Jim Crumley - The Nature of Autumn

Praise for Jim Crumleys writing

Crumley conveys the wonder of the natural world at its wildestwith honesty and passion and, yes, poetry. Susan Mansfield, Scottish Review of Books

Scotlands pre-eminent nature writer. Jim Perrin, Guardian

Jim Crumley soars with eagles and we watch with our mouths open, not just because the presence of the eagle fills us with awe but the virtuoso writing does, too. Paul Evans , BBC Countryfile Magazine

Crumleys distinctive voice carries you with him on his dawn forays and sunset vigils. John Lister-Kaye, Herald

The best nature writer working in Britain today. David Craig , Los Angeles Times

Enthralling and often strident. Observer

Compulsively descriptive and infectious in its enthusiasm. Scotland on Sunday

Glowing and compelling. Countryman

Every well-chosen word is destined to find its way into our hearts and into our minds and into our imaginations. Ian Smith, The Scots Magazine

Well-written elegant. Crumley speaks revealingly of theatre-in-the-wild. Times Literary Supplement

The Eagles Way was shortlisted for a Saltire Society Literary Award in 2014.

Also by Jim Crumley

Nature Writing

Natures Architect

The Eagles Way

The Great Wood

The Last Wolf

The Winter Whale

Brother Nature

Something Out There

A High and Lonely Place

The Company of Swans

Gulfs of Blue Air

The Heart of the Cairngorms

The Heart of Mull

The Heart of Skye

Among Mountains

Among Islands

Badgers on the Highland Edge

Waters of the Wild Swan

The Pentland Hills

Shetland Land of the Ocean

Glencoe Monarch of Glens

West Highland Landscape

St Kilda

Encounters in the Wild series :

Fox / Barn Owl / Swan / Hare

Memoir

The Road and the Miles

Urban Landscape

Portrait of Edinburgh

The Royal Mile

The Nature of Autumn

Jim

C rumley

Contents

Remember well

James Anderson Crumley

19111975

Part One

September

Chapter One

A Child of Autumn

I was born in midsummer , but I am a child of autumn. One September day in the fourth or fifth autumn of my life there occurred the event that provided my earliest memory, and it is not too extravagant a claim set my life on a path that it follows still. I was standing in the garden of my parents prefab in what was then the last street in town on the western edge of Dundee. An undulating wave of farmland that sprawled southwards towards Dundee from the Sidlaw Hills was turned aside when it washed up against the far side of the road from the prefab, whence it slithered away south-west on a steepening downhill course until it was finally stopped in its tracks by the two-miles-wide, sun-silvered girth of the Firth of Tay at Invergowrie Bay. Then as now, the bay was an autumn-and-winter roost for migrating pink-footed geese from Iceland; then as now, one of their routes to and from the feeding grounds amid the fields of Angus lay directly over the prefab roof.

I can remember what I was wearing: a grey coat with a dark blue collar and buttons and a dark blue cap. So we were probably going out somewhere.

Why am I so sure it was September and not any other month of autumn or winter or early spring? Because it was the first time, and because for the rest of that autumn and winter and early spring, and ever since, the sound of geese over the house any house has sent me running to the window or the garden. So was established my first and most enduring ritual of obeisance in thrall to natures cause. And so I am as sure as I can be that the very first time was also the first flight of geese over the house after their return from Iceland that September; that September when I looked up at the sound of wild geese overhead and also for the first time made sense of the orderly vee-shapes of their flight as they rose above the slope of the fields, the slope of our street, up into the morning sunshine; vee-shapes that evolved subtly into new vee-shapes, wider or longer and narrower, or splintered into smaller vee-shapes or miraculously reassembled their casual choreography into one huge vee-shape the whole width of childhoods sky.

But then there were other voices behind me and I turned towards them to discover that all the way back down the sky towards the river and as far as I could see, there were more and more and more geese, and they kept on coming and coming and coming. The sound of them grew and grew and grew and became tidal, waves of birds like a sea (I knew about the sea by then, for it lived in Arbroath like my Auntie Mary), but a sea where the sky should be, and some geese came so low overhead that their wingbeats were as a rhythmic undertow to their waves of voices, and that too was like the sea.

When they had gone, when the last of them had arrowed away north-east and left the dying embers of the their voices trailing behind them on the air, a wavering diminuendo that fell into an eerie quiet, I felt the first tug of a life-force that I now know to be the pull of the northern places of the earth. And in that silence I stepped beyond the reach of my first few summers and I became a child of autumn.

Now, in the autumn of my life myself, every overhead skein of wild geese every one harks me back to that old September, and I effortlessly reinhabit the body and mindset of that moment of childhood wonder. Nothing else, nothing at all, has that effect. I had a blessed childhood, the legacy of which is replete with good memories, but not one of them can still reach so deep within me as the first of all of them, and now, its potency only strengthens.

It would have been about thirty years ago that I first became aware of the Angus poet Violet Jacob, and in particular of her poem, The Wild Geese . It acquired a wider audience through the singing of folksinger Jim Reid, who set it to music, retitled it Norlan Wind, and included it on an album called I Saw the Wild Geese Flee . I used to do a wee bit of folk singing and I thought that if ever a song was made for someone like me to sing it was that one, but I had trouble with it from the start. My voice would crack by the time I was in the third verse, and the lyrics of the last verse would prick my eyes from the inside. The last time I sang it was the time I couldnt finish it.

Years later, I heard the godfather of Scottish folk singing, Archie Fisher, talking about a song he often sang called The Wounded Whale , and how he had to teach himself to sing it on automatic pilot, otherwise it got the better of him, but I never learned that trick. Even copying out the words now with Violet Jacobs own idiosyncratic spelling, I took a deep breath before the start of the last verse, which is the point where the North Wind turns the tables on the Poet in their two-way conversation:

The Wild Geese

Oh tell me what was on your road, ye roarin norlan Wind,

As ye cam blawin frae the land thats niver frae my mind?

My feet they traivel England, but Im deein for the north.

My man, I heard the siller tides rin up the Firth o Forth.

Aye, Wind, I ken them weel eneuch, and fine they fa and rise,

And fain Id feel the creepin mist on yonder shore that lies,

But tell me, as ye passed them by, what saw ye on the way?

My man, I rocked the rovin gulls that sail abune the Tay.

But saw ye naethin, leein Wind, afore ye cam to Fife?

Theres muckle lyin yont the Tay thats dear to me nor life.