The Stag

The Scottish Highlands · The first season · Told by Yan Ardatovskiy

The first time I went stalking in Scotland, Vadim and I were not in the shape those hills require. We were not in bad shape, either. We skied, we played a little tennis, we took the stairs when the lift was slow. But neither of us had ever done serious hill walking, and I want to establish this early, because everything that follows depends on it. We arrived at the castle with five other friends, a great deal of new tweed, and the confidence of men who had skied a great many black runs and felt that this should count for something.

The castle was exactly what you hope for and slightly colder. Grey stone, a tower with a flag that never once hung straight, antlers on every wall of the hall and a fire in every room that somebody was always feeding. The stalker was called Murdo. He was perhaps sixty, built like a gatepost, with a face the colour of a brick left out in the weather, and he looked at our tweed the way a mechanic looks at a car somebody has tuned himself. He said very little, then or later. We learned quickly that stalking in Scotland is not what people imagine. There is nothing left on those hills to keep the deer in check except weather and men like Murdo; the numbers are set every season, the old beasts are the ones taken, and a good stalker would rather walk home with nothing than take a shot he is not sure of.

At six the next morning the rain was coming sideways. Murdo split us up, and Vadim and I ended up together, as we did in most things in those years. Murdo looked at our boots. He looked at the sky. He said, “Right,” in a tone that suggested he had seen worse, and then he walked straight up a hill as if it were a pavement.

I have been to a great many beautiful places, and most of them were trying. The Highlands are not trying. They simply sit there, enormous, brown and purple and silver, with the cloud dragging its belly across the tops and the light changing every four minutes, and they do not care in the least whether you are impressed. The heather is soft for the first hundred metres and treacherous for the next ten thousand. Peat is not ground; it is an opinion about ground. By the end of the first hour Vadim had gone in to the knee, and I had discovered muscles in my back to which I had never been introduced.

Murdo glassed the far slope for a long time, flat on his belly with the telescope, as still as a boulder. Then he handed it to me without a word. Through the lens, a kilometre off, a stag stood on the skyline with his head up: a big dark animal with a thick neck and a crown of antlers like a thorn bush, looking, I would swear, straight at us. “That’s your beast,” said Murdo. “Old one.” Vadim took the glass and said, very softly, “He’s magnificent.” Murdo said, “Heads down.”

What followed took the rest of the day. We crawled. I had not crawled since I was a child, and I had not crawled then through water. We went on our bellies up burns and along the lee of ridges, with the wind in our faces, because a stag will smell you long before he sees you. Every time we reached the ridge where the stag had been, the stag was on the next one. Not running. Walking. Grazing now and then, with the air of a man finishing his lunch before a meeting he has no intention of taking. Once we were close enough to hear him roar, a sound that comes up out of the ground and through your chest, and then the wind swung and he was over the top and gone.

Murdo would not shoot, and he would not let us. Too far. Another beast behind him. Head the wrong way. He did not explain; he simply shook his head and we crawled on. By the sixth kilometre I could no longer feel my feet. By the eighth Vadim was talking to himself in Russian, a long, lyrical, filthy monologue about peat, and Murdo, who did not have a word of Russian, listened for a while and, for the first time that day, smiled. Somewhere around then he stopped calling us “you pair” and started using our names. He got Vadim’s wrong all day, and neither of us corrected him.

In the late afternoon the light went low and gold, and the cloud lifted off the tops as though somebody had taken the lid off a pan. We came over a shoulder of the hill on our bellies, the three of us in a line, and there, perhaps a hundred and eighty metres below, in a fold of ground, was the stag. Broadside. Still. Head down in the grass. For the first time all day there was nothing behind him but hill.

Murdo eased the rifle out of its slip and laid it on his own rolled jacket in the heather. He looked at Vadim, then at me, and slid it across to me. I do not know why he chose me, and I never asked. I settled into the stock. The peat was soaking through my shirt. My heart was going so hard I could see the crosshairs pulse with it. Beside me Vadim was breathing very carefully, trying to breathe quietly, which is the loudest way there is to breathe.

“Behind the shoulder,” Murdo whispered, right against my ear, his breath all tea and tobacco. “Take your time.” The wind dropped. The whole enormous hill went silent, as if it were listening too. I thought of the ten kilometres behind us, of the old stag who had walked us across half of Scotland, of how many things had to be true at once for this to be right. I thought, absurdly, that I would never be able to explain this afternoon to anybody who had not been on that hill, and that the only other person on earth who would ever understand it was lying in the wet heather at my elbow. I let out half a breath, as I had been taught, and put my finger on the trigger.

How many stags came down the hill, and how many friends went up it?

Names have been changed to protect the privacy of the people in these stories. So have some of the stories. Not all of them, and not everything that sounds invented is. Please do not treat it as a fair coin.