The Ravenmaster Read online

  But of course she did.

  My assistant Shady and I raced—okay, drove just about within the limits of the law—to Greenwich. Munin was up a tree right next to one of the Observatories, causing quite a commotion with the visitors and staff, croaking and cronking as loudly as she could and generally making one hell of a racket. Shady and I thought about climbing the tree, but it was big, wet, and slippery from all the rain, and we were perhaps a little past our best tree-climbing days. Besides, when we approached, Munin simply hopped higher and higher, from branch to branch. There was nothing we could do. We were Yeoman Warders—we were hardly going to call the fire brigade to help us catch a bird. We had no choice but to retreat to the Tower and come up with a Plan B.

  I returned to Greenwich Park the following morning on the pretense of walking my dogs. I didn’t want to draw unnecessary attention to myself, so I left my uniform behind. I stopped at very nearly every tree in the park, hour after hour, hoping Munin would still be around somewhere. I figured she was hungry by now, so I carefully examined all the park’s bins and all the cafés and the ice cream parlors and the entrance to the Royal Observatory, which was crowded with tourists milling around, just the sort of place I know Munin likes to target. But in the end, I gave up again and returned to the Tower thoroughly dejected. In Munin I had truly met my match.

  Ravens will do whatever it takes to survive. This explains their reputation for cruelty: They will feed on carrion and carcasses. They will live anywhere, in any conditions. They are prepared to push themselves and others to the limit to get what they want. You’ve got to admire that.

  I can remember during my time in the army I was asked if I wanted to go on a specialist survival course. I was up for anything, so I said yes and I asked one of my mates if he wanted to come with me. What sort of survival course is it, he asked, mushroom picking up in Scotland? That’s about right, I said, mushroom picking up in Scotland. And so he signed up as well.

  It turned out the course was a long-range reconnaissance and resistance to interrogation course with Special Forces in Germany. There just happened to be a couple of spare places for anyone foolish enough to volunteer. Me and my mate were pretty fit infantry soldiers with plenty of experience in the military behind us by then, but this was something else: escape and evasion, being hunted by dogs and a hunter force, and then the inevitable capture and interrogation.

  It was what you might call an interesting experience. I won’t go into all the details, but suffice it to say that there are all sorts of techniques that are used during interrogation training to try to extract information from you and you’re only supposed to offer up the big five: name, rank, number, date of birth, and blood group. You’re sleep-deprived and then bombarded with all sorts of questions and scenarios to try to get you to talk. To my surprise, on one of the tests—it was a recall and memory test—I found I had no trouble resisting interrogation. I managed to stay awake as my interrogator banged on for two hours and I was able to recall everything he had to say. You were supposed to fall asleep exhausted, but I rather enjoyed listening to him. “I’ll say this for you, Chris,” the instructor said at the end of the course, “you are one of the most boring gits I’ve ever met in my life.” On the way back home I remember my mate turning to me and saying, “Well, that wasn’t mushroom picking in Scotland, Chris, was it.”

  Dealing with Munin is not mushroom picking in Scotland.

  * * *

  A few days after her escape to Greenwich, I received yet another call from the Tower’s control room.

  Apparently, a gentleman who lived near Greenwich Park was claiming he’d caught a raven and was currently holding it under house arrest—in a sports bag! Incredibly, armed only with the bag and a blanket, a thick pair of garden gloves, and some chicken legs, he’d managed to capture Munin, which is certainly more than I’d managed with all my years of experience.

  Shady and I once again raced down to Greenwich. I knocked on the gentleman’s front door.

  “I think I may have one of your ravens in my kitchen,” he said.

  “I believe you have, sir, and we would very much like her back.”

  We were duly escorted into his kitchen, and lo and behold, there she was, the escapee happily secured in a sports bag, with her head poking out and her beady little eyes looking inquisitively around the room. We placed her into her travel box, thanked the gentleman for his great act of kindness and for helping us to save the kingdom, and made our way back to the Tower.

