Alasdair MacRae is a contract shepherd in Kinloch Moidart. In 1985, a young man, he won the Scottish National Sheepdog Trial. He went to Holland for a couple of years, putting on sheepdog demonstrations in a theme park. On his return to Scotland, his pals asked him, “How was it, Alasdair? How about the Dutch lassies?”
“Big,” he said. “Aye, they are big.”
At Neilston, Saturday, he’d run his dog, Star, and his three-year-old unregistered bitch, Bute. Bute is a medium-size black bitch, a strong bitch. Since unregistered dogs can’t compete in the National, Alasdair would have to get Bute registered on merit, an aggravating expensive process. That’s why I hoped Bute might be for sale.
Alasdair’s cottage was a midsize stone Victorian farmhouse with its front door opening on the narrow Kinloch Moidart road. “Hello, Mrs. MacRae, is your husband home?”
The homely girl in the thick yellow fish-smelling coveralls tugged at her hair and laughed nervously, “Oh, I’m not Mrs. MacRae. He should be home soon. I’m up from London. I just board with Alasdair.”
She worked at the salmon fishery. I asked her how she liked it, after London, so deep in the highlands.
“At least you can walk down the street at night,” she said.
Along the single track road outside, for miles, I hadn’t seen another car.
Alasdair MacRae is a stocky man in his twenties with a presence that makes him seem taller than he is. He’s unshaven, wears a T-shirt with a SURFER legend. “Would you like tea, Donald? I think there’s beer my brother’s brought, but it’ll be warm.”
The farmhouse kitchen is bare and low ceilinged, the light filtering through the windows seems gray-green. Alasdair doesn’t know why I’ve come and never stays still. He asks me, right off, if I know a dog called Mirk. An American dog buyer had Mirk off Alan Gordon. Mirk went over three years past.
“There are a lot of Mirks in America.”
“Aye. Right you are.” Alasdair clasped his hands together. “We’ll have to drive a bit to where I can work the dogs.”
A mile below Alasdair’s cottage, we abandoned the paved road for a rough track, forded a burn, passed into a skinny valley with steep crags on either side. It was the kind of place where western movies used to stage their Indian ambushes.
Alasdair pointed. I shaded my eyes, and way up there, I spotted the sheep: two or three, no, more like a dozen—another lot in that ravine there. I couldn’t tell how many, they were too far.
When Alasdair sent Bute, she shot down the valley until she hit a rockfall to clamber up and lunged up the rocks. She disappeared behind a rocky knob. If I had asked Pip to get up that slope, the climb would have killed him.
Once Bute is out of sight, we stand about, take a leisurely pee, and it’s more minutes before we see Bute, fifteen hundred feet up, a dot on the skyline behind the highest sheep. She descends and disappears again.
If she makes a mistake, the sheep will bolt off the precipice, and most will be dead by the time they quit rolling. A dog wouldn’t survive a fall either. If these were my animals, I’d be sweating, but Alasdair seems oblivious to the risk. As he speaks, the Scot takes in gasps of air, like an opera singer. “They’re down in that dip there” (gasp). “Aye. It’s quite steep, really.” He whistles (gasp). “The sheep are usually gathered along there. We bring them into the fold at the far end, there.” Whistles again. “That’s what Bute’s thinking I’m asking her to do” (gasp). (It was only later, after I heard other Scots punctuating their sentences with quick intakes of air, that I realized his is a dialect pattern, not emphysema.)
Bute finds a relatively mild decline and five minutes later the ewes arrive, panting, at Alasdair’s feet.
I am dazzled, can’t trust myself to speak, “Jesus, what a dog.”
Blandly chipper. “Aye. She’s quite a useful beast.”
In the guest room back at the cottage, there is a stack of mattresses beside my bed. “My brother, Farquar, will stop by late, or some of his friends.” Alasdair grins. “Sometimes I don’t know who’s here until they come down in the morning.”
While Alasdair washes up before dinner, I sneak out to the ratty kennels behind the house. Bute is uneasy at my inspection but stands it long enough for me to see she’s got dark, hard eyes. She’s a more businesslike, less affectionate bitch than Viv’s Holly.
We took Alasdair’s car to the restaurant. The countryside below Moidart is silver lochs and glistening tidal flats, and tidal islands covered with shoulder high brush. The road winds down the coast and Alasdair drives like a young man who knows just exactly where he’s going. We dip down beside a skinny mud flat, “In summer, picnickers try to cross that and then the tide comes in,” he snorts.
