IN THE FINAL MOMENTS BEFORE I SHOOT him, the stag stands tall, roaring a warning cry to other beasts to keep away from him and his harem of hinds. His head thrown back, he looks strong and proud, and his deep bellows echo eerily through the Angus gle
n, just as the light is beginning to fail.
A stalker and I have been lying flat, hidden in the heather for more than two hours, with me watching the final drama of his life through the telescopic sight of a bolt action .243 high-velocity rifle.
At one point the stag stood up but his body was partially obscured by a ridge, which bought him extra time. He sat down and dozed after his exertions with the hinds, behaviour you would expect to see at the start of the rutting season. As he slept in a rare patch of sunshine, all I could see were the tantalising points of his antlers gently moving this way and that.
Again he stood, but the random angle he presented once more prolonged his life – a bullet fired then would have severely injured him, leaving him wandering the hills in agony for days if the stalker could not put him out of his misery. He moved out of view.
Deer rutting and stag shooting season, Invermark Estate, Glen Esk, A Red Deer Stag with a hind.
Then the moment comes. The magnificent beast stands once more, roars twice, and although still at a slight angle, the pale target area of his body containing his vital organs, just beyond his mane, is exposed.
Andy Malcolm, the stalker who has taught me how to use the rifle, hisses at me to shoot. There are only a few valuable seconds when distance, angle and nature are on the side of the hunter. At any moment man can be betrayed by his scent, a tiny inadvertent movement or the sheer superiority of the stag's innate sense of another's presence.
I focus intently, summoning up every ounce of concentration, aiming where I know the stag's beating heart to be, and gently squeeze the trigger. The beast seems to stand stock still for a second or two, then rears up and falls. The moment is captured by Scotsman photographer Ian Rutherford who, along with the ghillies and the rest of our party, has endured seven arduous hours of stalking the herd leading up to this moment. There is no margin for error and a day's hard graft can be lost in a second.
The noise from the rifle is like a sonic boom and the blast ricochets off the side of the mountains, causing a flurry of avian activity as a pair of grouse, and other birds that had nearly betrayed our intentions earlier, flee the heather for the air in fear for their lives.
Andy stands up and strides swiftly across the moorland to make sure the stag is dead, and that he has been killed cleanly.
It's rare to find yourself alone in such a wilderness in the modern world. I absorb the heavy silence and look across the moorland to where the stag fell nearly 200 yards away and my instinctive first thought is: "Sorry."
Since then people have asked what it is like to kill a stag – the Monarch of the Glen, the iconic symbol of Scotland. At the actual moment of killing, there was nothing but an icy calm. In the minutes afterwards, however, I felt the unfairness of it; that, while my heart was beating rapidly, that of the stag, which was entirely innocent, had been stopped. The truth is, killing a stag is a tremendous responsibility, an almost inconceivably hard day's work and not for the faint-hearted.
The first question from the ghillies who catch up with us concerns where the bullet went in. They want to know that the aim was accurate. There is a tremendous amount of respect for the stags, in life and death. I had asked a young ghillie why he wore a shirt and tie along with his tweeds to go out on the hills. "It's out of respect to the stags. And the place, and the people who come here too, I suppose," he answered.
Looking at the stag up close, his eyes are wide open, his bloodied tongue hangs at the side of his mouth and I can see his body is warm. He is a nine-pointer – meaning there are nine sharp points on his antlers, and his teeth reveal he is about eight years old.
His dark, ruby red blood spills out on to the heather as Andy begins the gralloching – slitting him open and leaving his innards on the hill for other animals to eat. The blooding ceremony, where Andy smears my face with the stag's warm blood to mark a first kill, may seem barbaric to some, but there is no machismo behaviour involved and it seems an elemental thing to do. My smile in the photograph is sheer relief that the stag hadn't suffered.
The ghillies use their radios to summon trainee gamekeeper Angus Marshall, who that morning had been given the task of rounding up Fergus, a white native Highland pony known as a garron. Fergus is to carry the stag down the mountain because the steep terrain of the Burn of Tarsan is inaccessible to vehicles. In a short time, the stag is roped on to Fergus's back in preparation for the downward journey.
The annual stag cull, from the beginning of July to 20 October, is necessary to stop the rest of the herd starving. The oldest and the weakest beasts are taken out first. To date, no-one has come up with a workable alternative. It is not possible to sprinkle the Scottish Highlands and forests with contraceptives, or "put something in their food" when they graze on heather, wild herbs and berries.
This time of year is also the rutting season – a unique, joyful and sensuous time when nature programmes the stags to be at their most virile and battle it out for females. While the stags live separately from the hinds all year, the first frosts, usually at the start of October, seem to set off a physical reaction in the females which attracts the stags for the next month or so.
Jamie, Lord Dalhousie, who I meet on the Invermark estate near Brechin, says: "This is the time the stags stop eating, they run around roaring and only think about sex until seen off. It's quite like Friday night in Glasgow. The rest of the year they like to live in a gentlemen's club and don't go near the ladies. It's absolutely spellbinding watching deer carrying on."
While the "gentlemen's club" is one analogy, the stags' antics also strongly resemble raucous groups of lads on clubbing holidays to Ayia Napa or Magaluf whose mission, as well as excessive alcohol consumption and brawling, includes sourcing "babes", before staggering back to their holiday apartments.
