Free The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane

him to say ‘the tongue of a salamander’ or ‘a dodo’s foot’.
    Steve looked puzzled. ‘Sweets,’ he said. ‘This was the last box of Pick ’n’ Mix on the shelves on the last day of the Woolies’ closing-down sale in Tarbert. That’s a period piece now, that is.’
    He put the box carefully on a shelf, in between an ivory tusk and a screw-top jar labelled ‘4000-Year-Old Storm Water’.
    That evening, Joan, Steve and I sat round the table again while the late light faded out over the bay to a line of gleam. On the north wall of the kitchen was a glass box containing a white moth as big as a blackbird: Atticus atlas , from India. Its wings were linen-coloured and tightly stretched. In the corner a brindled kitten bullied an old white cat.
    After supper, Steve pushed his chair back from the table, poured more drinks and began to talk. Most of his stories involved the killing and eating of wild creatures. Poverty, curiosity and a keenly carnivorous palate had led him to try most meats. He’d been a forager long before foraging was trendily rebranded as wild eating. When he was a student in art college he’d taken an air-rifle into the life-drawing class, sat by an open window that overlooked a stand of trees, and shot any squirrels that appeared. When he lived in the country, he used to carry a short-barrelled shotgun in his jacket in case he encountered moving foodstuffs.
    ‘Have you eaten heron?’ I asked.
    ‘Oh yes. Best time to eat them is on the full moon, because they’re fattest then. The flesh is very, very fishy. Fishier than guillemot. One of the fishiest birds I’ve eaten, in fact, except gannet.’
    Had he eaten blackbirds? Of course, and in a pie. Curlew? Yes. More meat on them than you would imagine. Doves? Yes. Less meat on them than you would imagine. Eagle? No, not eagle, not yet. Swan? Steve’s face lit up. Memories were whirring across his inner eye like an old home movie, and he told me a story that I can’t repeat here – swan-murder still carrying a substantial penalty – involving a pigskin mannequin, an electric chair, two swans, a fireplace and an estate agent.
    That night, waiting for sleep, my mind flocking with images of corpses and taxidermy, I remembered Rebecca West’s description in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, an avid hunter who was said to have killed half a million creatures in his life. On the day of his death the Duke was in a reception hall in his palace in Sarajevo – even as Princip and the other assassins were taking up their positions along the line of the cavalcade – and the walls of that reception hall, wrote West, were:
     
stuffed all the way up to the crimson and gold vaults and stalactites with the furred and feathered ghosts, set close, because there were so many of them: stags with the air between their antlers stuffed with woodcock, quail, pheasant, partridge, capercailzie, and the like; boars standing bristling flank to flank, the breadth under their broad bellies packed with layer upon layer of hares and rabbits.
Their animal eyes, clear and dark as water, would brightly watch the approach of their slayer to an end that exactly resembled their own.

     
    I thought of how, once the guga -hunting party had departed from Sula Sgeir each year, the amputated wings of the dead gannets – 4,000 wings from 2,000 birds – were left lying on the summit, so that when the next big autumn storm came and the next big wind blew from the south or the west, thousands of these severed wings would lift from the surfaces of the island, such that it seemed, when seen from the sea, that the rock itself were trying to lift off in flight – an entire island rising into the air, like Swift’s Laputa.
    On the Sunday, Steve took me on a pilgrimage to his most sacred landscape.
    I was sitting in a Victorian dentist’s chair in Steve’s front room, reading. The chair was set on a pole on a massive base. It was