Sightlines

by Kathleen Jamie

  Jill smiled. ‘Could have been people here, or they could have come and gone . . . more than once.’

  ‘Long periods of abandonment . . .’

  ‘Maybe centuries . . .’

  ‘Perhaps that’s what this is,’ I said, meaning that perhaps someday in the future, when unimaginable change has come to the life we know, a few acres far out in the Atlantic might be pressed into service again.

  * * *

  Many people, including the Stornoway coastguard, knew we were on Rona, but nonetheless, as we cleared the bothy on our last morning and prepared to leave, we all three kept glancing at the horizon. Nothing was said, but only when the boat appeared, a steady gleam in the southeast, did we relax. When it did appear, that was our signal to move. The skipper wouldn’t want to hang about, so we began to heave all the seabags, sleeping bags, gas bottles, tape recorders and notebooks back down the hillside to the geo, where black rocks tilted to the waves.

  Seals were basking there again—they’d watched us come, they’d watch us go, but the rocks we stepped from were different now. They had a wild glamour about them, as though sprayed with an invisible graffiti tag: ‘Killer whale was here’.

  Those killer whales. Perhaps the eye has a memory of its own. One day, a few weeks after we’d returned from Rona, when the sense of light and spaciousness was beginning to wane, an email arrived from a biologist called Andy Foote.

  Dr Foote worked then with the North Atlantic Killer Whale ID project, which was based at Aberdeen University. Out of interest and a sort of public-spiritedness, we’d sent him photographs of the Rona animals. By magnifying the pictures and by comparing nicks and scars on their fins and backs with pictures held in stock, Dr Foote concluded that, yes, this party of killer whales was the very same five as had often been seen around Shetland the previous summer. When, from the cliffs of Noss, I’d watched a fin appear out of the water, what I’d seen was a puzzling, six-foot, slightly crooked black line, as if, as I thought then, someone had drawn a stroke with a pencil. A year and 180 miles separated the two encounters, but when, on Rona, I’d focused the binoculars again on a stately, slightly wonky fin, and thought hello, chances are it was indeed the self-same animal.

  Dr Foote wrote: ‘This is only the second set of photos of this party of killer whales on the west coast of Scotland, so it’s a useful bit of data.’

  A bit of data to him, but to me it felt like an initiation. ‘Believe what you see,’ say the eye-trained naturalists. Aye, right. Most of the time you’ll sound like a idiot. But once in a blue moon you might be right. You just might be making the same journeys as these other creatures, all of us alive at the same time on the same planet.

  * * *

  Tonight, at home, with the blinds closed against the winter dark, the shipping forecast gives ‘. . . increasing severe gale force nine later’. But that’s nothing. Some storm waves are so big they sweep clean over the peninsula of Fianius.

  I’d like to witness that. To see Rona in winter, just for a few short days; to hear the sea roar and spend long nights under the wheel of the stars. You’d soon know why the houses were dug down deep into the earth.

  The seals will be there, but the birds will be flown. The Leach’s petrels, new colonisers of the village, will be away far down into the Southern Atlantic. The cliffs will be bare, too, the puffins and guillemots dispersed out to sea. Skuas likewise, all headed south. As for the crossbills, heaven knows. One day, and with one mind, they must simply up sticks and go, twittering over the waves.

  THE STORM PETREL

  WE FOUND IT ON RONA, the very day we’d arrived, and in keeping it maybe I imagined I could bring home something of the sky and spaciousness of that island, at least for a while.

  It wasn’t the dead bird we saw, lying on the turf, not at first, but a tiny wink of metal. I said, ‘Look, what’s that?’ and Stuart replied, ‘Storm petrel. They breed here. But ringed—that’s a real find.’

  So here it is on my desk, in a polythene sample bag. An ex-storm petrel, just a clump of desiccated feather and bone, with a tiny ring on its hooked-up leg. When you report a ringed bird it’s called a ‘recovery’, but this one was beyond hope of that.