He gestures at a brushy island, and smiles a strange smile. “Have you met John Angus MacLeod? No, he wasn’t at Dalrymple, I’ve no doubt John is lambing yet. He comes from over there.”
Alasdair’s a man with opinions. Nursery trials (where the youngest dogs compete): “They were all right at first until they started awarding trophies at the end of the season. Now they push the dogs to get them ready for the nurseries; they push them to get them ready for the open trials. They ruin young dogs.”
And prices, he says, are mad: “Fifteen hundred pounds for a dog that throws its tail about. A thousand pounds for a dog with a savage grip. Now, that black Bute bitch, she’s worth, realistically, eight hundred pounds.”
Casually I asked him, “What are her faults?”
Alasdair shot me a hard look and didn’t reply right away. “I don’t care to talk about my dogs’ faults,” he said. After a couple miles he squeezed out, “Bute doesn’t care for the shedding, but she’s getting better at it.”
The restaurant was in a hotel where Alasdair often played with a traditional Highland band on Saturday nights. A plain room with sturdy tables and white paper tablecloths. Alasdair ordered a double orange juice in a pint glass please, and I wanted a bitter. Leaning across the table, I asked if the black bitch was for sale.
“Nae. I haven’t time or petrol to drive across the country looking for another.” The young shepherd warns me, in detail, that any good handler can conceal the faults of a dog (at least from inept American eyes).
We order salmon, another bitter, another double OJ. Alasdair is going on about devious handlers, but I am working up my nerve and everything he says is white noise. I warmed to Viv’s Holly more than Bute, but the hard unregistered bitch may well be a better dog. She may be too much for me to handle. “I’ll give you twelve hundred pounds for Bute,” I manage to choke it out. I drain my bitter.
Alasdair is annoyed. Says he’s flattered and not that he can’t use the money but no. “Far too many good dogs are sold to the States. It’s ridiculous. Did you know we’re importing Aberdeen Angus cattle from Canada? From Canada, mind. It’s just to get the bloodlines back. But once a dog is gone, it’s gone.”
He names several good dogs that shouldn’t have gone. He says, “That Glen dog Johnny Templeton sold to the States was much better than the dog Johnny kept. It’s ridiculous.”
I felt like a Quaker slave trader denounced from the pulpit. The color rose red in my cheeks.
“That Mirk dog I asked you about …” It seems Alasdair let Alan Gordon have him with the intention of buying him back but Alan Gordon sold Mirk to an American. “I would have bought Mirk back if Alan had told me.” He talks about Mirk, what a wonderful dog he was. He wishes he had a Mirk pup today. All those grand bloodlines gone.
I am hiding in my bitter, but Alasdair, now he knows why I’ve come, has become cheerful and expansive. He tells me that his father is a well-respected fiddle player, that he plays as often as he wishes all the way to Fort William. “Everybody expected me to be as good a musician,” he says. “If I had a son, I wouldn’t expect him to be any good with the dogs.”
Dinner came to just ten pounds. As we walked to the car in the gathering dusk, Alasdair says, softly, “I don’t regret the things I did when I was drinkin
g—though I did some silly things. I only regret selling Mirk to America. If I could walk onto the trial field with Mirk, oh, I’d be dangerous then.”
Oddly, I was relieved I hadn’t been able to buy Bute. I was honestly glad Alasdair wouldn’t do the sensible thing with the unregistered black bitch and sell her. I didn’t feel clever or competent, but I’m half used to that by now because I sleep like a baby.
In the morning Alasdair is quite helpful, suggests I visit Kenny Brehmer, gives me an address for John Angus MacLeod, asks me if I’ll inquire about Mirk once I get home. I will. He says I can stop here again if I wish, that it wouldn’t matter if he was here or no. “Just find yourself a bed.”
Okay. I stand by my suitcases wishing I knew where to go. “Well …”
Alasdair cocks his head like a schoolmaster. He tells me about Davey McTeir. “You’ll have heard of Davey,” who’d been running J. M. Wilson’s Bill dog until he and Wilson had a falling out and—just like that—Wilson reclaimed Bill. At the time Davey was strapped for cash. He had 150 pounds on the dresser, which he needed for something he’d promised—perhaps it was a car—for his family. But he heard of a young dog for sale: Ben. Davey spent the money for Ben. “A wise choice, eh Donald? A wise choice, eh?”
