These days, the city seaport of Balikpapan spreads over the north eastern entrance to its bay and is home to half a million souls. Its modern airport lies inshore of the Makassar Strait separating Borneo from the island of Sulawesi…

The early morning air was sharp with a smell of spruce and pine. Beyond the cantonment the solid green of mature forest stretched north, east and south, climbing to high ridges that dominated the hamlet. To the west the Ardnamurchan…

Hours passed swiftly, each man an automaton planting his allotted area. George walked between low furrows, ‘dreels’ in the forestry argot, and reached a shallow trench containing nursery plants bound in bundles of one hundred. Fact was, each bundle professed…

By four thirty, Robbie had climbed up to the area being planted. The men completed their work and gathered around him. A scattered high cumulus had come with afternoon and light airs stirred pleasingly with a freshness of spring. The…

The Commission cantonment of Polloch reached into silent forest, like a narrow salient. In the one storied bothies (two storied if you counted after the American fashion), most men had completed their evening meal and were variously napping, reading, listening…

In Strontian itself, daylight was fading and the shops had shut. Half a dozen regulars leaned on the bar counter of the Argyle Hotel with grim purpose and gave determined weight to trivia. Eyes flicked towards the door as Munro…

It took police and firemen two hours to extricate the Regional Forester’s dead body from the crushed Audi. The area of road was dolled off and photographs taken. A recovery crane arrived. Temporary arc lighting was erected and illuminated the…

Next day was Friday, last day of the working week. Before work began the workforce were mustered in the main hut where Euan Mackinnon addressed them. Their mood was jocular, and Mackinnon waited until curiosity quietened the conversational buzz. When…

Others were, of course, exercised by the matter of Munro’s responsibility for all Commission operations throughout the entire Lochaber ‘Region’, and who might fall heir to it. Euan Mackinnon, a rangy man with the wry humour of experience in its…

The widow had decided that her husband should be buried by the local church at Salen, overlooking its picturesque bay on the shores of Loch Sunart. The kirk was two hundred metres from her pretty bungalow. A barracks type building,…

The provenance of the brown paper bag with it’s content of nails and staples continued to be the subject of police enquiry, in the course of which Constable Fergus paid an official visit to Polloch. “This is a sample of…

The widow, high cheekboned and tasteful in tweed, was never unaware of her role in the community as wife of a Commission Regional Chief. Taking sudden bereavement in her stride, she displayed great dignity. A callow son stood in her…

After the funeral Euan Mackinnon had again been exhorted by Assistant Director to ‘hold the fort’, as had all other area foresters of the Lochaber region. Each received the impression that there would be no appointment to ‘Regional’ in replacement…

Each day on the parched moor, men continued to bend and straighten in regular rhythm. Spades reflected sunlight. Green sprigs advanced along the dreels. The bundles of Sitka and pine in red flagged trenches steadily diminished in number. The ganger’s…

The after taste of Alex’s bully beef sandwich occasioned a synaptic glow between the neuron “military” and the neuron “dislike”. He remembered the previous night’s disturbance, the loud crying out that had awakened him, and chose an indirect approach. “You…

Noel stopped and breathed deeply. He began to speak in more measured tones. “The Americans immediately deny any act where little evidence is left behind. They have a phrase for it. They call it ‘plausible deniability’. Our media know all…

Euan Mackinnon sat with Robbie in the public bar of the Argyll, fiddling with his whisky glass. “Alarm call, eh?” he commented upon hearing the ganger’s account of the outbreak. “There’s surely going to be more of this. We got…

The sun continued to glare. Tramping over the moor, every footfall raised a puff of dust from brittle heather yet to bloom. On the wide plateau, furrows of ploughed land ran crustily into a blue haze. Afforested hills, patched in…

“Have we lost it completely, Scoop?” he said to Ruairidh. “We seem to be volunteering for extra work.” “Drama at Acharacle,” Ruairidh said. “Intrepid forestry workers save old township from destruction. Think of headlines and grandchildren at knee level. Yes,…

The gangers quickly organised their charges into two groups, each man equipped with a long-handled beater in the form of a flap of vulcanised rubber attached to a rough wooden shaft, these having been transported by lorry. Their torches flashing,…

The long meeting room was crowded, some standing behind the twenty seated representatives of organisations such as The Friends of the Forest, Protect the Raptor, and The Ethno-Botany Society. A cultivated wildness of hair was prevalent, like a badge. Most…

While the lowliest of the Commission cultivated the fastest softwoods to mature, Assistant Director cultivated a political class for the funding his organisation needed, all in the interests of an industry whose profitability rested within the grasp of hands toughened…

In Polloch’s bothies, men had taken their evening meal and were whiling away time, each after his inclination. Silas opened the throttle on his motor bike and roared off to Strontian. Since his arrival at Polloch in October, six months…

The weather remaining warm and dry, the working week ended. Polloch’s men showered and shaved. Porch lights were left on, otherwise the bothies fell dark. At seven thirty the Strontian hotel bars had begun to fill. The activist, ‘John’, paying…

Saturday dawned cloudless, another brittle blue day. A bright sun washed in white light the shades of brown on the hills and deepened the shadows of forest fringe. Although it was not a working day, Polloch stirred early. Men appeared,…

It was a pleasant morning at the ‘Fort’. Streets were busy, with the town in bright sunlight. Several yachts and white motor cruisers sat quietly at their mooring buoys and contrasted against blue waters of the loch. The huge wedge…

