the moment it takes to turn your back, it sometimes looks as if snow has crept back after the hills have thawed.
One night, descending the hill of Roneval, MacGillivray is spooked by a strange fire flickering on the hillside. He creeps to within a hundred yards of it but then holds back, skirting around the flames through the dark, convinced that the fire had been kindled by sheep stealers, rustling the sheep partly out of anger, partly to alleviate their hunger. Dear Sirs, we are squatting under revolting conditions in hovels situated on other men’s crofts … One hovel = two rooms = twenty-five people crammed to the rotten rafters in there. The people’s situation beggars all description, the poverty just unimaginable; the shores scraped bare of shellfish, nettles, brambles … uprooted and eaten, scurvy seen the first time in a century.
At the head of Loch Langavat, struggling through snow and snowmelt, MacGillivray turns north-west for Loch Rèasort. He has not eaten anything since he set out in the morning dark from Northton. Each bog, each bank of snow, seems to swell before him. But once he clears the watershed between Rapaire and Stulabhal, it is a long downhill glide to Luachair. There! He can see the thin glimmer of Loch Rèasort, the mountains are shutting down its light. Two hours after dark he reaches the house of his friends, opens the door, calls out a greeting to them.
Now I am looking down into the glen with its loch shaped like a rat. If I could bend down from this height and pick the loch up by its long river-tail it would squirm and wriggle beneath my grip. I’d heard of golden eagles doing that to adders, lifting the snakes and carrying them off in their talons as the snakes writhed and contorted in the air like a thread unravelling there. And more exotic things than snakes are sometimes taken by eagles. The lists of prey recorded are eclectic: grasshopper (Finland), pike (Scotland), tortoise (Persia), red-shafted flicker (USA), dog (Scotland, Estonia, Norway, Japan, USA), goshawk (Canada), porcupine (USA) … More hazardous, perhaps, than even a porcupine was the stoat that an eagle near Cape Wrath was once seen to lift, the eagle rising higher and higher in a strange manner then suddenly falling to the ground as if it had been shot. The stoat had managed to twist its way up to reach the eagle’s neck, where it fastened its teeth and killed the bird. Or the wildcat that an eagle was seen to lift in West Inverness-shire: the cat was dropped from several hundred feet and the eagle later found partly disembowelled with severe injuries to its leg.
The golden eagle is capable of predating a wide spectrum of birds, mammals and reptiles, and yet where possible they are essentially a specialist predator, feeding on a narrow range of prey items common to the eagle’s mountain and moorland habitat. Golden eagles adapt to become a more generalist predator when their usual prey is scarce. In the Eastern Highlands of Scotland 90 per cent of golden eagle prey is made up of lagomorphs (mostly mountain hare, but also rabbits) and grouse (both ptarmigan and red grouse). In the Outer Hebrides their diet is more varied because their usual moorland prey, hares and grouse, are scarce here. So, in the Western Isles, rabbits, fulmars and, in winter, sheep carrion make up a high percentage of the eagle’s diet. Grouse and hares are also less common in the Northern and Western Highlands than they are in the east, and consequently the eagle’s diet in these regions is also varied, with deer carrion becoming important in winter. But as a general rule, carrion, despite its availability, tends to be much less significant in the eagle’s diet through the bird’s nesting season, when live prey are preferred, and tend to be easier to transport to the nest than bulky carrion items.
I settle down above the glen with my back against a boulder and keep watch. I can spend hours like this, waiting in the margins for the chance of birds. But today it is a long wait and I can feel the wind drying out my lips. I am just about to give up and move on when I see two golden eagles flying low down a steep flank of the mountain. Their great wings pulled back behind them, their carpal joints jutting forward almost level with the birds’ heads. They cling so close to the side of the mountain they could be abseiling down the incline. An adult bird and a juvenile, the immature eagle with conspicuous white patches on the underside of its wings. All the time the young bird is calling to its parent, a low, excited cheek cheek cheek, the sound carrying down into the glen, skimming across the loch.