As it happened, that was a wise choice. McTeir’s Ben was a wonderful dog. It wasn’t a choice I would have made. I was middle-aged, and not at all dangerous.
I drove north on the west road, along Loch Ness, crawling behind the tourist coaches, edging past cars parked on the verge while tourists scanned Loch Ness with binoculars. While my clothes were being washed in Inverness, I drove out to Culloden Moor. There is not much to see. The battlefield where Charlie lost all is flat and not large. The spot where the clans charged, the English line held, the fatal English artillery thundered—a walker can tour the graveyard of the clans in an hour.
The Visitor’s Centre displays an old-fashioned plaid with wrapping instructions in case anyone wants to try it on. They’ve relics of the battle: so and so’s pistol, someone else’s dirk. The original battle orders issued to Charlie’s troops are there, as well as the forged version the English passed out to their own troops—the forgery with “No Quarter” added. Naturally, since the English were terrified of these barbarians, they fought hard and took revenge.
The highlanders were exhausted and hungry (they’d had a biscuit, each, the day before), and Charlie ordered the Highland charge too late to be effective. They were outnumbered two to one: Charlie calculated every highlander was worth four English troops.
The duke of Cumberland, the English commander, was fat, ill natured, ugly, and victorious. He ordered no quarter, and most of the wounded highlanders were shot, a few were burned alive. Along Culloden footpaths are great upended boulders that mark where they buried the clans: Here the MacDonalds, here the Frasers. Here is the Well of the Dead where the English slew the wounded who dragged themselves to it for a last taste of cool water. A few tourists, dressed against the chill, stroll about taking pictures.
They fought in April, 240 years, twelve generations of men, ago, but the fighting seemed more recent than that. I wondered that the grass ripped by the rushing troops had time to heal. Today the Highland mists were very close to the earth, blanketing souls who might yearn to flee.
At Culloden, the Farquarson clan stood with Charlie. The MacCaigs stood with the Farquarsons.
With a 30,000-pound bounty on his head, Bonnie Prince Charlie wandered the western Highlands for half a year until a French ship took him off. Afterwards, he lived in Rome—a plump, unhappy man, cuckolded by his German wife, drinking too much, weeping openly when friends played Highland ballads in the long, long Italian evenings.
Cumberland’s troops slaughtered the Jacobites. Those who escaped death on the battlefield were pursued to their own doorsteps and murdered there. Their homes were burned. New laws forbade the wearing of the tartan or playing the bagpipe. The highlanders were disarmed. Jacobite estates were confiscated by the Crown.
Although diehard Jacobites still hatched plots and Charlie never lost his place in the highlanders’ hearts, the clans were done. After Culloden, many of the remaining chieftains began to discover London’s charms and leased their lands to English sheep farmers, who signed their leases on condition that the land be untenanted. From 1746 until Victorian times, the small Highland farmers (crofters) were systematically driven off their holdings. Here and there in the Highlands, you’ll find a mossy wall where a village used to be, a home’s scorched lintel stone. Some crofters migrated to the shoreline, where they could make a scant livelihood gathering seaweed. Others moved south, crowding the warrens of Edinburgh and Glasgow. They arrived, already starving, distinguished by rural customs and dress, unskilled, speaking only Gaelic. They did not thrive. In 1835, life expectancy in Glasgow was about thirty years, fully half the children in some Highland parishes died by the age of eleven. Between 1780 and 1810, 42,000 highlanders left for Australia, the United States, and Canada. Four out of five survived the journey.
Although it wasn’t that cold at Culloden, I was shivering when I got back to the car. I drove badly back through the tangled Inverness streets, and polite drivers blinked their warning lights at me. I was a sure thing for an accident and didn’t dare the crowded Loch Ness road. I opted for the slower inland route south. The Bed and Breakfast in Fort Augustus was nicer than most. My room was smallish but Scandinavian modern, with a built-in writing desk. The owner was a fair-haired woman in her thirties. They’d run cattle previously, right on the shore of Loch Ness, but now they only kept tame Highland cattle for the tourists to photograph.
I said times were hard for American farmers, too. I said I’d just visited Culloden.
“Culloden was a sad day,” she said.
I blustered, “But Charlie was such a twit!”
