I break my walk up into bite sized chunks. Fifteen more minutes and I’ll stop for a mint club biscuit and a swig from my water-bottle. Gone are the days when I could make it to the top of a Munro without stopping, yet I pick up the pace as if that will somehow result in my chocolatey incentive arriving sooner. I slow down when I hear a skylark overhead.
The endless variety of songs it can produce provide a chirpy soundtrack to a saunter in the countryside. They evoke memories of previous occasions when a visit to the Scottish hills has coincided with a bizarre, but little documented, natural phenomena - a sunny day.
This is the first hike I’ve been on since before my son was born, and I feel lucky to hear my favourite bird. Not least because skylark numbers have dropped by around 75% since my formative rambles in the Pentland’s with my dad. I wonder if there will be any of my feathered friends left by the time I’m dragging my own son up the hills?
It’s something I like to imagine us doing together in the future. That might not be for a while though as he’s just turned two, and I’m no spring chicken. By the time he’s old enough to climb a mountain with me, and I’m still fit enough to climb a mountain with him, I reckon there’s a window of opportunity of around four hours. I try to work out when that will be and make a mental note to keep free the afternoon of June 11th 2032. I really hope it’s not raining that day.
My knees may not have many miles left on the clock, but thinking about the relentless march of time has sent my mind wandering somewhere much further off than the top of Ben Chonzie. Like that hurled bone in 2001: A Space Odyssey the tiny bird hovering above me has transformed into a hulking spacecraft.
Inside the spacecraft is one of those cryogenic suspension chambers, and inside that is me. Inside me are a billion nano-bots, helping to keep my body intact during a million year journey from the charr-grilled remains of planet earth. To keep my brain stimulated, as I drift through time and space, my stasis pod has been programmed to play recordings of skylark songs.
One day the ship’s computer wakes me and I step on to the soil of a new world. The sights, smells, and sounds of nature envelop me. Fantastical multicoloured birds sing impossibly beautiful songs as they dance across a binary-sunlit meadow, and I start to zap them out of the sky with my laser gun. A million years of ornithological warbling has made their sound unbearable. I keep zapping until there are no more of the harpies left to torment my ears and I can finally set about rebuilding civilisation.
Then I hear it - the exuberant strains of a skylark. I search for days but my scanner confirms the blithe spirit exists only inside my head. I raise the laser gun slowly to my temple and I shudder and beam back down to reality, my walk, and my favourite birdsong still radiating through the air overhead. Even though I’ve only been daydreaming about an imaginary future I feel a twinge of guilt about wiping out all those exotic alien birds, and decide that if the time ever comes to enter a stasis pod I'll program it to play the pan pipes, or maybe some Enya.
I feel guilty about the skylark too. Its tunes may make a jaunty accompaniment to a ramble but from the skylark’s point of view it’s a screamed instruction to keep away from his territory, or a warning not to go trampling over his weans nesting on the ground nearby.
I wonder if it’s also warning me not to keep straying off into the future, and to concentrate on enjoying the present with my child? Or maybe I’ve just been out in the sun too long and am reading far too much into the frenetic twittering of a small brown bird? At least travelling a million years into the future, and back, means my pit-stop will be well overdue. I look at my watch and do a double-take.
How can there still be thirteen and a half minutes until my mint club??