Part 4

Few sounds are heard by that mountain-tarn. The travelling cloud lets fall no echo of its fierce frost-crashing shards. Dawn and noon and dusk are quiet-footed as mist. The stars march in silence. The springing Northern Lights dance in swift fantastic flame, but are voiceless as the leaping shadows in a wood. Only those other wayfarers of the mountain-summit, tempest, thunder, the streaming wind, the snow coming with muffled rush out of the north, wild rains and whirling sleet, the sharp crackling tread of the hosts of frost: only these break the silence; or, at times, the cries of ‘the eldest children of the hill’ as the mountain-Gael calls the eagle, the hill-fox, and the ptarmigan--the only creatures that have their home above the reach of the heather and in the grey stony wildernesses where only the speckled moss and the lichen thrive.

When I was last at this desolate and remote tarn I realised the truth of that hill-saying. After the farthest oaks on Sliabh Gorm, as the ridge to the south-west is called and up which alone is a practicable if rough and often broken way, came scattered groups and then isolated trees of birch and mountain-ash. Thereafter for a long way the heather climbed. Then it gave way more and more to bracken. In turn the bracken broke like the last faint surf against huge boulders and waste stony places. The grouse called far below. The last deer were browsing along their extreme pastures, some five hundred to eight hundred feet below the precipitous bastions of Maoldhu. Higher than they I saw a circling hawk and three ravens flying slowly against the wind. Then came the unpeopled wilderness, or so it seemed till I heard the wail of a solitary curlew (that spirit of the waste, for whom no boggy moors lie too low and desolate, for whom no mountain-ranges are too high and wild and solitary), and once, twice, and again in harsh response but faint against the wind, the barking of a hill-fox and its mate. All life had ceased, I thought, after that, save an eagle which in a tireless monotony swung round and round the vast summit of Maoldhu. But suddenly, perhaps a hundred feet above me, six or seven ptarmigan rose with a whirr, made a long sailing sweep, and settled (slidingly and gradually as flounders in shallow waters among grey pebbles and obscuring sand-furrows) among the lichened boulders and loose disarray of speckled granite and dark and grey basalt and trap--an ideal cover, for even a keen following gaze could not discern the living from the inanimate.

Truly the eagle, the hill-fox, and the ptarmigan are ‘the eldest children of the hill.’ The stag may climb thus high too at times, for outlook, or for the intoxication of desolation and of illimitable vastness; sometimes the hawks soar over the wilderness; even the mountain-hares sometimes reach and race desperately across these high arid wastes. But these all come as men in forlorn and lonely lands climb the grey uninhabitable mountains beyond them, seeking to know that which they cannot see beneath, seeking often for they know not what. They are not dwellers there. The stag, that mountain-lover, cannot inhabit waste rock; the red grouse would perish where the ptarmigan thrives and is content.

How little has been written about these birds of the mountain-brow. What poetry is in their name, for those who know the hills. They dwell higher than the highest June-flight of the tireless swift, higher than the last reaches of the sunrise-leaping larks. Cities might crumble away in pale clouds of dust, floods might whelm every lowland, great fires might devour the forests and the red insatiable myriad of flame lap up the last high frontiers of bracken and climbing heather, and the ptarmigan would know nothing of it, would not care. Their grey home would be inviolate. No tempest can drive them forth. Even the dense snows of January do not starve them out. Do they not mock them by then taking the whiteness of the snow for their own? They have nothing to fear save the coming of a black frost so prolonged and deathly that even the sunfire in the eagle’s blood grows chill, and the great pinions dare no more face the icy polar breath. ‘They’ll be the last things alive when the world is cold,’ said an old gillie to me, speaking of these storm-swept lichen-fed children of the upper-wild.