  The following day Munin was no worse for her travels, although she was a little underweight, so I decided to keep her safe in the enclosure for a few weeks in order to monitor her health and get her back to her regular size. I thought it might also give her time to reflect on her actions. Me too: Munin’s great escape taught me a very simple lesson, one that over the course of my career as Ravenmaster I have had to learn again and again. And again.

  Never ever underestimate the ravens.

  13

  CITIZENS OF THE WORLD

  Ravens may sometimes be hard to spot, but they can be found everywhere. The editors of the most authoritative guide to European birds, Birds of the Western Palearctic—or to give it its full title, Handbook of the Birds of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa: The Birds of the Western Palearctic, nine volumes, not exactly light reading—write that for the raven the concept of habitat is “so wide-ranging that the concept of habitat is hardly applicable,” which is a good way of putting it. Ravens are cosmopolitan creatures, so it might be easier to state where they’re not at home than where they are. You won’t find them, apparently, in Novaya Zemlya, which is that little archipelago in the Arctic right up at the north of Russia and Europe, or indeed in parts of Siberia. But otherwise, where there are deserts, mountains, moors, forests, cliffs, coasts, towns, villages, or cities, you will find ravens or one of their subspecies.

  Corvus corax hispanus: Iberia, Balearic Islands, Sardinia. Corvus corax laurencei: from the eastern Mediterranean through the Middle East and all the way to China. Corvus corax tingitanus: north African coastal regions. Corvus corax canariensis: the Canary Islands. Corvus corax varius: Faeroes and Iceland. Corvus corax kamtschaticus: Mongolia and Japan. Corvus corax tibetanus: have a guess. Corvus corax sinuatus: western North America and Central America. And of course, Corvus corax principalis, known as the common or northern raven in North America. They get everywhere. In 1921, according to Bannerman’s Birds of the British Isles, ravens were even found scavenging at the British Mount Everest expedition at a height of 21,000 feet!

  For all their ubiquity, these days the Tower of London is one of the few places a visitor to the U.K. is likely to see a raven—unless you’re visiting the Welsh hills or the Scottish Highlands, or the uplands of northern England. According to Derek Ratcliffe, in his great book—the definitive book on ravens—The Raven: A Natural History in Britain and Ireland, “Although abundant in London in 1500, the Raven was almost gone by 1800.” What happened?

  During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ravens came to be regarded as pests who spread disease, as enemies of the farmer and the shepherd with his flock, and as vermin in the towns and cities, and they were hunted almost to the point of extinction. They were hated and feared. Bounties were placed upon their heads, their nests destroyed. Indeed, it wasn’t until 1981 that ravens in the U.K. were protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act—before that, they were fair game. Fortunately, numbers have increased: according to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, there are currently seventy-four hundred breeding pairs in the U.K. and Ireland, though this is still a tiny number compared to estimates of, say, a million crows and half a million magpies. It takes a long time for a species to recover from persecution.

  There is no doubt that ravens in the wild can be pests, especially juvenile ravens when they gather together in great numbers. Yet for all their unpopularity, they remain strongly associated with the glories of Britain’s ancient past, their symbolic
role in British life and culture far exceeding and outlasting their actual presence in our lives. There was a poet, John Clare, one of the great working-class poets of England, a peasant poet who often bemoaned the destruction of the countryside and who wrote a lot about birds. In his poem “The Raven’s Nest” he imagines a world unchanging, where the ravens return each year to the village, “where still they live, / Through changes winds and storms and are secure / And like a landmark in the chronicles / Of village memorys treasured up yet lives / The huge old oak that wears the raven’s nest.” Nice that, isn’t it, the idea of the raven and its nest storing up the village memory? Ravens not as omens of ill but as dark recording angels.

  The raven is indeed so closely identified with the British countryside that it has kindly lent its name to dozens of villages, towns, rivers, fields, farms, and homesteads. In Cumbria, for example, you have a Raven Beck, several Raven Crags and a Ravencragg. In Scotland there’s a Raven Craig. There’s also a Ravensdale (in Yorkshire), an East Ravendale (in Lincolnshire), Ravenfield (again in Yorkshire), a couple of Ravenheads (in Cheshire and Merseyside), more Raven Hills than you could count, plus Raven Rocks, Raven Scars, Ravenstones, Ravensides and Ravenswoods. In Scotland, you have your Corbiewell and Corby Loch. Ravens are written into the landscape.