Both birds are only 100 feet now from where I am sitting. Through my binoculars I can see the lighter-coloured feathers down the adult’s nape and the yellow in its talons. The juvenile’s calling is growing more persistent, rising in pitch. Then the adult eagle drops fast into the heather with its talons stretched in front of it. At once the youngster is down beside its parent. Something has been killed there. The adult eagle rises and starts to climb above the glen. The young bird proceeds to dip and raise its head into the heather, wrenching at something. I stay with it, watching the young eagle feed. When it has finished it remains in the heather, carefully preening its left wing. Each time the young eagle lifts its wing there is a flash of white in the plumage like an intermittent signal from the grey backdrop of the mountain.
I realise I have witnessed something special, a juvenile golden eagle learning to hunt. The immature bird was clearly still reliant on its parents for food, but it was now piggybacking, tagging along while its parent hunted down the mountainside. The young bird flew so close to the adult, it must have seen the prey in the heather – whatever it was – at the same time as the adult eagle.
I remain watching the juvenile for the next twenty minutes and twice it lifts off the side of the mountain and lands again. Each time it lands it thrusts its talons hard out before it at the last minute as if practising its strike. The adult bird comes back into view again and the young eagle shoots up to meet it, circling its parent, crying repeatedly with its begging call, ttch-yup-yup, tee-yup. I have a very close view of the adult eagle as it swoops low across the cliff in front of me. Its tail is a dark grey colour, like the gneiss beneath it.
It all comes to a head, this gutting of the island from the inside out, when MacGillivray and his uncle are summoned by the laird to decide the fate of his uncle’s farm at Northton. The laird’s factor, Donald Stewart, is there, whom MacGillivray does not care for, whom he calls a wretch of a man. Donald Stewart, who is as ruthless as the sea, who will clear the bulk of the people from the west coast of Harris by 1830, who will even plough the graveyard at Seilebost till skulls and thigh bones roll about the ground like stones. And now Stewart has his eye on the farm at Northton, which is the finest farm in the country. So MacGillivray’s uncle has been duly summoned to the big house at Rodel for this meeting – the Set, as it’s known – and MacGillivray goes along to support him, to steady him, just as his uncle steadied MacGillivray when he was learning to shoot a gun all those years ago. The pair of them enter the house at Rodel where Stewart and the laird, MacLeod, are holding court at a large table, and before MacGillivray and his uncle have even sat down they are told that his uncle has lost the farm, that it has already been decided and would he like to bid for a different farm instead? What happens next is truly wonderful: MacGillivray’s uncle, distraught and silent, listens, Stewart seethes and listens and MacLeod squirms and listens and gulps at his snuff, while MacGillivray stands up and harangues them, boiling over with indignation at the injustice, at Stewart’s duplicity, at MacLeod’s promises to him about the farm. MacGillivray is like the sea that night in January when the wind picked up the water in whirlwinds of agitation. He is furious with MacLeod and Stewart, but most of all he is furious with Stewart, who he knows is really behind all this, the wretch. And when he has finished fuming at them, MacGillivray sits down and there is a long silence. Stewart sits in cowardly silence and MacLeod, who is also a coward, gulps prodigiously at his snuff. Then MacLeod nods and it’s settled and the farm is his uncle’s for another year at least. The rent is set at £170, the meeting is over and MacGillivray and his uncle are both leaving and making straight for the nearest public house.
Seton Gordon once helped a golden eagle cross back over from death. He found the eagle hanging off a cliff in upper Glen Feshie. The bird’s foot had been almost severed by the jaws of a trap which was fixed to the top of the cliff. Gordon and a companion quickly haul the eagle up the rock. They are shocked by how light the bird is, how many days it must have been hanging off the cliff. They carry the eagle, so weak it does not struggle, to some level ground. Very reluctantly, Gordon amputates the leg at the break. They wait and then watch the eagle as it starts to flop its way along the ground towards the precipice. Gordon’s friend shouts at him to catch the bird before it is dashed to its death, but he is