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 peninsula stretched to finally meet the Atlantic Ocean at mainland Britain’s most westerly point.
A door opened, breaking the stillness, and a grey haired man trudged off to routine tasks. The burring of an alarm clock carried faintly through an upstairs window in the solitary row of timber bothies, slowly colouring from the roof downward as a low sun rose into cloudless sky. The grey haired man re-appeared, rolling a calor gas cylinder up to the open door. He went inside and the door closed gently behind him. The cantonment was awakening to another working day.
It was the latter half of March and, surprisingly, it hadn’t rained for two weeks. The earth was dressed in the dead grass of summer and sap had yet to rise. An entire region was desiccated, as dry as a prehistoric bone. Tourists were beginning to travel through these parts armed to the teeth with fire raising potential; once, it would have been cigarettes, but huge numbers had kicked the habit and peril came mainly from barbeques.
Three capped plastic bottles sat upright in a corner of the bedroom, each brimful with petrol. Beside them sat a military style haversack. Silas felt sunlight warm on his skin and swung bare legs out of a narrow cot. Mild silence lay over the bothy. Pulling on a pair of dark jeans, he went to the window. The rising sun gleamed on dense forest. Beneath massed trees, long shadows were withdrawing as the sun climbed.
Silas looked at the army-style camp bed, neatly made with a white sheet bent over a single blanket, one was enough in this spell of dry weather. A few books leaned against each other on a short mantelpiece. I need to fix bookends so I can stand them straight, he thought. He threw an old coat over the bottles of petrol and went downstairs to fry bacon. Minutes later came sounds of the newcomer, Louis, pull off pyjamas and stumble about a bedroom overhead.
Parallel with the tree line, the row of eight identical bothies stood, each ten metres tall with pitched roof and creosoted planks, Scandinavian in appearance. The bothies had been erected by a worldly Commission to house, remote from townships and their cargo of vulnerable women, an itinerant workforce of bachelor men. This hamlet was called Polloch.
A generation had come and gone since then and its legacy was the vast area of 40year forest that disappeared into distance beyond the bothies. These days, Polloch housed many cutters, reapers of the spoils planted when their fathers were young, and one solitary planting squad, for the Commission still created timber for future generations and a wood pulp industry of voracious appetite.
Silas ate his breakfast, ignoring Louis cobbling something together at the cooker, then washed his plates at the old sink. He filled a flask with soup and shoved it beside the sandwich box in his backpack. Leaving the ugly noise of Louis’ hurried eating, he booted up at the front door, hoisted his pack over one shoulder, and went outside patting the seat of a motorbike parked at the grassy verge.
Forestry workers drifted down the hardcore road towards a cluster of huts some little distance below the timbered bothies. Silas joined the men with Louis hastening to catch up. The day was dew fresh with a sharp tang of woodland. A pleasant day was beginning, the sun climbing in a clear sky, the prospect calm.
Led by a utility truck, a convoy of vehicles arrived from Strontian, the local village eponymous to the chemical element strontium. Groups of workers separated and men climbed into the vehicles. First to drive off was a long-based landrover packed with the planting squad, fledgling foresters leavened by a couple of experienced hands who had disdained promotion to the felling elite, the big earners. Within minutes the huts stood silent, deserted but for a ganger to attend the telephone and take inventory of the storage areas.
The landrover turned from the B-road and rocked dustily along a rough track, a ten man squad facing each other along worn bench seats behind their ganger, who drove. With another typical working day ahead, there was no conversation; the newcomer contemplated an aching session of planting, the others thought of how they might spend an evening of dry solitude when the day’s work was done.
They were a mixed crew, fairly representing the various types attracted each year to the Commission. They jolted together; savers of the planet, gays fleeing a hostile social environment, searchers for the Middle Path, artistic types seeking fresh inspiration, escapees from the rat-race, each one the casual lover of a great outdoors. One, only, was a local lad left school the summer before.
The landrover pulled up beside a narrow track wavering thinly between a straggle of birch. The squad emerged, working jeans and dark shirts with rough fabric planting bags slung over one shoulder. A small backpack or a hand-held plastic bag contained food and bottled water. Each man held a spade by its haft. Nobody spoke, and they began to ascend the dappled path between silvery trees.
Robbie, a heavily built man in his sixtieth year and their ganger, watched them diminish with distance. There was no need to accompany the squad. They had been in the area for several days and would simply continue to plant where they had left off yesterday. His priority was to set a schedule for next week. He put the landrover into gear and elevated his body in a half turn as he twisted to look behind, mistrusting mirrors, manoeuvring the vehicle on to twinned wheel tracks.
The planting squad reached the rolling plateau of moorland destined to become suckling ground for millions of tonnes of paper. It would give a pleasing appearance as thick forest for forty years or thereabouts before the saturation planting of imported spruce with a leavening of pine would be harvested, winnowed, and transported to be milled into wood pulp. A heather moor would thus be transformed into a vast area of white stumps surrounded by bleached heaps of discarded brash. Some fifty years would suffice to have vegetation conceal the bones of the forest. It made sound economic sense, and anyway the region was rarely visited.
The planters dispersed and soon each man was rhythmically bending and straightening along ploughed furrows with their speckling of stones. The thud of spades striking into black peaty soil carried on a gentle breeze. It would be another warm day.