The Dun Cow Rib

  Also by John Lister-Kaye

  The White Island (1972)

  The Seeing Eye (1979)

  Seal Cull (1979)

  Ill Fares the Land (1994)

  One for Sorrow (1994)

  Song of the Rolling Earth (2003)

  Nature’s Child (2004)

  At the Water’s Edge (2010)

  Gods of the Morning (2015)

  Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  www.canongate.co.uk

  This digital edition first published in 2017 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © John Lister-Kaye, 2017

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Extract from The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, edited by Ralph W. Franklin, Cambridge, Mass. Reprinted by permission of The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

  Excerpts from The Ring of Bright Water trilogy (UK, Viking, 2000) reprinted by permission of The Marsh Agency Ltd on behalf of Gavin Maxwell.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 78689 145 7

  eISBN 978 1 78689 146 4

  Typeset in Dante MT by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  For my mother

  τροϕεῖα

  ‘A boy’s will is the wind’s will,

  And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.’

  My Lost Youth, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82)

  ‘If I can stop one heart from breaking,

  I shall not live in vain.’

  Part One: Life, VI, Emily Dickinson (1830–86)

  Contents

  Foreword: The Deep Heart’s Core

  1. Wildcats and wilderness

  2. Death of a dog

  3. The Manor House

  4. The Dun Cow

  5. Ye hunter’s badge

  6. Rheumatic fever

  7. Hearts and minds

  8. Hampton House

  9. London

  10. Bartonfield

  11. The dragon’s den

  12. The pain of injustice

  13. Summer and the Arabian Nights

  14. ‘All my holy mountain’

  15. An innocence exposed

  16. Hill Brow

  17. ‘Upon thy belly shalt thou go’

  18. Dark shadows, bright horizons

  19. Rock of ages

  20. The Pheasantry badgers

  21. Ring of Bright Water

  22. ‘Future plans for this island’

  23. Great hopes, dire straits

  24. Paradise lost and found

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  The Deep Heart’s Core

  Years ago I built a hut overlooking a pond – a small loch or ‘lochan’ in Highland parlance – where, like Thoreau at Walden, I go to write or just bare myself to the effervescent mysteries of nature and life. It’s called the Illicit Still, named by my children because for years I kept a bottle of whisky locked away from their prying teenage eyes. It has a lumberjack’s oil drum stove, some rough and ready bunks, an old sofa, a table and chairs – just about everything serious contemplation requires. It has become a treasured centre of separateness, a place to muse, an escape.

  Sheets of wind and light cruising the surface of the loch are there to distract me, and flights of mallard come streaming past to land squabbling in the marsh. On looping wings a heron often shoulders in to stalk leggily through the shallows, or house martins and swallows skim through like fighter jets, hawking flies across the cloud-brimming surface.

  Occasionally a stream of bubbles grabs my eye and the quizzical mask of an otter peers from among the water lilies; or, ballerina en pointe, a roe doe tiptoes down to drink, and, every once in a while, an osprey crash-dives right in front of the hut. I jump up, concentration shattered like a brick through a window, to watch it lift off again with a brown trout writhing in its long, black talons – death and glory intertwined, the death of necessity and the glory of life eternal. My neck cranes to catch the last silhouetted image as it levers out of sight above the trees. I catch my breath. It’s a drama I have witnessed hundreds of times, but I still emerge swaying, dazzled, blanked, my work suddenly lost and meaningless. Such stark, irrepressible images have been etching themselves into my soul for more years than I care to remember.

  I was there recently, supposed to be roughing out an article on Scottish wildcats. A lazy June afternoon of bright, backlit cumulus and sun shafts burning through the vitreous brilliance of spring leaf, dressing the birches and willows as precious gifts. Our spring has kept us on tenterhooks this year, it arrived, fled and came again, twice hijacked by a relentless northeasterly from somewhere above Russia. In May I lit the log stove in sunshine as sharp as chilled vodka. And it was there, in this vibrant corner of our little Highland world, emerging from the cold sun shimmer on the loch, that a familiar notion came rollicking in as it has done many times before. Yet this time it was strangely different, punching in with power and pizzazz, the way that a sun-burst spotlights something that you’d really never noticed before and forces you to look again.

