is a realpolitik about nature I have always admired. A ruthless opportunism simmers within every organism. There is nothing cuddly or cute out there, nothing sentimental or romantic, nothing generous or forgiving, nothing magnanimous or altruistic. Just sheer functionality honed to perfection, perpetually thrust forward by single-minded sexual hedonism and the narcissistic selfishness required for survival. Every species is driven by need for a home, for food and for the universal urge to procreate. To wild nature mankind’s lofty notions are as meaningless as his grand pretensions. They are as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal, superfluous flights of fancy, there to be grabbed and exploited to the full. I built a fishing hut and a lochside hideaway for my own purposes and those of my family. The woodmice saw only a convenient, dry sanctuary from predation and an excellent place to rear their young. It was as though they had said, ‘Thank you very much, that will suit us nicely.’
The sun was sinking. A golden gleam had caught the pines on the far side of the loch and tiger-striped the ice. Soon the woodmice would venture out for food and take their chances with tawny owls and foxes and the pine martens with which they share this little patch of wildness. For now this place was theirs. I had a home of my own and it was time to go.
2
Spring at Last
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all Ridicule and Deformity . . . and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself.
– William Blake. A letter to Dr Trusler, 23rd August 1799
May 1st Spring comes late to this neck of the Highland woods, but when it finally arrives it does so with virtuoso panache – and an irresistible surge of passion and activity, like a dam bursting. Up at the little loch, where I have gone to think and work, I sit leaning against an old pine tree with my notebook on my knees. I am sitting on a folded square of thick blue polythene membrane I have carried around for years, a bit of damp-proofing left over from a building job. The ground is still moist from six months of sodden winter although the early morning air is fine and the sun, up and out since 5.00 a.m., is generous. This is spring, there’s no doubt of that; the light is yellow; today the sun’s gift is of both song and dance.
April in the Highlands is firmly gripped by winter’s long tendrils. It toys with spring and then draws back. Snow and the bleat of new-born lambs are April’s signature. I heave a sigh of relief when the month passes. May is defiant; it breaks free like a half-trained puppy, running away from the north wind and the rain, ducking the sleet squalls and raising its shout for the sun and the springing grass. Buds and birdsong belong to April, the only poetic concessions it makes between flights of caprice and outbursts of spleen. But leaf is May’s great gift, tentative at first, egged on by the anxious early flowers of wood anemone, violet and wood sorrel, then building to a climax with a rush of orchids, fixing the moment, no going back from here. My birthday is early in May; every year I gauge the spring’s progress by the extent of new leaf on that day.
Even if I didn’t know it had just turned May, if I had somehow just awoken from a deep coma to find myself bewildered and totally blind, my first unmistakable impression would be of spring. It assaults you. It rides the breeze that teases the surface of the loch and whispers in the willow’s new, unfurling leaves at its edge. You can taste its tangy intoxication on the air. Irrepressible birdsong envelops you as in Caliban’s haunting dream: ‘sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not . . .’ and ‘. . . a thousand twangling instruments will hum about mine ears . . . that, when I waked, I cried to dream again’.
Despite my polythene square, spring is surging up at me from below. Green shoots are piercing the tufts of winter-bleached grass and worm casts have oozed to the surface like toothpaste, as though the very soil is sick of being stuck below ground. Nature is shaking out her skirts after a coma of her own for six long months. In the pines and birches around me blackbirds, song thrushes, great tits and coal tits, wrens, dunnocks and chaffinches, and willow warblers just in from Africa are fluting, trilling, sawing and hammering out their rousing refrains of life and duty. They are grabbing the moment as if their lives depend upon it, which, come to think of it, they almost certainly do. It’s infectious. Whatever the day is arousing in my red blood corpuscles is surging in theirs too.
But here’s the rub, the first of the great barriers between wildness and the human state, of which I have to keep reminding myself lest I get carried away. For them, the birds, insects, mammals – any sentient organism out there – no conscious thought process exists: this is no chance encounter with a bright spring day as it is for me, in which I can revel and wax lyrical if the mood takes me; for them it is programmed in, a climacteric of expectation and urgency they have all prepared for and are utterly dependent upon, every last one of them. For all the inherent poesy of the birds’ melodious accomplishment, the spiralling muses of Keats, Wordsworth and Ted Hughes are a million miles away from where nature grinds its uncompromising corn. The birds are at it in earnest – a deadly, heaving, rugger-scrum earnest, because their lives and futures depend upon it. Their hormones are surging with the turning year, responding to the call of the lengthening days, bursting out into sunshine, revelling – all of that – and dragging me with them, but there is no unison here, no shared compunction between human and the wild, none at all. They are apart and mindless and prescribed. We would do well to remember that. Every individual organism is out there settling old scores, fixing space for themselves and their future alone. Pheromones are teeming and lifting off into champagne air: breasts are swelling, opinions changing, adopting new stances. To me, the lofty observer who can walk away from all this if I choose, it seems that forces have combined to insist upon – to demand – this spontaneous exultation to the turning year.
There have been, of course, all the clichéd envoys of spring with a capital S – the daffodils, the cherry blossom, the birdsong, the rush of early nesters, the return of the ospreys from West Africa, and, as a grand orgiastic climax to it all, the great churning and croaking congregation of toads in the loch, pushing and shoving, thronging, clasping, ovulating, ejaculating and, with fixed amphibian grins, coldly revelling in it all. And it would be quite wrong to suggest that at these latitudes (north of Moscow) nothing at all happens in March and April. Day on day the temperature has been rising, teasing upwards, two steps forward one step back, and all tantalisingly slowly. But even if the toads and the birds do know what’s happening, the weather is confused and uncertain. Between bursts of over-optimistic sunshine snow piles in and angry rain and sleet squalls seem to chase us right back to February. But what the capricious weather patterns can’t interfere with is the sun.
The great god Sol is creeping up on us, each dawn a fraction higher, stretching every day longer and longer, reaching out for grander ambitions. By the end of April we are enjoying fourteen hours of daylight, against the meagre ten we had back at the beginning of March. The season’s tug is winning a nuclear war. The land is soaking up solar energy like dew in a desert. It is being absorbed, sucked in and relished by the plant world’s chlorophyll, kick-starting the rush of leaves into violent action once again. May gives us first fresh leaf and it gives us green. That is why I don’t allow myself to get excited about spring until the first of May, when all that leaf is sudden, sudden, sudden – all change. One minute the world is a tracery studded with buds, the next time you look a viridescent pastel haze has suffused the land in every direction. It’s a bad moment to go away. When you come back you’re in a different land.
Across the other side of the loch, in the marsh, mallard are chasing their own destiny through the shallows. I can hear them and see them – at least, I can hear frantic quacking and see the flurrying among the rushes. Every now and again a skirmish of wings rises a few feet into the air and drops down again, out of sight. I feel sorry for the females. It is a duck’s lot to be hounded by two or three drakes at once. If I were to creep up, as one easily could – so intent are they upon this pressing affair that I could get very close – I would see the poor duck ignominiously shoved below the surface by each swain who grips the feathers on the back of her neck in his bill and treads her back with