I recognised it instantly, as instinctively as you know the sound of your own voice. Grief – Latin: gravare, heavy; Old French: grever, to burden – that weight, that overwhelming burden of desolation I thought I’d conquered thirty years before had never gone away at all. It was still there, hidden, padlocked, forgotten, lurking deep in the darkest canyons of my hippocampus, silently waiting for this moment.
* * *
I returned to rainy Scotland buoyed up and inspired by the Spanish project and determined to pursue my mother’s influence further. I had learned so much, not just about captive breeding. Twelve years ahead of us, they had made and resolved many of the mistakes with lynxes we were now making with our wildcats. For hygiene, we were diligently removing cat faeces every day.
‘No,’ Antonio had said, ‘leave them in for at least a week or two. They contain pheromones, important territorial signals.’
‘Oh,’ I answered blankly, wondering why the hell I hadn’t thought of that.
* * *
For thousands of years since the last ice cap retreated, these deeply glaciated glens, carved through unyielding metamorphic schist, have stubbornly resisted the severest ravages of mankind. Drawing strength from the rock beneath, nature has always fought back. It is how so much of the Highlands’ precious wildlife has been able to cling on. Ours is a land of golden eagles tilting on glider wings and the metallic screams of peregrines echoing from the walls of the river gorge. I never cease to catch my breath when I see the Bourneville blur of pine martens filching food from the bird tables. My heart beats faster at the sudden flash of a salmon shimmering up the rapids, and every autumn dawn I awaken to the hills echoing with the roaring of rutting red deer stags. Although we very rarely see them, somehow, against all the odds, a few Scottish wildcats might have managed to hang in there too.
One of the many joys of living among the mountains is arriving home after forays further afield. On a clear day, turning west just after Inverness, the Highland capital, the great grey rampart of the nearly 4,000-foot Affric mountains looms out of the distance, solid and reassuring. I never tire of that rugged molar horizon, a welcome home that wafts my spirit skyward like the red kites we so frequently see wheeling and soaring over the rich dark soil of the Black Isle fields. Without those mountains my life might have been entirely different.
A squealing, wiggling welcome from my two Jack Russells, Nip and Tuck, a spousely hug with hot tea and a slice of my wife Lucy’s banana cake settled me straight back into cosy domesticity. Oh, it was GOOD to be home. But for me home has always been so much more than the cushioned refuge of the complacent. I have lived at Aigas so long that the land has claimed me, shaped me to match its wildness and its contrary needs, so that whenever I’ve been away I need to relocate and tune up again like a harp that has had to travel. So as soon as I tactfully could, I slipped out into the fresh cool of the evening and walked briskly uphill to the secret forest location of our wildcat project. I needed to stand and look at them with the brighter, wider eyes of the Spanish experience.
We haven’t given our cats names. They are identified by gender and their pens: ♂ in Pen 1, ♀ in Pen 2, ♂ kitten in Pen 4 . . . and so on. There’s no good reason why we shouldn’t name them, but, respecting their innate wildness – as far from fluffy moggies as wolves from a poodle – we have avoided humanising them as much as possible. They have all been DNA tested and are high quality, over 89 per cent wildcat – probably as good as we are going to be able to find in the remaining wild population. By careful selective breeding we can further diminish the hybrid genes, sharing high quality kittens with other captive breeders to broaden the gene pool and reduce the risk of inbreeding.
The pens are big and built on the woodland edge, with grassy spaces between natural cover of broom, brambles and thickets of wild raspberries; the damp patches have sprouted clumps of grasses, rushes, docks and nettles – as natural a wildcat habitat as we can achieve. Sunlight flickers through the trees, gnats dance, bees drone, the breezes shimmy through. Unthinking, wild birds – chaffinches, dunnocks, wrens and robins – dip and bob just out of reach, keeping the cats alert and, unlucky for some, foraging mice and voles make the mistake of blundering in.
As the still evening air settled around me I stood at the gate to Pen 2. The male, a big rangy tom with attitude, jumped silently down from a high perch. Panther shoulders rolling in sinister ripples beneath the fur, he stalked slowly but purposefully across to stare me out. Ten feet from the wire, he sat on his haunches and glared. He glowed with all the assurance of a million years of evolution. He was magnificent. I resented the wire and wanted to be in the pen with him. When I moved to unlock the gate he hissed, lips curled and long fangs gleamed. His ears flattened and he crouched; his whole mask bristled with rancour. The emerald eyes flared, long white whiskers arrayed in a bright fan. This cat has a history of disliking men and makes his feelings clear. The black club end to his ringed tail twitched. And that stare – you get the feeling that he is in charge of the world.
We keep human presence to a minimum. Every day one of the rangers enters the pens to feed and to clean away the detritus – bones, feathers, the scaly legs of quail or pheasants, rabbit fur. Every two weeks their bedding is changed for fresh, sweet-smelling straw. The rangers had often told me that the tom in Pen 2 was threatening, possibly even dangerous. ‘Oh yeah,’ I’d shrugged, smiling smugly to myself. ‘Dangerous? Nah, don’t believe it.’
I unchained the gate and entered the safety chamber, carefully closing it behind me. He hissed again, louder, his anger rising to something akin to fury, ending the hiss with a sharp ‘Spat!’ A duty ranger would always have food – quail or rabbit, or fluffy, yellow day-old chicks (a by-product of the ghastly intensive poultry trade) we buy frozen – to throw to a hungry cat that came close. It’s a routine, expected when we enter the pen: they pounce, snatch up the prey and whisk away into cover, up onto a high perch or into a den. I had none – hadn’t thought it important; besides, my head was full of Iberian lynxes and new ideas. I wasn’t thinking right, dull stupidity eclipsing brighter reason. I opened the second gate into the pen. He was five feet away, no sign of backing off. ‘Hullo,’ I spoke softly, shaking my head. ‘Sorry, Tomcat, nothing for you tonight.’ I showed my empty hands.
It happened so fast, so dazzlingly lightning fast, that I had no time even to flinch. He sprang. He lashed out with both front paws, razor claws fully extended, slashing down my trousers and onto my boots. Then he was gone. Fire without smoke. In one blur of black-striped fury he had launched, slashed, turned and vanished under a clump of broom. The corduroy at my left knee was torn open and blood began to well up from a blade-thin slice in my kneecap. Long white streaks in the green rubber of my boots marked where the claws of both paws had ripped downwards, streaks eight inches long. But for the boots he would have slashed my left leg to the bone.
I had felt nothing. It happened so fast and with such accuracy that the tomcat had not bodily hit me, not followed through with brute force, rather it was delivered at a perfectly calculated distance, the down-swiping claws at full stretch, pulling away the instant they hit home. That cat knew exactly how to use its claws as weapons of contempt, just as a thug with a knife might slash to disfigure you.
I looked down at my knee as the blood roped and plied itself through the torn weave of my trousers. I cursed, a curse as much at my own disregard of the warnings and my crass appearance in the pen without food as at the tomcat himself. I limped out. Only twenty-four hours earlier I had told the Spanish biologists that even though our cats were captive bred they were still wild animals and totally unpredictable. Some of us only ever learn things the hard way.
I walked back to the house