The Best Way Into The Woods

“I could recall even the casual locations of certain small rocks. I could recall the look of a hundred different kinds of daylight on all these places,… I had come to be aware of it as one is aware of one’s body; it was present to me whether I thought of it or not”

 

Wendell Berry

 

I was on my way into the forest again, this time from the north, where the trees at the edge of the woods had grown thick and dense. They formed a barrier that grasped at me and resisted every step and turn with a fallen branch, a tussock of heather or interlocked trunks of wood. But there was a way, though it was difficult to find at first, and it still tested me because I had to cross the river on foot, provided it was not running too deep. But I don’t see the river crossing as any trial by water. It’s a joyful thing. Crossing from one side to the other is an act of purification. There’s no way to avoid it by stiffly picking your way over, balancing on stones and doing everything you can to avoid the flow, distancing yourself from the reality of nature as you see some city dwelling hikers do. You have to go plunging forward happily, embracing the shock of cold as it pours into your boots. Kicking up the spume with your knees so it catches the sun, enjoying the rush of clear water and accepting that this is the boundary, the gateway through which you cross into the real world – the world as it was meant to be. I let the water wash away my troubles, and as I hit the far side the blood rushed around my body as the spirit surged. That’s why this way was the best.

 

It was early spring again, but one of those years when winter, having shown little of its magic through the dark months, decided it still had a job or two to finish. Heavy snow showers were falling every few hours, then melting back to reveal the earth again, leaving blobs of snow sticking to the heather.

 

On the other side of the river I clambered up through the trees on the bank and the world opened up to meet me. Great hacks of heather, sucks of bogland, pines standing singly and in huddles scattered around. Beyond it all was the great expanse of mountain swelling up thousands of feet and meeting the clouds, where they joined the sky. 

 

A winter sky is a thing I cannot begin to explain – how so many colours coexist side by side, so different yet smoothly and perfectly married together. How does iron grey join itself to royal blue with no difference between them? The elemental whiteness of the smoking mountains dissolving into the air, below a deepening darkness that blends into a ragged cloud that is as dark as slate. I stood and watched, transfixed by shifting colour. It seemed as if all the shades had become one even while each retained its unique purity and place in the spectrum. It was only my gaze that decided if it was one or the other.

 

Where would my feet take me tonight? Left, through the forest to the vast boglands with its huge view of the mountains, where the deer bob and dance through the trees? Or right? Follow the track into the dense trees, up and over the rise and finally to the bridge that would lead me back to the dark moor? A long way, unless I turned off early, crossed the fence and followed the stream down to the river and the place where the deer cross. Then it is only half as far, but all through the deep heather that would have me working hard, and take at least as long in the end.

I decided to go left, and moved off into the trees. The graceful arc of two great branches met over my head to form a doorway – and there was one between every two trees. Beyond the threshold were dark columns with vaulted canopies clustered around the edge of a great space, in which vagrant flakes of snow roiled in the air like a shoal of fish.

 

The forest floor was covered with needles, softening the sounds of my feet on snow. I realised that although the needles were everywhere, I’d never seen one fall. So when does it happen? Do they drop in pairs in autumn? The pines are evergreen, but they must presumably shed needles sometimes to get rid of waste. Is it when the wind snaps off a branch? There are plenty of branches on the ground with their needles on. I tuck this question away for another day. The woods will give me an answer when they are ready.

I saw the mountains through gaps in the canopy. The carved face of Braeriach far ahead of me, wind flying up the face of its huge scalloped corries, driving the snow back up into the air. Why is it that the mountain always looks so vast from down here among the trees? Sometimes the peak seems to loom huge above me, and at other times it becomes no more than a shadow on the horizon, but it does not happen with any apparent sense. The hill seems to recede as I approach, shrinking back to a rounded lump as I near it. Then after hours of walking away in the opposite direction I glance over my shoulder and see it rearing massive above the branches, its black mass like a swollen wave of stone with a white snow flecked head poised to crash down.

 

In front of Braeriach stood the conical point of Carn Elrig, which of all the Cairngorm peaks has become my favourite, despite its diminutive stature. Its perfect shape makes it a key landmark of the forest, and the datum against which I orient myself. It is only half the height of the great hills behind it, but that means it is usually free of cloud and visible. Its top was white with snow, turning dark on its flank where the forest reached up as if it had the summit under siege.

 

I kept Carn Elrig on my right as I walked through the trees. There was an ancient pine in this part of the wood that I wanted to visit, standing alone in the middle of a huge boggy field. This old granny pine is long dead, and the way to it is tricky through the sucking mire of peaty mud and sphagnum moss. Walking through a Scottish bog is an art form in itself, and it’s no useless skill. Put your foot in the wrong place and you could find yourself stuck to the hip, or worse, with scant chance of anyone coming to your assistance. Some pools of watery moss are so menacingly still you wonder how deep they might go. There are old tales of horses being lost in them. So, I place my feet carefully. There are rules, sort of. Ground which looks firm is not. Plants that look tenuous are probably ok. Wet mud is more often ok to walk on than you might think. Avoid anything with grey gravel on top – it’s a trap. You can move quickly across dry sphagnum, but stop and you will sink. If it looks good, it’s probably not.

With great care I made it to the firm island, home to the old tree. It was long dead, but scots pines have a habit of shedding their bark quickly after death, leaving the core to dry out and solidify. They can remain quite strong when this happens, seasoning for decades, and the wood becomes bleached by the sun so that all that is left is a grey skeleton, creaking slightly from time to time. I settled down among stalks of heather, blobs of snow and young green saplings that were claiming their own places. With the tree at my back, I drew up my knees and watched the evening happen. The sky darkened earlier than it should, and I knew that more snow was on the way. The clouds let down grey veils as they approached. I think to myself that it’s as if they’re trying to touch the ground. It was not long before the air was filled with flying snow again. Carn Elrig faded into the sky and the trees turned black. I wrapped up warm and watched, thinking.

