I remember reading of Scottish wildcats in old nature books, and marvelling that such a fearsome creature could exist and look so similar to our own cuddly household pets. The Scottish wildcat, they maintained, is a beast of such extraordinary ferocity, strength and potential for aggression that it could kill a grown man. Every illustration showed the wildcat in a frozen, furious stance, back arched and bristling, ears pressed flatter than flat, eyes locked wide in a glare of blind rage, mouth wide open to reveal far more and far larger teeth than any of my own cats surely possessed. Even a small wildcat kitten, the books solemnly informed me, would be a ball of deadly rage when confronted by a human and would never – could never – be anything else.
The legend remains strong today. One rainy afternoon I was at Wildwood in Kent, a small zoo where native British animals (both extant and extirpated) are kept in roomy, natural enclosures. Having admired bears and boars, wolves and weasels, I finally tracked down the pleasingly huge and well-appointed wildcat enclosure and watched the two cats within – one dozing on a high platform and the other wandering around the cage floor. ‘They’re the most dangerous animals here,’ remarked a man standing nearby, apropos of nothing. ‘Worse than wolves, worse than lynxes.’ He pointed at the prowling wildcat, which paused and gazed back at him, its eyes inscrutable. ‘The keepers won’t go in with them. Not safe. Untameable. That could kill a grown man, you know.’
I just smiled and nodded, but the old books came to mind and I watched the wildcat and wondered whether it really would fly at any human that came near it, determined to kill, and whether the keepers really did have to manage the cats’ needs without ever entering their enclosure. The man wandered off and, a few minutes later, a petite young woman in keeper’s clothes arrived and promptly answered all of my questions by opening the enclosure door and stepping inside. The sleeping wildcat didn’t react, but the one pacing the floor did – dramatically. It rushed to the keeper and threw its stripy flank against her legs in a passionate show of affection. The keeper stooped and lifted up the cat, which snuggled down in her arms, butted its face against hers, and slowly cycled its front paws in the air in obvious and – to me as a lifelong pet-cat owner – very familiar delight.
I was not too sure what to make of this. I’d seen quite a few other wildcats in zoos prior to my day at Wildwood, and they’d all looked fierce enough, but this one was doing exactly what the books said wildcats never did. I thought back to Ring of Bright Water, that classic of nature writing by Gavin Maxwell. Although the book was primarily focused on Maxwell’s pet otters, it also briefly featured a young wildcat kitten that was attempting to swim across a sea loch when Maxwell, crossing the loch by rowing boat, found it and fished it out, shutting it in a conveniently empty hamper and bringing it home. The kitten seemed accepting of its fate at first but soon became unhappy, then angry. It escaped from its prison and climbed as far up the chimney as it could, necessitating a second rescue. Encouraged back into the room from above by Maxwell’s accomplice, it took up a defensive position on a high table and turned to face its would-be captor. It had transformed from a sweet-looking kitten to a ‘noble, savage wild animal at bay’.
And that was only a kitten. We learned nothing more about this particular kitten – it was somehow wrangled back into its box and then passed on to a new owner, who wanted to truly test the notion that wildcats are untameable. But that passage had lived in my memory for years, and I couldn’t square it with this full-grown wildcat enjoying a good old cuddle in human arms.
Just before the keeper set the cat gently back down on the ground, I took a photograph of the two of them as evidence against the next person who tried to tell me that wildcats were untameable. I talked to the keeper when she came out of the enclosure – a difficult task in itself because the over-affectionate wildcat was desperate to leave with her – and learned that this particular cat (a female called Isla) had known human love and care since her first hours on Earth. Bred in captivity, her inexperienced mother abandoned her at birth and the keeper had hand-reared her. She grew up as tame as any hand-reared domestic kitten and deeply bonded to her keeper.
I thought about my own little wild cat – my gatita fiera – born feral and rescued from a life in the wild at five weeks old, and not properly socialised until she was 12 weeks old. Her wildness would never completely leave her now. Feral kittens are tamed pretty easily if you can get them young. Four weeks old and it’s a breeze. Even up to eight weeks old it is usually perfectly doable, but thereafter things get more difficult and if your kitten has reached 12 weeks of age the challenge is close to insurmountable. Yet my kitten was never fierce, only fearful, and the tales of ungovernable ferocity that surround the Scottish wildcat don’t seem to be applied to the African wildcat or even to other European wildcats.
Watching Isla the not-wild Scottish wildcat, and talking to her keeper, made me wonder again about the kitten Gavin Maxwell had rescued. We never knew how old it was, but was there really any reason to think that Scottish wildcat kittens couldn’t be tameable if caught early enough? I later read about another hand-reared Scottish wildcat kitten who also grew up tame and affectionate – more about her later – and yet legend insists this can’t happen. From birth to death the Scottish wildcat’s ferocity has long been its most celebrated, and feared, trait.
Today, with our Highland tiger so close to its vanishing point, another trait has taken over. Most of us who are interested in wildcats have never seen one in the wild and never will, and when we think of them we picture something not in-your-face ferocious but elusive to the point of invisibility. The change has been in our actions and our intentions, as well as in the wildcat’s fortunes. We want to see a wildcat, watch it moving through its wild world from a respectful distance. It’s nearly impossible because their population is vanishingly tiny now. But in times gone by wildcats were more common and would have been a threat to small livestock. Consequently many of the people who regularly encountered them would have had a different intention towards them: to hunt, trap and kill as many as possible. It’s hardly surprising, therefore, that the cats they saw were all teeth, talons, spit and rage – these cats had been chased and cornered and were desperate, fighting for their lives. Many of those whose skins ended up as taxidermy specimens were posed in full attack mode, padded out to increase their size, and even fitted with giant false fangs to exaggerate the impression of savagery.
