DIPPER, ALLT NA BRUADAR
The light arrives early in the far north-west, and on this May morning it spills over the quartz-veined shoulders of the hills to pour itself into the Allt na Bruadar. The Burn of the Dream. It is a good name for this water, which speaks in a language older than Gaelic, a syntax of cataract and pool, of runnel and race. The water is peat-stained but gin-clear, running cold over a bed of glinting schist and the dark, rounded forms of ancient stones. Here, where the air is sharp with the scent of bog myrtle and wet moss, is a world entire.
And at its heart, a flicker of fierce life. A dipper. He is a bird made of river-stuff: compact, dense, his form a dark comma against the bright water, punctuated by the startling white of his bib. He stands on a slab of granite, bobbing, bowing, dipping – a constant, rhythmic prayer to the current. He is not a visitor to the stream; he is its catechist, its interpreter. His whole being is tuned to the water’s frequency, to the subtle shifts in its flow and fall. The world above – the vast, empty sky, the wheeling eagle – is of little consequence. His world is the water-world, the few feet of spate and eddy that constitute his territory.
There is a need in him now, a pressure that is more than instinct. In a crevice of the bank, hidden by a curtain of fern and trailing ivy, is the nest: a globe of woven moss, and within it, the gaping, hungry mouths of his young. The pressure sharpens his focus. He cocks his head, his white-lidded eye blinks once, and then he is gone. He does not dive so much as walk into the water, plunging from the air into the chill embrace of the burn. For a moment, he is lost to the world of light and air.
Down he goes, gripping the streambed with strong claws, walking against the push of the current. He is a creature transformed, a bird of the air become a creature of the depths. Bubbles of air, trapped in his dense plumage, silver his form. He is hunting in a world of distortion and swift movement, turning stones, probing the gravel. He seeks the caddisfly larva in its casing of grit and sand, the freshwater shrimp that darts in the lee of a stone. He finds one, a pulse of life seized in his beak. He has what he came for.
He bursts from the surface as abruptly as he vanished, shedding the water in a crystalline shower. He does not pause. His flight is a low, whirring arrow, tracing the burn’s every twist and turn, a dark shape moving at speed over bright water. He flies to the hidden nest, a brief disappearance into shadow, and then emerges again, lighter, his duty done for now. He returns to his sandstone perch on the Allt na Bruadar, and begins again his ceaseless, dipping dance.