Gods of the Morning (11 page)

An hour later the sun had gone and we arrived at our vehicle cold and tired. I kept looking over my shoulder – no sign of Max. Everyone loaded their rucksacks into the Land Rover, some changed their boots, others stood about looking apprehensive. An uneasy silence had descended over us all. It had been a long, arduous day and my guests were getting stiff. No Max. ‘Jump in,' I urged, as nonchalantly as I could. ‘I'm not worried about Max. I'll run you home and come straight back for him.'

It was the last thing I wanted to do, an extra thirty-six
miles there and back, but I couldn't really keep them waiting any longer. I fired up the engine and turned the vehicle round. Just as I was about to let the clutch up there was an electrifying gasp from everyone on board, then a cheer as they all tumbled out of the vehicle. Down the track, still fifty yards away, Max was padding towards us with a pair of black binoculars held firmly in his mouth. His tail was wagging energetically; his eyes shone with unfettered canine pride. Kirsty burst into tears.

I hated to be parted from Max even for a day. On the occasions that I had to go away we both pined and I came home to rapturous, whole body-wagging welcomes to the very end of his long life. At the age of thirteen – a good age for a Labrador – he suffered a stroke and a little while later he died, swiftly and painlessly, with his head in my lap. I mourned him then and I mourn him now. I knew in my bones I would never have another dog like Max. Such is the price of love that, whether we resist it or not, some small part of us dies with the beloved so that, as we emerge from the moment, we know in our hearts that nothing can ever be quite the same again.

I buried Max beside the yew grove and planted thirteen daffodil bulbs on his grave, one for every year of his blessed life. Soon afterwards, honouring a local Highland tradition – many country houses have dog cemeteries with walls or railings around them – I erected a small stone carved with a Latin inscription,
Quo non praestantior alter
, written of loyal Misenus, son of Aeolus, of whom in Virgil's ‘Æneid' it is said, ‘Than whom none more excellent'.

I missed him terribly. Life seemed wearisome without a dog, the days empty, the house and the car strangely unwelcoming. But I knew I did not want another Labrador. The notion that I could just go out and buy a replacement seemed unthinkable, an alien country I had no stomach to visit. The very idea seemed a betrayal to Max and an injustice to any new dog, which, through no fault of its own, was never likely to be able to meet my galactic expectations. Besides, a son of Max from a local friend's Labrador bitch, a lovely gentle dog called Jubilee (born in 1976), had been given to my small children. He was a perfect children's dog, gentle, adoring, adored and adorable, but he was theirs, not mine, and nothing I could do would ever change that. So I scoured the livestock column of the local paper until I found something completely different. A Jack Russell terrier puppy for ten pounds. When I arrived at the house in the back streets of Inverness to a barrage of frantic barking from a bobbery pack of adult terriers of deeply dubious lineage, I thought I had made a mistake.

There wasn't much choice – only one left. So I called him Hobson and took him home, not at all sure what I'd bought. Nicknamed Hobdog by my children, he matured to be a splendid little character: loyal, feisty, tireless, endlessly enthusiastic and a wonderful companion. He went everywhere with me. He was as much my dog as Max had been, but he was also entirely different: the self-willed nature of the terrier breed made him an indomitable character and much more testing to train. But I loved him for it.

Long before his time Hobson became ill with an
inoperable bowel tumour. Faced with unacceptable suffering, I pulled the plug. I gritted my teeth and wept tears of betrayal as I buried him with more daffodils beside Max in this quiet place at the top of the garden.

Once again I went searching for another dog. Lucy was enthusiastic about another Jack Russell, so we put the word about among our friends. We hit lucky. There was a litter only a few miles away. We went to look and immediately fell for a fat little fellow, then only four weeks old, one of six smooth-haired pups in a huge cardboard box, all white with expressive black and tan faces and random black blobs dotted about their bodies as if someone had spilt ink on them. We would return at nine weeks.

