golden eagle on that morning of steady drizzle.
What became of the white hen and the eagle that he shot? When MacGillivray came down off the hillside with the eagle slung over his shoulders the whole village came out to greet him. It looked, at first, as if he was carrying a bundle of heather on his back. Surely the boy could not have shot an eagle? MacGillivray’s uncle proud as punch, one eagle the fewer to worry his lambs. And because then MacGillivray knew no better, because birds had still to enter his life, he did not count the eagle’s quills, did not measure its bill, did not dissect it to see what it had eaten. Instead, the eagle was dumped on the village midden. The hen, miraculous escapee, lived on, reared a brood, was then eaten.
The villagers call MacGillivray Uilleam beag (Little William). He comes to live among them, on his uncle’s farm on the Isle of Harris, when he is three years old. Before Harris, before he acquires his Gaelic name, there is not much to go on. MacGillivray’s father, a student at King’s College in Aberdeen, leaves soon after William’s birth in January 1796, joins the army and is killed fighting in the Peninsular Wars. MacGillivray’s parents are not married and his mother, Anne Wishart, is never mentioned again. So his birth is a hushed, awkward thing and the boy is bundled away to be brought up by his uncle’s family on their farm at Northton in the far south-west corner of Harris. When he is eleven, MacGillivray leaves the farm for a year’s schooling in Aberdeen before enrolling at the city’s university. Always returning from Aberdeen by foot to Harris for the holidays; a journey of over 200 miles, walking across Scotland’s furrowed brow, at ease within his solitude, hurrying to catch the Stornoway packet out of Poolewe, back home across the Minch.
After a day of rain and fuming cloud I found the eagles hunting at first light. I saw their shadows first, moving fast over outcrops of gneiss, the grey rocks glancing in and out of shade. The rush of their shadows betrayed the eagles; only storm clouds move that fast over the land. They were a pair and hunting low over low ground at the north end of the glen. I climbed a tall boulder, an uprooted molar, and perched on its flat top to watch.
The sun that morning was out of all proportion, suddenly huge and close. And what that sun did to the eagles … It found their hunting shadows and, as it rose, lengthened them like ink spills along the bottom of the glen. It found and lit the crest of gold down the back of the eagles’ necks in a clink and flash of bronze. And it lasted only a few seconds. But you hardly ever see that in a golden eagle, you are never close enough to see the bird’s golden hue, to the extent that you wonder how the bird got its name at all, when most of the time all you see is a great dark bird which MacGillivray knew simply as the Black Eagle. But there it was below me, the huge bloodshot sun finding and lighting up the delicate golds brushed into the eagle’s nape.
Bird of silence and the clouds, what sort of hunter are you? We tend to exaggerate you out of all proportion. Stories of you driving adult deer over cliffs, lifting human babies when their mother’s back is turned, fights to the death with foxes, wildcats, wolves … In the city where I work there is a swinging pub sign with an image of an eagle, talons clasped around a human child, flapping heavily, bearing the infant away through the cobalt blue. You must forgive us our silliness, our intolerance. For when we meet you your sheer size is dizzying. Seton Gordon once mistook a golden eagle for a low-flying aeroplane. Even MacGillivray, who so often saw eagles in the Outer Hebrides, was stunned when once, at the edge of a precipice, a huge golden eagle drifted off a few yards in front of him while a great mass of cloud rolled over the cliff. MacGillivray was close enough to almost touch the eagle and so struck by the bird’s presence, he shouted out from the top of the cliffs: Beautiful!
In reality a golden eagle could never lift something as heavy as a human baby, let alone a child. Even a mountain hare often needs to be dismembered, a lamb broken in two, before an eagle can carry a piece of it away. Gordon once wrote to a Norwegian lady after he heard about a radio broadcast she had made recounting her experience of being carried away by an eagle as a child. Gordon wrote to the woman asking if he could quote her experience in his book. She replied saying that she might consider his request on payment of a £25 fee.
Up on the bealach there is a movement along the ridge to the west: long-fingered wings, an eagle gliding just a few feet above the ridge. Then another eagle joins it: the male, noticeably smaller than the female.
Close up, when he was observing eagles from a hide – as Rowan did with his merlins – Gordon could tell the difference between the male and female golden eagle by the compact tightness of the male’s plumage. But at a distance it is hard to distinguish between the sexes until the pair come together, and then the size difference is obvious, as it is with many other raptors, particularly the falcons, hawks and harriers, where reversed size dimorphism (when the female is larger than the male) is a characteristic of the species, in contrast to non-raptorial birds where the male is usually the larger. Some of the male golden eagles MacGillivray saw over these mountains appeared so small he thought for a while that another distinct species of eagle existed in the Outer Hebrides, yet to be identified, cut off from the world in these remote hills.
Reversed size dimorphism is most pronounced in those raptors that hunt fast, agile prey. So, for example, the greatest size difference between the sexes is found in the sparrowhawk, where the female is nearly twice the weight of the male. By contrast, there is far less size variation between the sexes in those raptors that are insectivorous or feed on slow-moving prey, and no difference at all in carrion-feeding vulture species. Female raptors must substantially increase their fat reserves in order to breed successfully. This increase in weight does not equip them well to pursue and catch their quick, elusive prey. However, male raptors (those that hunt avian prey especially) must remain as small and light as possible in order to hunt successfully to provide food throughout the breeding season for the female and their brood. Size dimorphism is reversed in many birds of prey because the male cannot afford to become too big; he needs to maintain an efficient size and weight in order to hunt efficiently. The female can afford to become bigger because, during the critical breeding season, she does not hunt as prolifically as the male. This hunting respite allows her to lay down sufficient fat reserves to produce and then incubate her eggs. There is the additional advantage that the female’s larger size better equips her to defend the nest against predators.
What a strange grey beauty these mountains have (MacGillivray compared them to a poor man’s skin appearing through his rags). The land scraped bare, the moor a craquelure of gneiss. The warm rocks smoking in the rain. Like the earth must have been when it was raw and molten-new.
This morning I am watching a pair of golden eagles gliding low over the mountain into a strong headwind. Then they turn, so the wind is behind them, and drift away across the tops. Not once do I see them flap their wings. Wind-dwellers, they are at home inside the wind, can fly into a headwind as easily as they can fly out of it. There are accounts of eagles holding themselves motionless in wind so ferocious that men could not stand upright and slabs of turf were ripped from the rock and flung hundreds of yards.
I climbed after them. I wanted to try and follow this pair, to be up at the same height as the eagles, to be amongst them in their world, meet them as they skirted low across the ridges. For hours I walked along the tops of the mountains, red deer coughing their alarm barks at me. I sheltered from the wind in shallow caves amongst the boulder fields, sipping from my thermos, waiting for the eagles, daydreaming about finding MacGillivray’s unknown species of eagle, his ghost eagle, undiscovered for centuries, the coelacanth of these Hebridean mountains. Spend long enough looking for eagles and you could be forgiven for being haunted by them. Sometimes I have gazed and gazed at a dark shape against the rock convinced it is an eagle, summoning that shape into a bird. Gordon once watched a pair of golden eagles fly into a passing cloud and followed their dim outlines through the depths of white vapour as though, he wrote, they were phantom eagles, or the shadows of eagles.
From one of my shelters I see the male golden eagle again, briefly, gliding back along the ridge towards me. Then he turns and shoots out over the deep glen with its black loch full of rushing clouds and now the reflection of an eagle rushing through those clouds.
Sometimes the hunt begins at a great height. Prey is picked out over a kilometre away – a rabbit cropping the machair, black grouse sparring