Its ostensibly fierce character and apparent refusal to be tamed made the wildcat a feared animal, but also inspired respect for the power it held in its body and spirit. Two thousand years ago, Caledonia (as the Romans called Scotland) was occupied by indigenous people known as the Cattani – a probable reference to wildcats. By the seventh century ad , Scotland was divided into seven Pictish kingdoms, and the most northerly of them, Cait, took its name from the wildcat. Today the name has evolved into Caithness, and the region itself is still inhabited by wildcats. The fighting skills of the cat were much admired and the animal itself became a sort of totem to various warlike peoples of the region. Indeed, its image lives on in a variety of clan crests today. One such is the Clan Mackintosh crest, which bears an image of a wildcat standing tall on its hind feet, forepaws aloft and mouth open wide. It bears the motto ‘Touch not the cat bot [without] a glove’. On Clan MacGillivray’s crest the wildcat is seated with one clawed paw held up, and the motto is ‘Touch not this cat’. Clan Sutherland’s crest also bears a wildcat, sitting but with both forepaws raised, with the words ‘Sans Peur’ (‘Without fear’), and the Duke of Sutherland’s Gaelic title is Morair Chat, meaning ‘The Great Man of the Cats’.
The Picts worshipped a wildcat goddess, Ura, who dwelt in the heather. For Pictish people, the wildcat was a creature imbued with magic – like the hare, it was linked with the moon and with witchcraft. There are many representations of wildcats to be found within old Pictish stone carvings dating back to the Iron Age, though fathoming out their cultural significance is probably impossible. Interpreting later representations of cats on artefacts is even more difficult, as domestic cats came to Britain with (and a few before) the Romans and had become very widespread in Britain by the seventeenth century, so some British and Scottish cat-related legends are more connected to them than to wildcats.
One enigmatic cat of legend is the Cat Sith (also Cat Sidhe, Cath Sith or Cait Sidhe), a Celtic fairy creature native to the Scottish Highlands, sometimes characterised as the alter ego of a witch. While not wholly malevolent, it was not a spirit being to trifle with, as it was able to steal the soul from a corpse before it could be taken by the gods and could place a curse on livestock if not adequately appeased. To prevent the former, Celts would guard a newly dead body overnight and discourage or distract the cat spirit by extinguishing fires in the room, and by playing lively wrestling and jumping games nearby (which the Cat Sith, being a cat, would want to join in with). On Samhain, the winter festival, leaving a saucer of milk out for Cat Sith would bring a blessing to your house, but if you forgot then your cows’ udders would be cursed and you would have no more milk from them.
Cat Sith may be based on the Scottish wildcat, but its appearance suggests a different origin: it was large, but jet-black instead of striped, with a diamond of white fur on its chest or throat. Today, many believe that it was inspired by what are now known as Kellas cats (after a Highland village near where some sightings occurred) – very big black cats that are rumoured to dwell in the Scottish Highlands. The biggest known individual measured almost 110cm from nose-tip to tail-tip but considerably larger examples have been reported. Since the 1980s, several such cats have been caught in north-east Scotland and the biometrics and genetics of these and other museum specimens investigated. The majority were found to be hybrids between wildcats and domestic cats, rather than feral black cats. Ancient Kellas cats, however, may have been pure but melanistic (black-furred) wildcats – at least one museum Kellas cat was identified as a melanistic wildcat, and melanism is known in other wildcat populations. Several taxidermied Kellas cats are on public view at the time of writing – you can see them at the Elgin Museum, Elgin, Morayshire; the Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh; and at Aberdeen University in the foyer of the zoology department. A couple of specimens of curiously long-faced black mystery cats have also been found in Scotland in the 1980s and 1990s, and these were briefly dubbed ‘rabbit-headed cats’. However, they too are now considered to be hybrids, with the domestic parent a Siamese or other long-faced ‘oriental’ breed.
Incidentally, another small mystery black cat has been noted in Transcaucasia, on the border between Europe and Asia, just north of Turkey. A writer called C. Satunin published his descriptions, from several specimens, skins and skulls he examined, in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London in 1904. So confident was he that this black cat was a new species to science that he named it as such, with the striking moniker Felis daemon. The cat was larger than a domestic pet, with a black or very dark-brown coat scattered with white hairs. However, no further evidence of its presence has been found, and it’s likely this, too, was a black-furred hybrid between the local European wildcats and black domestic cats.
The evidence that wildcats once occurred naturally in the wild in Ireland is patchy. It’s possible the evidence of their presence is down to imported, traded living cats and corpses rather than natural occurrence of actual wild animals. There are definite cultural links to wildcats in Ireland, though. The legend of Cat Sith was known from Ireland as well as Scotland, and several notable Celtic Irish warriors wore wildcat pelts to demonstrate their fighting spirit. Cats are also acknowledged in a variety of Irish Gaelic ancient place names.