The same old gillie once saw a strange sight at my mountain-tarn. He had when a youth climbed Maoldhu to its summit in midwinter, because of a challenge that he could not do what no other had ever done at that season. He started before dawn, but did not reach the lochan till a red fire of sunset flared along the crests. The tarn was frozen deep, and for all the pale light that dwelled upon it was black as basalt, for a noon-tempest had swept its surface clear of snow. At first he thought small motionless icebergs lay in it, but wondered at their symmetrical circle. He descended as far as he dared, and saw that seven wild-swans were frozen on the tarn’s face. They had alit there to rest, no doubt: but a fierce cold had numbed them, and an intense frost of death had suddenly transfixed each as they swam slowly circlewise as is their wont. They may have been there for days, perhaps for weeks. A month later the gillie repeated his arduous and dangerous feat. They were still there, motionless, ready for flight as it seemed.

How often in thought I have seen that coronal of white swans above the dark face of that far, solitary tarn: in how many dreams I have listened to the rustle of unloosening wings, and seen seven white phantoms rise cloud-like, and like clouds at night drift swiftly into the dark; and heard, as mournful bells through the solitudes of sleep, the _honk-honk_ of the wild-swans traversing the obscure forgotten ways to the secret country beyond sleep and dreams and silence.

AT THE TURN OF THE YEAR

When one hears of ‘the dead months,’ of ‘dead December’ and ‘bleak January,’ the best corrective is to be found in the coppice or by the stream-side, by the field-thicket, in the glens, and even on the wide moors if the snow is not everywhere fallen, a coverlet so dense and wide that even the juniper has not a green spike to show, or the dauntless bunting a clean whin-branch to call from on the broomieknowe. Even the common sayings reveal a knowledge hidden from those to whom winter is ‘a dead season’ ... and it is a continual surprise to find how many people believe that from the fall of the leaf or the first sleet and snow, till the thrush doubles and trebles his note in the February wet-shine, that bird and insect and all green life have gone, that all Nature is dead or asleep. Thus, for example, ‘as keen in the hearing as a winter-plover’ must have been uttered, when first said, by a watcher of the multiform bird-life of our winter-fields and fallow lands, one who knew that the same drama of life and death is enacted in midwinter as in midspring or midsummer, a drama only less crowded, less complex and less obvious, but not less continual, not less vital for the actors. Who that has watched the pee-wits seeking worms on ploughed lands at midwinter, and seen them poise their delicate heads and listen for the phantom rustle of a worm in this clod or under yonder fallow, while the greedy but incapable seamews, inland come from frost bound coasts or on the front of prolonged gales, hear nothing of ‘the red people’ and trust only to bulk and fierce beak to snatch the prey from hungry plover-bills ... who that has seen this can fail to recognise the aptness of the saying, ‘as keen in the hearing as a winter-plover’? Who that has watched the ebb and flow of lark-life, resident and immigrant; the troubled winter-days of the field-travellers (as the familiar word ‘fieldfare’ means) and the wandering thrushes; the vagrant rooks, the barn-haunting hoodie; the yellow-hammer flocks and the tribes of the finch; the ample riverside life, where heron and snipe, mallard and moor-hen, wren and kingfisher, and even plover and the everywhere adaptable starling are to be found with ease by quick eyes and careful ears: who that has seen the sudden apparition of the bat, or the columnar dance of the ephemeridæ, or the flight of the winter-moth along the dishevelled hedgerows: or who that, besides the mistletoe and the ivy, the holly and the fir, the box and the late-flowering clematis, and many other of the green and flowering clans of the forest and the garden, has noted the midwinter-blooming shepherd’s purse, healing groundsel, bright chickweed, and red deadnettle, can think of nature as lifeless at this season? When amid the rains and storms of December an old gardener, instead of saying that spring was on the move, remarked to me that ‘’Twill be starling days soon,’ he gave voice to a truth of observation as impressive as it is beautiful. For often December has not lapsed before the mysterious breeding-change of the Vita Nuova, the New Life that spreads like a flowing wave so early in the coming year will begin to be obvious on the dun-hued lapwing, on the inland-wandering gull, and even on one or other of the small ‘clan of the bushes’ more dear and familiar to us. On none, however, is the change so marked as on the blithe starling, surely the bird of cheerfulness, for he will sing (does he ever cease that ever-varying call or flute or whistle of his?) when the lark cannot rise in the polar air, when the missel-thrush will not throw a challenge on the wet wind, and long before the most jubilant great-tit in the forest will ring his early tinkling bell under leafless boughs. For, even at Christmastide, though rarely perhaps quite so early, the dark bill will suddenly yellow, and a green and purple sheen will come over the russet plumage. Already Nature has looked northward again. And, when she looks, there is at once a first movement of the infinite sweet trouble of the New Life once more. The Creative Spirit is come again from the sun-ways of the South. ‘’Twill be starling days soon’--what is that but a homely way of saying that the old year has not lapsed before the new year has already stirred with the divine throes of rebirth. ‘The King is dead: Long live the King!’ is the human analogue. There is no interregnum. The cuckoo may have fled before the swallow, the landrail before the wild swan, but during the grey ebb of autumn ten thousand wings have rustled in the dawn as the migrants from oversea descend at last on our English and Scottish shores. A myriad host may have fled at the equinox, or lingered till the wet winds of the west and the freezing blasts of the north swept them from November; but on those east winds from Norway and the Baltic, from Jutland and Friesland, on those south winds leaping upward from the marshes of Picardy and the Breton heathlands and from all of the swarm-delivering South behind, on those south-west gales warm with the soft air of the isles of the west, and wet with the foam over lost Ys and sunken Lyonesse, what an incalculable host has come hitherward. Like great fans, the invisible pinions of the Bird-God, that Winged Spirit whom a Finnish legend images in continual suspense at the Cross ways of the Four Winds, beat this way and that: so that when already the lament of the wild-geese in storm-baffled flight from the South ulules in our norland dawns, clouds of larks are gathered like dust from the North-Sea lands, and are blown upon our shores, a multitude of thrush turn westward, the rook and the hoodie rise on the Danish wind, and yonder shadow drifting over the woods of Norway is none other than ten thousand fieldfares whose congregation will soon be spilt like rain upon our fields and pastures.