It is fifteen years ago now that I went with Lucy and my youngest daughter Hermione, then at the puppy-obsessed age of just six, to collect the one we had ordered, later named Rough. Only two remained in the box, all the others had gone, mostly as working dogs to gamekeepers. The breeder lifted Rough out and handed him to the girls. I found myself staring down at the tiny, stunted remnant, half the size of his brother, shivering in the pathos of abandonment at the bottom of the box. ‘What will happen to that?' I asked naïvely, not even knowing its sex.

‘No one's going to want him,' came the stark retort. ‘He's a runt. He should have been drowned at birth.' So, to our small daughter's uncontainable delight, Rough and Tumble came home together.

Perpetually bowled over and shoved aside by his clumsy, rumbustious brother, who was almost twice his weight, from
the very beginning Tumble attracted pity. We fell for it willingly and spoiled him rotten. He loved it and learned quickly to exploit it. A runt he might have been, but there was nothing wrong with his brain – he was far brighter than his brother. He never grew to match Rough's weight, strength or speed so what he lacked in brawn he had to achieve by guile. When there was food in the offing he could shovel on the charm and roll out the special pleading by the barrowful. It always worked. He came out on top. OK, he wasn't very robust, his coat was thin and he felt the cold, he couldn't breathe silently through his nose and he lacked the gutsy, feisty, randy characteristics of Rough and most other Jack Russells, but he possessed other, far subtler skills.

He could spot a soft touch a mile away and knew how to curl up in your lap and make you feel the most important person on the planet. We all adored Tumble. But at eight years old the defective genes that had branded him a runt finally returned to haunt him. An unseen internal physical defect caught up with him and plonked him firmly in the last-chance saloon.

Let me be clear: I am not sentimental about my animals. I love them as much or more than anyone else, and can be as soppy as the next man, but I will not stand by and watch them suffer. I have shot my dogs and my horses when there was no way out of their pain; blown out their brains in a final act of respect and oblation – a personal covenant I cannot and would not delegate to another. So when one day I noticed Tumble straining unnaturally to defecate, my heart sank. I thought I knew where we were headed. I had lost
Hobson to a horrid bowel problem and I didn't like the look of this at all. We tried laxatives to no avail. Volcano-like and ominous, a bulge appeared around his tail. To begin with it was soft and painless – not like a tumour – so I guessed it was a rectal hernia.

Town or country, when your dog is ill, it's a crisis, in our case made worse by living up a remote Highland glen. John Easton, our friendly local vet, is only twelve miles away and regularly comes to attend to our horses and cattle. He confirmed my suspicions: thankfully not a tumour, but two hernias not just a single, one on either side of his tail. ‘Sorry,' John shook his head, ‘there's nothing I can do. There's no medical treatment or cure. Your only hope is a risky and complicated operation with no guarantee of success.' Worse still, John couldn't attempt the surgery himself, it would have to be Glasgow: the highly respected University of Glasgow Veterinary Hospital, on busy summer roads a drive of four gruelling hours.

Tumble had become my dog. Once again I had a shadow, always there, always pleased to see me, always keen to join in with whatever I was doing. And in the evenings he would curl up on my lap in my fireside chair, snoring and dreaming in that oceanic slumber of contentment only a dog can know.

All summer the condition worsened. We kept him going on liquid paraffin. In front we had an alert, happy, healthy, fun-loving terrier; behind he was pained, distorted, grotesque, eventually unable even to wag his little tail. When I took him out it was taking him up to half an hour to evacuate pathetic caterpillars of excrement, and then only with my
help containing the obscene bulges on either side of his tail with my hands. Daily they grew larger. Incontinence followed, the internal pressure overcoming him so suddenly that he wallowed helplessly in the pathos of his own distress.

‘Do we risk the surgery?' I asked Lucy and Hermione, now eleven, who had hijacked both puppies five years before and, although she had reluctantly conceded Tumble to me and made Rough her special dog, her own constant companion, she had always doted on them both.

‘Daddy,' she said to me, fighting back tears and in a voice I had not heard before, ‘you are to try
everything
.' I phoned for an appointment in Glasgow.

A few days later we were there, Tumble and I, face to face with a smiling young Australian surgeon named Ross. I stood Tumble carefully on the stainless-steel examination bench. Ross was pulling on surgical gloves. ‘I need to investigate the extent of the hernias. Will you hold him firm?'

