The high life

摘要

The water in the Alpine lake is so cold it snatches my breath away. I plunge beneath its glassy surface one last time and then emerge, blinking, to sit on a sun-warmed rock. The small valley that cradles the tarn is quiet. Its steep grassy slopes arepeppered with bright flowers, like freeze-framed fireworks: yellow vetch, electric-blue gentian, pale saxifrage and hot-pink alpenrose. Far beyond the water in front of me glint distant snowfields. There's something dreamlike about the Alps in summer, especially in good weather in places like this, a couple of thousand metres above sea level, when colours intensify and the air shimmers. A loud, high-pitched, whistling call shatters the silence, then another, its echo reverberating from a boulder field that spills down towards one shore of the lake. I look up - not at the rocks, but at the blue, blue sky. The whistle is a warning of danger from above. I don't speak fluent marmot, but it could mean "Eagle!" No bird of prey glides overhead this time. YetI trust the judgment of the creature that raised the alarm. Since the end of the last ice age, orperhaps even earlier, thousands of generations of Alpine marmots have been using sound to communicate efficiently with each other across the mountain meadows and rock piles that are their favoured haunts.