Wildcamping Part Five. Apex

Saturday 25th July

sound diary: https://youtu.be/ycYR1IVEysQ

And I am writing this sitting in an armchair, having showered. There`s a slight evening breeze nudging the blind awake, blinking in my bright bedroom. This is Glentruim Lodge, my Lothlorien interlude. Set remotely, amongst trees a short walk from the river Spey. It`s weird to be confined by walls after unfettered wanderings. In fact I put off arriving until late afternoon, wanting to visit the Scottish Wildcat Centre in Newtonmore. I like that town; it feels like a modest workaday place after a series of flashy towns like Pitlochry and Aberfeldy. I really like that the bicycle repair man tweaked around with the back brake and set the wheel rolling again at no cost. A hand painted sign outside his shop advertised free bike repairs for long-summer-holiday-kids. I`d like to have recorded a chat with him, about the wheeled travellers he`s encountered, passing through. But instead, I fitted the “dead cat” to my audio-recorder and turned up at the wildcat centre. Which was a small shopfront and a spry older man cleaning the windows. I looked around for compounds or cages. He explained this was actually a gift shop. I spied more colourful life-sized wildcats cast in resin or plaster, identical to the stripey blue and white one plonked behind the shinty stadium gates. “You`ll want the Highland Wildlife Park at Kincraig. 5 miles down the road”. And so, 11 miles later I heaved up the hill to a massive carpark, which was coach-less, overseas visitor-less. I pushed on to the kiosk. I hadn`t booked, but there was room for me. £18.50 felt like a lot of money but I`d been funded generously already for this project (Visual Artist and Craft Makers Award) so in I went. Finding my bearings, the signposts that caught my eye were: Wildcat, Lynx, Wolf. (Giraffe seemed less of a potential candidate for my imagination`s rewilding project. Ditto Polar Bear). After sitting outside on the fringes of a snow monkey colony, eating a baked potato from the Antler Café, I went a-hunting: I paced the entire perimeter of a heavily be-shrubbed, sloping enclosure belonging to an invisible Lynx. Sunlight glared on the undergrowth and bushes, shadows dark and dappling. The creature had melted. And so I hobbled down to the wildcat enclosure. My blistered heels were still recovering from exploring the Birks of Aberfeldy in wet sandals. I`d had to seal my pungent trail running shoes in 2 plastic bags. Like double wrapped Camembert. There was no access to the wildcats, the entrance barred to visitors. I walked around a couple of times to make sure. I later learnt that 4 kittens had been born in May and, as these are so rare and endangered in Scotland, the welcome mat has been removed to (potentially disease carrying) visitors. 

I`ve heard it said that after seven days we are already adapted to quite radical life shifts. And hopefully the sedate comforts of Glentruim B and B weren`t about to set my nomadic dial back to one !  . . .  But I sensed settled changes. Surveying myself in the full length mirror (after days of shop window reflections) my face had softened and was more open, very sunburnt. Forehead shining like a beacon. My posture relaxed. Muscles more toned, belly reduced. I`d been immersed in another element for over 150 hours and today, having reached my journey`s mid-point, pulled myself up onto the bank.

So, getting back to earlier in the day,  as I shuffled up towards “Wolf Wood” I felt lean and limber. (“Third time lucky” I thought). And there they were. In a pinewood. Six of them sitting decorously on a platform by the viewing area, like a marvellous composite statue on a plinth, When they moved it was with a feline gracefulness, much more powerful and fluid than any mere dog I have seen. Every sense alert and hyper-tuned to all surrounding sounds, sights and smells. And such symbiosis. When they sprang as one from the platform, sensing the approach of feeding time (the first since Wednesday I learnt) they rushed through the trees like a shoal of fish slipping through  water. They moved with neither jolt nor jerk. As the signs of feeding time grew more apparent and urgent to them, individual wolves broke rank and attacked the high fence between us and them. Leaping high, then banking off, landing softly. And then in the next pulse of hunger, frenzied digging at the fence roots between us.  We were the prey. Finally a thin dog whistle set them all arushing to the wood`s edge. Another whistle brought them chasing across to this side once more.This to-ing and fro-ing repeated until, finally, hunks of red meat were released into their enclosure and each wolf fetched away its meal, adrenalized by the “chase”.

I came away dazed and stirred. It`s strange, often in the past when running the forest  trails above my house at Glenbenna, especially around sundown, I`ve found myself rehearsing how I would defend myself if suddenly confronted with a wild animal, a wolf in particular. A hungry apex predator needing to eat. And such encounters will have been our collective memory for many thousands of years. Wrapped in my atavistic reaction will be all kinds of bogey man projections. In reality wolves very seldom kill people. However, I imagined lying in my tent, on a remote grassy plain, and hearing a pack of wolves. Howling. Beautiful. Terrifying. 

And this evening I`m now sitting on such a grassy plain, overlooking the river Spey. My heart sings; such a timeless landscape, river curving side to side like a slow skater sliding over river ice. Nearby I`d come across a boulder and on it a plaque read that Glentruim is the very heart of Scotland, halfway between Atlantic and North Sea. That from here, the trail will lean geologically downwards all the way to Montrose on the east coast. I pulled my guitalele from its soft case and tuned 6th to D and 5th to B. And played The Wolf into my recording machine

Glentruim Lodge