A Work of Hope - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 149

way up; some possessed multiple trunks; one or two grew almost hori-
zontally. Their trunks were elephant grey, their branches dragon-scaled
in sunset pink, crowned with a haze of shrubby needles.
'I call it the geriatric forest. It's like an old people's home. The deer
come down here in the winter. As soon as the seedlings reach the
height of the heather, they get eaten.
'The problem is not deer. It's the stalking industry, which ensures
that the deer are overpopulated. The Forestry Commission has sport-
ing tenants. They don't live here, they just come to shoot the deer, but
they hamstring us. Their attitudes are very traditional. One of them,
an Englishman, threatened to burn my house down.
'Red deer in Scotland are about two-thirds of the size of those in
continental Europe, and of those preserved in peat bogs here. They
are woodland creatures. On open ground they have less to eat. The
deer in the Highlands are the runts of the glen. When settlers in North
America saw the red deer there, they were so much bigger than the
British specimens that they assumed they were a different species and
called them elk. It's been a source of confusion ever since.' (It now
appears that, though very closely related, they are a different species:
the North American red deer (or elk) was reclassified in 2004 as Cer-
vus canadensis . Another possible reason for the reduction in size is
that hunters tend to select and kill the biggest stags.)
I later read that The Monarch of the Glen , painted by Sir Edwin
Landseer, who also sculpted the recrudescent lions in Trafalgar Square,
was set in Glen Affric. (The location is hotly disputed, however. Other
accounts suggest that it was painted in Glenfeshie, Glen Orchy or Glen
Quoich.) Completed in 1851, the painting became the emblem of the
ersatz culture, the Balmorality, created in the newly cleared Highlands
by Victoria and Albert at Balmoral Castle and by the aristocrats who
mimicked them. This mythologized re-enactment of the lives of the van-
ished Highland peoples - all tartans and claymores - was the narrative
with which those who had expropriated the land and expelled its inhab-
itants justified and eulogized the new dispensation. It was the Scottish
equivalent of Marie-Antoinette's Hameau de la Reine, at Versailles.
The painting depicts a magnificent stag, overfed and splendidly
pointed, eyes raised imperiously to the hills: both the idealized quarry