  It wasn’t exactly a surprise. It was a notion that had been there long enough, decades in fact, loitering, like something I’d been meaning to do for ages but kept forgetting. So I never pursued it. But the seed was set; as the years passed, slowly and silently it grew, becoming something altogether rounder and fatter than just a fanciful notion – yes, pressing and personal – more like a hunger, that signal shift from an ache to a pain, but much more urgent, refusing to go away, until I could ignore it no longer.

  For forty years now, I have run a field studies centre from my home at Aigas, in Strathglass, one of northern Scotland’s wildest glens. Folk come from all over the world to learn about the ancient natural and cultural history of the Highlands and Islands. Our environmental education work for local schools serves thousands of youngsters every year, helping them to value and enjoy nature as well as grasp the essential ecological processes for human survival. It has never palled. I still get a buzz from the lectures reeled out by our dedicated young staff, or from our visitors raving about the acrobatics of the pine martens they watched from a hide last night. Seeing youngsters pond dipping for newts and dragonfly larvae in the shallows always makes me smile. It spins me back – back to the story of my own, not-so-lost-and-forgotten childhood all those decades ago.

  It was Gavin Maxwell – one of Britain’s most celebrated non-fiction writers of the ’60s – who brought me, still in my twenties, to the Highlands of Scotland, a land so very different from the rest of Britain. In 1969 I headed north to work with him on a rocky lighthouse island in the straits between the Isle of Skye and the mainland – it could not have been a more extreme shift from my own English pastoral background and my unhappy job on the heavily polluted coastline of industrial South Wales.

  The Highlands was a shock, a shock of joy and freedom, the heady thrill of escape, the tang of fresher air, new rock beneath my feet and the surging wave of the spirit. It was a rebirth, a release wholly intoxicating. I felt alive again for the first time since childhood. But such elation would be disastrously short-lived. When Gavin suddenly and unexpectedly died that September it seemed that my entire world had crashed in ruins around me. I was out of a job and a home. But the drug that is the magic of the Highlands had curved deep like the osprey’s talons, and was not about to let go. So I elected to stay and try to make a go of b
eing a naturalist and a writer, to put down roots and find a home here – a tough call, but one I have never regretted.

  On a crisp January day a few years later I discovered Aigas, an unloved, abandoned and faintly ridiculous Victorian mansion, all battlements, cannon spouts and spiky candle-snuffered turrets, arrestingly sited on a hillside overlooking the River Beauly – and condemned, within a month of being torn down, totally demolished. The roof leaked where thieves had ripped out the leadwork, windows were broken and plaster ceilings had come crashing down. When I first entered the house, snow had piled in through collapsed skylights and blanketed the hall floor. A car was parked outside, the front door wide open. I followed yeti-footprints through the snow and up the main staircase, on up a spiral stair and out onto the roof with no idea of whom or what I might find. A man in huge boots was standing there with a clipboard, assessing the scrap value of the building before demolition. ‘Who are you?’ he challenged. ‘I’m a prospective buyer,’ I said. The words just tumbled out. But it was a half-truth, and not the first time such a thought had entered my head. I had long nurtured the idea of starting a field studies centre somewhere. This time it had the ring of truth.

  A sleepless night. The Victorian building wasn’t even a hundred years old. I loved its wild woods and fields; the tangle of its long-forsaken gardens and its shimmering loch tucked into a fold in the hills all seemed to be calling out to me. Its position overlooking the glen was magnificent and, besides, I’d seen swifts’ nests in the tower and a roe deer had frolicked away into the rhododendrons as I departed down the drive.

