The Great Wood by Jim Crumley

Author:Jim Crumley
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780857900906
Publisher: Birlinn
Published: 2011-10-04T04:00:00+00:00

after fox bark.

* See Among Mountains (Mainstream, 1993)

* Feadan – the chanter of the Highland bagpipes. I was unclear if his use of the word in the original meant literally the playing of a chanter, or if he was using the word to indicate nature’s music on such a morning, so being a poet I chose the latter, because being a poet he did too!

CHAPTER SIX

Strath Fillan

The track looks old and well made. It is stony, but with a strip of grass up the centre and along each edge. Think carts, towed by horses, think clansmen in sandalled feet. Oh, go on then, think stalkers’ Land Rovers if you must. I like how the track rises and falls and leans in and out over the small contours, how it has been hand-made to fit the land. It skirts a primitive tract of bog and glacial moraines. The River Fillan is what remains of the glacier in question; Strath Fillan is its spoor, defines the breadth of its passage.

A small and furtive watersheet lies amid the glacier’s heaped footprints. It is called Lochan nan Arm. If you happen not to be blinking and if you happen to be looking at the precise moment in precisely the right direction, you might catch a glint of gunmetal grey or (much less likely in this rainiest of airts) of reflected sky blue, and puzzle over what might lie there. In which case you would not be the first, for its name means the Lochan of the Weapon and it is the last resting place of a sword belonging to Robert the Bruce who came off second best in a skirmish here and ditched the sword to facilitate a hasty retreat. Or so they say, dismissive of the obvious riposte that such a fighting king throwing away his sword sounds a touch unlikely, a touch like surrender, and the Bruce did not get where he is today with a taste for surrender in the face of adversity. Anyway it was all a few years before he became the master strategist who turned a little-known lowland stream called the Bannock Burn into a torrent at the heart of the psyche of every Scot from that day to this, and finally united his fractious kingdom.

It may be that he always intended coming back to retrieve the sword, but there is no evidence he ever did. On the other hand, there is no evidence he ever threw it in there in the first place, not that that has stopped many a treasure hunter from dredging the place from time to time. In any case, I imagine that the Bruce had more than one sword, being king and all that. And anyway, he was more of a battleaxe man, wasn’t he?

The track has been jacked up abruptly to cross the railway, beyond which it dips again then curves, then breasts a rise. You then stop dead at the sudden, deep green blessing of an old pinewood, one more souvenir of the march of time since that long lost day when Strath Fillan’s glacier gave up the ghost.

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