When is the turn of the year? We have certainly not to wait till the missel-thrush calls down the wind on the moist south-wester that comes in February. The changing seasons are indifferent to our calendars. Autumn may burn the lime and chestnut while Summer is still in her glory; Summer may steal back upon us through the September haze, or even after we have heard the dry rustle in the woods of October. We are familiar with the return of halcyon days when St. Luke’s Peace follows the wind Euroclydon, or when St. Martin’s summer gleams like a quiet sunset on the stormy brows of Winter. In mid-December the gnat may still be seen spinning her dance by the hedgerow, the warmth-loving bat may still wheel through silent afternoon dusks, the robin will pitch his blithe song from holly to holly, the hedgesparrow will chase the winter moth, the chaffinch will challenge the marauding tit. In January, when the snow-lids open and the blue is seen, a lark will spray his sudden music from far up in the pale azure, and as the long notes tinkle and the interwoven song falls down the blue invisible ways, we almost imagine that sky-glimpse to be the very face of spring.

Thus we have to wait for no day on which to note from the calendar that the New Year is come, or on which to exclaim that Winter is gone and Spring has arrived. A day may come, in February, perhaps, when, suddenly, one will realise, as after sleep one realises one is awake, that the hands of the South are in the woods, that the eyes of the South are looking into the white sleep of blossom and flower, that the breath of the South has awakened love, has stirred music in the hearts of all the clans of song. But if we had not ourselves been asleep we should not have waited thus long for the exquisite surprise. We should have known the divine conspiracy by which the North and South are lovers, and the West comrade to the East. The conspiracy of the eternal passion by which power desires power, and dominion lusteth after dominion: so that all the effort of the North is to touch the lips of the South, all the dream of the East is to reach the sunset-gardens of the West. We should have known, when out of December frost or January snow the redbreast thrilled a canticle of joy, or the russet moth sought his wingless love in windless flame-set twilights, that the Grey Lover already felt the breath from those ardent lips. We should have realised that when across the snow-silence the fieldfares no longer edged southward, that when on the upland-pasture the lapwing began his bridal change and in the bare orchard the starling began to glisten as though he had bathed at the edge of the rainbow, or to wonder, in some ice-set mirror, at his dun beak now grown yellow as the sheltered crocus he knows of under the garden-yew ... we should have realised that while this dark-browed barbarian from the North slept, the fair woman of the South had passed smiling by, and kissed him as she passed.

