THE WATERSHED

THE GOLDEN EAGLE GLEN ends abruptly in a wide headwall, lightly wooded with mostly birch, craggy, bouldery, and bisected by a white-knuckled burn whose procession of ragged waterfalls echoes far down the relative tranquillity of the glen. The best way from the watcher’s rock to the watershed is to keep the burn’s company. It was here one late June evening, with breeze enough to deter the worst of the midges and the glen softened by shadow after a long day of sunshine, that I toyed with the idea of spending the brief hours of pale darkness up on the watershed to watch the sunrise on the eyrie crag and see what unfolded.

Then the ring ouzel started singing. The song is full of jazzy rhythms and a tendency to belt out one haunting note again and again, like Sweets Edison used to do (if you know your jazz, Sweets is best known for his muted trumpet wiles filling in the spaces on the best albums of Sinatra, Ella, Tony Bennett). On and on, mellifluous and fluent, chorus after chorus, the song flowed like mountain burns, and then I had the notion that I would like to sit where I could see the singer, but without the singer seeing me. So I crawled away from the rock, my chin in the heather, one slow yard at a time.

The ouzel was in a low, scrubby birch tree by the burn and mercifully with his back to me. I crawled into the lee of a smaller rock, put my back to it and simply sat there. If he turned round I would be in full view, but I was dressed in something like the shades of the rock and the land, and I was silent and still and these things always help. Then the fox showed up. It was trotting along its accustomed path, one-fox-wide, but as it neared the ouzel’s tree it slowed its pace then stopped. Then it sat. Then it put its head on one side. And if you were to ask me what I think it was doing, and if I thought you were not the kind of person easily given to ridicule, I would tell you that I think it was listening to the music, as I was myself. But now I was listening to the music while also watching the fox listening to the music while both of us were also watching the musician, who seemed to be oblivious to both of us. For three, perhaps four minutes, this situation prevailed, and a moment of my life was attended by the most enduring magic.

It all ended abruptly. The ouzel simply stopped singing of its own accord, and flew off into the deepening shadows of the burn. The fox scratched its nose with a forepaw, stood up, and wandered off. I sighed out loud, still under sorcery’s spell. The truth is that I don’t really know what the fox was doing, only that it seemed to be fascinated by the bird and the only fascinating thing the bird was doing was singing. Nothing in the fox’s behaviour suggested it was stalking the bird. And as far as I could see, it was doing exactly what I was doing, nothing more, nothing less.

I know this though. If you spend a lot of time in one place with one overriding purpose centred on one particular species (in this case, the eagle glen and the eagles), you also acquire an onlooker’s knowledge of at least some of the eagles’ neighbours and fellow-travellers, just because you are out there and for long periods you are quite still and the neighbours and the fellow-travellers go about their workaday business and you see at first hand how they get on with each other and how they treat you like a bit of the landscape. There are many days in this glen when you see no eagles at all, and a handful of days when they are rarely out of sight, but there are no days when you see nothing at all.

So each time I climb the burn at the right season of the year, en route to the watershed, I stop some distance short of the rock by the stunted birch and listen and watch and wait, just in case. And because I have gone often enough for long enough I now know that the ring ouzel is an unpredictable presence in the glen, that there are years – often several years at a time – when the bird is a regrettable absence, but sooner or later it returns.

Today, the day the pale eagle found me at the watcher’s rock, there is no ring ouzel singing, and if the dog fox is out, I have not seen him. What I do know is that he no longer has any cubs this year, for the eagles took all three, one by one, and sometimes that too, is part of the story of how the creatures of the glen get on with their neighbours.

For as long as I climb the headwall, the only long view is behind me, back down the entire length of the upper glen, which has something of the feel of a steep-sided alpine meadow, and beyond which the descent steepens through forest and this burn becomes a turbulent river hell-bent on the loch, two miles distant and a thousand feet lower. Suddenly the slope relents, the confines of the headwall and the flanks of the glen vanish, and you breast the watershed. You are drawn to the solitary cairn like a bee to a wild rose; the transformation in the nature of the land is instant and utter. Here, on the right kind of day, there unfurls such a breadth of heartland mountains cramming the horizon from east to west and folding away improbable distances northwards, that you are aware of the catch in your breath and the uncertainty of your eyes as they struggle to take it all in. It doesn’t matter how often I climb here, it is a place to which I have never grown accustomed. And sometimes, on the blue moon days, I have seen an eagle or a pair of eagles rise against the mountain horizon (an old voice in my head: “You must learn to scan the middle distance!”) and on up into skies without limits, which is when and where you learn things about the eagles that you never see and never learn from a hide. They don’t inhabit the world as constrained by the window of a hide or the lens of a camera. They inhabit the world, this world, this three-dimensional territory, with a mastery of airspace as utter as any creature that ever drew breath. Nothing is beyond them here: 100 mph in a shallow glide with wings half-folded and unbeating, a 3,000-foot free-fall that ends fifty feet above the ground and segues into a 1,000-foot power-climb then another freefall and the softest of soft landings on the frond of a rowan sapling. I have even seen the pale eagle rise on a thermal alongside a cliff and with her feet down and her wings wide, urging the wind to drift her purposefully – playfully – backwards through the air.

The watershed itself sends its infant burns south and north, and these, though they rise within yards of each other, are destined one for the Forth and one for the Tay and if their paths ever cross at all it must be somewhere around the Bell Rock lighthouse, fifteen miles out into the North Sea from Arbroath on the Angus coast. The abrupt headwall of the eagle glen is behind and below me now in the south, but the watershed itself is a gentler land, wide and turned up at the edges towards east and west, and dipping gently to the north, where long, easy slopes slide away to one of the great east-west crossings of all Scotland.

So this watershed, this plain in the sky, is the tract of land that sustains the very heartbeat of the eagles’ territory. I lived down there to the north at the foot of these long slopes for five years, and I learned a lot about myself and a bit about golden eagle territories during that time. It seemed to me that their territories had more to do with wind direction than physical boundaries, that there were, for example, negotiable overlapping areas between this territory and the nearest one to the east, because the birds themselves seem to prefer to hunt into the wind, for it affords them more flight control, so that if there was a west wind blowing the hunting birds from both territories would be out in the western reaches of their territories, and a tailwind would ease their burdened journeys back to the eyrie. At that time, both pairs prospered from a superabundance of rabbits on the lower slopes above the cottage where I lived, and on several occasions I saw birds from both eyries working the same hillside, which I assumed to be part of the negotiable terrain. But during the nesting season this watershed is the exclusive preserve of the pale female and her mate, and another eagle straying this close to the eyrie meets with ruthless intolerance. In late summer and autumn the boundaries relax. I have – once and only once – seen the four adults and the two single chicks they fledged lazily afloat on a warm late-September afternoon, the terrier-yaps of the young birds falling a thousand feet down the sky to my ears. All six birds were high above these north-facing slopes where that brief rabbit infestation a decade ago now had perhaps established some kind of common ground and a precedent of mutual tolerance on the brief days of the wild year when the living is easy. The golden eagle’s nesting season is a long one. By the end of December the courting overtures that reinforce territorial boundaries will have begun again, and so will old hostilities.