Maja

I think it is true for most people that the older they get the more disappointing life becomes. The horizon lowers, possibilities diminish, mind and body protest more when made to work, or simply refuse to work at all. This disappointment is, like physical aches and pains, a part of the aging process. I know people much younger than me who feel it, but I don’t. I feel lucky.

When I wake in the morning the first thing I do is step outside and breathe in the fresh air. Sometimes it is still dark, sometimes it has already been light for an hour or two. Dark or light, mist or rain, snow, frost or sunshine, it doesn’t matter. I open the door and stand there in my dressing gown and breathe. I hear the river thirty yards away. Maybe I hear birdsong, maybe Julia’s music is playing next door, maybe an engine is running, or maybe everything is silent. It doesn’t matter. It’s the breathing that counts. It amazes me to be alive. Still to be alive.

The day that Lachie came to tell me about his ghost started in this way, as every one of my days does. It was raining quite hard, as he said, but then the clouds lifted and my garden seemed to shake itself and dry out a bit. I got dressed, made my breakfast, pottered about at various tasks. I live mainly without noise, which some people find disquieting. Perhaps if they cannot hear noise in the background they think life has ceased all around them. For me, it is the opposite. What sounds there are become louder. I hear my own breath in my nose, the creaks and cracks of my body and of the house, the tick of the cooling kettle, a gust of wind outside, a mouse in the wall. I hear birds all the time. There is nothing more full of life than a bird singing.

Later, I sat in my chair at the window with my sketchbook. I saw three things that morning that moved me. First, I saw a little gang of chaffinches come to the bird table and clean up the breadcrumbs I had spread there ten minutes earlier. I just had time to make some coffee and sit down before they arrived, chattering like bairns let out into the playground at breaktime. Of course, they come because I always put food out. There had been no sign of them in the garden beforehand and yet within those few minutes they all knew the breadcrumbs were there. Word had got around. When they had finished they flew off again, as if they had other important matters to attend to, which they probably had. That was one thing.

Then I saw Julia’s cat making his way along the wall that separates our gardens. Tam is a handsome black-and-white beast, sometimes interested in stalking small birds, sometimes not. This morning he seemed simply to be out for a stroll, inspecting his domain − his more than mine or Julia’s, since we don’t use the top of the wall as a path. I tapped on the glass and he stopped, looked disdainfully over his shoulder in my direction, then carried on at the same casual pace. That was another thing.

I made a few quick drawings of the chaffinches, as I have many times before. Just impressions − they move so fast. And the sketch of the cat on the wall was so vague that he was almost not there, although Lachie seemed to see him well enough when he came in after school.

The third thing was more unusual. I went outside to gather a few leaves, which I wanted to draw in their death shapes, maybe paint them in their beautiful, rich death colours. And also to go to the shed for logs for the stove. The shed was dark and then I opened the door and it wasn’t. I put some logs into the sling, a handy item Julia got for me. It makes the logs easier to carry. Just before I closed the shed into darkness again, I saw a stone that shouldn’t have been there, lying against the foot of the jamb. I bent to move it. It wasn’t a stone. It was a toad. He was very welcome as far as I was concerned but something was not right. I touched him with my finger. He did not move. I lowered the sling of logs and looked more closely. The toad was dead − whole, fresh, but dead. I made sure of this − that he wasn’t fast asleep, that this wasn’t an ill-chosen spot for hibernation. Then I fetched a trowel and nudged the corpse on to it, and took it outside and buried it in the soft, damp soil.

I did not make a drawing of the toad in death. But I see him, even now. Or her. It could have been a her.

Was the shed the toad’s place? Did she know why she had gone there? Was it to hide or to sleep? Did she feel ill? Does a toad know what it is to feel ill? Did she go there to die?

Somebody, I don’t remember who, said that humans are the only mortal beings because only we know that death will come to us. Every other creature on this planet − midge, ant, mouse, fish, snake, deer, whale; chaffinch, cat, toad − is blessed with immortality because they do not have that knowledge. They are alive and that is all they know or expect. They do not know that they will die. Or so we, in our arrogance, presume.

