The Dun Cow Rib Read online

  A tantalisingly brief visit all those years ago, just one night – supper and a schooner of dark amontillado together in the Palacio, her silvery laugh, a gentle totter out into the glove-soft moonlight – all her fragile health could cope with. The heady perfume of night-scented jasmine, dama de noche, wrapping us round, then back to the fireside in the echoing, whitewashed salon, olive logs crackling like pistol fire till bedtime. In the morning we were off again, driving away. A toe dipped in, just that and no more. I had always hoped to make it back one day. Now, almost fifty years later, I was there again.

  I turned off the main road and bumped down a sandy track. To my left the tidal marshes and rippling reed-beds stretched away toward the Guadalquivir river. Then, a mile or two later, wholly unexpectedly, and without any announcement, the imposing edifice of the Palacio loomed up in front of me like a mirage, tucked into the edge of the forest, its compound enclosed by a perimeter wall of startling white. ‘Oh my God! I’ve been here.’ I called out, forgetting that there was nobody to hear me. ‘That’s it! That’s where my parents stayed yonks ago.’

  It had been a grand hunting lodge like many that were built in the Highlands of Scotland at the height of the Victorian sporting era, although this was considerably older. The Duchess of Alba had entertained Francisco Goya there in the eighteenth century and it had harboured many other dignitaries, including General Franco, to hunt deer and wild boar. So had Lord Alanbrooke, the British Field Marshal and Second World War Chief of Allied Staff who’d had a stormy relationship with Winston Churchill but still managed to be powerfully influential over the Allied victory.

  When Alanbrooke rented the Palacio in 1958, he and his wife had hosted a natural history expedition led by the founding triumvirate of what would later become the World Wildlife Fund: Guy Mountfort, Julian Huxley and Max Nicholson, three towering grandees of the embryonic nature conservation movement. With characteristic brimming enthusiasm, my mother had bought me a copy of Mountfort’s splendid book, Portrait of a Wilderness – The Story of the Coto Doñana Expeditions, and I had spent many hours poring over the black and white photographs. I still treasure it today, her fluid handwriting in the flyleaf, ‘I hope you can join expeditions like this one day.’

  Memory billowed in – jaw flexing and a lump forming in my throat. Yes, it was here, on the edge of these marshes. That was the building; I’d stayed here in the ’60s, spent a night with her here. Then, just then, trapped by that implausible cocktail of circumstance and emotions, my abstract notion came flooding back in.

  I suddenly saw that it had taken me most of a lifetime properly to understand that from early childhood every encounter with nature, each little glimpse of truth and comprehension of the natural world, had braided together to make me what I am. From some formative vital spark I had been hoarding images of birds and mammals, of reptiles and insects, of plants and soils and landscape and of their very essence, the wildness that defines them all, until at some consciously unordained past moment they had silently taken me over and modelled me into the creature I have become. Over the decades of working with nature everything had coalesced into a deeply personal raison d’être – yes, I suppose I mean a vocation. It was an extraordinary sense of destiny, mildly unsettling, and demanding questions I could not at that moment answer. But why? How did it happen? Was it one principal influence, or several flowing together like mountain streams? When, exactly, did it start? And just who or what could have been responsible?

  In those few minutes my world had shifted. That notion – that misty, blurry, hovering thing I had been ducking for years – was suddenly as crisply defined as a bright mountain peak when the clouds part. My brain was fizzing. I needed to reconnect with that last haunting image of my mother.

  Was it her unflagging love and encouragement that had been the determining force? The rare chance of being together in that wild and beautiful place, the squeezed hand, the gift of a book? Is that what had been happening all along? Had her fortitude and zest for life been the moving force throughout my childhood? Or was it the unintended consequence of her ghastly, life-shortening illness that had somehow funnelled me into what I am? My head was spinning. Memories and images crowded in, colliding, swamping each other and leaving me light-headed, floating in an emotional limbo. Did she spark a flame that night in the Palacio? Did it spin me off into a dizzying parallel universe, from which I would never fully return? I needed to capture that moment again and follow its lead.

