THE TROSSACHS IN MAY SUNSHINE. You can still see the places high up where the cliff face burst open, where slabs of rock tumbled down the mountainside and smashed into boulders as they fell. In this kind of strong sunlight you see the broken cliff face’s tinfoil shimmer, for the geological wound is still too new to have acquired the grey patina of age.
An old and sparse mountain woodland of mostly oak and birch, browsed by more than 150 years of sheep and deer beyond any hope of significant natural regeneration, had stood in the path of the rockfall. Some of the rocks simply broke through the wood. Trees were uprooted or broken at the waist, or had great limbs torn away. You can still see the casualties. But other trees stood firm, slowed or halted the progress of the fall, and when the dust and the appalling noise settled, a new and precariously poised boulderfield began to adjust to life several hundred feet lower down the mountain from the cliff that had started it all.
So it was a boulderfield with broken, wounded and dying trees, or at least it was at first. But nature is not one to miss an opportunity even if it is one born out of such destructive upheaval. For the boulderfield’s sudden and brutal arrival has been the making of the wood, or rather the re-making of the wood. It is such a steep place and so treacherous underfoot that grazing animals rarely set foot there now. Thus, nature swarmed all over the rocks and mangled trees and smothered them with new possibilities.
Other trees rushed into the new vacuum, some the progeny of the crippled survivors of the rockfall, some borne on the wind, some carelessly transported by birds. Woodland plants followed, wood sorrel, wood anemone, wild hyacinths. They all found niches among the boulders and the dead and dying and recovering and wound-licking trees, and the old wood found new strength and spread higher and wider across the face of the mountain. So now you find not just oak and birch but also young rowan, holly, ash, aspen, willow, juniper, pine.
I got to know the place first when I was watching its badgers. An old hand in the glen told me about them, and about the rockfall. The badgers were attracted westward from a sett a few miles along the glen by the huge chambers that were created where boulders had come to rest in that ungainly chaos. The badgers scarcely had to dig out their setts at all. They adapted to their new surroundings by becoming skilful mountaineers, front-pointing up almost sheer rock faces with some style. It has always seemed to me to be a part-time sett, perhaps an outlier to be used when the sett to the east is overcrowded. But the fox den is full-time.
It was while I was watching the badgers that I found the foxes. I was walking in to the sett one spring evening in the last of the light. I had stepped across a skinny burn just above a little waterfall that must have masked the sound of my feet, and rounded one more rock when I simply came face to face with a fox.
We were both on the same narrow path, with no room to pass each other. We both stopped and stared at a distance of about twenty feet. We both assessed the situation. We both thought in our own way, “What now?”
He was a dog fox, returning from a successful hunt. A small rabbit hung in his jaws, limp as an empty sock. His coat gleamed foxy red, darkening towards his hind quarters. His ears and lower legs were black, the tip of his tail and his chest white. I thought it odd that he had not turned and run.
Where are you going? What are you doing?
I made it easy for us both. I started to retreat, walking carefully backwards and speaking to him in what I hoped was a calm and benevolent tone of voice, while he watched with his head slightly on one side. After a few yards, I turned and walked away from him towards the edge of the wood. I then did something very specific simply because a week earlier I had seen a badger do it. I rounded one of the huge boulders that had a thick mattress of heather and moss on top, then climbed its “blind” side until my head was level with the top.
My progress from there to a flat-out prone position on the springy green mattress was infinitely more ungainly than the badger I had watched, but I made it without too much fuss and I was now ten feet higher than the path, hoping that would be enough. Here, the badger simply lay down and watched the wood. I now did the same thing.
There was, of course, no sign of the fox. But there was an hour of usable light, and if I lay silently and still, who knows?
A mistle thrush was singing nearby. I have come to associate two birds in particular with the environs of a working badger sett. One is the robin, which seems to delight in feeding on badger spoil heaps and into the very mouths of entrance holes. The other is the mistle thrush. I once timed one as it sang – just over two unbroken hours of song, song that lay on the still woodland air like a cloud of silver smoke. The musical invention of the bird is uncanny and kaleidoscopic in its colours and patterns, and its music also offers the perfect antidote to the occasional tedium of a badger watch when nothing at all happens.
I lay on the rock listening, and the fox suddenly walked back along the path going the other way, and minus the rabbit. So somewhere nearby there was a vixen with cubs. So I changed my working routine at the sett. In an effort to encounter the fox more often out in his territory, I started to work the hill above the wood in the afternoons, and come down to the badger sett in the evening. Three weeks later I saw him walking along the top of a drystane dyke, pausing often to scent down in among its stones. Suddenly a pair of wheatears were flying around his head. I put the glasses on him, just in time to watch him devour a clutch of nestlings one at a time from their nest inside the dyke.
He jumped down from the dyke and headed uphill towards a deer fence, turned and followed it east until he came to a stile, nothing more than a few parallel straps of wood like a wide ladder, but completely vertical. He ran at the style from about five yards away and leapt, hitting it about halfway up and scrambling over and jumping down the far side in a single fluid movement.
“Hmm, you’ve done that before,” I said aloud to no-one at all.
I did not see his cubs that year, but the year after, I heard that four had turned up dead on a nearby eagle eyrie. I mentioned it to the old hand in the glen who simply said:
“Ah the balance of nature, eh?”
So I quoted Snoopy to him; you know, Snoopy from Peanuts:
“Those who believe in ‘the balance of nature’ are those who don’t get eaten.”