If they do not know of death then it follows that they do not know of life either. They are alive but they don’t know it. I mean, they don’t comprehend it. They don’t examine life and worry about death, nor do they worry about life and examine death. Again, this is our presumption − or the presumption of some of us.

But maybe the toad did know. Maybe they all know more than we think. Maybe they know more than we do.

Nevertheless, it is true − whatever we presume − that animals and birds are immortal. We are here, then we are not. The crows, the bees, the mice, they are always here, and they will be when we are gone. We do not know them each, we know them all. It is as all that they outlive us.

I didn’t mention the toad to Lachie. I thought, with the ghost girl, he had enough on his mind. And maybe I had too little in mine, because I dwelt for quite a while afterwards on what he’d told me. It wasn’t that I wondered if he’d really seen her. It was this: if she was a ghost, would she know?

I used to go walking in the wood. I don’t walk there now. The old, roofless church and its overgrown graveyard is about as far as I venture these days. But whenever I went to the wood, especially in the evening, I would see a deer. Maybe more than one. The wood is their place. Roe deer with their dark coats and white rumps. One would see me and freeze, and I would freeze too. And something would pass across the distance between us. If I stood still she would wait; she became part of the wood. Then quietly, gently, she would move off through the trees. If I began to walk first, she would watch me and sometimes her nerves could not bear it and she would flee. And often she would unfreeze others that I had not known were there. Off they would go. I was no danger to them but they did not know that. They trusted their fear and they were right to trust it.

There is a poem by a poet whose language was Gaelic. It is very beautiful, although painful and sad. I have read the poem and heard a recording of the poet reading it. His name was Sorley MacLean and ‘Hallaig’ is the name of the poem and of the place it is about. People once lived there, his ancestors, but it was emptied of people, and now its houses are all in ruins. I do not know any Gaelic but even in English it is a beautiful poem. Gaelic has not been spoken in Glen Conach for a long, long time. When I think of the deer in that poem she has stepped out of it and is coming closer and closer to the houses here. A few of these houses are also in ruins. There are gaps where others used to be. The deer sniffs at the grass, at the stones, she skips through the gap in the dyke. I have seen her grazing among the unreadable gravestones where the grass is thick and lush. One day she will come sniffing among the ruins of this house, even those of the Big House.

The deer is Time. That’s what the poem says, and it is as true of this glen as it is of Hallaig, which is on an island on the other side of the country. It is too far away for me to go there. Maybe once, if I had kept going westward, but not now. Julia went there. She has a thing about islands: she likes to visit them, ticking them off. It was Julia who showed me the poem and played me the recording of the poet’s voice. I felt as if I were hearing something very ancient, from centuries ago. It was a long journey to the island, she said, and even when you got there it was a long walk to the place in the poem. But she went and she came back and she told me about it.

When I used to meet the deer it was like meeting Time. I didn’t know that then. I know it now. It was like meeting Time and then Time fled and left me on my own. But Time never goes far. It is in the wood beyond my window, it is in the churchyard beyond my garden wall. If I am very still I can hear a twig cracking under its weight.

What they are trying to do here is change the course of history. For the last two centuries, people have been leaving the glen. Not enough food, too many bairns, no money to pay the rent. In other parts of this country the owners cleared people out and put sheep in instead, or they turned the land into playgrounds for stalking deer, shooting grouse and catching salmon, and only they and their guests were allowed to do these things. Some of this happened here, but it was not so extreme as elsewhere. Still, there were many people living in the glen a hundred years ago, and more if you go back another hundred. Now there are just a handful. Shirley and Peter Darroch, who have the Big House, are not of the glen. Only a very few folk can say that they were born and raised here, and even fewer that their parents or their grandparents were. The Darrochs bought the estate ten years ago, after the financial crash. The people before them, the Duff-Hasties, had had enough. They said it was impossible to make it pay and they were being persecuted by politicians in Edinburgh who knew nothing about the countryside. It may be true that politicians in Edinburgh know nothing about the countryside, or not much, but it was nonsense to talk of persecution unless it was of hares or birds of prey, and that was not being done by the politicians. Most folk in the glen were not sorry when the Duff-Hasties sold up after the crash, the chief regret being the loss of the fun that had been had with their name (they were widely known, among other things, as the Puff Pastries). I cannot say that I had much time for them. Before them were the Grants, who had the estate for a hundred and fifty years. I knew Sir Gregory Grant, who was a good man, and I knew his son, who was not a bad man but who came to a bad end. And before the Grants were the Milnes, whose line died out in 1832.

