The Nature of Autumn by Jim Crumley

Author:Jim Crumley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: jim crumley;the nature of autumn;saraband
Publisher: Saraband
Published: 2016-08-25T20:21:24+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Swan Songs

Swan song – it is an odd expression, generally credited to Shakespeare: “I will play the song and die in music”, said Emilio in Othello. But Shakespeare was no one’s idea of a naturalist, and the most likely explanation of that line is that he was familiar with an already established scrap of folklore and simply gave it a voice. Yet the idea endures and has gone into the language: a swan song is a final endeavour. But there is no biological evidence to support the idea that a swan’s dying gesture is a song. On the other had, the song of swans is my idea of autumn’s soundtrack, for the arrival of the whooper swans on migration from Iceland or Scandinavia is a brassy blast of an ancient heraldry from the edge of the Arctic Circle that puts chills of anticipation between my shoulder blades. If I am honest, no other bird has quite the hold on me that the whooper swan does. The whole tribe of swans, from ubiquitous mutes to Australian blacks and North American trumpeters, has captivated me for many years, but something in the sound and the sight of a skein of whoopers in flight adds a presence, an Arctic edge, to a Scottish autumn that somehow embodies my fascination for the northern places of the earth. There is a Celtic or Norse (or both!) legend that the souls of princes fly on after death in the form of whooper swans. Flying from Iceland to Scotland every autumn, and back again every spring, is my idea of what immortality might look like.

The autumn of 1989 was an extraordinary one for people of my persuasion, extraordinary for an event that is as indelible in my mind today as it was on the day I drove 200 miles to witness it. I left Stirling at dawn on the long haul up the A9 to the edge of the Cairngorms. I noticed that the Insh Marshes, one of my favourite places on Earth and one of the most reliable of autumn and winter whooper swan haunts, was empty. That fitted with what I had heard. The mountains were snow and gold. The roads were all but empty. October Tuesdays are quiet in the eastern Highlands. Just past Aviemore I counted my 20th buzzard of the journey. I paused for coffee and the view of new snow on the mountains around the Lairig Ghru, and I wished briefly that I was going there, but my destination was two hours further north. I skirted Inverness, crossed the Kessock Bridge, and drove on, a willing slave, for the moment, to the A9. Halfway between the Cromarty Firth and the Dornoch Firth I finally turned off into a quiet landscape of low hills and woods and hard-won farms. Almost at once a male hen harrier lifted slow and gull-coloured from a roadside fence, not from a post but from the top wire of the fence itself, which looked precarious to my non-harrier eyes, but I imagine it knew what it was doing when it preferred wire to post.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.