The planting squad gravitated together at the Commission vehicles as a week’s supplies were packed inside, and remained in a group as they left the supermarket carpark and crossed into the Fort’s High Street where a long row of little…

Silas returned from Fort William with the others and loaded his supplies into a kitchen cupboard and a refrigerator. The beer and return journey in the landrover had made him drowsy and for a time he dozed on the living…

Sunday. George awoke to shouting outside. The siren at the huts began to wail. He threw off the single blanket and opened a window. A cloudless sky was strangely grainy. Air held a distinct odour of wood smoke. The hair…

Mackinnon jumped down from the vehicle and met Robbie at the office doorway. The ganger was anxious. “We could be cut off here if the fire crosses the Strontian road behind us. The road along Loch Shielside is already blocked.”…

The two gangs of men had been instructed to take a substantial meal then rejoin him at the hutments. When they did, those among them who were domaciled (‘quartered’ imparted a whiff of impermanence) in the storied bothies poignantly carried…

The activist sat down to a traditional Sunday breakfast at his hotel. They did you well here, he considered, in competing for the tourists trafficking through on their way to Hebridean splendour. Popular also were tours of the nearby battleground…

This early in the season, local hotels and boarding houses had gained unexpected patronage, courtesy of the prolonged spell of fine weather. West Lochaber, however, a peninsula created almost an island by long lochs north and south, was also isolated…

Whether portraying themselves as trendy urban or substantial suburban, incumbents and aspirants to the centres of power tend to spend Sundays routinely. Not many go to church in Europe, unlike in the United States where God is always kept as…

The power of the Commission, created a hundred years before by Royal Charter and the country’s greatest landowner, reached invisibly into an uncaring populace. This hegemony, on the few occasions it attracted any notice, was vaguely perceived as a benevolent…

The fire in the wood was very near. Polloch lay in shadow under a grey-black pall that curtained sunlight as smoke eddied through the darkening cantonment. Herds of red deer and delicate roe escaping the fire continued to be visible…

Men were appearing then disappearing in swirling smoke. Burning debris fluttered or flew in the air. The hose continued its steady play on the roof of the foremost bothies, the water jet bending upwards into opaqueness. Red eyes glaring in…

The ganger turned towards the men, waving one arm to bring them near. “Listen, all of you. Try to take a turn round No1 and No2 but don’t go in. Put out anything burning close to the houses.” He noticed…

Grouped tightly together, the planting squad retreated down the road past the cantonment of eight houses, their pace quickening as in a tight group they stepped into clear air near the hutments. Reaching the hardstanding area the men slowed then…

Urgency snapped in every communication as Mackinnon’s colleagues rousted emergency services into action. Police, fire services, medical triage units, all were alerted and the region’s media sources informed. In the vast bureaucracy that was the Commission, these initiatives were classified…

Events grew in fibres of circumstance. Tedium had nurtured impatience. Impatience had overwhelmed him. His mission had been to accumulate information in evidence of the Commission destruction of a landscape. Tens of thousands of repetitive thrusts of his planting spade…

The activist did not linger at the layby, but kicked his Ducati into life and took to the road past a series of signs requiring him to ‘Beware of Falling Boulders’. At Morar, he turned off the dual carriageway and…

Assistant Director had overplayed the nineteenth hole, having found a most congenial companion while celebrating a decent round in which golfing gods had beamed upon his errant swing. Golf, that implacable destroyer of hubris, had allowed unforgettable glimpses of eagle…

‘To be strong everywhere is to be weak everywhere’. The dictum of Sun Tzu and Von Clausewitz was no learned mantra but an instinct with Euan Mackinnon. He chose to fight with forces concentrated on selected points of weakness. When…

While the new arrivals were being introduced to their accommodation, a war council convened at the Argyll. It was quickly decided that Rattray, who held Commission title to the Grampian region and had arrived with a contingent from Badenoch, should…

The planting squad, cleaned of soot and grime, slept soundly in sleeping bags stretched on a wooden floor, excepting Iain, who slept with teenage profundity at home in his own bed. Noel awoke at dawn. He had chosen a corner…

The activist was early among an array of tables laid neatly, and whitely, for breakfast. It amused him to request a ‘full English’ in this mountain centre of Caledonia and he ate leisurely, nodding and smiling at several pensioners as…

Assistant Director was hanging the jacket of his pinstripe on a mahogany coat stand when Alison followed a gentle knock into the office. Her boss raised his eyebrows by way of query. “There is an urgent message from Mr. Rattray,…

Throughout the night, Control had slipped in and out of shallow sleep, constantly shifting in the queen-size bed. “Oh, for God’s sake!” his girlfriend had finally cried out in exasperation, “what the hell is the matter with you?”, and arose…

Society has its organ grinders still. Few in number, they are generally to be found selling sheet music from a plastic stand at railway stations. The mighty organ, however, playing each song piano or fortissimo according to its political orientation,…

South of Fort William that morning, the traffic had backed up for five kilometres in either direction when the ambulance sped back to Belford Hospital, the activist securely braced to restrain movement of his neck and spine. A police recovery…

By midday the light breeze had grown warm in the sun. The fire continued to advance and broaden its front. North of the road a dark pall of smoke hung over a land heavily clothed in spruce and pine. Below…