Winter is the anvil on which nature hammers out next spring. Its furnace is cold fire. It fashions motes of life. These endure. Even in the utmost extremes of landscape and weather, they endure.
Three thousand feet up in the Cairngorms, and deep in the nadir of the wild year, there is danger of a kind in simply being so exposed to the adrenalin of solitude and silence and the primitiveness of midwinter at its zenith. Strange how the season’s zenith and nadir can co-exist in the same place at the same moment.
There is a brink somewhere just ahead. It is not a thing of the landscape, not a cliff edge or a bergschrund. It is a thing of the mind. Can you stretch the day’s boundaries just a little more? And how much is a little more? How much of this rarefied distillation of solitude can you handle? What do you stand to gain? What do you stand to lose? Look around at the nothing that surrounds you, a nothing saturated in Arctic quantities of snow; surely such nothing-ness is inimical to life?
But a moment ago, a tiny scatter of movement caught my eye and vanished. I stopped in my tracks, literally in my tracks. There were no other tracks. All I could see was white walls weeping, the white walls of an amphitheatre of snow. Snow in billowing downdraughts, snow so solid you could build it into buttresses, snow so fozy and gauzy it hung on the air like curtains of iced steam. I remember thinking perhaps it should be colder at the winter solstice this high on loveable old Bràigh Riabhach. This is my sacred ground. Here in all the tormented, tumultuous geology of the mountain massif we call the Cairngorms is a piece of such singularly dishevelled ground that some unknown someone some unknown sometime ago christened it (with surely malicious understatement) “rough”.
An Garbh Choire, the Rough Corrie.
Somewhere down below, down in the belly of the snow cloud that had squatted on these mountains for a week, was the boulderfield of the Làirig Ghrù, a place of underfoot treacheries at the best of times, and this, you could be excused for thinking, was not one of those. Not unless this is your idea of sacred ground; not unless, over the last forty years, this of all mountains has occasionally commanded you to stillness in its company and revealed to you one of its many secrets, leaving you spellbound and speechless; not unless it has mostly done so in winter and mostly when you have been alone; and not unless you are a nature writer for whom such a moment is the living, breathing definition of the Holy Grail.
Somewhere up above, up on the mile-wide summit plateau of Bràigh Riabhach, is where the River Dee liberates itself from the underworld of the mountain’s dark red innards into the snow-lit overworld in a single convulsive shiver; and where, when the mood takes them, winter winds shudder and wail at 150 miles an hour.
Between these two fundamental phenomena of this most fundamental of lands is the corrie someone decided to call “rough”. In that company it’s some accolade. And something fleeting had just caught my eye, and I looked up towards the headwall and all I could see was white walls weeping. And the more I stared, the more I began to wonder if I had seen anything at all. So I stared harder, but the whole corrie was hung with unfathomable layers of snow. The headwall was curtained by teeming downdraughts, lavishly hung folds of falling spindrift. But from time to time, gaps in the curtain briefly opened and these showed momentary glimpses of the snow behind the curtain, snow that clung to the raw stuff of the mountain in blue-grey depths, the pelage of the hoary old remnants of Scotland’s Arctic. That further-back snow had plastered the Rough Corrie worryingly smooth. It looked like far too much snow to cling for very long to something so vertical as the corrie headwall.
Choire Bhrotain, the enigmatically named Porridge Corrie, was missing. The glacier that had dragged its creaking, growling carcase this way 10,000 years ago, give or take a millennium, howked out the Porridge Corrie en passant, an oh-what-the-hell-why-not whim, and made a corrie within a corrie there, a gratuitous roughening up of the Rough Corrie, an extra helping of garbh, a pinch of rock salt rubbed into the glacial wound. I knew it was there because I have often seen it before, explored its edges in less onerous seasons than this. I knew where it hung, like a picture of a corrie on a corrie wall, high up there on my right, because I was standing by the young Dee and I was facing upstream, and as long as I kept the river in my sight, the map of the corrie in my head would place its component parts on their correct compass points. Roughly.
My stance was a few hundred feet above the Làirig Ghrù, also roughly. I didn’t count my footfalls or time my climb. It could be 300 or 400 feet – there are a thousand to play with here between the floor and the rim of the corrie, all of them rough, and mostly I could not see more than about fifty of them at any one time. Even when those gaps opened in the tumbling spindrift, they revealed no known reference points above or below to give them meaning. There was only the river to rely on. I had reassured myself earlier that if conditions should become too much for me (too much flimsy snow, too much mountain, too much Arctic, too much dreich), I would turn and follow it back down to the Làirig, and where it turns right for Aberdeen I would turn left for Coylumbridge. I would refine the process as I walked, but that was the gist.
