The 28-year-old was already something of a rare breed – a female gamekeeper with a penchant for designer clothing and sparkly lip gloss. But on this particular day she was about to become something else. Lunch.
After shooting a stag on the Scottish Isle of Rum, she’d expertly disembowelled the beast before dragging it down the hillside to wait for someone to take her back to base.
Lying in the heather in the autumn sunshine, she drifted off to sleep and who knows what woke her. Perhaps it was a flicker of light. Maybe some kind of ancient and instinctive sense of danger.
Whatever it was, she awoke just in time to see a large golden eagle swooping down, seconds away from grabbing her torso between its outstretched talons. Her piercing scream and instinctive waving of arms saw the predator off and, unsurprisingly, Portia Simpson never fell asleep in the heather again.
Fending off an attack by an eagle is a riveting way to start a memoir of how a woman, and a townie at that, followed her dream of living on a remote island, killing some things, nurturing others, and fighting for her right to do so in a profession still seen as a male domain.
Her path from tomboy child with a collection of pet snails to her fight to become the first woman to become a gamekeeper and wildlife manager in Scotland is at times surprising and, more often than not, hilarious.