Some folk tales from further afield explore how the cat went from wild to tame. The African story ‘The Cat Who Came Indoors’ tells of a female wildcat seeking a companion. Her first choice, another wildcat, is killed by a leopard, so she decides to team up with the leopard instead. But then a lion kills the leopard, so the wildcat stays with the lion instead … until he too is beaten by a bigger enemy – an elephant. The wildcat feels sure that she has found a worthy companion at last, but then a man comes upon them in the forest, and shoots the elephant dead. So the wildcat follows the man back to his hut, and lives in the roof, hunting the mice and rats that come to raid the food stores. One day, there is a noisy altercation inside the hut. The cat looks down from the roof just in time to see the man violently thrown out from the hut, and in the doorway stands his angry wife. When the wildcat sees the wife, she knows that she has found the ‘finest creature in all the jungle’. She jumps down from the roof, moves into the hut, and is still there today.
African wildcats were treasured by the ancient Egyptians, who first domesticated them. One of the most beloved figures in the Egyptian pantheon was the cat-headed goddess Bastet, or Bast, deity of joy and love, who came to prominence around 1000 bc. A temple to her – comprising a shrine and a huge statue surrounded by gardens – stood in the city Bubastis, and Egyptians travelled to the city for a week-long festival each year. Bastet inspired the famous ‘cat cult’ whereby cats were held in exceptional reverence – to kill one was punishable by death, and when the family cat died there was a period of mourning. Dead cats were embalmed and mummified, and taken to a cat cemetery, along with a supply of embalmed and mummified mice to sustain them on their journey through the underworld. Several vast cat cemeteries have been unearthed, though sadly their historical interest was not always recognised and many valuable specimens were destroyed.
The Egyptians did not want to share their precious cats with the world, and exporting cats was made illegal. This slowed but could not curtail the spread of domestic cats into Europe and beyond. No other nation adored cats quite to the same extent, but a few came close. For example, during the Song Dynasty of China (960–1279) there was evidence that pet cats were treated lovingly and that special foods and treats for them could be bought at market. The cat does not have a place in the Chinese zodiac, but in the Vietnamese equivalent, the rabbit is replaced with the cat (probably due to linguistic confusion).
Ancient Greek and Roman cultures were familiar with domestic cats and kept them as pets as well as pest controllers. Cats make the odd appearance in the mythology of the time – the Greeks added cat associations to their ideas about the hunting goddess Artemis after linking her with Bastet. The same went for the equivalent Roman goddess Diana. In Ovid’s epic poem Metamorphoses, she transformed into a cat when the Roman gods had to flee to Egypt. In general, cats were looked upon quite favourably but their mischievousness and ‘lecherous’ character was also noted. The Islamic faith also holds cats in high regard, partly because of their fastidious ways and partly out of admiration for their beauty. There is a story that, when Muhammed’s favourite cat fell asleep on the sleeve of his robe, the prophet cut off the sleeve to avoid disturbing the cat.
In Britain, domestic cats and wildcats were both present in the years following the Roman invasion (though the former was gradually increasing and the latter slowly declining). It is difficult, therefore, to be certain whether some of the cat-related myths of the time related to one, the other or both, though over time it’s likely the balance shifted more and more towards domestic cats. Through the Middle Ages and into Victorian times, cats of all kinds in both Britain and western Europe were linked closely with witches and witchcraft, which made them enemies to the Church, and many thousands of them were killed (along with the alleged witches). It would seem fitting that a witch would choose a wildcat over its tame, milk-lapping cousin as her familiar, though at least some people of the time – particularly those of a highly religious persuasion – were almost as suspicious of the latter as the former, regarding both as conduits of evil. In the fifteenth century the Duke of York wrote of cats thus: ‘Their falseness and malice are well known. But one thing I dare well say that if any beast hath the devil’s spirit in him, without doubt it is the cat, both the wild and the tame.’
In some regions, this mass antipathy towards cats caused domestic cats to become rather scarce for a time, and this had a most unfortunate unintended consequence of facilitating the spread of bubonic plague, which began in the fourteenth century. The disease was carried in the digestive tracts of fleas living on black rats, and with fewer cats around to kill the rats, they and their fleas spread unchecked and more widely. It took some time for people to link the plague with the rats in particular, and for a while it was widely believed that any flea could spread the Black Death. Consequently, even more cats were killed, until people began to notice that those people who held on to their cats were not dying from plague at the same rate as the rest of the population. In the wake of this insight, new laws were passed in Europe that placed cats under strict protection.
Wildcats have also made frequent appearances in British literature – including several mentions in Shakespeare’s works. In The Taming of the Shrew, the titular ‘shrew’ Kate is called a ‘wildcat’ more than once, and it’s clear that this isn’t a compliment. In Act 1, Scene 2, Gremio says to Petruchio, who has fallen for Kate:
O sir, such a life with such a wife were strange.
But if you have a stomach, to’t, a God’s name,
You shall have me assisting you in all.
But will you woo this wildcat?
Later on, Petruchio puns on the wildcat theme by saying that he will transform her from ‘a wild Kate to a Kate’. If a person was called a wildcat it meant they were fierce, impulsive, ungovernable – the term survives today in phrases like ‘wildcat strikes’ to describe unauthorised work walk-outs. The wildcat also gets a mention in The Merchant of Venice, but this time in reference to its sleepiness rather than its ferocity. The ‘brindled cat’ that ‘mews thrice’ in Macbeth (Act 4, Scene 1, line 1) may also be a wildcat, although if it is then Shakespeare’s observational powers have let him down as wildcats typically do not mew, just hiss, snarl and caterwaul.
