Peter Ross: Searching for the Monarchs of the Glen

This is what I have come to see: the red deer of the Highlands which, as October draws to a close, are coming to the end of their annual rut, one of nature’s greatest spectacles. At this time of year, the villagers of Laggan and Newtonmore are usedto hearing the bellow of the stags challenging sexual rivals; on mild nights, some locals leave a window open, the better to hear the sound. It is part of the texture of the dying year, comforting in its familiarity. As the cuckoo is to spring so the roar of the stag is to autumn in this part of Scotland.

It is beginning to get light as I arrive at Creag Meagaidh National Nature Reserve, almost 4,000 hectares of mountain, wood and moor, owned by Scottish Natural Heritage. There are an estimated half a million red deer in Scotland, distributed across the country from Galloway to Sutherland. Creag Meagaidh is home to between 100 and 600 depending on the time of year and the weather. Right now there are thought to be between 300 and 400 there.

Ross Lavin is the man taking me to see the deer. Tall and slender with a hawkish profile, he is a professional stalker. Lavin is 30 and has been stalking for 20 years, learning the ways of these animals, and how to hunt them, from his father, a forest ranger. He first shot a deer – a roe buck – when he was 11, he thinks, or maybe a little older. There are roughly 250 deer culled on Creag Meagaidh each year. The population is kept down so that the deer cannot overwhelm the landscape, destroying the new trees and trampling the bogland, and also because, otherwise, many of the weakest would starve to death over winter.

Shot deer are bled and gralloched – gutted – right there on the hillside, their innards providing a rich steaming feast for eagles. The meat is sold to a game dealer for around £2 a kilo, a price approaching a 20-year high, and these are animals which can weigh between 50-80 kilos by the time they are hanging up in the larder. Over a year, venison sales can raise several thousand pounds for the reserve. On estates which offer commercial shooting, a hunter might expect to pay £350 for a stag, a £50 tip to the stalker, and £10 for every point on the antlers if he – let’s just assume it’s a he – wants to keep the head as a trophy.

There is, then, a considerable monetary value on the life of a red deer. But no-one at Creag Meagaidh regards them in that light. They are seen as valuable in themselves, as vital and immutable a part of the landscape as any crag or corrie, and as embodying, perhaps, the wildness of the Highlands. “I love them,” says Lavin, very simply, when asked how he feels about the deer.

I hadn’t reckoned on such a quick and direct answer, expecting instead a degree of tough-guy humming and hawing. But no. “I just love watching them. The excitement has never worn off. It’s the wildness of them, and the hardiness, the way they survive and thrive in the harsh conditions. There’s nothing better than being out on the hill early in the morning. Out before anyone else, seeing all the things other people don’t see. There’s a heightened sense of everything that’s going on around you.”

It’s an attractive idea, this greed for observation, the gluttony of being a witness, devouring life with your eyes and having more than your fair share. I feel it, too, and am keen to get out there. Lavin leads the way, followed by his colleague Shane Farquhar, a man in his early twenties, dressed in tweed, a tribal tattoo on one hand, who is learning to be a stalker. There will be no shooting today. It is a welcome change for Lavin, who takes no pleasure in taking a life; though he believes in the necessity of the cull, he sometimes feels the sadness and weight of it.

We start up a path, through brown ferns and heather the colour of biscuit. It’s a sore climb and I can soon feel my pulse in my ears. Behind and below us, Loch Laggan is a silver bullet. We are walking into Coire Ardair, a glacial valley, past birches as gnarled as a witch’s fists. Some of the trees are splintered and brown, smashed by boulders falling during avalanches. It’s hard to imagine this place covered in snow. Today is mild, relatively speaking, though wet and very gusty. Cloud the colour of gunsmoke drifts quickly across the peak of Sròn a’ Ghoire. Everything – sky, land and water – seems to be in motion. The only point of stillness is a peregrine hovering, hungry, above the heather.

Lavin points across the river. “There’ll be deer further round. Tucked in, out the wind.” We walk on. Lavin and Farquhar get out their tobacco and roll fags with the insouciance of men taking their ease in the village pub. Every now and again, the stalkers pause and scan the hillsides with binoculars. They are using these to confirm what they have already seen. They must have some peregrine in them, as they are able to spot deer at an astonishing distance. “Once you get your eyes tuned in to picking them out, it’s quite easy,” says Lavin.

At about half-nine, we see the first deer. They are high on an impossibly steep slope, amid the scree and smirr. There might be 30, 40, even more. “There’s a helluva lot of deer there,” says Lavin, simultaneously appalled and delighted at the sheer numbers. “And there’s a big stag. He’s a big switch head.”

A switch is an oddity among stags – a beast with no crown on its antlers, just sharp tips. This means that during the rut, when the stags would normally charge and lock horns, a switch, armed with these unsheathed swords, could maim or kill his opponent. If the stalkers were armed, they would shoot the switch to prevent him injuring other deer. As it is, they can simply admire him. There is a whole lexicon around deer, switch being part, which you would never hear unless out on the hill with men like these. A stag with 12 points, or tines, on his antlers is known as a royal. A 14-pointer is an imperial. A stag with no antlers at all is a hummel. A knobber has just bumps and is usually one year old. A spiker is a young stag with short spikes and no points.

A stag which has been successful in the rut and won hinds is said to be “holding” them. One stag can fertilise 30 to 40 hinds during the rutting season; they are his “harem”, a usage which gives him the despotic, sultry air of a Ottoman potentate.

Lying flat on the ground, just below the lip of a steep gully carved by a burn, we peer over the edge at the deer. What with the noise of the wind and the water, it is hard to hear the roaring, but sometimes the sound carries. It is a deep and defiant grunt, zealous and jealous, which dares other stags to have a square go. Lavin, cupping his hands around his mouth, can do a pretty good approximation. He uses this roar, when stalking, to call stags towards him, and jokes that he learned it from weekends on Sauchiehall Street, “where there are definitely similarities with the rut”.

The biggest stags, when they roar, tilt their heads back and gape wildly, call attention to their powerful neck muscles and shaggy grey-brown manes, and this is usually enough to make challengers walk away. Rage, aggression, braggadocio and extreme sexual promiscuity are not characteristics and behaviours which one would admire in a man, but in a stag they are undeniably impressive.

Mostly, it’s exciting just to get so near to these animals – at one point we were within 40 yards of them. But the challenge involves a good deal of stealth, creeping through the wet heather, using every rock or tree or moraine as a hiding place, and making sure to approach with the wind in your face so that the deer are less likely to detect your approach. Deer can smell a man at a mile away or more. You talk in whispers when you spy them, and pray they can’t hear your heart thumping in your chest.

“The thrill of the chase,” Lavin says later, “is getting close without them knowing you are there, and pitting your wits against the terrain and the weather. You can’t think about anything else when you are doing it. You are 100 per cent focused. Stalking is the difficult bit. Shooting is easy. You just point to the right place and pull the trigger.”

That, certainly, will be the lasting memory of this day among the deer – the intensity of looking; a degree of prolonged attention which makes the eyes throb and the mind tighten like a snare. I’ll always remember watching one particular stag go, disappearing over the steep edge of Coire a’ Chriochairein, silhouetted against the flowing sky, until – for a long moment – only his antlers remained and then, finally, sadly, those too were lost in the enveloping mist.