To be far north of the Highland Line and among the mountains, when
winter has not only whitened the hill-moors but dusted the green roofs
of every strath and corrie, may not have for many people the charm of
the southward flight. But to the hill-born it is a call as potent as
any that can put the bittersweet ache into longing hearts. There is
peace there: and silence is there: and, withal, a beauty that is not
like any other beauty. The air and wind are auxiliary; every cloud or
mist-drift lends itself to the ineffable conspiracy; the polar breath
itself is a weaver of continual loveliness often more exquisitely
delicate than the harebell, often incalculable or immeasurable, or
beautiful with strangeness, as moonlight on great waters, or the
solitary torch of Jupiter burning his cold flame in the heart of a
mountain-tarn. There is no soundlessness like it. And yet the silence
is relative; is, in a word, but an imagination laid upon an illusion.
If there is no wind on the moor, there may be a wandering air among the
lower heights. If so, many hollows of rocks, caverns lost in bracken,
caves of hill-fox and badger, sudden ledges haunted by the daw and the
hoodie and filled with holes as though the broken flutes of the dead
forgotten giants of old tales, will make a low but audible music: a
lifting and falling sighing, with singular turnings upon itself of an
obscure chant or refrain, that just as one thinks is slipping into this
side knowledge and is almost on the edge of memory, slides like rain
along that edge and vanishes, vague as an unremembered fragrance. Or if
the suspense be so wide that not a breath moves lower than where the
corries climb towards the very brows of the mountains, one will surely
hear, far up among the time-hollowed scarps and weather-sculptured
scaurs, that singular sound which can sink to a whimpering, as of
unknown creatures or lost inhuman clans strayed and bewildered, or can
be as though unseen nomads were travelling the mountain-way with songs
and strange flutes and thin wailing fifes, or can rise to a confused
tumult as of embattled hosts, or to a crying and a lamentation more
desperate than the cries of men and a lamenting as of that mysterious
and dreaded clan, the Grey Children of the Wind. The wind, in truth, is
almost always to be heard, near or far. Sometimes the eye may learn,
where the ear fails: as when one is in a glen or strath or on a shore
or moor, and, looking up, may see smoke rising from the serrated crests
or the curving sky-lines, like the surf of vast billows--to realise
soon, that this volcanic apparition means no more than that vast
volumes of driven snow are being lifted by the north wind and whirled
against and over the extreme mountain-bastions. _Trath chaidleas ’s
a ghleann an t-àile_, ‘when the air sleeps in the glens,’ goes a
Gaelic saying, ‘you may hear the wind blowing in the high corries _mar
chaithream chlàr_,’ like the symphony of harps.
Then, too, it is rare that the snowy wilderness is without voice of
mountain torrent, for even when frost holds the hill-world in a grip
so terrible that the smaller birds cannot fly in the freezing air,
there are rushing burns of so fierce a spate that the hands-of-ice are
whirled aside like foam, and the brown wave leaps and dashes from rock
to rock, from granite ledge to peaty hollow, from brief turbulent
channels to chasms and crevasses whence ceaselessly ascends the damp
smell of churned surge, above which as ceaselessly rises a phantom
spray. Again, there is that strange, continual earth-movement, the
alarm of all unfamiliar wayfarers. Who suddenly unloosened that rush
of rock and earth yonder? What enemy moved that boulder that leapt
and hurtled and crashed downward and beyond, but a score yards away?
Of what elfin-artillery are those rattling stones the witness? What
hand, in the silence, thrust itself through the snow and crumbled that
old serrated ledge, where, a week ago, the red deer stood sniffing
the wind, where, yesterday perhaps, the white ptarmigan searched the
heather?
Moreover we are in the domain of the eagle, the raven, and the corbie.
They are seldom long silent there. And that sudden call on the wind?
... what but the Merry Folk, _Clann Aighean Siubhlach_, the Wandering
Deer-Clan, passing like drifting shadows over white heather-pastures
lost to view? It is long since the love-belling of the stags made
musical the mountain-side: was not ‘the Silence of the Deer’ the first
sign of winter come again? But that cry was the cry of hunger--a _guth
accaimeach_, a sobbing voice, as once I heard a prosaic roadmender
unprosaically and with kindly sympathy allude to the winter-bleat of
the snow-famished deer. And that other bleating: of sheep left upon
the hills, and overtaken by the White Weather. How goes the sound,
the translated echo of their mournful iteration, that is now a long
ululation of lament and now a rising and falling bleating as of
confused words? The same roadmender I speak of said--after himself
lamenting in sympathy _tha’m fuachd a muigh’s a staigh an diugh ..._
‘the cold is outside and inside to-day’--that it went like this: _Tha
sinn cèarr, tha sinn cèarr, tha sinn cèarr’s gun fhios againn!_... ‘We
are astray, we are astray, we are astray and have lost our bearings!’