In more recent literature wildcats tend to be more sympathetic figures, and they crop up with relative frequency in children’s animal stories. As a child, I was very struck by the wildcat that appears in Danny Fox Meets a Stranger, one of the series of books by David Thomson that featured the wily Danny Fox and his family. The foxes live in a rough and rugged landscape, suitable for wild beasts of all kinds, and one day a wildcat comes to the foxes’ den. This cat, whose name is Shaggy, explains to the foxes that they can tell she is a real wildcat by the rings on her tail. She is calm, wise and infused with magical power, which she uses to help the foxes drive away the wolves that threaten their territory. I adored her not just because she was a wildcat but because she was that extremely rare thing in 1970s children’s stories: a stand-alone female character who was neither a princess nor a damsel in distress.
In the more recent, popular teen story Angus, Thongs and Full-frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison, the Angus of the title is the family pet but is a Scottish wildcat hybrid that the protagonist Georgia and her family brought home from a Scottish holiday. Angus looks just like a wildcat and his other wildcat traits include immense size and grumpiness, though in the 2008 film adaptation of the book he is played by an emphatically not-wild fluffy grey Persian. In the enormously popular His Dark Materials books by Philip Pullman, each human is accompanied by an animal ‘daemon’, a manifestation of their spirit which shapeshifts through different species through the early years of the human before settling on a final form at the start of the human’s adolescence. The lead character, Lyra, has a daemon called Pantalaimon who, before he takes his permanent form of a pine marten, often takes the shape of a wildcat. It was one of his more useful forms – in wildcat mode he is a fierce fighter and defeats several enemies in battle.
However, wildcats are missing from many of the animal-anthropomorphising classics of children’s literature. I’ve seen it argued that this oversight explains why we as a nation aren’t as interested in wildcats as we should be – and it’s certainly true that rose-tinted childhood memories are good for fostering warm fuzzy feelings towards wildlife. Conservation projects for water voles and badgers have The Wind in the Willows to look to; for otters there is Tarka the Otter; and so on. A few wildcat books do exist, of course, like Chia the Wildcat by Joyce Stranger, but they are not of classic status. Perhaps this should be a clarion call to authors of children’s fiction who also care about Scottish wildcat conservation – what’s needed is a universally loved and popular fictional wildcat hero to inspire the next generation. Or perhaps it needn’t even be fictional. After all, the truth of the wildcat’s life is more strange, moving and fascinating than any fairy tale.
Speyside, 2013
Twelve hours and 40 minutes. It’s long enough to fly from London to Bangkok, or to Honolulu or Caracas. I could be spending this late Friday night wandering around a shiny airport, browsing guide books for Thailand (or Hawaii, or Venezuela). Instead, I’m sitting in the distinctly un-shiny Victoria coach station on one of a row of plastic chairs, sandwiched between two fellow travellers who look just as tired and apprehensive as I feel. We’re waiting for the 588 coach from London to Inverness, due to depart at 10.30 p.m.
There are several ways to get from London to the Scottish Highlands. You can drive, you can take a train (by day or overnight on a sleeper) or you can fly, probably to Inverness. Then there’s this way – the cheapest way, possibly the greenest way, and certainly the most gruelling way – the overnight coach. National Express do their best to make the journey as painless as possible and I have nothing but praise for them, but nearly 13 hours on a coach is what it is and I’m not anticipating a fun night. Especially as several of the other coaches seem to be running as much as three hours late and there’s no sign of ours yet.
It’s not so bad in the end. The staff open the doors at 10.30 p.m. as our coach pulls forwards, and a queue swiftly forms. I join it. The coach reminds me of a bull or buffalo, thanks to the long, arching wing mirrors – curved horns framing its blunt head. Luggage is loaded into the coach’s capacious belly, and one by one we climb on board to take our seats. The coach is packed – there’s one of those wiry, Craghopper-clad young backpacker types in the seat beside me, and behind us a bevy of Glaswegians conducting a loud, amiable but very sweary conversation in their almost impenetrable accents. We are surrounded by other rumbling coaches, bound for Edinburgh, Cardiff, Aberdeen, Salisbury – every one of them running late and impatient to get going. Coordinating this mass of vehicles may not exactly be air traffic control but it still seems a daunting prospect for me. It’s 10.45 p.m. when our coach lumbers out of the station, leaving its rivals behind, and noses its way into the central London traffic, still heavy and relentless even this late in the day.
I’m on my way to Aviemore. First, though, we will call at Golders Green to fill the handful of seats still vacant. Then the long plod through the night northwards to our first stop, Penrith. Then into Scotland, where we stop at Lockerbie, then Glasgow (where I presume our sweary friends will leave us). Then Stirling, then Perth, then Pitlochry. And, by nearly lunchtime tomorrow, we’ll reach Aviemore, where I will leave the coach and its few remaining passengers to complete their journey to Inverness.
For now, I stare out of the window at the London sights as they crawl slowly by. I notice a couple of sculptures I’ve not seen before. In a square of green somewhere near Hyde Park, a big chrome hand breaks out of the earth, clasping a Vespa scooter in its shiny fingers. The next one is the oversized, severed head of a horse, carved from stone and balanced on the tip of its nose. I don’t know quite what to make of either of them.
