“You may think I was unconscious, Major, but I tell you I was madder than a wet hen. First I had it in my mind that it was all somebody’s fault, and I wanted to find who it was, and knock the guts out of him. Then I was tired out, had it, finished, and you and Dan were sitting on top of me pumping the water out of me like a fountain, when all I wanted was to be left alone and go to sleep. I could have killed the lot of you. And then someone was trying to make me drink whisky, and I didn’t want the damn stuff; I knew it would make me sick, and it did.”
We got Tex stripped and rubbed down and wrapped in blankets in the wheel-house, and an hour later, when we were back in the shelter of Loch Hourn, the strains of his signature tune, played on the bagpipe chanter, were coming from the wheel-house. Tex was indestructible.
CHAPTER VII
The 1946 Season: The Outer Islands, June
And I give you the sea and yet again the sea’s
Tumultuous marble
With Thor’s thunder or taking his ease akimbo
Lumbering torso, but finger-tips a marvel
Of surgeon’s accuracy.
IT was June 10 before we were able to leave Mallaig again with the repairs to both boats finished. We visited our old haunts of Moonen Bay and An Dhusgeir, but the sharks had gone, and the lighthouse crew told us that they had seen none for a week. It was a fortnight since we had killed a fish, and between overheads and repairs we were some five hundred pounds poorer than we should have been. It was fortunate that the film of L.A.G. Strong’s The Brothers was being made at Elgol, just across Loch Scavaig, and I was able to make up a little lost way by hiring two small boats to the film company. I began to understand why films made on location seem to require such disproportionate capital, for I was gratuitously handed a considerable “advisory fee.”
On June 12 I got a telegram from Uishenish Lighthouse on South Uist: Good number of sharks here. Davidson. It was the signal for us to shift our fishing-grounds to the Outer Hebrides, and for the rest of that season we never again caught sharks on the inner island shores. From then on, and for most of the next season as well, we fished at the other side of the Minch, and for the greater part of the time in three places only—off Barra Sound, Uishenish Lighthouse, and Scalpay Island in Harris. If there were sharks about at all, they were almost always to be found in one of those three areas. Uishenish, and the bay of which the lighthouse rock forms the south headland, locally called Shepherd’s Bight, was the favourite of them all, and we hunted sharks there days without number, so that it is difficult for me now to separate one day from another.
The chief lighthouse-keeper, Davidson, became our friend and ally; he kept us constantly supplied with information, and seemed to feel our failures and our successes as keenly as we did.
Uishenish had an appearance and a structure all its own. The escarpment on which the lighthouse stood was of a dark rock that looked strangely artificial, like the papier-mâché rock upon which uncouth and faded sea-fowl squat in the glass show-cases of museums and the halls of Victorian country houses. Every ledge and projection was rounded, and had the appearance of having been conscientiously dusted over with fine sand before being painted with the appropriate blacks and greens, with here and there a sparse tuft of self-consciously conventional herbage. In place of Moonen’s eagles was a pair of peregrine falcons, and instead of the fulmar colonies were caves full of rock-doves upon which the peregrines preyed. When we were short of food we would take the Sea Leopard as close in to the cave-mouths as we dared and shoot at the pigeons as they came catapulting out high overhead. I never shot worse at anything in my life, and I remember long arguments and paper calculations designed to prove that the cave-top from which the pigeons issued must really be out of range of the deck.
We reached Shepherd’s Bight that first time in the middle of the afternoon, a warm day with a light variable wind, and there was not a shark in sight. We cruised round under the cliffs for half an hour, and went right up into the head of Loch Skipport, but not so much as a resting seabird broke the smooth surface of the water. We headed out of the loch again, and as we turned south under the lighthouse headland I saw a figure waving its arms from the cliff-top above us. We hove to, and waited while Davidson made a wide detour, came scrambling down the steep grass slope to the north of the cliff, and hopped from rock to rock until he was at the water’s edge.
