Bring Back the Wolf - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 103

Gamekeeping is one of the greatest threats to this source of employ-
ment. Already one of the reintroduced sea eagles has been killed,
alongside many other birds of prey, by poisoned meat laid out, most
probably by a gamekeeper. 30 By damaging the potential for wildlife
tourism in Scotland, the deer and grouse industries could be destroy-
ing more employment than they generate. This is not to dismiss the
gamekeepers' right and need to work. But it does suggest that more
people could make a living if the land were put to another use. The
skills and local knowledge of the gamekeepers would be in high
demand as wildlife-watching became a more important industry.
The wind filled my mouth and sealed my ears. It roared inside my
head and numbed my hands. I watched a new cloud mass rolling
towards us, dark as fate. We set off over the moor on the far side of
the hill. But for porcupine tufts of unpalatable grass, the earth had
been shaved: the plants, like those on some of the sheep pastures of
Wales, were just half an inch high. Water welled up around my boots
with every step. We came down to a gash in the soggy moor, torn from
the land by a small dark stream. It had exposed the stumps and trunks
of great pines, buried in the peat but now eroding out of the hillside.
'They haven't been dated yet, but they're close to the surface of the
moor, so they're likely to be recent. There would probably have been
trees alive here 150 years ago. You can go to almost any glen in the
Highlands and you will find the stumps of the vanished forest. It's a
tree graveyard.'
Heading down the hill by another route, we were hit by a storm of
rain and hail. Driven by the wind, it was so hard and cold that I could
feel the inner contours of my skull, sounded out by the sonar probing
of ice and water.
We found ourselves among denser heath. In the midst of the storm,
Alan stopped to show me hard-bitten birch twigs emerging from the
heather. The lichen that encrusted them testified that they were much
older than their size suggested. The path down the brae took us into
another corner of the remnant forest, where a few more crabbed
pines clung to the same ridge. The squall passed suddenly and the
sun slashed through the sky, almost violent, its intensity somehow
heightened by the coldness of my skin, as if, frozen hard, I could no