ONE

HEATHROW AIRPORT in my mind is a loathsome phenomenon without a redeeming feature.

Oh, except this one: I had a London publisher at the time and I would be sent airline tickets to fly from Edinburgh to London for meetings with my editor. I cannot believe that was what the Wright Brothers had in mind when they showed the world how to fly, but it happened a few times over several years in the course of producing and publicising three books. On what would prove to be the final occasion, I was staring mindlessly out of an aircraft window, a helpless unit of its hapless cargo, as we dawdled through the ritual of queuing for the right to take off, and all I could see was the curving procession of aeroplanes in front of us, the grey sprawl of the apron and an apparently unending prairie of short grass, the Slough of Despond wrought in grey concrete and green turf. It is the only place I have ever been where there was no landscape of any kind. Instead, there was just a dead flat dull green stain, a sprawling grass desert that blurred at last into the lowered undercarriage of a bloated grey, bottom-heavy sky that leached a grubby sub-species of drizzle such as a disgruntled God with a vengeful sense of irony might have devised.

All the while, the engines throbbed and wailed, the pitch rising and falling as we inched forward then stopped again and again and yet again, a soundtrack of such intense disagreeableness that it was surely composed specifically to complement that moment of bleak purgatory. I suspected the disgruntled God again, God the vengeful composer.

It appeared from beneath the aircraft in which I sat, and, this being August, it was as unexpected as Santa Claus. Its indifference to its surroundings was shocking yet somehow miraculous, God the miracle worker. My first thought was uncharitable: either it was one of a race that had evolved a mysterious defence against the maddening, deafening assault of engine decibels, or it was already quite mad and quite deaf.

Away it walked, away and away and away.

Where are you going? What are you doing?

It walked far, far away across the grass the way foxes do, in a dead-straight line, hind foot stepping carefully in the print of the corresponding fore foot, the way wolves do, because in snow it halves the effort of trail-breaking, and somehow, in the absence of snow, they never bothered to dispense with the habit. Somewhere beyond the limit of my vision through an aircraft window veined with blown rain, there must have been a destination, an end of the line for the fox that would reveal its purpose (or its purposelessness), but all that I could see suggested nothing so much as the most pointless journey on earth.

And then I thought: how could it all have come to this for the red fox tribe? Where and why did it all go wrong? And when did the fox strike a bargain with the one species on earth – yours and mine, the people – that has invested so much creative energy into finding ways of killing it… when did it strike a bargain that allowed it to live more or less unmolested in our towns and cities (albeit with a better than average chance of being run over before it is two years old), but not in our fields and forests and moors and mountains where it truly belongs and where its routine fate is to be hunted, shot, trapped, poisoned or ripped apart by mob-handed hounds, after which its tail might be hung from a gamekeeper’s gibbet as evidence of his good stewardship of his boss’s acres?

There may be ten thousand foxes in London alone. No-one knows for sure (how do you count them?) but students of urban foxes have tried and come up with that best guess, and from the lofty vantage point of my own home base just south of the first of the Highland mountains, I am prepared to believe it. But these are not my idea of foxes, and that bargain between my tribe and the fox tribe is not my idea of a fair deal.

And yes, I know that Heathrow Airport is not, strictly speaking, London (and whether this fox beyond the aircraft window is included as one of the ten thousand I confess I neither know nor care), but again, the view from my northern outpost reinvents London as a vast seepage of greyness and noise, and Heathrow and its fox (its foxes?) are embraced in its unearthly maw. I have watched many foxes disappear, and occasionally the disappearance has been inexplicable (for the fox also has that other wolf trait of how not to be seen when it so chooses), but never, until that moment, had I encountered a fox whose very presence was inexplicable. So I watched it walk on and on, and away and away and without lifting its head or breaking its stride, until at last it dwindled into the last yard of available distance where it was consumed by that grey-green twilight world from which (it seemed to me at that moment) the only possible means of escape was up.

We taxied at last, we turned, we roared, we thundered, we flew. We burst open the sky, we soared into a sunlit Valhalla of vivid blue where we laughed in the face of the Vengeful One, and by then Heathrow was just a bad taste in the mouth, and a whisky from a smiling stewardess took care of that. We flew north to Scotland and sanity, circled over Edinburgh in sunshine and there in the northwest (and tilted weirdly at an angle of about thirty degrees) was the mountain arc of the Highland Edge, with that so-familiar dark blue-green pyramid at its centre, Ben Ledi in its summer clothes, and for so long now my friendly neighbourhood mountain, my fox mountain. We levelled out then and swooped to meet the earth, and the landscape of my life was back on an even keel, except that at the very moment when the aircraft wheels screeched and bit into Scottish soil, the Heathrow fox returned to begin to haunt me. Twenty years later and from time to time, it haunts me still.

Where are you going? What are you doing? Did you never hunt a mountain boulderfield or roll in a fragrant wood of wild hyacinths? Did you ever even know that these things exist?