 

There’s so much here, in the blank parts of the map – the bits that people forget about. I’m not quite sure why it is that I always seem to have these woods to myself, though I do enjoy it. The desire to be surrounded by nature is a desire of spirit, not of mind. I do not ask why I go to the wild places. I only know I must in order to be whole, and this is enough of an explanation. Go where the heart leads, and the head will follow.

 

A bit of snow whipped into my face and I shuffled further down, taking shelter in my hood. My vision was cut down to a slice of sky over the distant Feshie hills – no more than a darker shade of grey against the sky. Then a cloud snagged against the hills and peeled back from the mass, letting a shaft of light pour through the gap onto the forest below.

I was too far away to make use of the light. Photography was ostensibly the reason for my visit to the woods this evening, for it’s one of the ways which I’ve come to appreciate the natural world and why I seek to know the forest better. It’s given me joy in the pursuit of the most remarkable moments of light, and the most interesting parts of the natural stories which are always going on in the world. It’s why I was sitting there in the snow at sunset with soggy feet, hoping for a chance at a good photo of the forest. Although, that said, passion for the landscape always came first, and even if I couldn’t take photos then I’d still come here for these moments.

 

I could see the light spilling through the woods and across the dark moor, miles away. The light from the sun is liquid gold flooding through the gathering dark, striking into the woods and picking out its layers again from the darkening wall of wood. And I can see that if I were sitting over there – a few miles away on the hillside of Carn Elrig – I would be in the perfect place to photograph the moment. I can see it in my heart – the gilded edges of everything. The way the snow wraps its fingers behind the tree trunks and the way the pine needles glow in the backlight. The layers of the forest glowing underneath the iron sky. I know the very tree that I would have placed in the foreground, in perfect silhouette with the hills of Glen Eanich beyond. What a sight it would have been to see, what a photo I could have made. Yet I have no regrets. I have seen enough to know, and it is enough that both I and the forest understand that the remarkable thing is happening, whether I am physically in it or not. I am there in my heart and in my mind. I can put myself in that place and that moment even now, because it has come to be a part of me.

 

After a few minutes the clouds closed up the chink in their armour. The light would not reach me here tonight, but there were still marvels to be seen. I crossed back through the bog and turned toward the mountains, following the winding animal tracks that turn and twist their way through the brown heather stalks.

This is one of the wildest parts of the wood. It wasn’t always so. I know that just over there, where I left the track, there was once a croft, but the land has taken it all back. There is no more than the faintest of outlines on the ground that marks the place where the moss and grass have grown over all that remains of the stone walls of the house. There is no mark of field or in-bye still to be seen, as far as I can tell. There is the deep brown heather all around, rugged and pitted. Dead wood strewn all over the place, with delicate green lichens thriving in the rotting wood.

The snow came on hard, turning the spring evening gradually into a winter night. Time can go backwards sometimes, after all. The evening calls of songbirds were silenced. The air turned thick and grey with snow, and the front of my jacket became spotted with white as it clung to me. It blew into my eyes, forced my sight downward to the ground. I pushed deeper into the forest, into places I had never been before. I walked from clearing to clearing, discovering twisted crone trees who struck contorted ballerina poses, catching snow on their branches. The silence and the coldness were increasing, but the sounds of the wood had not been smothered. They had simply been calmed.

I came across a small burn that cut through the woods in a ditch. All the trails joined together at a narrow crossing point, and the ground was thick with the prints of deer who must have been here just minutes ago, for the delicate quotation marks of hoofs were pushed into the freshly fallen snow. I looked around, but saw nothing but trees. They were always ten steps ahead of me. However, my eyes did fall on the remains of pinecones sticking out of the snow, and my fingers gently picked one up to lay it in my palm. There was no mistaking the way that the scales had been ripped off, leaving a strangely naked central stem – the telltale mark of a red squirrel. And there, next to where I pulled the pinecone from the snow, was another. This one was different – the scales prised open and chewed up but still attached, like little box lids that had been wrenched past the hinge. That was surely the mark of the scottish crossbill; the only bird that lives exclusively in Scotland, whose pincer-like bill is slightly misaligned, allowing the bird to prise open the stiff scales of pinecones to get at the seeds within.

I felt absolute delight to find the signs of so much life around me, signs of the creatures that truly called the woods home. I was no more than a visitor – one whose knowing would never be complete. But somewhere close by a squirrel was no doubt curled up under its own tail, swaying in the branches while the snow softly fell over its drey; the deer were lying in the shelter of dense juniper, their backs turning white with drifting snow; the crossbills were hunkered in their nest, keeping the chicks warm and dry under a blanket of warm snow.

The sun vanished at last behind both horizon and cloud, while the snow gradually ran out and ceased. I started to retrace my steps, untying the thread of my footsteps from the tangle of trees and heathers. As I returned to the old dead tree on its boggy island my eyes were down, my thoughts concentrated on finding sure footing when my attention was seized by a huge brown shadow upon the tree’s upper branches. As soon as I became aware of it, it fell from the branch, and with a tremendous beating of wings took to the air above. With an unmistakable, and surprisingly gentle call of cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep… the Osprey rose into the sky, where it was joined by a second bird, circling in the deepening blue before flying off toward the north. Quietly, I pressed on, following them the way I had come, back towards the north – the best way into the woods.