  My five-volume wartime Handbook to British Birds says that storm petrels are ‘essentially pelagic’; they ‘never occur inland except as storm-driven waifs’. That’s the kind of language they inspire. There’s a lovely poem by Richard Murphy, called ‘Stormpetrel,’ which begins: ‘Gipsy of the sea / In winter wambling over scurvy whaleroads / Jooking in the wake of ships . . .’

  At only six inches long, dark brown with a white rump, somewhat like a house martin, you’d think storm petrels too small to jook anywhere at all, never mind in storms, but they manage fine, and come ashore only to breed, in crannies between stones, on islands and cliffs at the ocean’s edge.

  So the bird is small and the ring on its leg even smaller. Back at the bothy we had to peer at it down the wrong end of binoculars, to make out the number and this terse address. ‘British Museum, London S.W.7.’

  The rings on other birds, bigger birds, gulls and suchlike, often have space for the word ‘inform’. ‘Inform British Museum’, they say, which makes it sound as though the bird in question had transgressed somehow, had jumped parole. The ‘inform’ makes the bird-ringing project sound imperious and Edwardian, which it was—Edwardian, anyway, because bird ringing began in 1909. But the storm petrel’s leg is so twig-­thin, there is no room for an ‘inform’.

  A few days after we got home I did contact the British Museum, via its website. There are boxes to fill in:

  Ring number: 2333551

  Type of bird (if known) Storm petrel.

  Sex of bird (if known) Unknown.

  Age of bird (if known) Unknown.

  Was the bird dead or alive? Dead.

  Recently (one week)? Long dead. Desiccated corpse.

  What had happened to the bird (hit by a car, oiled, etc.) Possibly predated.

  Where found? Scotland. Island of North Rona.

  Where, more precisely? The north-pointing peninsula called Fianuis.

  When found? Early July.

  I pressed ‘submit’, and the form went off on its own mysterious flight, leaving me with the questions not asked:

  Smell of bird?—mysterious, musky, like an unguent.

  Where found, even more precisely? Under an earth­-fast rock, on a patch of gravel, almost at the point where the vegetation expires altogether, and the waves pound ashore.

  What kind of day? A lively, companionable summer’s afternoon, with a sun bright enough to glint on a tiny metal bead, and make us notice it, the only man-made object in all that place.

  * * *

  It was the twentieth century before it was ascertained that birds do actually migrate; it seemed so improbable that swallows, for example, flew all the way to southern Africa. They obviously vanished in autumn and reappeared in late spring, but some folks thought they just hid, or hibernated in the bottom of ponds. Gilbert White frets around the subject of migration; he hedges his bets. When he was writing this letter of 1769, all options were open:

  ‘When I used to rise in a morning last autumn, and see the swallows and martins clustering on the chimnies and thatch of the neighbouring cottages, I could not help being touched with a secret delight, mixed with some degree of mortification: with delight, to observe with how much ardour and punctuality those poor little birds obeyed the strong impulse towards migration, or hiding, imprinted on their minds by their great Creator; and with some degree of mortification, when I reflected that, after all our pains and enquiries, we are yet not quite certain to what regions they do migrate; and are still farther embarrassed to find some do not actually migrate at all.’

  ‘Hybernaculum’ is his word for the winter quarters a swallow repairs to, but where was this hybernaculum? His other words were interesting, too. ‘Embarrassment’ and ‘mortification’ almost suggest that the Enlightenment just then dawning, all that science
and discovery, might have been driven not by the will to master and possess nature, but out of chagrin. As human beings, our ignorance was beginning to shame us, because we didn’t know the least things, like where swallows went in winter.

  * * *

  The British Museum passes the forms on to The British Trust for Ornithology, who organise bird-ringing in the UK. So in due course a computer printout arrived from the BTO. It informed me that the storm petrel had been ringed twenty-four years previously, not on Rona, where we’d found it, but 170 miles northeast of there, on the island of Yell.

  Yell—I knew that place. It’s one of the northernmost Shetland Islands. Only the summer before I’d been there with my friend Tim. We’d seen killer whales off the cliffs at Noss, and made a road trip north via the chain of ferries, passing farms and small towns and the oil terminal at Sullom Voe. We’d traversed Yell, then taken another ferry to the farther island of Unst and made our way to see the gannetry at Muckle Flugga.

