Cluny Macpherson is skulking among the shadows, his coarse clothes worn, the heath as well : the ageing heather, past its best. The coldness rises through his body from the damp earth and crawls around the tops of grey boulders. He stops, and stamps lost feet, watching the mottled snows creep lower down the shoulder of the hill. Winter is on the prowl again.

Behind him, a raven turns into the wind, wheeling across the face of rock, its sombre call an augury. The raven, brooding, waiting... Cluny too... brooding over the empty land. He has waited many winters, treading alone the borderlands, enduring in an unyielding country, refusing to capitulate.

His eyes are rheumy, yet alert, and scan the distant moors for any movement. He is aware of every sign. But no-one comes. What happened to their dreams? To that brave people? They departed, cheering and singing at dawn, but their cries fell short in some field afar.

And now... the sound of the wind's boom on the barren waste is a soldier's drum, soldier's drum. He can see the stark remains of a fallen shieling on the heath. Its blackened walls forsaken. The gentle homeland violated... children at the stream... their mothers watching... the intimate heart of a way of life... gone.

This is a ravaged country.

Clapping his arms around damp bands, he grumbles tetchily to himself. In the dwindling light his eyes glint by at droplets set along a branch, which scatter in the fitful fray of wind gusting among the trees. The dark boughs bend and shiver in the squall : all round, a stirring in the wilds. He feels the impulse in himself, though nature seems more animate.

The scent of birch is sweet when it has rained. He looks at delicate patterns formed of twigs, sprayed out above a mossy rock, tracing their outline like a child, wide-eyed.

Then stoops. He has found a dead hare. Taking a stick, he prods and pokes, investigates : its eyes clawed out, fur scattered everywhere. The whisky trickles round his mouth, as he laughs and wheezes to himself. 'Blood...' he smiles. 'Blood will have blood... Heh! Cradh! Cradh!'

He shambles on, determining for himself which way to take : smiling, or complaining with a scowl; winding through the fallen branches overgrown with sodden moss; cursing the wet weather, or amused by bleak remembrances; whisky dribbling from sore lips.

Occasionally he stops, head to one side, and listens to some cadence on the wind. As afternoon turns sombre and the grey sky reaches down, he rests like this more often; or he casts a morose glance across the broad expanse of moor - no sign yet of his coming, no news of his return.

He can hear the groan of the wind in the bending heather; can see the glancing light - tossed on lonely lochans far away - lapping and dappling in the dusk; but the clouds stream endless from the sea, with sheets of rain that wrap the slopes in mist... patches of gold swift-running through the twilight over the blown waste... dull cry of whaup on the grey moor, and the wind turning in haste.

As Cluny looks, he sees the sweep and splendour of the hills : this, an austere and beautiful land, with a wild charm, moody and dark. Its beauty, its sadness, reverberates.

O heart of Scotland at this turning time, wind turning silently over the loch, and life a departing! What will become of the land? Cluny will walk the edge of another winter by himself... await a return... await the greater turning. He is obdurate, and laughs at the ill-dark chaos fore and aft. 'Blow! Blow!' he cries, and bends his head into the rain.

A chill grey canopy is descending, enveloping the moor : shadows encroaching over the illimitable waste... spreading out to the distant lonely reaches - Lochaber, Knoydart, Kintail, and beyond. The night clouds of the north and east loom nearer, like some dark serpent wrapping itself around the whole of the world.

Below the branches, the peaty burn steals ceaselessly toward the moor. Flowing in and out of life, it mutters quiet soliloquys. And skulking there, among the trees, he is aware of others too - quiet ones who watch him pass. He knows their hushed chthonic presence, and shares a secret in the wild with preternatural visitors, who make elusive forays from the underworld, or from his own...

He has withdrawn so far, indeed - he seems so entered in and fey - it is almost like abduction. These strange people of the hill : they turn and mutter in his dreams. He'd let them bear him far away, under the earth, beyond the day. But turning, he casts a dour look back, and they have fled. They always do.

The winds are scourging the upper corries; the snow is descending from on high; and all the hillside growing dark. Who will keep watch over the land, where the children used to shout and play? Who will watch the bonnie land, with its lost people, its broken dreams? For the night will come deeper. Aye, the night will come deeper. Winter too : will scatter ice-particles over the lonely grave. Over, over the lonely grave.

Cluny slips away between the shadows of the trees, merging and disappearing. Out through the night, all life a turning in; the wind turning in haste and rising wild on the distant peaks; all life turning in toward inevitable dead winter.

And though, in this savage wilderness, the cry of children might seem far gone, yet it laps along the frontiers of his mind, and echoes still, in these abandoned woods... like a song, like a strange homecoming and sad farewell.