  I had no idea what it would cost to restore the house and grounds or how to set about it, and if anyone had given me even the sniff of a clue, I would have walked away and never given it another thought. But they didn’t. Hotheaded youth can be a handy set of blinkers when you don’t really want to grasp reality. You can gloss over problems that would frighten the heck out of wiser folk. And yet, oddly, its very desolation invoked piquancy, an added romantic allure. I loved it. Not the dottily turreted house, but the whole Aigas place. It had somehow entered my blood – a Shangri-La, a personal Lake Isle of Innisfree – and I heard it ‘in the deep heart’s core’.

  So a few days later I bought it. Impulsively and without a second thought I borrowed the money and bought it for a home and a place where I could create a field studies centre for the Highlands – an unheard-of notion back then, and one people laughed at with mockery in their voices. To me it presented what many said was an impossible challenge, and to such I have always risen like a greedy trout to a fly.

  So, yes, forty years now, family all fledged and flown, and somehow we have survived. More folk than I can count or remember have come to slough off the stresses of hectic lives, to learn about the bloody tribalism of the Highland clans, to witness our splendid wildlife and unwind among the mountains and glens of our glorious upland scenery. I have never tired of it, never regretted that youthful impulse despite the scorn and the multifarious trials heaped upon us down the years.

  To have been a working naturalist; to have striven to fill the unforgiving minute, and to have shared the joy of these mountains, lochs and glens with so many other people has been its own reward. I have never doubted that it was the right move, the right place to be, but after so many years you begin to wonder just how on earth it all happened. When did it all start? Long before I’d even heard of Gavin Maxwell. Where did this predilection for wild nature come from? Was it genetic – nature or nurture? Who handed me the chalice? And whence the faith that spurred the ‘sixty seconds’ worth of distance run’? From whom, precisely, more than fifty years ago, did the precious mantle of conviction come? Suddenly I needed answers, to tie them down, get them straight in my head. That was it. That was the irrepressible notion – more than a notion, it felt like a summons, a gauntlet hurled at my feet by the colliding forces of time and joy – that finally gripped me at the Illicit Still and refused to let go.

  John Lister-Kaye,

  House of Aigas

  April 2017

  1

  Wildcats and wilderness

  The Scottish wildcat isn’t just any old cat, it’s special – no, way more than special. It’s unique, and unique in so many different ways, bad and good. It’s Britain’s most endangered mammal – that’s bad, capital BAD. And it’s wild, wild, WILD, with its own marque of spitting, feline wildness – that’s far beyond good, it’s brilliant.

  From the sort of glimpse you might be lucky enough to get in your headlights, a wildcat can look a bit like an oversize farm tabby, but that’s where the resemblance ends and the conflict lies. It’s the black that defines both the wildcat’s fur and its sombre northern climate, an aggressive camouflage that breaks up its outline into bands of shadow exactly as a tiger’s stripes do, but without the perpetual sunlight shafting through jungle. Its bushy club tail with a dense black tip has four to six clear black rings; its fur is of dulled zinc with vertical sooty stripes – stripes that also run up and outwards from its burning, emerald eyes. It hunts at dawn and dusk, retiring bandit-like to its lair to lie low throughout the day. A stealthily prowling, silent, green-eyed arch-predator of the dark and dripping Highland woods, it is reputedly untamable, a top carnivore. Ferocious. A snarling, hissing, spitting demon of a cat with murder etched into its soul.

  The trouble is that we humans have been introducing domestic cats into wildcat habitat for centuries. Wildcat toms cannot resist domestic pussy, and vice versa. The evolutionary lineage of both is too close and the hybrid progeny of such unseen nocturnal pairings are fertile. Invisibly their genes blend and nowadays many hybrids stalk the Highland woods. By their own promiscuity our precious wildcats are genetically polluting themselves into extinction, a situation only humans can resolve.