As we creep northwards through increasingly anonymous London streets, the coach conductor delivers his announcement in matter-of-fact tones. Wear your seat belt Don’t drink alcohol – if you do, you’ll be chucked off the coach. (the Glaswegians, who I suspect have ‘pre-loaded’, chortle at that one). Fail to get back in time from a comfort stop and we won’t search for you, we’ll just leave you behind. No, I’m not joking. Yes, there is a toilet on board but seriously, hang on till the service station if you possibly can because things can get very bad very quickly in there. I huddle down in my seat and watch the rows of kebab shops and off-licences, the crowds of people going in and out of them. I imagine dense forest and wild moorland, the absence of sound. I’m on my way to wildcat country – albeit slowly and uncomfortably.
Soon we are on the motorway and there’s no longer anything to look at, but it’s still difficult to sleep. I’m getting uncomfy, with my camera bag on my knees (but there is no way I’m letting it out of my sight or even out of my arms). The young man beside me is dead to the world and, judging by the quietness all around, so are most of the others, including the rowdy Glaswegians. I conjure up the image of Abernethy Forest, one of my favourite places on Earth. I imagine padding down the pine needle-cushioned pathways, alone, losing myself in the stillness and the sweet air, becoming a small animal navigating a complex path between the towering rutted trunks of the old Scots pines. Raising my binoculars to scan the next ridge along, and glimpsing a broad, banded tail disappearing over the top of it.
Just as my eyes are beginning to feel heavy, we pull into our first service station. I take the chance to jump off, to stretch and wiggle and yawn, and pull my coat around me against the cold. It’s only going to get colder.
Back on board, we make swift progress northwards on the M6 and I doze, dreaming of blazing green eyes and distant tawny shapes appearing and disappearing along banks of dry bracken. I don’t wake up properly until we pull into the station at Penrith. We’ve made it to the Lake District, how about that? It’s sometime in the small hours, and pitch-dark outside. The man beside me wakes, straightens, jumps up, grabs his bag and strides down to the front of the coach. He’s the only one to get off here. Peering out of the window, I watch as he swings his rucksack over his shoulders and lopes away confidently into the night. With an empty seat beside me, I’m suddenly the envy of the rest of the coach – those who are awake, anyway.
It’s still dark when we reach Glasgow and disgorge more than half of the passengers. Through a slow grey dawn we cross-country our way eastwards, then north. We lose a few more people at Stirling and more at Perth. Now we’re on the A9, it’s daylight and snowy hills are looming into view all around. Below, the Tay rushes along, a few early common gulls swirling like snowflakes along its deep-cut valley. Proper Scotland. My sleepiness is overwhelming but in the moments I’m awake my heart thrums a bit more quickly with excitement, anticipation.
At Aviemore, I stumble down from the coach, retrieve my case, and head up the high street. A strange place, Aviemore, laying low in the Cairngorms’ shadow. Its name makes me think of eagles and glittering snowcaps but the town itself is uninspiring. One long straight road lined with blocky shops selling outdoor gear, coffee, outdoor gear, coffee, and so on. But when I reach Tesco I hear a familiar sound and pause. In the car park’s spindly trees, there’s a flock of fat little birds, peach - and ochre-coloured with outrageous punky hairstyles that whip about in the brisk breeze. They fidget and bicker and twitter like sleigh bells. Waxwings. Well worth the ten minutes it takes to set down my bags, unpack half of my camera bag to unearth the actual camera, and take some pictures.
Buses from here to Nethy Bridge aren’t frequent. Or maybe they are by Highlands standards – I’m not sure. Sooner or later one turns up, anyway, and carries me away from Aviemore and into the Spey Valley proper. The roads, the railway and the villages are all tucked into this strip of flat land within one of the most mountainous parts of Scotland. We skirt the edge of the great pine forest, and weave along narrow roads through meadows, riversides, the occasional reedy lochan. Among the black crows dotted amid cows is the occasional oddity: a crow that’s black and grey. A hoodie. We’re close to the intergrade zone where the distributions of the carrion crow and the hooded crow meet. This, as much as anything, brings home to me how far north I am now. I’m dizzy from sleeplessness but try to cast my gaze as widely as I can – along the field edges, down the trails into the forest, everywhere where a Scottish wildcat could conceivably wander. Never mind that it’s broad daylight. Hope springs eternal – it has to.
It’s a 20-minute walk from the bus stop in Nethy Bridge village into the forest and the little cottage where I’ll be living for the next two weeks. I trundle my wheelie case down the narrow wooded lane that undulates away alongside the River Nethy, a lively tributary of the Spey. I’m stepping slowly, keeping my eyes open. The trees get taller, the houses fewer; human sounds fade away but the chatter of the Nethy is ceaseless. My gaze is mainly sweeping far ahead down the lane, in case any animal should rush across ahead of me. But it’s when I glance to my right into a pasture that I see my first wild mammal of the trip – an ash-coloured roe doe who trots hastily to the edge of the trees when she sees me and watches me go by from there. A moment later, I see my second – a red squirrel bounding across the large garden of a particularly grand house on its way to raid the purpose-built squirrel-feeder nailed halfway up a tall pine.