  All that was one place, stored in one corner in my mind, but Rona was wholly different. Different direction, different culture: uninhabited, remote and Hebridean. As soon as I read the letter, though, a connection shot between them. Suddenly they were linked by a flight-path, straight as an arrow. I thought I knew my maps, but not as the storm petrel does.

  Perhaps if you were some sort of purist, if you carried a torch for ‘the wild’ and believed in a pristine natural world over and beyond us, you might consider it an intrusion to catch a bird, and make it wear a ring or a tag. Perhaps you’d consider that their man-made burden violates them in a way. I admit there was something uncomfortable about the metal ring, soldiering on while the bird’s corpse withered. But when I got the chart out, traced the route, measured the distance, and understood that yes, of course, on a southwest bearing, you could swoop via certain channels from the North Sea through to the Atlantic, on small dark wings, it was because this one ringed bird had extended my imagination. The ring showed only that it was wedded to the sea and, if anything, the scale of its journeyings made it seem even wilder than before.

  * * *

  It was ringing which proved that swallows indeed flew south, and did not stupefy in the bottom of ponds, and ringing, too, which showed that storm petrels do the same. They migrate from Shetland or Rona or their many other breeding places, down to the vast pelagic hybernaculum off Namibia and South Africa. A few come to grief; become small, washed-up bodies on a faraway shore, some bearing a return address. An address! Ludicrous thing for a storm petrel to carry. ‘The Ocean’ would be their address, save for those weeks when they’re obliged to creep between stones to breed.

  So that’s why I keep the bird’s remains, here in this room, my own hybernaculum—if only for a while. It’s just a tuft of feathers in a polythene bag, a tiny skull, and with that silvery ring above its shrunken, black webbed foot. I keep it for the intimacy, and for the petrel smell: fusty, musky, suggestive of a distant island in summer. And I keep it out of sheer respect because, in life, this ounce of a bird had made twenty-four return trips the length of the Atlantic. Twenty-four at least—which is not bad at all, for a waif, wambling.

  VOYAGER, CHIEF

  Voyager, chief of the pelagic world,

  you brought with you the myth

  of another country, dimly remembered

  —STANLEY KUNITZ

  SOME TIME AGO, long before I’d discovered the Hvalsalen in Bergen Museum, I found the vertebra of a whale. It was on the low turf of an uninhabited Hebridean island, just up from the beach. It was perfectly bleached, and some yellow sea pansies had taken advantage of the shelter it afforded; they bloomed within the oval where the spinal cord would have passed.

  Finders keepers. I dare say the pansies had first claim but I picked up the bone anyway, intending to carry it home, a splendid thing, part anatomy, part sculpture. I still have it, and from it all my interest in whalebones developed. It’s not big; more than likely it had belonged to a minke, which are small as whales go. It’s about fifteen inches across at its widest, but heavy, like an engine part, with three smooth, propeller-like vanes emanating from a oval hub and, above the solid hub, the hole, diameter of my forearm.

  To get home, the bone and I had to cross Glasgow by subway. It was strapped to the outside of my rucksack—or I was strapped to it. That amused me—being lashed to a portion of whale, diving from the traffic-loud street down escalators into the tunnels below. It’s in my attic room now, a sign of the pelagic world.

  I suppose I’d always half known that there is a whale presence in these islands. Or, put the whale’s way, these islands are a surprising, sometimes disastrous presence in the sea. Since I found my own bone, I’d began to keep an eye out for whalebones deposited around the landscape. I mean, erected there deliberately, not just washed up. I’d kept an eye out in private houses and gardens or, occasionally, in old-fashioned small town museums. I’d begun to notice that around the sea’s edge, and surprisingly far inland, there are whale relics: melancholy beautiful bones.