  In 2012 we at the field studies centre joined forces with Scottish Wildcat Action to implement their optimistic-sounding ‘Conservation Action Plan’ to try to save the last few remaining wildcats in the Highlands (Felis silvestris grampia – cat of the Grampian woods), part of which would be captive breeding for release into carefully monitored, prime quality habitat. That was the bit that interested us: the breeding and release of sexually mature kittens to bolster whatever remains of the wildcat population still out there. If there is any. We don’t know – nobody does. We hope there might be a few left in the remoter mountain reaches of our local glens.

  The Scottish wildcat is the very essence of wildness and wild places, and, hope or no hope, it’s ours. It badly needs a marketing manager. Throughout recent history our wildcats have been present the length and breadth of Scotland, a top predator in some of the most rugged and wild landscapes in the UK, perfect for a super-cat. If your average domestic tabby is a Ford, our wildcat is a Ferrari. They call it the Highland tiger: bigger, stronger, meaner, sleeker, stealthier . . . and, like poor old Shere Khan, the tiger in the Jungle Book, it’s in serious trouble because of us and the way we’ve always treated land as a resource without much thought for wildlife: there for exploiting and to hell with the consequences. It’s our fault – our ignorance, our stupidity, our negligence, our selfishness, our greed. That’s bad, very bad. We could do much better if we put our minds to it – if only we would put our minds to it. We could, you know: humans don’t have to behave like mindless vandals. We have the wit and the ways; it’s the will that snarls us up. We could stop the rot and reverse the destructive trend for most wildlife if only we could focus minds. The wildcat is precious. We must not lose it.

  It seems to have taken forever to get some official conservation action, but it has happened at last. We pray it’s not too late. The whole bureaucratic machinery of government recently lumbered into action. The National Lottery stumped up. Money shouts and has claws. Suddenly there were press releases, websites, blogs, tweets, posts – all that social media guff buzzed around the world before you could say kitty. We held meetings, published plans to neuter or remove feral domestic cats and hybrids, created research and mo
nitoring jobs, consulted everyone except God and the cats themselves. We were beginning to feel a bit smug – dangerously smug. After two years and twenty meetings we hadn’t saved a single wildcat. So I took myself off to Spain to learn about their highly successful captive breeding and release project for the Iberian lynx – just what we were trying to achieve with the wildcats at home.

  I met up with the Spanish biologists near Seville. We all spoke the same language of nature conservation, if not in quite the same tongue. Spanish wildcats are slightly smaller than ours, the same species without the grampia. From the illustrations and photos, theirs – gato montes – have a paler pelage to reflect the higher levels of sunlight and make the black stripes look blacker, but they are otherwise identical.

  They’ve suffered the same old problems: loss of habitat to industrial agriculture and forestry, persecution by gamekeepers and hunters, hybridisation with domestic and feral cats, and road kill . . . all the familiar insults we’ve thrown at ours. We think we’re down to the last few hundred animals in the Highlands, and it’s pretty doubtful whether any of those are pure wildcats. The Spanish don’t seem to have much of a clue about their gato, but they’re doing great things for their lynx.

  So I headed for Coto Doñana National Park, 1,300 square miles of coastal dunes and salt marsh, Las Marismas, and semi-natural pine forest stretching from just south of Seville down to the Portuguese border, the Gulf of Cadiz foaming at its fringes and one of the last refuges of Europe’s most endangered cat, the deliciously spotted Iberian lynx. I longed to see one in the wild; a slim chance, but one I wanted to try. I would not see a lynx, but I was to discover much more about myself.

  I knew a bit about Doñana. Memories came lancing through. I’d been there once before – back in . . . was it ’65 or ’66? – when my parents had stayed at the grandiose former hunting lodge Palacio Doñana, a large, ornate, whitewashed mansion, back then a stylish hostel for intrepid visitors. My father had rushed back to London on business and left my mother there for a few days. She’d loved it and urged me to join her. There were good reasons for always wanting to please my mother.