This all seems to augur well. I find my way to Dell Cottages and locate mine among the small group of single-storey buildings tucked into the north-eastern edge of Abernethy Forest behind a wall of pines and silver birches. I pause at the door to listen. I can’t even hear the river now. Instead I can hear jackdaws, the crisp ‘kik’ from a passing great spotted woodpecker, the squeaks of coal tits and ‘pinks’ of chaffinches. More distantly, cows, pheasants, the bugling of a passing skein of greylag geese. Actual wild greylag geese, winter visitors from Iceland. Not the semi-feral herds that loiter around park lakes back home. Each new voice sparks excitement, wards off the urge to sleep. I glance at the bed, then dump my things on the living-room floor, grab my camera, and walk into the forest.
Why am I here? I know it isn’t the best place I could be. There are wildcats here – or at least we think there are – but their gene pool is polluted heavily with the DNA of domestic cats because this is (by Highland standards) an area with a lot of people, and a lot of people means a lot of pet cats. Even if I were to see a cat that looked convincingly wildcat-like, the chances are it’d be a hybrid. I should be further east in the remoter Cairngorms, or over in the far west in Ardnamurchan, or north in Caithness, a region actually named for wildcats. I should be settling into a camouflage-patterned bivvy on a wild moor five hours’ hike from the nearest road.
Instead, I’m wandering into this large (but still remnant) Caledonian pine forest. It looks unspoilt, untouched, but it’s not, of course. There are human-made pathways, for a start – wide, straight ones like the one I’m on now, and narrow wavering ones that zigzag away into the dark latticework of the distant trees. There are plenty of gnarly old pines but there are younger ones too, stands of them, marking places where clearance happened in the not-too-distant past. I pass a clearing and note a row of telegraph poles and their cables. There are signs up here and there, pointing visitors towards the surrounding villages and warning of the hazards of fire and off-lead dogs. Not untouched, by any means, but there is real wildness here. Away from the trails the ground is rugged and pitted, carpeted with a fabulous thick understorey of heather and bilberry, dotted with boulders, great fallen trunks and the spaces between them that offer shelter and safety. It’s potential wildcat habitat. If I’d come here a hundred years ago, I might have stood a fair chance of seeing one. And if I could somehow come here a hundred years hence, if current conservation efforts have gone as well as they can and all our hopes and dreams for the Scottish wildcat have come to fruition, there could be good numbers of wildcats here again. But in the present moment, it’s more about just being here than any real chance of seeing what I long to see.
March is a quiet time in the forest. Summer’s visiting birds aren’t here yet – the likes of willow warbler, tree pipit, cuckoo and redstart. They’re heading north but it’ll be weeks before they arrive. That leaves the residents – the coal tits, the chaffinches, the crossbills (three different species, though you’ll need a sonogram of their calls to be sure which is which). A soft purring note from the trees above alerts me to another the crested tit, found nowhere else in Britain except these forests. I stare almost vertically upwards and with some difficulty discern the bird poised momentarily on a dead branch tip – a silhouette against a pale cloudy sky, but there’s no mistaking that spike-topped head profile.
I can’t keep going much beyond this. I would like to lie on the cushiony heather and fall asleep but it’s cold and I fear deer ticks, so I head back to my cottage. It’s late afternoon now. Hunger and tiredness battle for supremacy, but to satisfy the former I’d have to walk back into the village to visit the shop, so instead I climb into bed and sleep solidly for the next 14 hours.
The next day I walk to the shop for provisions, following the bumpy riverside path. I disturb a goosander on the way – a sleek, cigar-shaped diving duck. She is resting on a rock when she spots me approaching, and slips into the rushing water, letting it carry her past me. When I am almost at the village, another river bird makes itself known – the hard clicking call of a dipper sounds past my ear and I just glimpse the bird itself as it rockets past in low straight flight. It’s a round dark shape on a whirr of wings. It reminds me of a skimmed stone or a bomber plane, overcoming its own heaviness through powered straight-line speed. Then, like a thrown stone that’s run out of kinetic energy, it drops into the water and the rivulets engulf it immediately. An alarming moment, but this is what dippers do. I know the bird is quite comfortable underwater, whether it’s walking about clasping riverbed stones or being carried along by the flow.
I wonder what it’s like to be a dipper, never to leave the riverside. To live every moment of your life with the white-noise roar of rapids in your ears – is it like silence to them? What do they hear when they submerge; what can they see? I spot the bird again as I make the return walk with a bag full of provisions. It sits on a midstream rock in a field-guide pose and preens its sheeny dark and snowy-white plumage, batting pale eyelids and bouncing on its sturdy legs. I leave it behind and follow the trail home. Time for a long walk.
The RSPB’s Loch Garten Osprey Centre lies at the other end of the forest. It’s not open yet (too early in the year) but the walk is a good one, covering a good 13km of forest. A lot of it is along the Speyside Way, a 96km trail that follows the great river from the Spey Bay on the Moray coast all the way to Aviemore. This particular stretch takes you away from the river and through the forest, but you’ll rejoin it if you carry on south to Boat of Garten, or indeed north to Grantown-on-Spey. Its signposts bear thistle heads, and they guide me west out of the village, along a lane for a while and then into a section of forest that is new to me.