  * * *

  There are thought to be no wildcats left in Doñana, but there is a stable population of around fifty Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus), a mesmerisingly beautiful, medium-sized spotted cat with ear tufts and a bob tail, closely related to the longer-legged Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx), the one that used to roam Scotland 750 to 1,000 years ago and that many would now like to see reintroduced. The park authority works closely with a lynx captive breeding complex on its western boundary, a shining conservation success: by the time I visited, sixty-nine radio-tagged lynx had been released into good habitat since the project started eleven years ago. Those lynx are out there and breeding. That’s exactly where we would like to be with the Scottish wildcat.

  The welcome by Dr Antonio Rivas bowled me off my feet, his enthusiasm mirrored and endorsed by his entire team. Two days later I came away elated, rejoicing that nature conservation held such splendid people at its noble heart. I was exhilarated but tired, very tired. I turned in early. In my hotel room I re-read my notes, added a few more and climbed into bed. I sat tapping into my laptop. Suddenly my eyes weren’t focusing, lids leaden, sleep rolling in like a fog. I jerked awake, once, twice, three times . . . just catching the laptop before it slid to the floor. I gave in. In free fall – altogether out of it.

  Much later, at an unlogged moment in the small hours, I surfaced sufficiently to dream vividly. I was back in the Palacio, aged nineteen, with my mother. Not just vividly, I was there. It was as real as a dream could possibly be. I caught her perfume on the sultry air, heard her voice and felt her arm in mine.

  The notion I had harboured for ages was that a very long time ago some accident of fate had made me want to be a naturalist – no, not want, NEED to be a naturalist, a person wholly engaged with nature, philosophically, emotionally, practically and professionally. Now, after a long career in nature conservation, I needed to look back and tie down influences, analyse roots and causes, and above all work out just who and what had spun the wheel, handed me the potion, spiralled me into being what I am and have been for more than fifty years.

  My mother was no naturalist. She had no scientific training at all, very little knowledge beyond what she had read, and even less opportunity to spend time in the wilds anywhere. My parents came to Spain every year for her health – British winters were always bad for her. They had built a home here, an eyrie high above the ancient Roman and Moorish fishing village of Fuingerola, long before it became a tawdry tourist resort. That one brief expedition to Coto Doñana was an exception, but one she loved.

  The book she gave me, Guy Mountfort’s natural history classic with its wild boar, fallow deer, lynxes, flamingos and imperial eagles, had sparked a new sense of purpose. I don’t believe that the idea of her son becoming a naturalist had ever entered her head – the profession barely existed in the 1960s. No, I’m sure she only saw it as an uplifting hobby, a worthwhile pastime; but that was it, that was the moment the idea of participating in such an expedition and perhaps one day even mounting one myself had fired me with a restless, vaulting ambition.

  In that time-eliding dream she was beside me, eyes flashing, smiling, laughing, encouraging – ‘Why don’t you stay here for a few days and try to see some of the wildlife?’ In a burst of memory as bright and shining as leaves after summer rain, I saw her chatting to the locals, old women swathed in black sitting in the afternoon sun outside their whitewashed cottages, and the little children playing in the dusty street. There she was; in self-taught fluent Spanish she was embracing the local
people she so loved – ‘¿Son estas sus nietos?’ – and I watched her throw back her head with a little flick of her hair as she always did when laughter bubbled out of her like a mountain spring, and that slightly startled look, wide-eyes flashing, as though her own mirth had caught her unawares.

  She had died suddenly and shockingly in her fifties, catching us all off guard – my father, my sister, me, her own twin sister, everyone who knew and loved her. None of us were prepared for it, although for God’s sake we’d had enough warning. Years of it. She’d been an invalid since my birth, battling with a degenerative heart condition, a struggle against hopeless odds with never the remotest chance of winning, yet never giving up. We knew it but we hadn’t seen it. We hadn’t seen it coming because we ruddy well didn’t want to and because she’d fooled us – brilliantly fooled us – for years and years. Even when all the chips were down she still managed to trick us into thinking she was OK, that somehow she’d pull through, that she’d always be there for us. She’d led us through a lifelong masterclass of endlessly loving, benign deception – a life of perpetual, courageous, stoical, dogged, resolute, unflinching – yes, bloody astounding – concealment because never once through all her trials did she ever complain about her ghastly, crippling condition, never once gave up hope or gave in to the slightest flicker of self-pity. We all knew she was seriously ill, but we blindly and stupidly refused to believe it. It’s called denial.

