I SPENT the better part of my childhood peering out over the Bactrian humps of Jura and out, on to the island of Islay, where this week, US celebrity gunslinger Larysa Switlyk has been gunning down sheep, to general dismay. Reactions to the story and the images which have accompanied it have been heated. But the argument about what – precisely – is wrong with the American huntress’s trophy-hunting trip to the Inner Hebrides has felt less clear.

The objections have jumped from theme to theme. Is it legal? Is it moral? Is it tasteful? What will this kind of international coverage do to the image and precarious economy of the home of Laphroiag and Ardbeg anyway? What does it tell us about who owns Scotland, and the power they continue to wield in the country’s rural communities? What does it tell us about the law of the land?

These are all good questions. But undergirding much of the public debate on this in newspapers and on radio has been a much more basic, more visceral urban distaste for those who shake hands with death on a personal basis.

If you grow up in the kind of community where the word “guns” is generally followed by the phrase “a report has been made to the procurator fiscal,” this reaction is perhaps understandable.

But to casually generalise from this to all of Scotland’s rural communities – where guns are licensed, soberly-handled, by decent people as an ordinary working part of life – well, it just underscores the social distance which continues to separate many of Scotland’s rural communities from the political and media hubs which dominate discussion of their lives.

Let’s be careful about this. Rural communities aren’t monoliths either. Canvass the folk of Islay – or people staying on the other side of the water – and I’m sure you’ll encounter different views on hunting and guns, never mind the grinning Switlyk.

But in responding to legitimate concerns about the trigger-happy American this week, we’ve been treated to yet another wave of incurious metropolitan commentary, dripping with dumb incomprehension and stereotyping of just the kind of community I grew up in. And that’s vexing.

One of the most boring features of the social and cultural debate in this country is its insistence that the only authentic Scottish voice is west-coast, post-industrial, generally male, generally miserablist. I don’t mean to denigrate the importance of these perspectives. They deserve to be part of the conversation. But so too do the lives lived by folk who experience the world outside of the square forty miles between Glasgow and Edinburgh. But we – still – seem only rarely to hear their stories.

In the mid-Argyll of the 1990s, you didn’t need to look hard to see the skull beneath the skin of life. The green world was charged with both. As a kid, stoating about, you lived on intimate terms with animal life, and animal death.

I can still precisely picture the first – and only – time I caught the fog of a Scottish wildcat, and the only time I saw an osprey, perched inscrutably beside a loch, presumably pondering a fish tea. We caught the ebb and play of a pod of dolphins, racing each other down the coast. Saw the magnitude of a golden eagle, unfurled.

Even the everyday creatures of Kintyre graced the place with a kind of magic, lightly dusting even the most familiar landscape with the constant possibility of the unexpected moment, as an unfamiliar shape cut itself out from the sky, or a shadow detached itself from the treeline.

Picking carefully through the claustrophobic deadwood of browning pine needles, the close air could suddenly be interrupted by the noise and motion of a sparrow hawk, screaming through the boughs. Some wee burd was done for, you reckoned, but your heart couldn’t help knocking a couple of extra beats at that flash of yellow, at those eyes.

Even the forest floor had its frissons. You’d turn up deadly toadstools under the leaf-load, with names calculated to fire the juvenile imagination: fly agaric, death cap, destroying angel. The stuff of a witch’s brew. Death, sprouting before your very eyes.

The coastline squirmed with soprano choirs of oyster-catchers. Huffy seals, sunbathing at 6 degrees centigrade, as undiscouraged as a Scottish tourists. Even the familiar silhouette of the stubby buzzards, perched on telegraph poles like pensioners waiting for the next bus service, lent the weeds and the wilderness a kind of constant collective attentiveness which you felt contemplated you as a kid.

But all this life was double-threaded with death. And I’m not sure most urban weans in Scotland know anything similar.

The sea coughed up a steady supply of marooned jellyfish amid the blue tangle of fishermen’s twine and old bottles. The occasional minke whale snagged on the beaches which margined Loch Caolisport, pulling after them a screeching cloud of hungry birdlife.

Sometimes you’d encounter a pensionable seal which had swum its last length, or a daft sheep which decided to go spelunking with fatal consequences.

Summer meant flattened toads crisping on the tarmac, and autumn and winter meant it was shooting season, and the air would be full of the Catherine wheels of falling pheasants, and the jagged rockets of woodcock exploding from the underbrush.

With the piercing logic only the very young are capable of, my wee sister convinced herself that the lady of the manor’s principle function in life was to wander the single track roads of the estate, picking up roadkill, as every-time she encountered the landowner’s wife in her wax proof jacket and headscarf, she was brandishing some kind of dead bird.

All this was part of life. I don’t think it made us psychopaths, or emotionally dead to the living world. Exactly the opposite.

This intense emotional involvement with the animal life around us was crystallised – for me – in the sombre, responsible outlook of many of the gamekeepers with which I grew up.

I don’t meant to suggest they were all saintly. Some were anything but. We know too many Scottish landowners set their gamekeepers, through a nod and a wink, criminally to kill off beautiful birds protected by law.

BUT speaking for the best of them, they brought a moral seriousness to their work. That meant respecting the animal life it was – often – their duty to bring to an end. This perspective is – I think – characteristic of plenty of rural people in Scotland who don’t cut about in full tweeds, or own great tracks of land, or vote Tory. And it is a perspective you hardly ever see articulated.

But Alastair McIntosh gave it voice this week, on BBC Good Morning Scotland’s thought for the day. “In Scotland, most stalkers have an ethic,” he said, reflecting on the Islay story. “As a one-time stalker’s ponyboy, I think of Tommy, who’d spend all night out on the hill to track a wounded animal. Or Iain, who accords to every kill the respect he gives a funeral.” Thinking back, I can remember the kind of people folk McIntosh is referring to.

His problem with the Larysa Switlyk? “A gamekeeper said to me this hardcore hunting from America lowers the threshold of respect for animals. This is not about the bambification of nature. This is about decorum. A quality of soul. We hurt ourselves if we treat killing lightly. We too are part of the natural ecology. And that’s a lesson from our finest stalkers, whose veneration for the deer can edge towards the spiritual.”

For me, that’s exactly right. Call it legacy Presbyterianism. Call it basic decency. We hurt ourselves if we treat killing lightly. But we also do so, by making savage generalisations about folk like Tommy, like Iain, like the countless rural Scots who love nature, and have the courage to confront it in both realms. In life, and

in death.