All is so quiet. It inspires me to quieten as well. I’m soft-stepping, wincing when my boot cracks a twig or my coat makes a swish. I know there is wildlife here, rare and localised wildlife too. The capercaillie, a turkey-sized grouse, is in this forest, albeit in dwindling numbers. For such a big bird it is amazingly skilled at silently slipping away well ahead of searching eyes. I’ve only ever seen one, a male, spotted by a birding friend as we walked a quiet trail in a patch of forest rather like this one. The bird – huge, black-feathered, utterly imposing – stood alert with its fine fan-tail half-raised on the side branch of a pine. It was dozens of metres away on the far side of a steep valley, well outside the ‘scare’ zone of any other bird. But it was watching us, and when it realised we were watching it too, it turned its back, stepped off its branch into the air and flew rapidly away from us into the shadows. This extreme sensitivity to disturbance could be one of the reasons why capercaillie numbers are in free fall. It would probably be best if I didn’t see one, and the chances that a caper would be hanging around so close to a main walking pathway are slim anyway.
The path takes me through a patch of open, heathy ground, alongside boggy pools which, later in the year, will no doubt teem with exciting insect life. The Highlands has dragonflies that don’t occur down south – white-faced darters, northern emeralds and the like. But in March the dragons are still water-bound nymphs, and the skies are empty of their skimming forms. A lone buzzard wafts over, drawing my attention with its desolate call – a soft cat-like wail that is, I suspect, the closest I’ll come to a feline encounter today.
I near the visitor centre, and follow a short path towards it, and then I have a sudden, unsettling sensation that I’m being watched. I stop, and turn slowly. There is a small birch next to me, not much taller than I am, and in it is a coal tit, barely an arm’s reach away. It’s uncharacteristically still. It is, indeed, watching me. And so is the other one sitting close to it, and so are all five of the other coal tits perched here and there in the same tree. They tilt their pied heads up and down, side to side, and are quiet. I feel suddenly thrown into a bizarre hybrid production of Disney’s Snow White and Hitchcock’s The Birds. I walk on, slowly, and in each tree I pass there are masses of coal tits. A few chaffinches too, and a robin. And then there is a crested tit, impishly beautiful with its banded face and speckled spike-crest. In its front-on stance it’s the shape of a teardrop as it eyes me from its perch on the arm of a bench. I realise what’s going on – I’m approaching the RSPB’s feeding station here and these birds are taking a break from jostling over that, instead hoping for an easy handout from me. I resolve to return with a bag of peanuts later in the week.
I turn to follow the path back through the forest, and soon I have left the unsettling army of little birds behind and am back in the quiet and still. I walk in a reverie that’s almost uninterrupted by wildlife until I’m quite close to the edge of the village. There, a sudden soft whirr of wings makes me snap around just in time to see a female capercaillie vanish at speed between the trees.
The next day, drizzle is falling and I take two buses southwards to Kingussie and the Highland Wildlife Park. The staff on the gate are surprised to find a visitor arriving car-less, and I have to wait until a keeper in a safari vehicle turns up to drive me through the first section of the reserve, where big, hooved beasts wander unconfined. I’m delivered to the central part of the park, and begin to explore.
This small zoo holds mainly European – in fact mainly British – wildlife, though there are exceptions. I’m here in time to see the two young male polar bears, recent arrivals, roaming their extremely spacious hillside enclosure. I’ve been watching for a little while when the bears come together and begin to play. It’s a charming but also intimidating spectacle, the two animals’ immense power all too obvious as they stand tall and wrestle, grumbling and grunting and mock-biting at each other’s faces and necks. The effect is only slightly spoiled by the fact that both have clearly been having fun in the muddy patches and their coats are grubby, making them brown enough to be Ursus arctos rather than U. maritimus.
I wander around the rest of the park. There is much to divert me both behind the wire and out in the open. A small flock of oystercatchers is flying about – I keep bumping into them as they flash overhead, piping excitably. On the distant hillsides, herds of red deer are grazing. In a tall aviary, a snowy owl rests on her perch, watching me with sleepy cat-eyes. I make my way past the Eurasian lynxes, which recline together on the roof of their shelter, unphased by the increasing rain. One lynx is sleeping on its side in an elegant muddle of long limbs, while the other is awake with head raised, gazing into the middle distance, its beautiful tufted face turned away from the handful of admiring humans at the cage wire. I wonder whether some instinct tells it that its kind once belonged here, in this wild landscape. Our lynxes were wiped out some 1,300 years ago. Now, it’s looking increasingly likely that a lynx reintroduction or reintroductions will happen, sooner rather than later.
I follow the signs to the Scottish wildcats, passing red squirrels (showy) and capercaillies (hiding) along the way. There’s their enclosure – or enclosures. The design is clever; the wildcats have several ‘rooms’ to live in, linked by tubular overhead walkways that cross the paths. I look up into the walkway over the path ahead and meet the cool stare of a big male Scottish wildcat, sitting bunched up in the mesh tube just where it bends round a corner. I stop and drink him in.
The signs on the cage tell me his name is Hamish. He is huge, even in his compact posture – a round-edged loaf of cat with his fat banded tail wrapped around his toes. His face is full, square-jawed. His tremendously thick coat looks bristly, as though it’d feel harsh under a stroking hand, not that the look on his face encourages stroking. Far from it. The close-set green eyes stare, a confident challenge. The black markings that surround them are bold brushstrokes. On his chest is a star of white, which I know or suspect should not be there. White markings on apparent wildcats can be a sign of domestic genes. A lot of white is a clue that the cat in question will not prove to be a wildcat or even a ‘good’ hybrid, but a touch of white is not so bad. It seems pretty feasible that a little white chest-star marking could occur in pure wildcats. When I speak to his keeper later, she says that it can and, although Hamish (like every other wildcat in captivity) doesn’t have a completely pure wildcat genome, the DNA tests he’s had show that he isn’t far off. In every other aspect, he really looks the part, from his deep-pink nose to the blunt black tip of his tail.