‘Sure,' I said, and to Tumble, ‘Sorry, little man, he's going to stick a finger up your bum.' It hurt and he yelled, and I felt a traitor for having to hold him so tight. ‘Sorry,' I murmured again, when it was over, burying my face in his velvet ears. ‘Please don't stop trusting me just yet. Can you fix it, Ross?' I asked.

He promised he would do his best but warned that if it failed there would be only one outcome. There was a moment of silence, broken only by the slap of the rubber gloves springing off his fingers. Hermione's words swirled round my brain. ‘Do we give it a go?' he asked at length.

I liked his honest eyes, and his bare, scrubbed forearms
seemed to evince an inner strength. This young man had the air of a real professional. Sometimes I think Aussies are more straightforward than us Brits; I trusted this one instinctively. I nodded. Just for a moment I had no words.

I had to leave him, of course, and trail back up north through the wide, empty mountains to our lonely Inverness-shire glen, the lonelier for Tumble's absence and made more poignant by Hermione's tears and Rough's whining restlessness. Three days passed, then the phone call.

Ross said it was much worse than he had expected. When he opened Tumble up he'd found the whole bowel distorted and doubled back on itself in an S-shape. He'd had to straighten it by hitching it permanently to the abdomen wall. Then he darned the splits in the ruptured muscles where the hernias bulged, stitching them together in a mesh of zigzagged sutures. The little dog had come round, but he was sedated and drowsy. They wanted to hold on to him until the bowel moved, to see if it was going to work – the crucial test. It would be another day or two perhaps.

The next day a friendly Glaswegian nurse phoned: Tumble had eaten a little, but still no movement. Another twenty-four hours dragged by. It was the same the following morning – still nothing. It might be better, she suggested, if I came down and took him home . . . ‘Some dogs are very particular about where they go.' That's my Tumble, I thought, and ran for the car.

In three and a half hours I was there, pacing the corridor, like a prisoner awaiting sentence. The door opened. I knelt to greet him. The same small, blotched black and white face
with tan eyebrows, the little black nose, the same eyes of polished oak, ears cocked in woozy recognition, only a bald patch on his neck where the anaesthetic had been. For a moment I held his head in my hands, staring into those deep, unreproving eyes. Could he possibly understand why I had abandoned him?

It was just as well I was braced for his rear end to be a mess. His underbelly, tail and backside were shaved to the pink, the whole region angry and swollen, sutured like a Christmas turkey right down his belly and round his unhappy tail. Gingerly I carried him out to the car. ‘We need a good movement to know if the bowel is working properly,' smiled another kind assistant as I left. ‘Please give us a ring and let us know.'

On the way home I stopped to stretch my legs on the one thousand five hundred and eight-foot high-point of the Drumochter, the high mountain pass that separates mellow Tayside from rugged old Inverness-shire where the treeless hills veer skywards to the clouds on both sides of the road. Tumble looked up from the blankets as if he wanted to do the same. ‘OK,' I said, ‘gently does it.'

He wobbled out onto the deer-cropped sward, looking round at the fragrant, cooling hills of late summer, as if to say, ‘This is more like it.' He stood still for several minutes, occasionally lifting his nose to test the air. Then he glanced up at me for reassurance before sniffing a tussock of rushes. He eased forward, went to cock his leg, winced with pain and thought better of it – after all, he had been gutted like a fish. He looked back to me for guidance.

‘What a good boy,' I said reassuringly, in the voice I have always used when my dogs perform their functions satisfactorily. I wanted him to have another go, however sore he was. I know how vital kidneys are. But something bigger was on his mind; he had grander designs than that. For a moment he looked nonplussed, eyeing first the mountains and then me before moving stiffly and purposefully to a place of his own particular choosing, an intimate amphitheatre of lawn encircled by a lilac pastel haze of fading heather. Awkwardly and painfully he bent to a faecal crouch. I held my breath. A moment later the finest, glossiest, roundest, most spectacular four-and-a-half-inch polony of healthy terrier excrement launched itself triumphantly into upland Perthshire. I never dreamed that I would be so thrilled to see a dog turd. Smiling broadly, I reached for my mobile phone.