  And written in the skies as well. There is a small constellation of stars in the Southern Hemisphere called Corvus, which roughly resembles the raven, and which was so named by the second-century astronomer Ptolemy, based on a strange story about the god Apollo, who sent a raven to fetch some water. The raven took a bowl for the water and flew off, but then spotted some figs. He tasted the figs, but they weren’t ripe, and so he waited until they were. He then flew back to Apollo with a water snake and lied to him, saying the snake had blocked the stream where he had gone to fetch water, which is why it had taken him so long. But Apollo knew exactly what the raven was up to and condemned him and his kind to be able to drink no water until figs are ripened, which is apparently why ravens sound so parched! He threw the raven, the bowl and the snake into the zodiac, and now the four brightest stars, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, and Beta Corvi, form the constellation Corvus. It’s one of the great raven stories.

  One day when I’m retired I might go and visit all the different raven towns and villages in Britain and Ireland and all the raven-associated places and species around the world, gathering up all the incredible myths and stories. I know there’s a Raven’s Brew coffee company over in Ketchikan in Alaska: they claim their coffee is “The Last Legal High.” That’d be a fun trip. And the Baltimore Ravens of course, the American football team. I also rather fancy visiting the ravens of Australia: Corvus coronoides, Corvus mellori, and Corvus tasmanicus, which is rapidly disappearing. I’ve been lucky enough to spot ravens in the wild in a few places on my travels over the years. In Cornwall, I once spotted two specks against a patch of blue sky amongst dark gray drifting clouds, circling side by side, wing tip to wing tip. They were diving and turning in formation and then ascending in circles again. I can still see it now: the ravens dancing in flight like that moved me more than any human performance ever could.

  I just wish I’d been paying rather more attention to the wildlife all those years ago when I was in the army. Who knows what I missed. I remember sometimes we’d be out on patrol in Northern Ireland, in South Armagh, and I’d stop the team and signal them to go to ground because there was some vole or field mouse by the side of the road, or a hare or a rabbit prancing across the fields. The other soldiers thought I was crazy. But it made a nice change from looking out for IRA snipers.

  In fact, I remember after our first tour in Northern Ireland, we briefly returned back to the battalion base before being deployed on a six-month unaccompanied tour in Belize. Belize! If only I’d been paying attention in Belize!

  We prepared for the Belize tour in the traditional British Army fashion, by doing some jungle training—in the winter, in the snow, in Thetford in Norfolk. I’d certainly never been anywhere like Belize before. Formerly British Honduras, the country had just been granted independence when we got there, but there were still British soldiers garrisoned as a deterrent force. The place was like a dream. This was where I first took up scuba diving, diving off the coral reefs, with the barracudas and the hammerhead sharks: an underwater world I’d never imagined. And the sheer range of natural habitats: over half of Belize is forest, where you get these wild pigs and deer and these creatures called tapirs, thick-set little creatures which look like black pigs with long snouts, and which are nocturnal and feed on fruit and you’d follow their tracks through the jungle to find water holes and you’d find them there swimming, their snouts up in the air like snorkels. I loved the little tapirs. And then you’ve got your howler monkeys up in the trees, and your crocodiles in the rivers, the jaguars, the pumas. And snakes. Lots and lots of snakes. And spiders.

  Though I didn’t realize it at the time, Belize is a bird-watcher’s paradise. If only I could get back to Belize now, knowing everything I know about birds! I’d go and look at the keel-billed toucan, and the collared aracari, and the blue-crowned motmot, the slaty-tailed trogon, the jabiru, the boat-billed heron, snail kites, American pygmy kingfishers—the list of incredible birds in Belize goes on and on.