  Suddenly it was night. She leant on my arm as she walked slowly and unsteadily, only a few yards, all she could manage, away from the dim lights of the Palacio, out into the warm, thick darkness. Her aluminium stick clicked with each step and her breath came short and sharp. Stars winked and glistened high above us and a weakling moon hung like a segment of white peach among rags of back-lit cloud. We stood and listened to the night sounds of Las Marismas: nature’s wild orchestra in its finest fling. Far off geese haggled excitedly out on the distant water, the soft fluting of flamingos rising and falling, broken by shrill arpeggios of waders from the shallow lagoons in front of us. ‘I love this.’ Words whispered with an instinctive reverence for wildness. I knew exactly what she meant.

  My dream was as vivid as a dream can ever be. I was with her in body, mind and spirit. Right there. I could see the moon-gleam on her greying curls and I could hear the way she rested her front teeth invisibly on her lip and drew air through them with a thin, barely audible whistle when she was thinking. I could feel the warmth of her arm as that old familiar perfume wafted out to bind me to her as it had done ever since I was a small child climbing into her bed.

  Our conversation was brief – no need for elaboration – words primed with resonance of the moment, the place, the mood. A collusion of loaded silence and love piling in like grace. I felt my spirit lifting off and soaring to the stars. It was as though something I had been searching for all my life was suddenly there beside me. We laughed together, as one.

  I don’t know how long it lasted – difficult to tell with dreams – but I sensed that it was long enough to slough off the thirty-four years since her death, long enough to whirl back through the Spanish darkness to those transcendental moments of unity I had never thought I could know again. In all the intervening years I had never come so close, never so distinctively re-lived her presence with such intensity, never guessed that it was possible. I woke up wondering where I was.

  The room was hot and airless. I rose and went to the casement, flinging it wide. A breeze off the marshes as soft as thistledown caressed my face. There, only a few yards away, was the moonlight flickering across the black lagoon, the gossip of distant geese, the woodwind of flamingos floating into satin air, the redshanks’ piccolo piping and the insistent whistles of wigeon drakes. Then it came. From somewhere deep inside me, from some visceral cavern I didn’t know existed, catching me completely unawares, an unstoppable upwelling of emotion rose volcanically within me, choking, convulsing, overpowering. Tears flooded down my face.

  I recognised it instantly, as instinctively as you know the sound of your own voice. Grief – Latin: gravare, heavy; Old French: grever, to burden – that weight, that overwhelming burden of desolation I thought I’d conquered thirty years before had never gone away at all. It was still there, hidden, padlocked, forgotten, lurking deep in the darkest canyons of my hippocampus, silently waiting for this moment.

  * * *

  I returned to rainy Scotland buoyed up and inspired by the Spanish project and determined to pursue my mother’s influence further. I had learned so much, not just about captive breeding. Twelve years ahead of us, they had made and resolved many of the mistakes with lynxes we were now making with our wildcats. For hygiene, we were diligently removing cat faeces every day.

  ‘No,’ Antonio had said, ‘leave them in for at least a week or two. They contain pheromones, important territorial signals.’

  ‘Oh,’ I answered blankly, wondering why the hell I hadn’t thought of that.

  * * *

  For thousands of years since the last ice cap retreated, these deeply glaciated glens, carved through unyielding metamorphic schist, have stubbornly resisted the severest ravages of mankind. Drawing strength from the rock beneath, nature has always fought back. It is how so much of the Highlands’ precious wildlife has been able to cling on. Ours is a land of golden eagles tilting on glider wings and the metallic screams of peregrines echoing from the walls of the river gorge. I never cease to catch my breath when I see the Bourneville blur of pine martens filching food from the bird tables. My heart beats faster at the sudden flash of a salmon shimmering up the rapids, and every autumn dawn I awaken to the hills echoing with the roaring of rutting red deer stags. Although we very rarely see them, somehow, against all the odds, a few Scottish wildcats might have managed to hang in there too.

