Nature's Child

Nature's Child is a beautifully written study of the perils and pleasures of an upbringing so close to wild nature.

It is also John's meditation on fatherhood, and the delights of bestowing experiences on his daughter during those "literally wonder-full years of childhood", which usher back for him memories of his own childhood; of the elation of simple discovery.

As he puts it:

"Life is a collection of fragments of time charged with deeply personal sensation and meaning ".

What is love if not time given in joy and delight?"

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we have started
And know the place for the first time.

Little Gidding, T.S ELIOT

Extracts from the book

The Eyes of a Child, P7 - P8

As I write, Hermione's twelfth year is drawing to a close. The years of innocence are waning, slipping through our fingers like fine sand, and her attention is soon to be drawn away by the hurly-burly of modern teenage life, shrill and insistent. But we have had the good fortune to live through a period of years, those from six (give me a child that can walk and talk), when a child's mind is wide open and as absorbent as a sponge, until now (and hopefully for a little longer), when other influences will inevitably barge in and take over.

Six or seven blessed years of exploration and discovery, fat and full, it so happens of the natural world, because that is what surrounds her here and preoccupies her home life. It's her lot that her family home is a field studies centre among the mountains and forests of the Highlands, that her father is a naturalist who works with the kites, osprey, eagles, otters and pine martens of a remote and beautiful glen and that my work periodically takes me to wild and exciting places around the world; hers, too, that I have often been able to take her with me – although it has sometimes seemed to me to be the other way around.

They have been years of recollection, literally the re-collection of those wonders and bright images that shaped me into who I am and how I think. Without an inkling of the effect she was having, she has forced me to remake many of the discoveries of my youth, visiting them again after an absence of more than forty-five years, with that vivid and untrammelled freshness that is the hallmark of a child"s perception.

Hermione has brought me to remember things I didn't know I had forgotten, caused me to smile suddenly with déjà vu, and to pick up and re-examine familiar things, a shell or a crab carapace on a beach, a fir cone or a tadpole, things I have scarcely bothered to think about since I was her age. I have stood beside her holding my peace as I watched stark nature ride the roller-coaster of her formative emotions – through ecstasy to agony and back again – a process that I first experienced so long ago.

Beauty and the beholder

P 26
She has caught them in the act or raw, amphibian sex – called amplexus – the smaller male riding the female, clasping her round the waste with his bowed forearms, locking into position so that he can release his cloacal sperm on to her gelatinous bootlace of black dotted spawn.

P 27
For over an hour she has gathered up hundreds of coitally embracing amphibians. She has achieved a crawling, croaking, eight-foot boatload of fecundity. Three hundred toads are sloshing around her as she climbs in, easing her feet between them so that she can take up the oars. Then she sculls back across the loch to show me her squirming, spawn-strewn consommé of unexpurgated sex.

She is beaming all over her face. Are you looking for me?

P137 – P141
On the second night we had recovered sufficiently from our travels to want to stay up late. The same lark resumed its litany and we sat with our whiskies and beers recounting the excitements of the day. Ewan tossed more acacia branches across the fire. The flames responded greedily; the wood crackled and sparks plumed and flared high into the air. Smoke stung our eyes. Lions roared in the distance; instinctively we stared out into the darkness. The night air seemed to heave with foreboding, each muted roar shutting us up in mid-sentence and causing a frisson of electricity to arc backwards and forwards between flickering faces.

The voice of the male lion is both claiming and demanding. "Whose land is this? Whose land is this? Mine! Mine! Mine!" is how old hunters recount it. You are in no doubt that it's you who is being challenged along with everything else in earshot. To us strangers from another world it is both awesomely arresting and profoundly reassuring to know that lions are out there claiming territory and killing game, as they always have done – biological imperatives which, in Scotland, we have reserved exclusively for ourselves ever since we exterminated the wolf and the lynx. It is good to be chastened in an unfamiliar environment, to shake out a few convictions, sweat a little at the neck, to feel the shiver running down your spine.

Slowly we drift back into talk. Finding adult badinage tedious, Hermione takes off with her torch to visit the kitchen camp and watch the Tswana boys washing their pots. Nick recounts yarns of old colonial lion hunters and narrow escapes, and modern tales of lions and hyenas coming into camps and dragging hapless safari guests from their beds. Lucy looks apprehensive. Longer than we realise has slipped by. She calls out to Hermione. No answer. I stand up and call again, louder. Still no answer. Nick, Hamish and Warwick put down their beers and rise from their chairs, rubbing smoke and mosquito repellent from their eyes. I call out for a third time "We'll take a look" Nick says.

