Just Passing Through

A tale of the unexpected unfolds at dawn in a Stirlingshire glen as a rare, shy creature slips out of the shadows

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BALQUHIDDER GLEN in Highland Stirling is a land I hold dear. Its landscape blends mountains and hills with woods both native and the other kind, with two lochs fed by an array of mountain burns, and the coils and far-flung floodplain of the River Balvaig. It has been a benevolent land for my nature-writing life.

I have watched golden eagles here more often than anywhere else with occasional walk-on parts for sea eagles, and mountaineering badgers and pine martens and red squirrels and foxes and mountain hares and otters and deer and wintering whooper swans and so many birds ...and once, 30 years ago now, this happened.

An early June early morning after a night watching badgers and I was walking quietly down a rocky, wooded hillside. Experience, nothing else, taught me to treat the walk-out with as much care and anticipation as the walk-in; nature is as much of a presence in the dawn as the dusk.

Sacred stillness hovered among the oaks and birches, aspens and alders. Colour bled into the sky. Sometimes the years of patience in nature's company alert you to the fact you are being watched - say a snatch of scent, a footprint in a small square of mud, a glimpsed shadow, that kind of thing - but occasionally you just get unaccountably lucky.

This was the latter. A bootlace came loose. I slipped off my pack, the easier to bend and tie the lace, realising then that it was broken. That has never happened to me before or since, but fixing a temporary repair was why I happened to be sitting on the ground and silently preoccupied with my fingers and the lace, but otherwise still.

Job done, I sat back, and some kind of instinct twitched.

What the...?