ST MARGARET’S LOCH lies at the foot of Arthur’s Seat, a miraculous little mountain within sight and sound of Edinburgh’s Old Town. Its situation at the heart of Holyrood Park may be tame, and although its swans (and its geese and ducks and gulls) will almost all take food from your hand, they are still wild in their seasonal flights and in their characteristic behaviour. On a midwinter night, the mountain is a black mask and the city seems suddenly far off. The loch is hard ice, and draped in a blue-black sheen of bounced light from the city’s night sky. About sixty swans are gathered here, and clustered around them are hordes of the lesser fowl of the night, grateful for the restlessness of the swans that constantly break down each new creeping frontier of ice to keep a corner of the loch ice-free.
A night like this at this time of year can mean anything up to eighteen hours of darkness to stand through, to stare through, to get through in a one-footed doze, to bicker through and reassert a claim on a small space of the water or the ice. Yet these birds are the lucky ones, for the city feeds them by day. Carfuls of Samaritans bring bread and other scraps. Most of the birds will eat well enough to thole the nights, a fact not lost on the city fox which traverses the mountain in the evening from a daytime refuge under a shed in the fag-end of a Duddingston garden. Nor is the fact of the ice lost on the fox. Where ducks and geese can stand and walk, so can a fox.
He is a hunter, and cold and hunger only serve to keen his hunter’s instincts and embolden him. He will know there may be a gauntlet of swans to run, but he knows too that if he watches from a distance, prepared to wait out as much of the night as it takes, sooner or later the restless throng will carelessly expose one unwary duck.
A distant bell sounded 10pm, chimes that wavered through the vagaries of the wind, now bright, now muffled. My way was up through the whins with a torch for the pitfalls. Eight years as a newspaper journalist here had given me a back-of-the-hand familiarity with the middle of Edinburgh and these were my most favoured of all the city’s acres.
Above the nearest whins the track dipped into a hollow that shut out the city and darkened the night with deep shadows. It was there I met the dog fox, there that he turned from me, disappeared at once heading for higher ground, but I heard his feet thumping frozen grass, then higher up, frozen snow. There I saw him again, trotting and relaxed again, and with his moonshadow for company. He stopped once to look back, then changed course onto a long downhill curve that headed for the loch. I took a detour of my own so that I came on a small outcrop that looks down on the loch, and there I sat and prepared to shiver for a while.
After about twenty minutes, I saw him walk slowly along the lochside path at the foot of the mountain, moving away from the swans, intent on a scattered group of ducks standing one-footed on the ice towards the far end of the loch. He took a few tentative steps onto the ice, then a dozen more purposeful paces. Then all hell broke loose.
Two swans rose from water onto ice, and in a running, sliding fury with necks stretched straight and low and wings threshing the ice, they drove at the fox from fifty yards, scattering ducks, geese and gulls in squalls of protest. What the fox would have seen as he turned his head at the first explosive cracking of the ice was this:
Two wingspans of around seven feet, and wingtip to wingtip, charged at him like a breaking wave, a wild white wave tumbling across the ice and rendered all the more eerie by the back-lighting of the city and their weirdly mimicking ice-defused reflections. The swans never really became airborne; the wings were deployed to make sound and fury and awful spectacle, and the bowsprits of their heads and necks were unmistakably aimed at the fox. The fact that the birds were running on ice added chaos to the charge and that only added to its ominous edge. And all this was happening at the fox’s eye-level. It is hard to imagine he ever saw a more terrifying sight in all nature.
Considering the underfoot conditions, his retreat was surprisingly deft and sure-footed until he was within a yard of the shore when he lost his nerve completely, crashed chin-first onto the ice, recovered and clambered awkwardly onto the path while the swans subsided onto the ice but careered on another twenty or thirty yards completely out of control, all decorum shot to hell in a virtuoso routine of panto slapstick. By the time they were on their feet again, the fox was a shadow among shadows.
We retired, the fox and I, to such food and shelter as we could glean from the night city, and (from our very different points of view) to dwell on the vigilance of the white sentries of the winter night under an urban mountain.