Lister-Kaye - At the Waters Edge: A Walk in the Wild

First published in Great Britain in 2010 by

Canongate Books Ltd,

14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

This digital edition first published in 2010

by Canongate Books

Copyright John Lister-Kaye, 2010

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Crow and An Otter by Ted Hughes. From Collected Poems The Estate
of Ted Hughes and reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their
permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for
any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections
that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

A catalogue record for this book is available

on request from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 84767 890 4

Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,

Grangemouth, Stirlingshire

www.meetatthegate.com

for
Magnus Magnusson
in gratitude

Wealth dies, kinsmen die, a man himself must likewise die. But one thing I know which never dies world-fame, if justly earned.

Odin, in Hvaml (Words of the High One), from the Smundar Edda (Old Icelandic mythological poems)

Every once in a while we all need to get out, to give ourselves up to a favourite wild landscape, to explore and experience and to wonder. We should do this in every season and all weathers, by day and by night. We should touch and smell and listen. We should absorb moonlight on water, feel the wind in our hair, and discover the other creatures with which we share the world. We should be forcing ourselves to reconnect with wild nature and our origins. We need to do this before its too late.

Dr Jeff Watson, scientist and conservationist,
19522007

Contents

Preface

January 9th The frosts sunlit sparkle that opened our year was quickly banished by a shroud of grey. The nights have been raw and the days burdened with icy drizzle. For a week we have shivered in the damp of winter chill. I have left my desk and my fireside only reluctantly, briefly venturing out for my Jack Russell terriers, Ruff and Tumble, and always without conviction. Even they have been happy to scuttle back indoors. But today is different. At last a troubled sun has shouldered through, with bright lances of green striping the river fields, drawing me to my study window. Mist hangs over the river but the suns courage is calling me out. Its not quite ten oclock.

I left the dogs curled in their kitchen basket, pulled on my old jacket, my boots, hat and gloves, grabbed my binoculars and stick and set out on the circular walk I have done more times than I can count. I turned up the Avenue between the tall trunks of ancient limes and horse chestnuts, kicking the drifts of leaves across the path just for the reassuring swishing sound they make.

My walk takes me gently uphill, northwards with the sun at my back towards high, rocky crags and then turning to face the lurching clouds of the Atlantic west by following the Avenues parallel lines of lofty trees, precisely planted by Victorian landscape gardeners. Now, more than a century later, in the reassuring way that nature always does in the end, the trees have broken free. The old drive they lined where carriage wheels once crunched on raked gravel is long disused, lost beneath a blanket of leaf mould, and their stretching, moss-sleeved arms have mingled overhead, forming a tunnel of bosky shade. Only the rigid spacing of the trunks reveals their hand.

In the lower branches of one of the limes a spiders web caught my eye. It arched from twig to twig in a mist of fine lace. It was strikingly beautiful, so much so that I stopped to look more closely at the intricacy of the design. It was studded with beads of dew. The weak, low-angled sunlight gleamed from tiny prisms, incidentally distilled from the nights cold air, an unnecessary adornment tipped in for good measure. The spider herself was invisible. She had withdrawn to a bark crevice, where she waited, with one foreleg fingering the pulse of a silken cord to alert her when her trap was sprung. I couldnt resist jiggling the web with a straw, imitating a moth struggling in its tacky mesh. She was fooled, but only for a second. She rushed out to rope her victim round and deliver the poisoned bite to paralyse her prey. Halfway to my straw she realised her mistake, stopped, seemed to think for a second and then returned to her lair. I smiled. That spider was smart. I knew I couldnt fool her twice.

That net was a killing machine I knew that well enough but thats not all I saw, nor what I chose to write in my journal. What had stopped me was the beauty of the morning caught in the dewy eye of her device. I was witness to its delicacy, its symmetry and its inspirational cartwheel design. It was this beauty that possessed me and made me stand and stare. It possessed me not in a purely poetic sense, blinding me to everything else, but in the practical perfection of its own intricate existence. A spiders web doesnt need to be beautiful to work, but the presence of such radiance is a constantly recurring natural melody I have noted over and over again, almost always there, underscoring the drama of the moment.

Wherever I look in nature I find myself confronted by the paradox of sublime design and grim function, almost as though one is mocking the other a deadly game, sometimes so violent and brutish that it takes my breath away the stabbing bill of the heron, the peregrines dazzling stoop, the otters underwater grace in pursuit of a fish. And then the beauty floods back in as though some grander plan than evolution fits it all together with added value, that extra aesthetic ingredient, the work of some unnamed genius quite incapable of creating anything shoddy or brash. So I walk, and I watch, and listen, and slowly I learn.

Back at my desk I wrote this brief entry for the days walk. Its a habit. I always try to write down what I have seen and perceived to be the truth, a journal of these secret and personal thoughts and undertakings. Its not a diary, nor in any sense a scientific record but I have noted down those things that have caught my attention and hauled me off, incidents and happenings that I have wanted to remember and revisit, and which have helped me engage with the land and the animals and plants that share this patch of upland delight with me, the place I have come to know as home, theirs and mine.

Flicking back through these pages and volumes, I find a perpetually repeating theme. It is the timeless paradox of beauty and the beast inextricably tangled with the impact of man. It is the indescribable and often inexplicable beauty of nature and the overarching sense of wonder it carries with it, always drawn into sharp contrast by her utterly ruthless laws and the terrible truth of mankinds peaceless domination of his and their environment.

Slowly, as the decades have slid by, I have become intimate with my circular walk in a way few of us can hope to achieve in the hurly-burly of modern life. I never cease to be grateful that my work has permitted this level of involvement with the natural world. It doesnt matter what day or what season it is, my walk is an addiction and an escape. Im taking off towards a loch my loch encircled by wild and sensuous woods. I dont mean