"Missy OK," a voice speaks from the darkness. A torch flickers. Lot approaches the fire; it lights up his smiling face like a pumpkin lantern.

"Where is she?" I ask, in a voice only slightly edged.

"Missy OK," he repeats. "See?" I follow him the twenty yards or so to the kitchen camp where, hidden by the Land Rovers, he and the Tswana boys have a fire of their own. A Tilley lamp hisses energetically from a low branch. There she is, immortal and invulnerable, on her hands and knees busily catching moths as they are sucked irresistibly into the bright yellow light. "Are you looking for me?" she asks, scarcely glancing up.   

Hitting the hot glass shade the moths fall, dazed and singed, on to the bare earth beneath. On the ground an array of upturned wine glasses encircle the lamp. Beneath each one is a captive moth, compound eyes blazing with a demonic glare. Proudly she shows me. Some have pale silver wings with huge unblinking mock-eyes of electric blue; there are big cinnamon moths with crenellated wing edges and palm-branched antennae, furry, and quivering; others have small, sleek wings of burned cork and purple, silvered with moon dust.

Then she takes me by the hand to see her piece de resistance. In a tin billycan lent to her by the Tswana boys, she has imprisoned a small collection of the most fearsome-looking scorpions I have ever seen.

P140
The creatures are crawling atrocities. I find myself thanking God they can't fly. "How did you catch them?" I ask incredulously.

"It's easy." She smiles up at me as though we are talking about catching newts at home. "I dazzle them with my torch, pop a glass over them and that's that! I slide the cover of my notebook underneath. Then I turn them upside down. They can't cope with the glass."

"You do know how nasty their sting is, don't you?" I try to sound severe.

"Oh yes," she says dismissively, "but they're quite sweet really.'

Dawn & Dusk

P 40
I knew very well that those happy days could not last. They had met wild jackdaws, flown the free wind and tumbled in a flock among the tossing treetops.

P 41
It weighed mightily. With the joy gone from her own blue eyes she shouldered the reality. She knew it was best for her beloved charges, but she could not hide that she wanted to go with them. She wanted to live their world just as they had lived hers – as I had, all those years before – to extend the bond, hold them close, locked with her in spirit so that she could tumble with them down corridors of sunshot sky.

To have been able to magic them down from the heights at will, even for a few brief weeks, calling into the wind and the wind answering her back with its paired shadows of gleaming black delight, had lifted her to the very brink of ecstasy. And when they flew it was as though she was scrawling her own signature across the sky. This was the gifts of gods; she was Mowgli and Dr Dolittle; she possessed the magic of Merlin and Gandalf, all her own. To child and adult alike it was unbridled joy. Little wonder she looked so forlorn when, one day not long afterwards, they both lifted from her arm and swept away.

Little Brown

Price: £10.00

Some quotes from Nature's Child . . .
 
"With a shake and a rattle, our scruffy chicks were dressed in fine raiment of black and grey, each silken head a dome of feathers masking the quick mind beneath."

"When they flew it was as though she was scrawling her own signature across the sky."

"My spirit longed for the rhythmic whoop of its wings and its wild bugling summoning the beauty of the morning."

'I saw her lift him out and cup his insubstantial frame in her hands, raising his beak to her lips as is to breathe her own life into his failing breast."

"Emerging like some terrible prehistoric beast, lumpy dripping, glistening, shreds of sphagnum trailing from his antlers."

"Two proud heads clashing together with all the combined force of our largest land mammal"s wild and unchecked rage."

"Bound for the remote and uninhabited, straggling archipelago of the Treshnish Isles."

"She lay on her tummy, her face over the gunnel, only a few feet from their wide eyes and inquisitive faces."

"In no time at all she has found her first fossil encrusted with fool's gold, which awards it a special lustre."

"They came together to breed in countless jostling and clattering hordes, where they succumbed, littering the ocean floor with their beautiful shells."

"Shimmering wings swept back and forth past our faces, over our heads."

"I am far too long wedded to the squat-faced, russet-masked acrobats that skim in and out of the stables every summer."

"These shells belonged to somebody else - that much was clear."

"Files of springbok strolled through the heat shimmer."

"Among the most menacing creatures God ever created."

"Uttering wild, fluting calls, cranes glide serenely to land."

"The polar bear's great head high in the air, her nose sampling the wind like a gun dog."

"She pored over the work, punctuating her text with intricate diagrams of the excitements she had witnessed."

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