Then I had started to ask myself if I should be there in such conditions, the familiar self-scrutiny of the solitary mountain wanderer. I had no intention of climbing the corrie walls to the plateau, not with the mountain happed in a fleece as thick as a polar bear’s. I became the focal point of a quarrel between two truths. The first truth was that for the sake of my own safety I had no business being there. But the second truth was that I had put myself there because being there is exactly my business. I am more in the business of savouring mountains than climbing them. I do climb them, of course, but with a wanderer’s gait rather than a mountaineer’s. I don’t much like beaten paths or recommended routes, I don’t put ticks on lists of summits and I’m no rock climber. I don’t frontpoint up frozen waterfalls. I never learned to trust a rope, far less another climber urging me to trust his rope. Here, in the Garbh Choire, the river was my rope. Trust that. Climb when you’re ready.
And my business is to admire and applaud and marvel at this theatre of the wild, to question it, rather than to participate in it. I am not interested in measuring myself against it, but rather the height of my ambition is to taste it and to write it down. There you are, there is the honesty of my situation: I want to know all this to write it down. If I simply know about it and do nothing with the knowledge then I have no means of articulating my response to it, and responding to the wildest gestures of the nature of my native heath is the best reason I can think of for exploring it. I am a nature writer at heart, this is nature writing on the edge, and I like edges.
The cautionary voice, then, had been silenced by the edginess of the hour, and I had pushed on for the heart of the corrie. Far below and hours ago, considering the day as it dawned from the side of the road at Coylumbridge, a single thought: I wonder how the Garbh Choire looks and feels in this? So here I was finding out, jumaring up the fixed rope of the Dee, and all I could see was white walls, weeping. And all I could hear was the muffled river and the wind that dived down from the plateau and billowed the curtains drawn around the corrie wall. And then something moved that wasn’t me and wasn’t snow.
I found a rock where the wind was less boisterous, flattened a level shelf in the snow and sat on it. I like being still when nature is in a berserk mood. I like thinking about the natural forces at work on such a mountain on such a day when I am in a position to witness them at work. Being still assists that process.
Almost instantly, I saw spiders. They were tiny and red and they were moving on the surface of the snow, and being still had brought them into focus. They will have a name, these mountaineers for whom one of my footprints is an abyss. Biology will have considered them, mapped them, classified them and given them a Latin name. There was a curious comfort in the presence of another living creature with a purpose in the Rough Corrie that day, even a tiny red spider. I wonder if the Latin-name-giver paused long enough to ponder their purpose. I can only imagine they were hunting, but what the size and nature of their prey might be is beyond my imagining.
And where did they live?
And did they feel the cold?
But it was not little red spiders that had stopped me in my tracks, or made me sit on the mountain. I began to scrutinise the snow for focal points, tried to assess distance, looked for changes in the contours of the visible land where whatever I had seen might take cover or feed or draw breath.
And now I was in my element, in that state of mind which is unknown to the climber who insists on climbing in company. I tasted the thrill of it in the back of my throat. The heightened absorption in my surroundings, the single-mindedness of the job in hand, became the summit of my mountain day. Life rarely gets this simple. I was sitting on a mountainside where nature’s mood pushed me to the extreme edge of what I had any right to handle on my own, but it was precisely because I was on my own that I could handle it, and that I could work at this pitch of profound concentration. And then fifty yards away I saw the inch-wide head of a bird move in the snow. I had my focal point, I unsheathed the binoculars, and I found a snow bunting.
Snow buntings are simply among my favourite things. Small squads of them live up here all year round, and not much of anything does that (spiders maybe). A handful of pairs breed on the summits of the land – the Cairngorms and the Ben Nevis group, where the terrain resembles their Icelandic origins – and on bare Shetland tracts. The numbers are guesswork but maybe fifty pairs all told. But migrating thousands flock to our coasts and stubble fields to while away the winter, and there are few more agreeable spectacles on a drab midwinter day than several hundred snow buntings in a loose flock, freewheeling over the machair of the west or the red sandstone clifftops of the east, thickening strands of fence wire to rest between feeding forays. And I once met a solitary brilliant white and glossy black male bird on St Kilda in early June, presumably a late migrant en route home to Iceland. John Love notes in his book, A Natural History of St Kilda (Birlinn, 2009), that the snow bunting has only been recorded once as a breeding bird there, and that was in 1913. He also compares St Kilda’s origins to Surtsey, the island which rose out of the sea off Iceland in a volcanic convulsion in 1963, then he writes that the first bird to breed on Surtsey was the snow bunting. It is the sheer daring of the bird that delights me.
