who up till then I had not seen) meeting the male there, receiving prey from him.
Later, when the moor was quiet, I walked up to the spot where the merlin pair had met. When the female gathered the prey from the male she must have scuffed it, loosening feathers from the dead bird. There was a dusting of feathers across the site where the food pass had taken place: down feathers snagged in the heather and in the cotton grass. How else could two birds of such charged intensity meet except in an explosion, a fit of sparks? I picked up some of the loose feathers and lined my pockets with them. Then I walked on up the burn, following in the merlin’s slipstream.
III
Outer Hebrides
Before the long walk to London, before university in Aberdeen, before birds had entered his life, William MacGillivray learnt to shoot a gun. The first shot he fired – his uncle supervising, leaning over him, telling him to keep the butt flush against his shoulder, to anticipate the recoil – he blasts a table, hurries up to it afterwards through the bruised air to inspect the splintered wood. Getting his eye in, his uncle nodding, encouraging. With the second shot, he brushes a rock pigeon off the cliffs, flicking the bird into the sea. His third shot hits two pigeons simultaneously, sets them rolling like skittles. Recharging his gun with buckshot, peering over the cliff, searching for the pigeons bobbing in the thick swell. Let the barrel cool, William. His uncle saying this and as he says it MacGillivray tests the barrel with his finger and flinches at the heat, and in that instant the gun worries him, becomes something more physical, and his shoulder wakes to the ache of the recoil. So by the time he fires the fourth and fifth shots he is too wary of it, of the power of the thing, his body squinting, flinching when he squeezes the trigger. And he pulls the shots wildly. His uncle lightly ribs him at this: You even missed the mountain! Some hours later, when the barrel has cooled, when his anxiety has cooled, MacGillivray fires the gun again. This time he hits and kills a golden eagle.
The first time I fired a gun? I must have been the same age as MacGillivray was, ten or eleven, staying at a friend’s house on a farm. We drove out with his father one evening in a pickup truck, bumping slowly along the side of a wood, scanning the brambly undergrowth. At first I could not find the rabbit, though my friend kept pointing to it, only a few feet from the truck; puffy, weeping eyes, hunched in on itself. A crumpled, shuffling thing. It had not noticed us. Its eyes looked like they had been smeared with glue. A mixy, his dad said; here, put it out of its misery. He turned the engine off, draped an old coat over the open window, a cushion for me to lean the rifle on. Then, like an afterthought, as if he felt it would stop the gun shaking in my hand, he pulled the handbrake up; its wrenching sound like a shriek inside the truck.
So MacGillivray waits for the ache in his shoulder to subside. Then sets about gathering what he will need to shoot the eagle: a white hen from his uncle’s farmyard, some twine, a wooden peg, a pocketful of barley grain, newspapers, the gun. He walks out of the farm and up the hill. When he reaches the pit that has been dug into the side of the moor, he ties the hen’s leg to the twine and fastens the twine to the wooden peg. He pushes the peg into the ground, sprinkles some of the grain beside the hen and primes the gun with a double charge of buckshot. Then he retreats to the pit with its roof of turf. When he enters the hide it is as if the moor folds him into itself. He can keep an eye on the hen from a peephole cut into the wall of the pit. He starts to read the newspapers. Rain seeps through the roof and the damp paper comes apart when he turns it. He finds himself rolling scraps of newspaper into balls of mush in his palm until it looks as if he is holding a clutch of tiny wren’s eggs. Outside he can hear the hen shaking the rain off itself.
He is dozing when he hears the hen scream. He scrambles to the peephole and there is the eagle fastened to the back of the chicken. The eagle is so huge it has shut out the horizon with its wings. The hen looks as if it has been flattened. MacGillivray hurries to pick up the gun, takes aim, and fires. But he has overloaded it with shot and the recoil shunts him backwards, the butt smashing into his cheek. He cannot see what has happened – if he has hit anything – as smoke from the gun has engulfed the eagle and the chicken, so he pushes through the heather doorway of the hide and rushes up to the target. The shot, he sees, has entered the side of the eagle and killed the great bird outright. The hen, amazingly, is still alive, trying to hobble away. So this is an eagle, he thinks; it is nothing wonderful after all … Gun in one hand, hen in the other, he throws the eagle over his back and brings its legs down on each side of his neck. Then he sets off back down the hill, wearing the huge bird like a knapsack.
Eagles started to make themselves felt while I was searching for merlins in The Flows of Caithness and Sutherland. There was the eagle’s plucking post – that huge flat-topped boulder, littered with bones – I came across far out on the bog. Now and then, too, I saw eagles – often a pair – rising high over the mountains to the west. It was hard not to act on these sightings, to stay on the flow and not follow the eagles into the west. Once, watching the male merlin rising above the burn, in the far distance, perhaps a mile away, I saw an eagle circling high over the moor. I liked the symmetry in that moment, lining up the smallest raptor in these islands with the largest. A telescopic projection, the merlin’s wingspan magnified onto the rising eagle, pointing the way to the next stage of my journey. So I left the merlins above their burn in the Flow Country and followed that eagle into the west, to spend a week amongst the mountains of Lewis and Harris, William MacGillivray’s