  As it was, I was too busy surviving in the jungle to take much notice of the bird life. I loved Belize. Being in Belize was a bit like being a kid in Dover, having to survive out in the wild, building A-frames, making fires, learning tracking and trapping skills. It suited me really well. The only thing that was different was the sound of the jungle at night—this constant humming and buzzing. Popping sounds and grunts and screeches. The never-ending sound of the jungle. And not just never-ending, the sheer volume of it. Sometimes, if you were driving down a track, the sound of the locusts and the crickets would be so loud it would drown out the sound of the Land Rover. We’d be rattling along and there’d be wild turkeys or pigs and the section commander would take a potshot, in case he could bag something for our tea. It was wild.

  * * *

  Belize may have been a missed opportunity for me as a bird-watcher, but then how many of us can honestly say we bother to pay attention to the birds and animals around us every day? Until I started working with the ravens I might have called myself an animal lover, but really I had no clue about animal behavior or animal intelligence, let alone all the great folklore and stories and symbols associated with animals. I just took them for granted. Growing up, we had a tortoise, we had rabbits, we had cats named Ginny, Whisky, and Sherry—spot the connection?—and dogs, including a Jack Russell called Ringo who bit me so badly he was taken away, and Bess the basset hound, who sadly died after I’d taken her on a very long walk. When we were posted to Cyprus my wife and I lived in a house in Limassol with a big garden and we ended up with a collection of twenty-two stray cats! They were everywhere in Cyprus and we’d take them in, look after them, and get them neutered at the vet. I remember one cat giving birth to her kittens one night on our bed, in fact. But for me it’s not the cats or the dogs, it’s the ravens who have taught me everything I know about the complexities of human and nonhuman animal relationships.

  14

  DOUBLE-HATTING

  Once I’ve released the ravens from the enclosure in the morning I nip back to my house in the Casemates, give my dogs a quick walk in the moat, get changed into my uniform, and it’s time to get on with the day job.

  I’ve always been what you might call a double-hatter. In the army, I was a specialist machine gunner. I’ll never forget the first time I fired a submachine gun on a 25-meter range. It was a completely useless old thing, really, and wouldn’t have shot through a wet paper bag, but I thought it was brilliant. The sound of it, the smell of it—cordite and gun oil. I just loved it. And the old SLRs, of course, the self-loading rifles, they had a real kick to them: it was like firing an elephant gun. Because I’m left-handed I had to learn everything round the other way, but nothing could dim my enthus
iasm. I specialized in SF—sustained fire. You’ve got your general-purpose machine gun, your GPMG, 7.62mm round, set up on a tripod, with a C2 sight, which allows you to fire out to ranges greater than 1,100 meters, and you work in a two-man team in your platoon to provide fire support. With a GPMG and a sight you can fire over hills! You can imagine the adrenaline at night in a platoon with nine guns in your team.

  As well as being a gunner I was also a drummer, which was as much a surprise to me as to anyone else. For me, playing music was an acquired rather than an innate skill—and certainly not a skill I was ever planning to acquire. I can remember on our very first day when I joined up, we were all lined up in an old aircraft hangar and our Platoon Commander came out and told us that we were going to be drummers. You’ll be infantry soldiers, he said, but you’ll also learn how to play the drum and fife. We couldn’t believe it! You can imagine what we said. We were youngsters—sixteen-, seventeen-year-olds, kids really—and we’d joined up to be “proper” soldiers. We thought we’d be out in the Falklands or somewhere, just like that. We didn’t realize we were going to have to spend eighteen months before we were assigned to our regiments learning to play the drum and fife! So we rebelled against it. Somebody got a petition going and we presented it the next day to the Platoon Commander and it wasn’t long before we were all lined up in the aircraft hangar and this old Drum Major came out of his office with his parade stick, waving it around, telling us we were all going to be shot for treachery. I was genuinely scared.

  We weren’t shot for treachery.

  Instead, over the next eighteen months, to my surprise, I became a part of a Corps of Drums as well as an infantryman—and I absolutely loved it. To this day the British Army still maintains a Corps of Drums in most infantry battalions. It’s an important part of the ceremony and rituals of military life.