The agroforestry talk had included poems about belonging, photos of Mangalitza pigs in woodland pasture. Now, on our way home, a saffron half-moon swims between cloud.
‘Do you hear wolves at night?’ asks Soheila from the passenger seat, looking up at the October sky. I dip the headlights for an oncoming car, take a moment to let her question calibrate.
‘Do you mean here, in Scotland?’ I’m checking this isn’t a metaphorical question.
‘Yes.’
That levity in her voice, always there, despite everything; Soheila’s family – Syrians living in Lebanon – now on the move once again.
‘We shot the last wolf here in Scotland in 1680.’ The moon is casting itself into Loch Awe, keeping pace with the car. ‘Do you hear wolves in Lebanon?’
‘Yes. Wolves, and hyenas – the national animal of Lebanon, I don’t know why.’ She laughs.
‘Have you been hearing the red deer – the stags – roaring?’ I ask
‘I don’t think so, I don’t know what they sound like.’
‘They bellow, it’s beautiful and eerie and extraordinary.’
‘Ah, I heard a strange sound the other night, I thought it was a bull on the common grazing, so, maybe that was a stag.’
I nod, put my hand into the bag of wine gums between us. Chemical Lemon hits my tongue.
‘Do you have deer in Lebanon?
‘Yes, we have deers there, maybe some relatives of yours? There’s a word for them, they are like your deers but different.’
‘Gazelle?’
‘Hah, that’s it, ghazāl. In Syria we say a woman is as beautiful as a ghazāl. It’s not like the deers here, there are not so many.’
Soheila offers me water from her bottle, I shake my head. She drinks, goes back to scrolling on her phone. I can see the pale flicker of her fingers even though I’m focusing on the road ahead, on avoiding potholes.
Soheila’s wolf question is quietly unravelling me. This prickle of tears – is it to do with innocence, or possibility, or all the different ways of sensing a place.
‘We don’t eat animals that eat other animals,’ she’s back with the farmer and his woolly pigs, ‘or fish that eat other fish, and any animals with claws, we don’t eat.’
Too late dipping my lights, we get flashed at by a Graham’s Dairy van. For a moment I’m bewildered by the blazing dark, by hunted-down gazelle, by wolves driven to silence. I blink myself back to the car, to Soheila’s easy presence, her voice again.
‘For example, we don’t eat eagles.’
I accelerate with the sudden urge to outrun the moon.
Leonie Charlton
Leonie Charlton lives in Argyll. Her travel memoir Marram was published by Sandstone Press in 2020, and in 2021 her poetry pamphlet Ten Minutes of Weather Away was published by Cinnamon Press. She is currently working on a PhD with UHI looking at Scotland’s deer debate through creative practice research.