Up here everything may have a snow-change ‘into something rich and
rare.’ It was in a hill-solitude, in white weather such as this, that,
for example, I heard from an old shepherd names for the eagle, the
corbie, and the ptarmigan that I had not elsewhere heard, nor have
seen in print, though for long now I have been collecting all whenever
and wherever chance permits the Gaelic and Lowland names of birds and
animals. The corbie he called _An t-Eun Acarachd_, the Merciless,
literally, ‘the bird without compassion,’ no doubt with thought of its
love for young lambs or its savage lust for the eyes of stricken or
dying sheep. The ptarmigan he called _An t-Eun_ (_Adhar_ or _Aidhre_),
the bird of the snow or frost--though this is but a variant, of course,
of the more familiar _Sneacag_ or _Eun-an-Sneachel_. When he spoke of
the eagle simply as _An t-Eun Mòr_, the great bird, that seemed less
noteworthy, but when he added, _Abù! An t-Eun Mòr Abù_, I was puzzled.
I thought he meant _aboo_ to simulate the _Iolair’s_ cry, though it
sounded much more like the muffled hoot of the great owl than the
eagle’s screech. He said he remembered that was the eagle’s name in
an old tale he had often heard his mother tell when he was a child. I
never thought of it as _Abù_, however, till one day I came upon this
word in a Gaelic dictionary and found it entered as being an ancient
war-cry of the Gael. Truly, a fit survival, for a wild slogan that has
ages ago died away from the Gaelic hills: to live still among these
desolate mountains, around those wind-tortured scarps and scaurs, in
the scream of the golden eagle. The old man had a special bird-name for
most of the birds he spoke of or about which I asked him. Doubtless
he was as good a naturalist and with as good a right to make names as
any ornithologist who would know what the old man could not know, and
would be familiar with common and other names that would be unfamiliar
there among the far hills, or, at least, to the old mountaineer, for
whom the hill-birds were the best of company. For the curlew, for
instance, though he knew the common Scots name, Whaup, he had the
good name _An t-Eun Chaismeachd_, ‘the bird of alarm’--how good a
name (though perhaps equally applicable to the grey plover, the green
whistler, or the lapwing) must be obvious to all who have walked the
moorland or travelled the hillside. And where an islesman or a man of
the mainland coasts would, for swiftness, use a comparison such as _cho
luath ri sgadan_, ‘as swift as a herring,’ he would say, _cho luath ris
nafeadag_, ‘as swift as the plover.’
White Weather, he said, was always first ‘called’ by the linnet,
the ‘heather lintie’ so loved of Scots song-writers, to which he
gave several names (‘out of a good ten that will be known to any one
whatever’), one a curious blend of Scots-Gaelic, _Shilfe-monaidh_
(_i.e._, the moor--chaffinch), another a pretty name, _Breacan-Beithe_,
‘little speckled one of the birch.’ But even he, for all his
hill-wisdom, could not tell me why it is that when the lapwing come
again after the great winter-end storm about mid-March, welcome
pioneers of the Spring that is stealing slowly up through the glens
and straths of the south, they always, if they nest on the slope of a
hillside, choose the east side for their unsheltered homes and where
to lay their eggs. Do they so love the bleak wind of the east? Hardly
any bird takes so little trouble with the nest: often it is but the
frost-hardened delve of a cow’s hoof, a tangle of bent, or the hollow
of a misplaced stone. I have heard that this is truer of the mainland
than of the isles, but I have not found it so. Last March or April I
remember that on the long, low-hilled and mainly ‘upland’ island where
I then was, not a single lapwing’s nest but was on the east slope of
grassy brae or sloping moor or pasture. But though he could not say
a word on so strange, almost so inexplicable a habit, he could be
positive as to the age of the eagle, and especially as to one aged
_iolair_ that he often saw on Maol-Aitionnach, the great hill that was
half the world and more to him: namely, that the king-bird lived to
be three hundred years. And he computed it thus: that an eagle lives
three times less than an oak, and three times more than a deer. There
is a familiar proverb that ‘_Tri aois feidh aois firein; tri aois
firein aois crsoibh dharaich_,’ ‘Thrice the age of a deer, the age of
an eagle’ (‘ferain,’ ‘fireun,’ and ‘fiolair’ are variants of ‘iolair,’
whose more ancient name is ‘antar’ (_an t-ar_), one of the oldest
names in the Gaelic language); ‘thrice the age of an eagle, the age
of an oak.’ The stag lives a hundred years, or so it is universally
believed: therefore the eagle lives three hundred, and the oak’s age is
at least nine hundred years. I recall, in connection with the eagle,
a singular saying which I heard many years ago and have not since
heard or anywhere encountered, to the effect that between dusk and
dawn a bat’s flight will be the equivalent of a thousand miles, that
between dawn and dusk a swallow will cover a thousand miles, and that a
thousand miles is the measure of an eagle’s flight between sunrise and
sunset.
Well, I must leave Maol-Aitionnach, and the snow-held hills.
Everywhere, now, the White Weather may have spread. Far south,
listeners may hear the _honk-honk_ of the travelling solander, that
most musical and thrilling of all nocturnal sounds or of winter-dawns:
or, like phantom-voices from the world of dreams, the _kuilliyak-ee,
kuilliyak-o_ of the wild swans, the _Clann righ fo gheasan_, the
Enchanted sons of Kings, who, as they wheel through the snowy twilight
under the dawn-star may remember the dim lands of the north, and a
great mountain that rises among white and silent hills and looks down
upon a black tarn I know of, so dark in the grip of black-frost, and
so strangely spared of the snow, that not a white wing rests there, or
floats overhead, but is mirrored as an enchanted sail in an enchanted
sea.