And now the unblinking black eye of one more male bird was watching me; a scrap of living, breathing warm-bloodedness at ease in the midst of that most demanding of landscapes in its most demanding winter demeanour. All I could see was the dull brown skull cap, the pale yellow beak, the black eye set in the off-white face, and a pale shadow behind and beneath the eye – for the bird has none of its midsummer splendour in midwinter. Ah, but then it bounced over a tiny rise into full view, and then so did twenty more, and as they bounced they stabbed at the snow, and as the distance between us closed I could see what it was they were eating: red spiders.
And then they flew in that loose-knit make-up of the flock, curved past me, rose twenty or thirty feet and landed again no more than twenty yards away, and as they flew, the snow-white of their wing flashes was a tribal badge, and they chatted in single down-curving notes. And they began again, scouring the snow for its tiny bounties, while the Garbh Corrie rose immensely above and around them, and all its white walls wept.
Suddenly the corrie filled with cloud, a cloud that seemed to consume daylight as it moved. I turned to assess my situation above and behind and below, and when I turned back to the birds they had gone. I stashed the binoculars, shouldered my pack and began to descend the lifeline of the river. Nature had stopped me in my tracks, and now it turned me in my tracks.
For an unbroken hour I walked down through grey-white silence, slipped into what I think of as a hand-in-glove relationship with the mountain, in which there are no distractions and no view, and no company other than the mountain itself, so that you feel the vastness of the massif gathered beneath your feet and reaching down into unimaginable depths below the very curved skin of the planet. You become aware of yourself almost as a creature you can observe from afar and moving minutely across that curving planetary skin, and of no more account in the mountain’s scheme of things than a red spider or a snow bunting – less, because they are at home on the mountain whatever its mood, and you, you are a fleeting presence for a few hours, a few days at best.
The scale of the Cairngorms makes these demands on you, and demands of you the quiet patience of the unbroken hours. Then I felt the cloud stir. I stopped and looked around.
There were holes in the cloud below me, and through one of the holes the darkness of trees. There were holes above too, and through one of these a patch of blue that was roughly the shape of the Isle of Mull. And then, over one more afternoon hour, the Cairngorms shed their hodden grey rags to emerge in sunlight as new-born as an adder in its new skin.
There was a sepulchral stillness to the pinewoods in the late afternoon, and all that crossed my path was a treecreeper and a roebuck. The pinewoods passed me on, tree-to-tree, my safe passage down through the dusk. I love the deep green pungency of these trees as I love few other facets of my native landscape. In the Cairngorms they lift you up until they part and offer you the unclothed mountains beyond their outermost shadows, then they reclaim you in the dusk and you feel reabsorbed into an ancient brotherhood of Nature, and I know of nothing else that treats you that way.
Late in the evening I sat in a bar with a fire, a whisky and a full stomach, and I wrote down the head of the snow bunting that emerged from behind an inches-high contour in the snow, and I raised my glass to the black eye at its centre. Up there at midnight, it was as cold as the Icelandic ice cap, but a small flock of snow buntings tholed the long darkness somehow and without fuss, and in the morning there would be more spiders.
There is a school of thought, and it is underpinned by a great deal of convincing science, that if climate change persists on its warming curve, it will remove birds like the snow bunting from our landscapes. If that happens, I might have to move to Iceland.
* * *
So what’s this? I take two steps along my pilgrimage through winter, and each one stumbles over an obstacle on the path, an obstacle that manifests itself not as a protruding stone or an exposed root, not as something I can step over and march on unperturbed, but rather (it seems to me) a thing of dark moods and hidden depths. For the truth is that these two powerful savours of what we like to think of as an idealised winter . . . the egrets in their blizzard, and the snow buntings in their high mountain world of winter at its most adversarial . . . these are souvenirs of old winters, and in the second decade of the 21st century such moments have become the exception rather than the rule. Winter is in the throes of becoming something other: something less wintry, something much less predictable, and something infinitely more adversarial, not just for snow buntings and solitary nature writers, but for all of us, for the very well-being of the planet.
Taken in isolation, they may look like inconsequential events, but as I wandered through what winter has become in the course of writing this book, I found myself confronting a single question again and again and again:
Whatever happened to Bleak Midwinter?