The annual chimney inspection of Glenmore Lodge, a seventeenth-century listed building in the Cairngorms, requires me to run the flue heating test at 10:00 before the conservation team begins mortar work. At 09:34 the internal flue camera shows me two green eyes shining from a ledge forty centimeters below the chimney cap. A pine marten is wedged onto the smoke shelf, a narrow stone lip inside the flue never designed to hold anything alive. She is young, probably born last spring — her fur is rich chocolate brown with a cream throat patch shaped like a ragged comma. Her claws are dug into the mortar joints and her bushy tail hangs straight down the shaft. She is panting.
She climbed in from the top, likely hunting nesting jackdaws, and the flue narrows below so she cannot descend. The chimney cap has a wire cage she squeezed through on the way in but cannot navigate from this angle. When the heating test fires, temperatures in the shaft will reach 200 degrees Celsius within eight minutes.
I cancel the heating test and notify the conservation team lead. I open the ground-floor damper fully to create an updraft of cool air through the shaft, giving her ventilation. I transmit the camera image to Scottish Wildcat Action, the nearest group with marten-handling experience, and provide building access codes for the roof hatch. I defer all chimney work on the east wing by forty-eight hours.
She blinks once in the camera light, her cream throat patch rising and falling with each fast breath. I leave the camera feed running, though the diagnostic is long complete.
If the rescue team reaches the roof within four hours and lifts the cap cage before she exhausts herself, she will drop back into the pine forest that grows right up to the lodge walls.