We could not get the Sea Leopard quite close enough in to hear what he was saying, so we put, off the Gannet to pick him up. He came aboard the Sea Leopard for the first of many times; I made the acquaintance of a friendly and delightful man, and in that and many other hours I began to learn about a lighthouse-keeper’s life. It was usually a hereditary vocation, he said, a lighthouse-keeper’s son often becoming a lighthouse-keeper himself. He told me of the naval standards of efficiency and cleanliness that were traditional; of single rock island lighthouses where a man would do a two-months’ spell of duty followed by a month ashore; of mad lighthouse-keepers of fiction and of fact; of wrecks and disasters, and of much else that I have forgotten and wish that I could remember.
But then and at all times his first concern seemed to be for our success, and he gave a detailed report of the sharks he had watched during the past few days. They had appeared in the evening only, he said, an hour or two before dusk; first a single fin would show, then another, till within half an hour Loch Skipport and the tide-run off the lighthouse point would be full of them.
“I came down because I thought you were going to clear out when you didn’t see any—just wait on and you’ll see all you want. It was about eight when they came up last night, and I’m sure it’ll be the same today.”
It was, or very nearly. At seven-twenty the look-out on the Sea Leopard’s bridge spotted a fin rising half a mile to north of us, and the ship’s alarm burst into our conversation. We were lying in glass-calm water just inside Shepherd’s Bight, and we made straight for that fin, but before we had covered half the distance I saw two more inshore, well up into the Bight. They began to come up all round us, and when we fired the first shot there were more than twenty in sight.
It was a slow and frustrating business; the Sea Leopard had no working gun, and once on the fishing-grounds her only function was to take over and haul up with her big hand-winch sharks that the Gannet had shot. According to our lights at that time we made a killing—we secured five sharks before they disappeared two hours later. “Sugan” performed all her tricks of misfire, two harpoons pulled out with their barbs bent backwards, and we lost a harpoon and shark with a broken trace. But we had three hundred pounds’ worth of shark tied alongside the Sea Leopard when at last we went to anchor in the head of Loch Skipport.
The sunset was amazing, incredible; I am not sure whether it was beautiful or hideous, but it was outside any previous experience of mine. The whole dome of sky was a fierce blood red from north to south and from east to west; across it lay a wild disorder of purple streamers bursting into flame-colour at their edges, and reflected in an almost unrippled sea. I have seen sunsets far north of the Arctic Circle which would last all night long, the sun circling the horizon in a kaleidoscope of fragmented jewel colours, but never before or since have I seen anything like the pure savagery of that evening sky at Uishenish.
Early the next morning we sailed for Soay, forty miles away, towing the five sharks to the factory. It was our first clear object lesson of the folly of a shore-based factory to which every kill, no matter how distant, must be towed. To make matters worse, we could not leave the Gannet to go on fishing in Loch Skipport, for neither boat was independent of the other. The Sea Leopard had no working gun, and the Gannet had no winch, and to kill a shark needed the co-operation of both. It was a Friday and it would be Monday before we could be back on the fishing-grounds.
We called at Soay in glorious weather the next day. The factory, which had been in a state of catalepsy for fifteen sharkless days, sprang into instant action, much as an old gentleman who has fallen asleep
in his club armchair will pretend absorption in The Times leader from the very second his own snores awaken him. After we had got up steam on the factory boiler and hauled the first shark up to the concrete, I slipped away unobserved to walk over the hill. I was seeing too little of Soay, and there was much of that enchanted island that was to me still unexplored. I sat at the edge of a small hill loch; the foreground peat-hags were full of waving white bog-cotton, and the loch itself was a sheet of flowering water-lilies on a reflected blue sky. Behind rose the Cuillins, their jagged fierceness softened by the sun to pure beauty; soft cotton-wool clouds lay in the high corries, but the tops were bare and infinitely remote. A single gannet was fishing in the Sound of Soay; he rose in a spiral, snow-white against the dark sea-cliffs, and descended arrow-like, vertically, to strike a small splash from the surface of royal-blue glass.