The breeding-change that may be seen even before Christmas, the January stir that becomes so obvious a week or so, or any day, after the New Year is come, here and now we are at the turn of the year. By mid-January, even, here and there, the song-thrush and the missel may have begun to build, and even the great-tit’s bell may tinkle in the coppice or wind-spared russet oak-glade. Already the snowdrop and the Christmas-rose, the green-white aconite and the pale winter-iris are become old acquaintances: many a primrose may have adventured in shy retreats: any day a wandering minstrel will spill a tinkle of music from among the first yellow spray of hazel catkins, the hedgesparrow may unloosen song under the early-opening woodbine-buds, the corn-bunting may crack his fairy-hammer or the wren try his new-year flute among the yellowing gorse: any day, at the sight of the first nomad daisies or the first gay vagrant dandelion, the yellow-hammer may become a lover and a poet. It is this unchanging ‘any-day’ element that redeems even the longest and dreariest midwinter; the sense of the ever-moving ichor in the eternal veins; the inward exultation at the ever-quickening and ever-slowing, but never-ceasing fans of life and death.

Yesterday, rain-fog; to-day, frost-mist. But how fascinating each. How vast and menacing the familiar oaks looked, leaning gigantic over dim lapsing hedgerows. How phantom-like and processional, the elms stealing into view one after the other; the birches disclosing tresses wet with dews from the secret woods they are gliding from to regain the secret lands beyond the misty river where I can hear the mallard call, like a sudden tocsin among the falling towers and silent avalanches of Cloudland.

It is desolate here, where I stand.

“_Cinnidh feanntag’s a ghàradh ’N uair thig faillinn ’san ròs_”

“_Nettles grow in the garden, While the roses decay._”

A long way off yet till the wood-thrush rings his falling chime from the April-Tree or French-Broom, as the laburnum is called in some parts of the Highlands. I know a wood where a great _Bealaidh Fhrangach_ sleeps, to awake months hence in sun-gold beauty. The wood-thrush will be its flute. Already I have to-day cut a slip from a garden-laburnum, for a friend who wants ‘a flute of the April-Tree’ (_feadan na Craobh Abraon_) ... for there is no timber better for the whistlewood of the bagpipe than this. And what more fit for the Strayed Pan, if perchance he follow the Phantom Call in the Hills of the North? But see ... the mist has gone like a haze from blue water. I hear starling-music over yonder in the _Talamh nan Ramh_, as Ossian calls the Country of the Woods. _The Flute of the April-Tree_, and snow at my feet! ‘The Flute of the April-Tree’: it has the yellow and white magic of spring in it.

THE SONS OF THE NORTH WIND

Down thro’ the Northlands Come the White Brothers, One clad in foam And one mailed in water-- Foam white as bear-felt, Water like coat of mail. _Snow is the Song of Me_, Singeth the one; _Silence the Breath of Me_, Whispers the other.

So sings a Swedish poet, a lineal descendant of one of the Saga-men whose songs the vikings carried to the ends of the world of that day. The song is called ‘The Sons of the North Wind,’ and the allusion is to an old ballad-saga common in one form or another throughout all the countries of both the Gall and the Gael ... from Finland to the last of the island-kingdoms between Ultima Thule and the Gaelic West. The White Brothers are familiar indeed, though with us they come oftener clothed with beauty than with terror, with strange and beautiful new life rather than with the solemnity and dread aspect of death.

Among the Gaelic hills we have a prose variant of ‘The Sons of the North Wind,’ which I suppose is still told to children by the fireglow on winter evenings, as, when a child, the present writer was told it and retold it by the fireglow on many a winter evening when the crackling fall of icicles from fir-sprays near the window could be heard, or the sudden shuffle of snow in the declivities of the steep glen hard-by. The story is generally told as a tale, but sometimes the teller chants it as a _duan_ or poem. For it is more a poem than a prose narrative on the lips of Gaelic speakers.