Frank Fraser Darling, a conservationist and author of A Herd of Red Deer, who spent a number of years in the 1930s living in the hills in the West Highlands observing the herds, reported how "exhausted" stags allowed each other safe passage up to the hills (equivalent to holiday flats?) to sleep off ("chill"?) after their encounters with the hinds, before returning to the battleground (nightclubs?).
I ask Andy if he has any nicknames for some of the stags that appear year after year. "There was one magnificent beast which always kept all the hinds for himself and wouldn't let any of the others near, ever. This went on and on. His nickname? Well, it would have to be The Bastard," he says ruefully.
Living in perhaps a more egalitarian setting than the hinds, I enquire if all the females do indeed get sex during what is, after all, also their annual opportunity for a good time.
Andy, now becoming slightly uncomfortable, replies somewhat primly: "The hinds 'get covered' by the stags and there's the chance that some might get left out. He can't take them by force but it may take him three or four attempts."
So far the day has brought forth sex and killing – but the triptych would be incomplete without the mention of money and the millions of pounds deer generate for the Scottish economy.
Colonel Bill Bewsher, vice-chairman of the Association of Deer Management Groups, representing the interests of 70 groups across Scotland, says: "The deer industry is worth £105 million to the Scottish economy, ranging from jobs on the estates to tourism and venison for sale. It is vitally important in such remote areas."
Lord Dalhousie, whose land has around 2,000 deer, with culls taking approximately 100 stags and 300 hinds annually, puts it thus: "This is a festival time in the Highlands. What pays the wages up here is sport. There are a few farms but it is sport which supports our six keepers and a trainee and one half-time. The school is dependent on the keepers' children.
"At different times of the year we have grouse beaters and pony boys. It's our harvest time – people have met their future wives here. All of this is not always appreciated politically."
A week of deer stalking costs around £12,000; grouse shooting is around £60,000, and the proceeds of both are reinvested in the estate. For those whose preconceptions have been formed from watching The Tudors or observing the soft lifestyle of deer in wildlife parks, the demanding physicality of culling and the sheer numbers of the beasts in Scotland needs to be fully understood. It is notoriously difficult to get an exact headcount for deer, but a stab in the dark figure from the Deer Commission for Scotland puts it at around 450,000. Other estimates say that it is nearer 750,000.
Approximately 100,000 are culled each year, with figures for 2006-2007 showing that these include 25,018 stags and 27,636 red hinds. Deer management groups carry out an annual count in late March or early April and agree cull targets leading to a "viable, sustainable stock of deer on the hill".
Lord Dalhousie's six gamekeepers each have their own beat on the 55,000-acre estate, which encompasses some of the most dramatic Highland scenery imaginable, including Mount Keen – the most easterly Munro.
Andy, who is also a keeper, is responsible for Glen Effock, which includes Loch Lee. We cross part of this beat during our day on the hill. He says: "Deer have learned the best places to sit where they can see all around them, and where they don't they can get the wind. It's not a coincidence. It's a hard lesson if they get it wrong."
We climb for a couple of hours up steep heather moorland until Andy stops, listening to the stags roaring, and explains that this is a "crucial part of the day". "All sorts of things come into the equation – the mist is halfway down the hills and the wild deer could be anywhere."
He spots a large herd just across the glen and lies back in the heather with his telescope, searching for a mature "shootable beast". He sees a large stag but says shooting it would be "like shooting your prize bull" and that the best stags are kept for breeding purposes.
Poor visibility defeats his efforts and we continue on for another hour or so by the Burn of Doune before reaching another area plentiful with stags. But this time there are sheep in the way and, just as Andy is deciding we'll approach the deer from the left, there's a sudden movement.
He turns quickly and says urgently: "Look, get down everyone, down, down."
A wounded stag, with what could be a broken back leg, is trying to run across the hillside 100 yards ahead. "It could quite possibly have been gored by a stag, not necessarily shot," he says.
The tripod for the rifle is set up but the stag evades the bullet. Radio messages are immediately sent to the other stalkers to be on the lookout for the injured stag.
Eventually Andy says: "I can see the beast" – he has decided on the one to be shot. The problem is that it is still out of sight and approaching it means we are going to be moving in full sight of deer until we reach it. It will require a "very stealthy approach" and he signals for Ian and myself to follow his lead and crawl SAS-style on our hands and knees and then on our bellies through black peat hags.
As in any high-tension situation, there is humour. Ed, one of Andy's terriers, stops dead, his backside in my face, and refuses to budge. I prod his flank but there is no reaction. I place my hand across his bottom and gently shove, concerned he might bark and ruin the day.
Andy, sensing the convoy has stopped, signals to Ed, who immediately trots forward.
The day ends when the dead stag is transferred to the larder – a butchering operation on the estate. His heart and lungs are removed and lymph nodes examined because the meat needs to be declared fit for human consumption. His details are entered in a log book along with who shot him.
Christian Nissen, managing director of Highland Game in Dundee, who last year bought more than 100 stags from the estate, says: "It is only when you've actually been out on the hill and done the job hands-on yourself that you realise how much effort has gone into it."
We leave the larder and step out into the pitch dark October night, while Andy and Angus perform the final tasks of the day.
Now, like me, you know how our beautiful stags are killed.