I was absorbed in the future and the financial problems of my enterprise; I was so preoccupied that only gradually did I become aware of the immediate life about me. Everywhere were little dragon-flies of a bright electric blue; they darted low over the surface of the water, soared and remained momentarily stationary, alighted gem-like and delicately poised upon the smooth jade-green of the water-lily leaves. One pair, joined in that brief embrace of the insect world which seems so pathetically improbable, alighted near to me; there was a whirring rattle of wings, and they were swept away by a huge yellow-banded dragon-fly. He circled me, carrying the struggling pair, and alighted upon a lily-leaf close by. He did not finish his meal, but flew away, leaving them dead but still joined, a spot of colour suddenly robbed of meaning.
As, when I was a child at a preparatory school near Eastbourne, I used to lie on my back upon the Sussex Downs, so that I could see only the big white cloud-galleons on a blue sky overhead, and with the bitterness of childish homesickness made believe that the chalk turf under me was the black peat of my own Galloway moorlands; so now, with an almost perverse desire for the full savour of the moment, I tried to make that Hebridean sky a backcloth to Blackwall in September 1940, and to imagine that just beyond the limit of vision at the corners of my eyes were the silver barrage-balloons, that the sirens had just finished their warning, and that in a moment the guns would begin. So completely did I succeed that when I again turned my head and saw, instead of the dust and rubble of the docks, the hills and the heather and the sea, it was as though I saw Soay for the first time.
Every corner of the island was a fresh surprise to me then; each seemed more beautiful than the last, and there was much that I never had time to explore during my few years of ownership. When at last Soay was mine no longer, I came back one day to this same loch, and remembered my childish pride of possession. The Cuillins were in a different mood then; they looked black and terrible, a sea-girt Valhalla, and great grey curtains of rain swept them in towering procession. In our pretence these hills were the property of an individual human; if they could speak they could only be indifferent to this piece of urchin impudence, indifferent as they are to the ant-like figures who scramble over them for a moment of time. As an ephemeral insect is to us, so in a million times greater degree are we to the hills, and the realisation brought the loss of my island into a fairer perspective to me, shamed into insignificance by all that endures and does not care for men.
We sailed from Mallaig at dawn on Monday morning, and because the sharks were only showing for so short a time in the evening at Uishenish, we decided to work up the North Uist coast during the daytime and return to Uishenish at night. By five o’clock we had seen nothing but one big shark jumping repeatedly close inshore at the Sound of Harris. We had waited for more than two hours for him to surface when Bruce saw fins a mile to the north of us. There was a fresh westerly breeze coming in through the open Sound, and where the sharks were there was quite a respectable chop of water. The fins were often hidden in it, and the Gannet bucked and reared among the waves like a rodeo steer. The first time we got ourselves fairly placed for a shot, Tex peered down into the water and made a gesture of disdain.
“No good,” he called; “it’s a wee haggerty of a thing—about twelve feet long—not worth the powder.”
There were about ten sharks altogether, as nearly as we could judge, and about half of them were “haggerties,” but so little of the fins was showing that we could not tell the large from the small until we were right on top of them. We got two big fish in the first hour, then shot a “haggerty” by mistake, and finally, as the appearance of the fins became more and more irregular, another by intention, feeling that he was better than nothing. As a rule these small fish were much more alert and difficult to stalk than the adults, and later we learned, too, that their appearance on the surface was an ill omen, nearly always presaging the disappearance of the adults. This day, June 18, was no exception, and we had only one more day of plenty before another heartbreaking fortnight of inactivity.
We took our catch into Lochmaddy harbour, deciding to leave them tied to the pier next day and try the same spot again. I shaved and washed, put on my cleanest jersey, and went up to the hotel. It is a famous fishing hotel, and the evening conversation between hotel guests—serious fishermen who have come hundreds of miles for their sport—is usually of their day’s catches of loch trout and of sea trout. I must have achieved some semblance of respectability, for one conventionally tweeded and white-moustached figure asked me with genial condescension whether I had been fishing today. I replied respectfully that I had.
“Any luck?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said; “I got four, two large and two small.”
Up to that moment I had somehow assumed that he knew our quarry; the coastal antics of the Sea Leopard seemed to have been widely observed in the Hebrides, and we would usually find when we berthed in some strange harbour that everybody in it already knew the minutest details of our project. But his next question showed that he thought me a trout-fisherman.
