I had forgotten just how devastatingly fast, how vicious and fierce attack was, and how lethal.” It shrieked, a thin, anguished shriek cut off and stilled by a crunching bite to the back of the skull. “In a flash of russet fur the bitch weasel shot out of the wall and grabbed the rat by the neck. “This one had made a fatal mistake,” he says, for example, of a medium-sized rat that had unwittingly strayed too close to the entrance of a (smaller) Mustela nivalis’s den. Behind the book’s benign, Wind in the Willows-style cover lurks all manner of ultraviolence Lister-Kaye’s many expert, wide-eyed descriptions of their hunts – gleaned from thousands of hours of painstaking, superhumanly silent observation – bear both the unsentimentality of a lifelong naturalist and the eloquent punch of a superior thriller-writer. They are, it turns out, not to be messed with. Mustelids to their friends, this is the family of predatory mammals that includes, in the order in which we encounter them in the book, weasels, badgers, pine martens and otters. This book, his 11th, is a re-ordered diary of experiences, occurring mostly over the course of a year or so, of one of the richest seams of wildlife with which Aigas is blessed: the Mustelidae.
Stll, at 77, clearly as inquisitive as an adolescent weasel – a comparison he will, I hope, take as an unalloyed compliment – Lister-Kaye is the owner and director of the Aigas Field Centre, a conservation hub in the remote Highlands, 12 miles west of Inverness. One of many threads in his completely mesmerising new book – subtitled The Secret Life of Forest and Woodbank – is a lament for mankind’s apartness from, and yet coarse domination of, the natural world: the insouciance with which we destroy habitats, obliterate animals on roads, and have so warped the order of things that we are the only predator many creatures fear.Īnd yet, if anyone can have been said to have “returned to the woodland”, it is this indefatigable naturalist.
“We left the woodland world of weasels and owls aeons ago and we cannot return.” So writes John Lister-Kaye some way into Footprints in the Woods, and he is, of course, entirely correct.
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