into a low-angled glide. At the last moment, wings open, tail fans and talons thrust forward. Stand under the path of an eagle stooping like this and the sound of the wind rushing through its wings is like a sheet being ripped in two.
Golden eagles can also take birds such as grouse on the wing, pursuing the grouse in a tail chase. But eagles need a head start, they need to build up a substantial head of speed, coming out of a stoop for instance, to be successful in overtaking and seizing such a fast bird as the red grouse. Eagles often hunt in pairs, contouring low over the ground together and sometimes even pursuing prey together on the wing. They also, occasionally, hunt on foot, poking about for frogs, young rabbits hiding in the undergrowth.
More often, an eagle hunts only a few feet above the ground, patrolling the same airspace as the hen harrier and short-eared owl. Several times I have watched golden eagles (and once a pair of eagles) hunting like this, glancing over the land, hugging the contours, looking to trip over prey unawares. Stealth is a critical factor in the golden eagle’s ability to catch prey. The bird’s traditional upland prey across its northern European range, grouse and hares, are equipped with supreme agility and speed, and more often than not this speed enables them to escape a golden eagle. It’s a wonder such a large bird could catch anything by surprise … But when you watch an eagle hunting low across the hills it is hard to keep track of the bird. It blends its dark brown plumage against the hillside and clings to the peaks and troughs of the moor. Glide – pause – drop – strike.
I hang above the deep glen watching the surface of the loch. From my perch on the mountain I can see the wind moving across the water. Blocks of colour, like leviathans grazing inside the loch, shunt into each other, black into grey into blue. The surface ripples as if rain were fretting it. Then, two new shadows pass across the water: both eagles are now hanging over the glen and – I hear it first – a raven is beating out from the cliff to harry them.
I am used to the size of ravens. Besides buzzards they are by far the largest bird I see around my home. I often hear the raven’s loud guttural croak as I hang the washing out, and I was glad to hear that call again up here in the mountains. But I had not expected the raven to be so shrunk beside the eagles. This great black bulk of bird I was so used to seeing and hearing, dominating the skies over my home, was utterly dwarfed, reduced to a speck of a bird, buzzing irritably around the eagle pair. I noticed how hard the raven had to work to keep up with the eagles. Either eagle could step away from the raven simply by folding its wings slightly and easing out of earshot of the raven who flapped and croaked, scolding after them. When the eagles pulled their wings back behind them like this, they grew falcon-like in their shape, tidying those great wings away, a split-second change of gear from soar to gliding speed. One of the eagles mock-swooped at the raven, suddenly rushing at it, effortlessly catching and overtaking the raven and then, at the last moment, glancing away.
No bird is so modest in its speed. There is not the impression of speed with golden eagles as there is with the more obvious sky-sprinters, the hobbies and merlins, who appear to live their lives through speed, though Gordon thought that the golden eagle was the fastest bird that flies, utilising its weight in a long glide to gain tremendous acceleration. Gordon once watched a male eagle descend to the eyrie from the high tops carrying a ptarmigan in one foot. The eagle was travelling so fast in its descent that it overshot the nest, rushing past it, before it swung round and was carried back up to the nest by its impetus. Gordon wrote that the speed of that eagle’s dive was quite breathtaking and he calculated that the bird must have been travelling at around 2 miles a minute. An aeroplane pilot flying down the east coast of Greece recorded being overtaken by a golden eagle while the aircraft was travelling at 70 knots. As the eagle passed the plane at a distance of 80 feet the bird turned its head to glance at the aircraft before it eased past it at a speed, the pilot estimated, of 90 mph.
But usually it is difficult to gauge an eagle’s speed and it is easy to think, because of its great size, that it is a heavy, laboured flier. Not until you see it glide over a wide glen in a single gulp or overtake a covey of ptarmigan flinging themselves down through a smoking corrie do you have a sense of what speeds a golden eagle is capable of achieving.
I watched the eagle pair and the raven skirmishing above the loch for fifteen minutes. The raven threaded between the eagles, barking at them, but it seemed half-hearted in its efforts to drive the larger birds off its patch, and there was almost a harmony in this dance, in the interaction between eagle and raven. The eagles seemed unconcerned by the raven jostling amongst them. Sometimes the eagles stole away from the raven and entered their own whirling dance, gliding towards each other and then a last-minute rush of speed as they sheared past, wingtips almost touching. Each time the eagles rushed at each other like this I was sure they were bound to collide, before the last-minute wing adjustment and the pair glanced past each other through the tightening air.
MacGillivray is awake, unable to sleep, running through the inventory of himself. Tomorrow he is planning another visit to the mountains on the border of Lewis and Harris, where he will be amongst friends, where his days will be overseen by eagles, where his unknown species of eagle shimmers on the edge of things. He sits up all night preparing for the trip. He was only in the mountains a few weeks ago but he wants to return to write – to finish writing – a poem. It has been nagging at him all winter, this poem. And he needs to go back to the mountains to get the details of the scenery right. The sense that he has too little material from his first trip to write the thing has been mithering him for months. But more than the poem this trip to the mountains is really about him trying to settle himself, to find a sense of resolution. He writes in his journal:
The chief cause of all my disquietude is the want of resolution …
He needs to calm himself with purpose:
At present I cannot help looking upon the vicissitudes of life with a kind of terror … If I had resolution, I should not despair …
And when he despairs his anxiety boils over and he turns his frustration mercilessly on himself:
… such is the fickleness of my mind, that my whole life, hitherto has been nothing else than a confused mass of error and repentance, amendment and relapse … I am truly ashamed of myself, not to say anything worse …
But before he can begin his walk there is this long unquiet night ahead and all he can do is check the inventory of himself once more, rehearse his daily rituals, as if he were checking the contents of his knapsack:
– Rise with or before the sun.
– Walk at least five miles.
– Give at least half a dozen puts to a heavy stone.
– Make six leaps.
– Drink milk twice a day.
– Wash face, ears, teeth and feet.
– Preserve seven specimens of natural history (whether in propria persona or by drawing).
– Read the chapter on Anatomy in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
– Read the Book of Job.
– Abstain from cursing and swearing.
– Above all procrastination is to be shunned.
Then it is dawn and MacGillivray is leaving for the mountains. He wants to reach Luachair, the tiny settlement at the head of Loch Rèasort where his friends live, before nightfall. But it is not the best of starts: he misjudges the tides and the great sands at Luskentyre are covered when he reaches them. Shortly afterwards, he loses his way in the mist and rain halfway up the ben.
North, then west, then north again, tacking up through the island. Tarbert to Aird Asaig, through the glen above Bun Abhainn Eadarra, up to the head of Loch Langavat. Lately the island does not recognise itself. People tipped out of their homes, the hills planted with sheep. And the villages all along the west coast of Harris, the machair lands at Nisabost, Scarista, Seilebost and Borve, all of them waiting to follow suit. Dismantling their homes, taking the roof beams with them to the new lives set aside for them on the island’s east coast, a land so pitted with rock not even beasts could live there. Blackface sheep leaking out into