In the latest work from Jim Crumley, dubbed “the pre-eminent Scottish nature writer”, Seasons of Storm and Wonder considers the natural life of the Scottish Highlands, bearing witness to the toll climate change is already taking on our wildlife, biodiversity and more. Read an extract from the beginning of the book below. 

Seasons of Storm and Wonder
By Jim Crumley
Published by Saraband Books 

I was born in midsummer, but I am a child of autumn. One September day in the fourth or fifth autumn of my life there occurred the event that provided my earliest memory, and – it is not too extravagant a claim – set my life on a path that it follows still. I was standing in the garden of my parents’ prefab in what was then the last street in town on the western edge of Dundee. An undulating wave of farmland that sprawled southwards towards Dundee from the Sidlaw Hills was turned aside when it washed up against the far side of the road from the prefab, whence it slithered away south-west on a steepening downhill course until it was finally stopped in its tracks by the two-miles-wide, sun-silvered girth of the Firth of Tay at Invergowrie Bay. Then as now, the bay was an autumn-and-winter roost for migrating pink-footed geese from Iceland; then as now, one of their routes to and from the feeding grounds amid the fields of Angus lay directly over the prefab roof. 

I can remember what I was wearing: a grey coat with a dark blue collar and buttons and a dark blue cap. So we were probably going out somewhere. 

Why am I so sure it was September and not any other month of autumn or winter or early spring? Because it was the first time, and because for the rest of that autumn and winter and early spring, and ever since, the sound of geese over the house – any house – has sent me running to the window or the garden. So was established my first and most enduring ritual of obeisance in thrall to nature’s cause. And so I am as sure as I can be that the very first time was also the first flight of geese over the house after their return from Iceland that September; that September when I looked up at the sound of wild geese overhead and – also for the first time – made sense of the orderly vee-shapes of their flight as they rose above the slope of the fields, the slope of our street, up into the morning sunshine; vee-shapes that evolved subtly into new vee-shapes, wider or longer and narrower, or splintered into smaller vee-shapes or miraculously reassembled their casual choreography into one huge vee-shape the whole width of childhood’s sky. 

But then there were other voices behind me and I turned towards them to discover that all the way back down the sky towards the river and as far as I could see, there were more and more and more geese, and they kept on coming and coming and coming. The sound of them grew and grew and grew and became tidal, waves of birds like a sea, but a sea where the sky should be, and some geese came so low overhead that their wingbeats were as a rhythmic undertow to their waves of voices, and that too was like the sea. 

When they had gone, when the last of them had arrowed away north-east and left the dying embers of the their voices trailing behind them on the air, a wavering diminuendo that fell into an eerie quiet, I felt the first tug of a life-force that I now know to be the pull of the northern places of the earth. And in that silence I stepped beyond the reach of my first few summers and I became a child of autumn.  

And ever since, every overhead skein of wild geese – every one – harks me back to that old September, and I effortlessly reinhabit the body and mindset of that moment of childhood wonder. Nothing else, nothing at all, has that effect. I had a blessed childhood, the legacy of which is replete with good memories, but not one of them can still reach so deep within me as the first of all of them, and now, its potency only strengthens. 

It would have been about thirty years ago that I first became aware of the Angus poet Violet Jacob, and in particular of her poem, The Wild Geese. It acquired a wider audience through the singing of folksinger Jim Reid, who set it to music, retitled it Norlan’ Wind, and included it on an album called I Saw the Wild Geese Flee. I used to do a bit of folk singing and I thought that if ever a song was made for someone like me to sing it was that one, but I had trouble with it from the start. My voice would crack by the time I was in the third verse, and the lyrics of the last verse would prick my eyes from the inside. The last time I sang it was the time I couldn’t finish it. 

Years later, I heard the godfather of Scottish folk singing, Archie Fisher, talking about a song he often sang called The Wounded Whale, and how he had to teach himself to sing it “on automatic pilot”, otherwise it got the better of him, but I never learned that trick. Even copying out the words now with Violet Jacob’s own idiosyncratic spelling, I took a deep breath before the start of the last verse, which is the point where the North Wind turns the tables on the Poet in their two-way conversation: 

The Wild Geese 

“Oh tell me what was on your road, ye roarin’ norlan’ Wind,
As ye cam’ blawin’ frae the land that’s niver frae my mind?
My feet they traivel England, but I’m deein’ for the north.”
“My man, I heard the siller tides rin up the Firth o’ Forth.” 

“Aye, Wind, I ken them weel eneuch, and fine they fa’ and rise,
And fain I’d feel the creepin’ mist on yonder shore that lies,
But tell me, as ye passed them by, what saw ye on the way?”
“My man, I rocked the rovin’ gulls that sail abune the Tay.” 

“But saw ye naethin’, leein’ Wind, afore ye cam’ to Fife?
There’s muckle lyin’ ’yont the Tay that’s dear to me nor life.”
“My man, I swept the Angus braes ye hae’na trod for years.”
“O Wind, forgi’e a hameless loon that canna see for tears!” 

“And far abune the Angus straths, I saw the wild geese flee,
A lang, lang skein o’ beatin’ wings wi’ their heids towards the sea,
And aye their cryin’ voices trailed ahint them on the air –”
“O Wind, hae maircy, hud yer whisht, for I daurna listen mair!” 

Seasons of Storm and Wonder  by Jim Crumley is published by Saraband Books, priced £25.