The North Wind had three sons. These Sons of the North Wind were called White-Feet and White-Wings and White-Hands. When White-Feet and White-Wings and White-Hands first came into our world from the invisible palaces, they were so beautiful that many mortals died from beholding them, while others dared not look, but fled affrighted into woods or obscure places. So when these three sons of the Great Chieftain saw that they were too radiant for the eyes of the earth-bound they receded beyond the gates of the sunset, and took counsel with the Allfather. When, through the gates of dawn, they came again they were no longer visible to men, nor, in all the long grey reaches of the years, has any since been seen of mortal eyes. How are they known, these Sons of the North Wind? They were known of old, they are known still, only by the white feet of one treading the waves of the sea; and by the white rustle and sheen of a myriad tiny plumes as the other unfolds great pinions above hills and valleys, woodlands and garths, and the homes of men; and by the white silence of dream that the third lays upon moving waters, and the windless boughs of trees, upon the reed by the silent loch, upon the grass by the silent tarn, upon the bracken by the unfalling hill-stream hanging like a scarf among the rock and mountain-ash. We know them no more by their ancient names or in their immortal body, but only thus by the radiance of their passing, and we call them the Polar Wind, and Snow, and Ice.

It is at this season, in all northern lands, that the miracle of the snow-change, the new beauty of the snow-world, is transcendent. Truly, it is miraculous, that change: that new world, what a revelation it is, showing us the familiar as we have never known it or have of it but a dreamlike remembrance, showing it to us at times as we can hardly conceive it. To the continual element of surprise much has to be attributed, in our country at least. In lands like Scandinavia and Russia the periodicity and uniformity of the snow-raiment of earth take much from this element of surprise. Hardly have the inhabitants grown used to the greenness of grass and sprouting grain and fluttering leaf, after the long months of a silent whiteness become dreadful as a shroud, when a grey pall is spun out of the east once more and out of the north comes the wind of death, and the leaf is gone away on the polar air, the grain is gathered or withered, the sere grass fades like wintry grey-green seas fading into continual foam.

Not so with us, who have those visitors, who can be so dread even here, for so short a time. The dark sword-thrust of the ice, compelling moving waters to silence and the blue rigour of steel, may reign for weeks in the Anglian fen-lands. Dense mantles of snow may cover the hills of the north for months, and the foreheads of Nevis and Schiehallion be white from the autumnal equinox till cuckoo-cry: for weeks the hill-fox and the mountain-hare may not drink at the frozen tarns, the moor-pastures may be lost to deer and sheep, and only the ptarmigan survive in the waste white places: for a week or two the boughs of the oak and chestnut, the plumes of the spruce and hemlock, the tresses of the larch and birch, may bend with the unmelting snowfall. But, at the worst, it is never long before a wind out of the south, or from the wet mouth of the west, breathes upon the fens, and the silence is become a faint stir, a whisper, a rustle; till the moveless steel is become a film, to be gathered some noon, like May-dew from the thickets, the autumn-frost from the whin and gorse. It is never long till the _meh-ing_ of the sheep is again a sweet lamentation upon the hill-pastures, or till the fox dusts the last snow from his root-roof in the wintry glen, or till the jay screams in the woodlands as from fir-plume and oak-bough slip or fall with heavy thump their unloosened burthens. True, the Sons of the North Wind, as in the Highland West and North we know so well and often to such bitter cost, may come to us with suddenness of tempest, raging in their mysterious wrath, and may long endure, trampling upon life, as, in the old legend, the gigantic phantom-men of the Northern Lights trample the souls of the dead condemned to Ifurin, the Gaelic hell. Every year there is sorrow upon some strath, grief in the glens, lamentation by hillside and moor. From the Ord of Sutherland to Land’s End there may be a tale of disaster. Snow-drift, snow-storm, snow-fog may paralyse communications and bring deep anxiety or irremediable grief to an incalculable number. Yet, we must admit that even our severest winter is but a fierce reminder of times long past for us, the times of the mail-coach, the rude cart, the mountain-pony, that the worst we ever have is tolerable beside the bleak wretchedness of Pomerania, the frightful cold of Esthonia, the death-in-life of Muscovy--to say nothing of lands still more wild and remote.