  One of the many joys of living among the mountains is arriving home after forays further afield. On a clear day, turning west just after Inverness, the Highland capital, the great grey rampart of the nearly 4,000-foot Affric mountains looms out of the distance, solid and reassuring. I never tire of that rugged molar horizon, a welcome home that wafts my spirit skyward like the red kites we so frequently see wheeling and soaring over the rich dark soil of the Black Isle fields. Without those mountains my life might have been entirely different.

  A squealing, wiggling welcome from my two Jack Russells, Nip and Tuck, a spousely hug with hot tea and a slice of my wife Lucy’s banana cake settled me straight back into cosy domesticity. Oh, it was GOOD to be home. But for me home has always been so much more than the cushioned refuge of the complacent. I have lived at Aigas so long that the land has claimed me, shaped me to match its wildness and its contrary needs, so that whenever I’ve been away I need to relocate and tune up again like a harp that has had to travel. So as soon as I tactfully could, I slipped out into the fresh cool of the evening and walked briskly uphill to the secret forest location of our wildcat project. I needed to stand and look at them with the brighter, wider eyes of the Spanish experience.

  We haven’t given our cats names. They are identified by gender and their pens: ♂ in Pen 1, ♀ in Pen 2, ♂ kitten in Pen 4 . . . and so on. There’s no good reason why we shouldn’t name them, but, respecting their innate wildness – as far from fluffy moggies as wolves from a poodle – we have avoided humanising them as much as possible. They have all been DNA tested and are high quality, over 89 per cent wildcat – probably as good as we are going to be able to find in the remaining wild population. By careful selective breeding we can further diminish the hybrid genes, sharing high quality kittens with other captive breeders to broaden the gene pool and reduce the risk of inbreeding.

  The pens are big and built on the woodland edge, with grassy spaces between natural cover of broom, brambles and thickets of wild raspberries; the damp patches have sprouted clumps of grasses, rushes, docks and nettles – as natural a wildcat habitat as we can achieve. Sunlight flickers through the trees, gnats dance, bees drone, the breezes shimmy throu
gh. Unthinking, wild birds – chaffinches, dunnocks, wrens and robins – dip and bob just out of reach, keeping the cats alert and, unlucky for some, foraging mice and voles make the mistake of blundering in.

  As the still evening air settled around me I stood at the gate to Pen 2. The male, a big rangy tom with attitude, jumped silently down from a high perch. Panther shoulders rolling in sinister ripples beneath the fur, he stalked slowly but purposefully across to stare me out. Ten feet from the wire, he sat on his haunches and glared. He glowed with all the assurance of a million years of evolution. He was magnificent. I resented the wire and wanted to be in the pen with him. When I moved to unlock the gate he hissed, lips curled and long fangs gleamed. His ears flattened and he crouched; his whole mask bristled with rancour. The emerald eyes flared, long white whiskers arrayed in a bright fan. This cat has a history of disliking men and makes his feelings clear. The black club end to his ringed tail twitched. And that stare – you get the feeling that he is in charge of the world.

  We keep human presence to a minimum. Every day one of the rangers enters the pens to feed and to clean away the detritus – bones, feathers, the scaly legs of quail or pheasants, rabbit fur. Every two weeks their bedding is changed for fresh, sweet-smelling straw. The rangers had often told me that the tom in Pen 2 was threatening, possibly even dangerous. ‘Oh yeah,’ I’d shrugged, smiling smugly to myself. ‘Dangerous? Nah, don’t believe it.’

  I unchained the gate and entered the safety chamber, carefully closing it behind me. He hissed again, louder, his anger rising to something akin to fury, ending the hiss with a sharp ‘Spat!’ A duty ranger would always have food – quail or rabbit, or fluffy, yellow day-old chicks (a by-product of the ghastly intensive poultry trade) we buy frozen – to throw to a hungry cat that came close. It’s a routine, expected when we enter the pen: they pounce, snatch up the prey and whisk away into cover, up onto a high perch or into a den. I had none – hadn’t thought it important; besides, my head was full of Iberian lynxes and new ideas. I wasn’t thinking right, dull stupidity eclipsing brighter reason. I opened the second gate into the pen. He was five feet away, no sign of backing off. ‘Hullo,’ I spoke softly, shaking my head. ‘Sorry, Tomcat, nothing for you tonight.’ I showed my empty hands.