Peter Darroch is from Perth, Shirley is from Yorkshire. They had enough money to buy the estate but they say they do not own it, they are its custodians. There are some who make faces when they hear this − they say all rich landowners come out with that line − but the Darrochs mean it, and anyway they are not that rich. They have set up a community trust and, in a few years, they say, they will transfer ownership of the estate to the trust. But first they want to make it possible for more people to live here. They are trying to build a more diverse economy − fishing, mountain-biking and holiday lets as well as forestry and farming. They want to do away with shooting grouse and pheasants altogether, but not stalking the red deer up in the hills. They have converted the home farm to be organic. They talk about making things sustainable, about people having two or three different jobs, about the farm shop and café being a hub for locals as well as visitors. To raise funds they made a deal with the energy company to put up six wind turbines. Some people made faces about those too. They said they were ugly and would spoil the views. Now the turbines are here, most hardly notice them. I like them. They are graceful, the way they chop the wind as it turns them, and they bring a lot of money to the glen. The farm shop and café wouldn’t have been possible without the turbines; insulating and re-roofing these cottages would not have happened. I moved in with Julia for two weeks last year while mine was done, then she moved in with me and they did hers. When I am no longer around they will be able to rent mine out easily, all through the year. Or they could sell it, but I hope they do not.

Shirley Darroch says her dream is to get people reconnected with the land. She gets quite emotional sometimes, and some laugh at her, but she cannot help it, she feels it deeply. She tries not to be too idealistic. ‘Down to earth,’ she says, ‘that’s what I want us to be. Down to earth, literally. But nurturing it, not taking from it and putting nothing back. The earth is thin here, fragile, there is not much of it between us and the rock. You have to be careful.’

Shirley’s dream is that the population grows so much that the glen has to have a school again. Lachie and his sister, Rosie, go out of the glen to school and they will be grown up before that change happens, if it ever does. Shirley also wants to turn part of the Big House into a retreat, where people can come to be ‘spiritual’. She is not religious, she says, but she likes the tales about ‘Saint Conach’, who was not a saint at all in the Church’s eyes. Shirley thinks his spirit is still floating about. I don’t know what makes a person saintly or whether there will ever again be a school in the glen and I don’t know about people being spiritual. I do know it will take longer to get a few folk back on the land than it ever took to get their ancestors off it, but Shirley means what she says and so does Peter, so maybe it could all happen, although I will not see it. A dream cannot come true if you do not dream it.

I know something else as well: that the glen can be a place for somebody, if they come here. It can be the place where they hide and sleep, and recover life if they are not ready to die. A place from which they can go back out into the world again, if that’s what they choose to do, or stay if they do not.

I know this because of the dumb lass. In these recent days I have been thinking about her more than I have done for a long time. A separate being from me, and yet we are conjoined. I haven’t seen her yet, the way Lachie sees his ghost, if it is a ghost. I don’t know who it is he sees, but he might be seeing the dumb lass.

That thought makes me wonder if there is a change on the way for me; if I might soon be beyond the animals, treading that line of mortality. I am not afraid. I am curious. But if I have more courage than some it is only because the dumb lass trod that line before me. I took the courage from her, stored it away and then forgot most of how I had come by it.

If a change is coming, it will come in its own time. Meanwhile I will get up every morning and breathe in the fresh air.