The other wildcat in the enclosure doesn’t match my mental picture as closely. But part of that is that she’s female and some of the traits we associate with Scottish wildcats – like size and broadness of head – are more pronounced in males than females. Her name is Betty and she has a slimmer tail than Hamish. On the other hand, she does not have a white chest star, her tail is ringed and black-tipped like it should be, and her beautiful face has its own undeniable strength and breadth. I learn from the keeper that these two had kittens last year, which have recently moved on to new homes, and that Betty still misses them. Both of the cats are soon distracted by lunch – the keeper shuts off one of their rooms and hangs a fat, fluffy rabbit leg from a rope inside. Hamish heads straight for the room when it’s opened up, and stands on his hind feet to grab and tug at the bounty.
I stay with the two of them for a while. I take photos of them and of the posters that highlight the plight of the Scottish wildcat and the efforts underway to save them. Captive cats like Hamish and Betty are incredibly important, especially Hamish with his exceptionally good genes. Showing them to the public is no less important, for wildcats are at our mercy – even more so than most wild animals.
The day after that, I retrace my steps back to the Osprey Centre, this time with the promised bag of peanuts. The weather has deteriorated, a few snowflakes waft about as I arrive, and the little birds are hungry. The coal tits fly to my hand to feed, just as I thought they would. I can’t photograph them as they do because my lens is too long (or my arms too short), but it’s not a problem – the closeness is breathtaking and the touch of their feet on my fingers sparks my soul. Standing there alone in the first moments of a snow flurry, hand-feeding wild birds in a wild place, I feel emotional, lonely, content.
A slow plod back and I’m nearly at the village again, not far from where I was when I saw the capercaillie two days ago. I’m crossing a small patch of sedgy grassland when something brown and furry bolts out of a hidden hollow through the long vegetation. I get a glimpse of a dark-striped back and a thick, black-tipped and black-ringed tail, and adrenaline sets my heart pounding as I watch the animal race to a big birch tree and start to climb. Then the excitement fades as I see that the quickly scrambling legs are white and so is the belly, and halfway up the cat stops, turns to me and shows a snowy chest and a face marked with white cheeks and blaze. Yet its eyes – intense and gold-green and sparking with fright and fight – remind me of Hamish’s eyes, and it has a wildcat’s thick coat and a wildcat’s wide face and a wildcat’s tail. I take what photos I can of it through the branches before it carries on climbing up and away.
I walk in the woods every day after that, miles and miles, varying my route, shifting my timings around, exploring open areas as well as the heart of the forest, sitting still and hidden for as long as I can bear on hillsides that afford a wide view across forest edge, marshy field, rock-strewn flank of open moor. At midday I go running, plodding along the cushiony forest trails in their cathedral calm. I see almost no other people and I see wildlife everywhere, but not the one wild thing I’m after. I find a favourite place on the forest edge, where my hiding place overlooks a bracken-covered hillside like the one I dreamed of on the coach. I go there at dawn and again at dusk. I stay late into the evening, until the light has nearly failed and my tired eyes imagine movement – the rocks and stumps coming to life.
In my second week, the wintery weather arrives in earnest. I wake up in a world muffled by snow, the trees around the cottage thronged with hungry birds, the spring flowers poking their leaf-tips disconsolately through the cold blanket. One morning I watch a red squirrel cavorting in my cottage garden for an hour, rushing and bounding around for no obvious reason, marking the pristine snow layer with a veritable art installation of spidery footprints. I fill and hang a bird-feeder from a tree in front of the garden door, and am rewarded with non-stop visitors – one day, a pair of fat-billed Scottish crossbills (well, probably) come and sit in the tree, and the next everything is kept away by a beautiful, wild-eyed young male sparrowhawk, lurking not nearly as invisibly as he thinks he is.
My wildcat searches carry on through the snowfall and the thaw. I do see one more apparently feral cat later in my stay, hunting in a swampy meadow well away from the village. This one, dark and brindled all over, gets my heart pounding fast, but a look through the telephoto camera lens shows that she is not tabby but a dark tortoiseshell, and while she doesn’t exactly approach me for a cuddle when she notices I am there, she also doesn’t show anything like the alarm I’d expect from any cat with some grampia in its genetic make-up – she simply carries on staring into the grass. A day or two before I head home, I talk to a local woman and she tells me of the litter of blunt-tailed, stripy kittens her childhood pet cat produced one year. They were just something interesting to talk about back then, these part-wildcat kittens. Now she knows that hybridisation is leading the Scottish wildcat to extinction, and she has no cat of her own anyway. But many others don’t know, or don’t care, and allow their unneutered pets to wander at will. Any true wildcats that remain around here are far more likely to meet a feral or pet cat than a fellow wildcat when it’s time to mate.
I feel melancholy on the coach ride home. Leaving this beautiful place brings sadness, and although I had never really expected to meet a wildcat in the wild, the scale of their absence is more obvious to me now than before. Yet walking in their world was also uplifting. I fall asleep somewhere on the M6, somewhere after 1 a.m., and dream that there had been time for one last slow, silent walk through the trees, one last pause to breathe and gaze, and one last heart-shaking moment of hope.