10

The Memory of Owls

The screech-owl, with ill-boding cry,
Portends strange things, old women say;
Stops every fool that passes by,
And frights the school-boy from his play.

‘The Politicians', Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-whoo!
Tu-whit! Tu-whoo! A merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

Love's Labour's Lost,
Act V, scene ii,
William Shakespeare

I cannot be trusted with owls. I shot one once, with an air rifle when I was a tearaway eleven-year-old, and the guilt lives with me yet. A tawny habitually roosted in a thick, incalculably ancient yew tree in the rambling garden of my home. Tawny owls had probably been roosting there for hundreds of years. The tree was not particularly tall – pruned back many times over many centuries – but its trunk possessed all the girth of great age, and from about fifteen feet up its massed limbs erupted in a dense, unruly
candelabrum of branches, casting their shade and their shed ginger needles in a broad circle over stone paving slabs heaved chaotically upwards, like tectonic plates, by centuries of roots.

My grandfather had shown me that owl with pride. Together we peered up into the thicket of branches. There, close to the main stem, sat a brown owl with its eyes shut. ‘There was a tawny owl in this tree when my grandfather was a boy,' he told me. It was arithmetic I couldn't fathom. My grandfather, very tall, bald and with gold-rimmed, half-moon spectacles perched on his nose, then well into his eighties, seemed to me to be as old as Noah, so the notion of his grandfather must surely have pre-dated not just the Flood, but the entire Old Testament. An unthinkable number of years and a wholly incalculable number of owls. I was awestruck.

That year I was given an air rifle, a BSA Meteor .477, with open sights. It was the most exciting birthday gift I had ever received. In the short space of a birthday afternoon I became Davy Crockett, Kit Carson and the Lone Ranger all rolled into one ill-disciplined puberulous youth bursting to tangle with danger and adventure. I was also given a packet of targets and some lessons from my father about handling guns. He made me learn by heart a rhyme that hung on the gunroom wall. It was called, appropriately, ‘A Father's Advice':

Never, never let your gun
Pointed be at anyone.
That it may unloaded be,
Matters not the least to me.

I can recite it now as then. It was a sportsman's code of conduct with hearty Victorian overtones.

If 'twixt you and neighbouring gun
Bird may fly or beast may run,
Let this maxim ere be thine,
‘Follow not across the line.'

It would be years before I discovered what a maxim was, but I recited it confidently and won the freedom I craved. It ran to seven verses, with a finger-wagging couplet of dire consequences at the very end:

You may kill or you may miss,
But at all times think of this:
All the pheasants ever bred
Won't repay for one man dead.

At the age of eleven it seemed to me to have the authority of God. But it did not say, ‘Don't shoot owls.'

In truth, the reverse was often the case. My grandfather, born a Victorian of the old school, was a shooting man – no, more than that, he was an excellent and widely respected shot. It was what sporting gentry of his generation did; a social shibboleth for acceptability obsessively adhered to by all who sought to move in those circles. Almost all country estates had shoots and employed gamekeepers. I have family game books detailing the staggering numbers of game birds shot – pheasants, partridges, snipe, grouse, duck and
woodcock – dating back to the early nineteenth century. Two volumes of my grandfather's, commenced in 1898 in slanting copperplate handwriting when he was twenty, and running on uninterrupted up until he enlisted for the First World War, then on between the wars, reveals that he was in high demand. He was invited to shoots throughout the land, and every summer he travelled with his loader and his chauffeur to Scotland for the ‘Glorious Twelfth' of August and the opening of the grouse season, first to the Campsie Fells, thence to Inverness-shire and Morayshire and on up to Sutherland for September deer-stalking.

