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The Dun Cow Rib. John Lister-Kaye
Читать онлайн.Название The Dun Cow Rib
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781786891464
Автор произведения John Lister-Kaye
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
Sir John Lister-Kaye is one of Britain's best-known naturalists and conservationists. He is the author of ten books on wildlife and the environment and has lectured all over the world. He has served prominently in the RSPB, the Nature Conservancy Council, Scottish Natural Heritage and the Scottish Wildlife Trust. In 2002 he was awarded an OBE for services to nature conservation. In 2016 he was awarded the Royal Scottish Geographical Society's Geddes Medal for services to the environment. He lives with his wife and family among the mountains of the Scottish Highlands, where he runs the world famous Aigas Field Centre. His book Gods of the Morning won the inaugural Richard Jefferies Prize.
Also by John Lister-Kaye
The White Island (1972)
The Seeing Eye (1979)
Seal Cull (1979)
Ill Fares the Land (1994)
One for Sorrow (1994)
Song of the Rolling Earth (2003)
Nature’s Child (2004)
At the Water’s Edge (2010)
Gods of the Morning (2015)
Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2017 by Canongate Books
Copyright © John Lister-Kaye, 2017
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Extract from The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, edited by Ralph W. Franklin, Cambridge, Mass. Reprinted by permission of The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Excerpts from The Ring of Bright Water trilogy (UK, Viking, 2000) reprinted by permission of The Marsh Agency Ltd on behalf of Gavin Maxwell.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 147 1
eISBN 978 1 78689 146 4
Typeset in Dante MT by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire
For my mother
τροϕεῖα
‘A boy’s will is the wind’s will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.’
My Lost Youth, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82)
‘If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain.’
Part One: Life, VI, Emily Dickinson (1830–86)
Contents
Foreword: The Deep Heart’s Core
13. Summer and the Arabian Nights
17. ‘Upon thy belly shalt thou go’
18. Dark shadows, bright horizons
22. ‘Future plans for this island’
Foreword
The Deep Heart’s Core
Years ago I built a hut overlooking a pond – a small loch or ‘lochan’ in Highland parlance – where, like Thoreau at Walden, I go to write or just bare myself to the effervescent mysteries of nature and life. It’s called the Illicit Still, named by my children because for years I kept a bottle of whisky locked away from their prying teenage eyes. It has a lumberjack’s oil drum stove, some rough and ready bunks, an old sofa, a table and chairs – just about everything serious contemplation requires. It has become a treasured centre of separateness, a place to muse, an escape.
Sheets of wind and light cruising the surface of the loch are there to distract me, and flights of mallard come streaming past to land squabbling in the marsh. On looping wings a heron often shoulders in to stalk leggily through the shallows, or house martins and swallows skim through like fighter jets, hawking flies across the cloud-brimming surface.
Occasionally