She pads her way down the hillside as the sky lightens, pushing through clumps of heather and blaeberry. The heather is dry now in late summer, and releases a cloud of honey-sweet dust. Her whiskers twitch. But she can detect another smell from lower down the slope, something damper and richer, the smell of somewhere more secluded, where she wants to be.
A flurry of downhill speed and she’s in a thick understory beneath young birches and rowans, near the beginning of the pines. Something has snagged her front right paw. She raises it, licks carefully between each claw. Bracken and tall grasses envelop her. When the sun is up, the trees cast brindled shade, merging with the pattern of her coat. She settles down, wraps herself round with her thick, banded tail. She will stay here for a while.
When the shadows lengthen she wakes and is off again, weaving along the forest edge. She moves stealthily, listening for faint scratchings, watching for tiny movements, homing in on the small creatures she has learned to catch and eat.
She’s found a burn, which has been flowing steadily all summer. When she hunches her shoulders and lowers her head to drink, she’s aware of the band around her neck, like a circle of thick skin but not as flexible, and without fur. Sometimes it gets in the way when she wants to scratch. But she’s growing used to it, and much of the time she forgets it’s there.
The seasons change, the hours of daylight shrink, the nights are colder. She’s still warm in her thick striped coat, but the ground cover is sparser now and small prey animals are harder to find. Her last few meals have been carrion.
Emerging from the pines as daylight fades, she places a tentative paw on a new kind of ground, a straight flat surface made of tiny stones. It feels alien and unwelcoming. She withdraws back into the trees, but curiosity lures her on and she follows the edge of the forest beside the track.
New sounds reach her from far ahead, a faint rumble almost like a purr, a muted thud, and something calling – perhaps an animal call, but not an animal she knows. Or perhaps she does. The call resonates deep within her memory, unsettling but somehow not really to be feared. She senses water ahead, and as the trees thin out she’s walking on soft sand by a loch that stretches away into the distance. The sounds are closer now, and there are new, enticing smells. When it’s fully dark, she skirts around unfamiliar block-like structures and tracks the smells to a cache of discarded meaty bones in a flimsy black covering, which tears apart easily, and she eats.
The year turns and the days lengthen. This is a good place to be, as long as she keeps away from those huge rumbling objects that can move at speed. She retreats deep into the forest by day, but she’s back beside the loch at dusk. There are plentiful remains to scavenge, and she’s discovered a new source of food: fat waddling creatures that frequent the shore, easy to catch unless they make a dash for deeper water or clumsily take flight.
She finds a favourite vantage point on top of one of the structures. Some evenings she hunkers down here, alert and watchful but safely out of reach. She’s grown accustomed now to those strangely resonant calls, but sometimes they come too close and she rises, spine arched, hissing, drawing back her lips to bare her long, sharp canines. Then she turns, jumps down, and slips away into the forest.
The seasons advance again: another autumn, another winter. And then something disturbing happens. She’s following a strong smell of something good to eat, half-concealed in the undergrowth. She edges closer, takes a bite, and is suddenly aware of barriers on all sides of her. She tries to turn, hissing in fury, but her movements are contained. She freezes, and waits. She hears those dimly remembered calls again and senses large creatures around her, but too near, much too near.
It’s quickly over. Released, she races for the safety of dense scrub. She’s unhurt but shaken and confused. She calms herself with a thorough wash, licking a paw and rubbing it across her face, drawing her tongue along her haunches. And something is different. She can lower her head more flexibly now. She lifts a back leg and scratches herself under her chin, claws moving freely through her fur. The thick band around her neck is no longer there.
Something shifts in her perception of her world. The days are starting to lengthen again. Sunlight filters down through the pines and the understory is thickening, buds beginning to gleam on winter-bare twigs. She senses the forest coming alive, and with it a new excitement. The lochside with its easy pickings is not the only place where she could be. Her world feels vast, inviting, an infinite patchwork of close-grown pinewood, open hillsides, scattered birches and dense bracken, with weaving pathways that she can make her own. She turns away from the loch and pads off through the trees, heading now in a new direction.
*
Callie is one of 46 captive-bred Scottish wildcats released in the Cairngorms since 2023, in a project led by the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland to save this iconic animal from extinction. For nearly two years, Callie stayed around Glenmore, on the shores of Loch Morlich, frequenting the campsite and Youth Hostel grounds. She seemed so attached to this territory that the project team removed her GPS radio collar. But she then confounded expectations and moved away. Trail cameras have since shown her in the company of captive-bred males from the same project, and then with her own litter of wild-born kittens.
Lead image: A photo of Callie caught by a camera trap © Royal Zoological Society of Scotland – Saving Wildcats