Jim Crumley - The Nature of Winter

I see from the Acknowledgements in this books predecessor, The Nature of Autumn, that I edge closer to poets and artists with the passage of time. It seems the process only deepens.

I doff my cap to William Butler Yeats again in these pages.

And my late great friend George Garson is here again too, and he was both artist and poet. It is probably time that I stopped trying to grapple with the nature of the debt that I owe him, and just be grateful that our paths crossed and that as a result my life was and continues to be immeasurably enriched.

For a Scottish nature writer working primarily in Scotland, the process has occasionally immersed me in the works of others furth of Scotland, some of them considerably furth. Shingi Itoh may not be a name on the lips of many readers and writers of nature books, but his book, The White Egret, is a masterclass in the art of nature photography. I have known and loved it for thirty years and finally I have the opportunity to pay it due tribute, now that little egrets have begun to creep into the fiefdom where I ply my trade.

I have long been grateful to the painter Charles Tunnicliffe for his thoughtful reading of the plumage of swans, and although it was doubtless intended in the first place as a kind of memo to himself, it is an object lesson for me in how the seeing eye of the artist is one of the most prized assets a nature writer can add to his toolbox.

And a couple of generations down the line, a young Fife-based painter (and incidentally a singularly entertaining blogger) called Leo Du Feu is one to watch. Weve worked together at book festivals, and in the context of this book we went whale-watching on the Forth. He has that virtue that George Garson used to extol: Control, but relaxed control, mind.

Other writers, of course, continue to cast their spell, and none is more enduring and more important to the kind of nature writer I have become than Seton Gordon. He is one of my orginal sources. And it was Gavin Maxwell who first made me aware of the possibilities of writing about the land for a living.

Aldo Leopolds A Sand County Almanac (written in 1940s Wisconsin) remains unopposed in my mind as the very pinnacle of the art of nature writing. My Alaskan friend Nancy Lord is one of Leopolds heirs, a powerful writer who is also increasingly involved in teaching the troubling science of climatology. And Roger Payne, an American whale biologist, wrote in Among Whales the finest work on the subject I know.

Thank you all, the living and the no longer living, for the benevolent influences of your work on this Scottish nature writer.

Finally, the most heartfelt vote of thanks of all is for my publisher Sara Hunt of Saraband, her editor Craig Hillsley, and my literary agent Jenny Brown. They are a kind of dream team for my kind of writer.