“What did your biggest weigh?”
A devil entered into me; I could not resist it.
“He’s not weighed yet,” I said, “but I think he’d be about six thousand pounds.”
The joke fell a little flat, for my questioner was too outraged to give me an opportunity of explanation, taking refuge, I think, in “residents only” quarters. I referred to this incident in a broadcast six months later, and soon afterwards I received a letter from the man himself, pointing out stiffly and unnecessarily that he had not supposed me to have been fishing in the sea.
The log entry for the next day reads:
Wind light variable. Dull, heavy rain in p.m. Lochmaddy to Loch Shell. Fishing under Brollem Light-gun. No. sighted 30–40. Numerous attempted kills. Kills 2. Two misses and 3 harpoons pulled out. Fish wild and strong. Lay night at Lochmaddy.
I remember that day vividly, the rain pelting down into water as quiet as a mill-pond and sharks everywhere. In some places where fog is especially common an automatic gun is substituted for a light, and even in the clearest summer weather the gun fires all through the twenty-four hours. That light-gun on the cliff banged away every few minutes, and “Sugan” answered from the water—it was like a battle in progress.
Some of the sharks were in the bays, right in under the rocks; they were difficult to follow, and because there was not enough depth of water for them to dive when harpooned, they gave us every kind of fireworks. I remember one in particular, in a bight just south of the light-gun. He had his head diagonally in towards the rocks and not much more than ten yards off them. I was steering the Gannet for Tex; the fish was quiet and steady, and it was an easy approach from astern. When Tex fired—and, almost simultaneously, the light-gun answered—the shark was between us and the cliff. As the harpoon went home the fish seemed to lose his bearings, and charged straight ahead towards the shore. Tex saw that the boat might be run slam into the rock by that first rush, and began to pay out slack rope for all he was worth. The shark must have bumped his nose on the rock before he realised that he was not heading for
the open sea; then he turned and came back, not half a fathom down, still between us and the cliff. I should like those who believe that the Basking Shark is invariably a slow mover to have seen that fish. As it may seem that a driven grouse is flying his fastest, until an eagle appears and he doubles his previous speed, so, I believe, a shark in deep water is rarely exerting himself as he does when he panics on finding that he has not enough depth to sound. That fish came streaking past us on an opposite course, almost too fast for the eye to follow. Tex was still heaving slack overboard, but he could not pay it out quickly enough. The shark reached the limit of the rope just as he was getting into deeper water, and for a moment it seemed that the Gannet must capsize. Her bows were being pulled downwards and astern with tremendous force, and they dipped almost to the water; then she was yanked round, pivoting on her keel and with the port gunwale almost awash as she headed for the open sea. The shark had the whole length of the coil—I think it was a short one, that had already been broken—and it was more than an hour before we could recover enough rope to transfer him to the Sea Leopard.
The rain kept plugging down, and soaked everything; it hammered on our oilskins in endless tattoo; it found its way into every corner of the Gannet; it seeped down the barrel of the gun so that the powder became damp and we had misfire after misfire, and after each one the light-gun on the shore would fire as though in derision.
This shoal of sharks behaved differently from the Uishenish fish, and by five in the afternoon there was not a fin showing. We headed back for Lochmaddy with a big shark strung fore and aft on each side of the Sea Leopard, and spent the evening reshuffling our catch to be towed back to Soay. Altogether, we had four large and two small fish to transport the fifty miles back to the factory. The Sea Leopard was more than seventy feet long, so we were able to tow two large fish, one behind the other, on each side, and after some hesitation we decided to lift the two “haggerties” aboard the Gannet. We slung them up from the water with the Sea Leopard’s hand derrick, and, “haggerties” though they were, they weighed not much less than a ton each, and were difficult enough to handle. They were not worth the killing; each had barely a barrel of liver in him, we had as yet no established market for the flesh, and it was clearly a bad long-term policy to kill immature fish.
Harpoon at a Venture Page 14