She was shocked, not by the sentiment, by the word. “But it was his,” she said. “The throne was Charlie’s by right.”
“I’m from the wrong country to find arguments about thrones persuasive.”
She looked at me. I coughed. I asked for a good place to eat. She directed me, adding, “will you be joining us for tea? Eight o’clock?”
“Sure,” I mumbled, “Sure.”
I was the only customer in the pub where I ate. The barmaid was friendly and had once read a book of mine. I scribbled an autograph on a bar napkin. The barmaid belonged to an environmental group fighting the introduction of salmon cages to Loch Ness. All that spilled fish feed and salmon manure would alter the lake’s nutrient level and, besides, what about Nessie?
What if Nessie should find the tons of fresh salmon in their steel cage irresistible and damage herself in her attack? Or worse, what if she never attacked all? Think of all those lines of tourists waiting (but not forever) on the loch side.
Only a few B & Bs offered evening tea, and that was fine by me. Usually I gave it a miss. The Brits are more accustomed to group travel than Americans and seemingly have no problem meeting strangers in the evening after having met strangers all day. But I was feeling guilty about the “Charlie the twit” crack and put on my sport coat and tie to join the others.
The windows of the pine-paneled sitting room overlooked the loch. The blurry photograph on the grand piano beside the binoculars looked mighty like driftwood to me but, I suppose it could have been a slender neck. As we guests chatted softly, the light was falling on the loch. Our hostess was a teacher of the ceidihl, the Gaelic harp, and her young pupil was to travel to Edinburgh in the morning to audition for the Royal Academy of Music.
As Loch Ness turned black and gave itself over to its own deep creatures, a young girl, perhaps twelve, fingered the strings of a harp as tall as she was, creating a clattering gladsome greeting to the head of the Clan MacLeish and after, a plucked tune that hung in the air like smoke: a lament for Charlie.
There are Scots who’d feel foolish if they didn’t take advantage of a fool. Late in life, when he certainly didn’t need the mon
ey, J. M. Wilson sold his home, Whitehope, to a man who offered him far too much money. Even as he signed the papers, J. M. regretted the sale.
So there were dogs I could have bought for three thousand or so, dogs otherwise not for sale.
But if Scots are Calvinists, convinced that those predestined for heaven are prefigured by their earthly estates, they’re Gaels, too, acquainted with brownies and ferlies, cantraips, spunkies, and fairies. In today’s money, the reward for Prince Charlie was a half million dollars. Although Americans joke about Scots’ tightfistedness, Charlie wandered the rough country for six months and no highlander claimed that reward.
I wasn’t the only one seeking a good young bitch. Peter Hetherington was on the phone every week. Joe McRoberts was looking. Davey McTeir wanted a bitch to “put over the water.”
I drove to Peebles, to Castle Douglas, to Kinross, to Dingwall, to Arcallader. I knew I should change the rental Ford’s oil after three thousand miles, but. … On Saturdays and Sundays, I followed the sheepdog trials. At Gleniffer Braes, I watched from Peter Hetherington’s car as the rain sluiced down and the windshield wipers cleared a triangle of faint vision and one at a time, hunched over, handlers got out of their cars to run their dogs. This trial was held beneath a convention of giant gray electrical transmission towers. Was this really my sport? What in God’s name was I doing in this country? Half the time, I couldn’t even understand the lingo. Would you spell that, please? Say again, please?
When I bought a collection of Bobbie Burns’s poetry for the Lowland Scot’s dictionary in the back, I made a good bargain. After a month among his countrymen, I could read a great poet I’d never kenned before. And Bobbie is a bonny companion, various enough for laughter, hard lust, drunkeness, and regret. Unlike most poets, Burns will accompany you everywhere.
Scotland was green, a dark, deep green like irrigated alfalfa fields at home. Mornings were usually misty or rainy, and all my photographs had a romantic flavor, wanted or not. I came to know and favor a few farmhouse B & Bs, and whenever I was near, that’s where I headed in the late afternoons. I disliked the Scottish towns. The giants, Glasgow and Edinburgh, ate a week’s supply of dwindling pound notes in a day. Midsize towns like Ayr and Kinross faced their high streets behind an unbroken wall of rectitude. The gardens behind the houses are lovely and quiet, but not for the traveler. Rooms on the High Streets echoed all night from lorry exhausts banging from one stone facade to the other.
Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men: Searching Through Scotland for a Border Collie Page 7