It remains undeniably the case that those nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century shooting estates, both great and small, operated a systematic annihilation of any wildlife that might presume to threaten a game bird, and many more that didn't. There were no meaningful wildlife protection laws until the middle of the twentieth century, no influential million-plus membership organisations, such as the RSPB and the Wildlife Trusts today. As a movement, nature conservation was a gleam in one or two visionary individuals' eyes. Ecology as a science and a profession hadn't been invented. Countryside and wildlife management was essentially the preserve of those private individuals who owned the land and everything that inhabited it.

Gamekeepers ruled their beats with snares, gin traps, poison baits and the gun – and with impunity. Anything with a hooked beak, including owls, was shot on sight. The animals and birds that fell prey to their grim labours became a currency. Gamekeepers were not just assessed by the spectacular ‘bags'
of game – mostly pheasants, partridges and grouse – they produced for their employers and guests, but by the total numbers of ‘vermin' they destroyed in the process.

In order to demonstrate proof of their dire professionalism, in the woods gamekeepers erected macabre gibbets for their victims. As a boy I remember examining these with morbid fascination. Lengths of wooden fence rail nailed to a tree in a prominent position, for an employer to see and approve, would often display the withered and shrunken corpses of crows, jays, weasels, stoats, sparrowhawks, buzzards, kestrels, peregrines, hedgehogs and, yes, often owls, all hanging in a row like bedraggled coats on pegs. In his book
The Amateur Poacher
(1879), the eminent nineteenth-century naturalist and writer Richard Jefferies stumbles across a gamekeeper's gibbet on the outside wall of a ‘ruinous' old wooden shed deep in the Wiltshire woods, ‘proof ', he writes, ‘of the keeper's loyal activity':

Along the back there were three rows of weasels and stoats nailed through the head and neck to the planks . . . a hundred in each row . . . about three hundred altogether. But the end of the shed was the place where the more distinguished offenders were gibbeted . . . four rows of crows, magpies and jays. Hawks filled the third row. The kestrels were the most numerous, but there were many sparrow-hawks . . . and the remains of a smaller bird . . . a merlin. But the last and lowest row . . . was the most striking.

This grand tier was crowded with owls. Clearly this gallery was constantly renewed . . . the white [barn] owl side by side
with brown wood [tawny] owls . . . and a few long horned [long-eared] owls. Trap and gun have so reduced the wood owls that you may listen half the night and never hear the ‘whoo-hoo' that seems to demand your name.

What Jefferies makes entirely clear is that this was the norm. Nowhere in this comprehensive description does he express any surprise or shock at his find. It was quite simply what happened on all shoots, a major modification of the natural world that would persist well into the twentieth century.

The naturalist James Edmund Harting wrote in his 1872
The Ornithology of Shakespeare
:
‘
Alas . . . that we should live to see our noble falcons gibbeted, like thieves, upon the “keeper's tree”.' In some remote corners of Britain these illegal and unenlightened practices and traditions still persist. Disturbingly, a gamekeeper on a grouse moor in Scotland was prosecuted for shooting a short-eared owl as recently as 2004.

I was reared in the dying decades of that punitive sporting tradition. For many country people, shooting was a lifelong passion, as were fox-, stag- and otter-hunting. I spent the years from when I could first run wild, perhaps six or seven – long before I had a gun – until my late teens, happily wandering through woods and fields watching animals being killed or, later, chasing and killing them myself. The rules were straightforward and unchallenged, a country apartheid every bit as uncompromising and odious as its human counterpart. With the exception of small birds, wildlife was either game or vermin, white or black, as stark and uncompromising as that.

And yet, curiously and counter-intuitively, it was also both
traditional and fashionable for country people, particularly those with leisure time to fill, folk who would then have described themselves as gentry, to study natural history. Many were serious, and seriously good amateur naturalists. Immaculately arranged collections of birds' eggs, butterflies, beetles and pressed flowers were commonplace, even the norm – and there were rules: an intriguing code of moral and ethical standards by which you operated your collections.

Never take more than one egg from a nest; only one rare orchid to be pressed. Never attempt to pin out your butterfly, moth or your beetle until you were quite sure it was dead in the killing bottle. As children we were taught how to fold and crush laurel leaves with a rolling pin and place them in the killing jar. Their aromatic vapours overpowered the butterflies quickly, but the beetles took much longer. If you removed them too quickly they came back to life. I am still troubled by the image of a stag beetle going nowhere, swimming on a pin hours after I had impaled it.