  In the centre of Edinburgh, for example, at the park called the Meadows, there stand the jawbones of two great baleen whales, set upright to form a double arch. They’re in a poor state now. Mouldered and corroded after a long century of chimney and exhaust fumes, they’re much the same texture and same drab colour as the trunks of the nearby trees whose branches overshadow them. They vault over a footpath popular with students and workers on their way downtown—heading to the office through the jaws of the Leviathan—but although the footpath is called Jawbone Walk, the bones are pretty much ignored. One way to make people look at them is to stand there looking yourself, but you soon feel idiotic, and maybe folk are right to disregard them; they’re just city curios, a bit of Victorian Gothic, like angels on tombstones. Except—they’re not stone. They’re real, animal, anatomical, announcements of the natural.

  There’s the story (of course, there’s always a story) of how these huge bones came to be stranded in a city park, out of sight of the sea—it concerns girls, and knitting, but such stories are not the whole story. The whales’ own narratives are unrecorded, but given that these bones date from Victorian times, the whale stories don’t take much guessing.

  The human side of the story is this: the jawbones have been in Edinburgh since 1886, when they arrived south from the Shetland islands to form part of a great exhibition—the International Exhibition of Science, Art and Industry. For six months the flat grassy Meadows were filled with the confidence of Empire, with grand halls and bandstands. There were trams, and life-size model houses, and demonstrations of the latest technologies: mining, sugar-refining, paper-making.

  There were ‘Women’s Industries’, too, glove-making for example, and a show of Shetland and Fair Isle knitting. This is what the whalebones were for: the Shetlanders had brought them along to form the structure for their stall. (A ‘picturesque tent’, one reporter called it.) Under this canopy young women from the islands gave demonstrations of knitting. Relays of girls sailed south, six at a time, ‘buxom, sun-browned, modest-­looking’, and they sat in their stall and knitted all day. One photograph survives. It’s in the Shetland museum, and it shows the girls and their chaperone seated at their work while over their heads the whales’ jawbones rear in a pointed arch, swagged and veiled with fishing nets and flags and shawls.

  To citified visitors, the whole ensemble must have spoken of ‘northern-ness’, of whales and fish and crofts and spinning. An idealised vision, of course. Their chaperone sports a ridiculous hat, but the girls are all bare-headed, with their hair neatly drawn back, and they wear white aprons and long thick skirts. The girls are lovely, but it’s the ghost presence of the whales which is arresting, both in the photograph and today, for real, in the Meadows, with no drapery, and with buses and pedestrians passing by. As for the animals, well, they went up in the chimneys of the nineteenth century. Science, Art and Industry, all of it smoothed and lit by whale oil.

  * * *

  The
whales whose blubber was rendered into oil came in those days mostly from the Arctic. From almost every east coast port, ships sailed north to the waters around Greenland, Jan Mayen, Spitzbergen. They sailed from Hull and Whitby, Dundee, Aberdeen, Peterhead.

  William Scoresby was a Whitby man, who, even by the time he enrolled at Edinburgh University in 1806, was already the veteran of several Arctic whaling seasons. He had to leave his classes before the end of spring term to join the ship commanded by his father, William senior. By the age of twenty-one, the younger Scoresby had his own command, but to him whale-catching was a necessary chore. He was much more interested in the science of the Arctic. Among much else he made drawings of the shapes of snowflakes—hitherto unknown; he conducted experiments with magnetism, and surveyed the east coast of Greenland. When whales were sighted and he was obliged to break from his surveying and give the command to chase, this was an irritation.

  Because of Scoresby, the headlands and inlets of the Greenlandic coast read like a roll call of the post-­Enlightenment; from Cape Barclay in the south to Cape Bright in the north, the ice-capped peninsulas and ice-choked fjords are a long list of male grandees: as he put it, ‘. . . respected friends, to whom I was wishful to pay a compliment that might possibly survive the lapse of ages’. Every fjord and island is for a friend or admired superior, the largest fjord of all, named in honour of his father, is Scoresbysund.

  From those waters, thousands of whales were brought back to Whitby—to all the whaling ports—reduced to bone and blubber packed in barrels. They caught polar bears, too. Scoresby once brought a live polar bear home, and dispatched it to Edinburgh as a gift to geologist Robert Jameson, his tutor there. It lived out its days in a ‘commodious den’. A bleak Greenlandic peninsula is still called Jamesonland.