The library shelves in my childhood home contained many exquisitely illustrated volumes of bird books, wild flower guides, encyclopaedias of natural history, guides to butterflies and moths, fungi, and even one I remember on injurious insects – stinging and biting flies and wasps. They were old and foxed and smelt fusty, but the illustrations were often protected by thin veils of tissue, to be lifted carefully aside so that the delicate watercolour prints were revealed in their full glory. It was from these precious early tomes that I garnered so much inspiration to discover wild nature for myself.

Not until much later did it dawn on me that the paradox
of killing the things you admired so much that you wanted to keep them was one of the perplexing contradictions of serious nature study of the day. This, coupled with obsessive and lyrical adulation of game species in art, prose, poetry and taxidermy, while lustily chasing otters, foxes, deer and hares and wilfully exhorting the extermination of most hooked beaks and carnivores, seemed at the time entirely rational and unremarkable. The two omissions from the list were rabbits and badgers. Rabbits were widely shot, trapped, netted and snared by all country people and formed a staple in their diet, and badger digging and baiting was a pastime – a sport, even – and the common preserve of village boys with time on their hands.

There was no excuse. It is no good trying to blame the confused standards of the times or my upbringing. I knew that my grandfather loved birds. He knew not only his robins from his wrens, but also his redpolls from his redwings, and his notes scribbled in pencil in the margins of some of those books are testament to where he had seen them, and to his lifelong interest in all country things. I also knew very well that having an owl in that old yew was a joy to him; it was a symbol of continuity, of English village country life going on as it had done for many centuries. That much had been made endearingly clear to me from his tone. The three of them had seemed to me to fit together in an ageless trinity of absolute belonging. He loved the tree for its antiquity and its long association with owls and he loved the owl for the refinement with which its occupation graced the tree. He certainly knew that tawny owls did no harm to anyone.
For all his exploits with the gun, I am sure he never shot an owl; nor would he have condoned it by a gamekeeper, far less his grandson.

The head-hanging truth that still torments my soul is that when no one was looking I crept out and shot that owl. For a moment it seemed not to move; then it tipped forward and fell like a rag at my feet. I picked it up, hot and floppy in my hands. Its cinnamon and cream mottled plumage was as soft and silky as Angora fleece. One owl, one boy, one gun. Two burst hearts, one with lead, the other with guilt. I had never held a tawny owl before and its lifeless beauty hit me in a withering avalanche of instantaneous remorse and shame. I have never forgotten it and never forgiven myself.

To this day I ask myself why I did it. Was it the raw, puerile stupidity of vandalism, or did some uninvited surge of prepubescent carnal machismo wade in and take over, blinding what little formative judgement I possessed? I don't know; but I do know that it was to become one of the definitive climacterics of my adolescence. At that moment something indefinable inside me changed, like a pupal case splitting open to reveal the real insect. It wasn't just shame: it was a deeper, purer catharsis, like snapping out of hypnosis and awaking to see the real world around me for the first time.

I hid the corpse under leaves deep in a thicket and never told a soul. But, like Lady Macbeth's damned spot, the image of the dead owl in my hand refused to go away. It haunted me then and it haunts me still. Although I went on to enjoy game shooting as a social convention for many years, from that day forward, in the hope that it might assuage my guilt,
I adhered to the sporting doctrine of ‘A Father's Advice' with the purity of the Absolute.

Later, in my teens, I reared tawny owlets that had been gusted prematurely from their nests while in the flightless, fluffy-tennis-ball stage. I have forgotten how many, but certainly five or six over as many years. I loved them all, but releasing them successfully to the wild became a passionate plea for absolution and atonement, an expiation demanded by the immortal owl within. It may also be that that one event, that single dead owl in my hand, conspired to bring about two important changes in my life, the second maturing from the first: one, that I determined to know and understand as much about nature as I could; and two, that in the fullness of maturity, I would become a lifelong, committed nature conservationist.