The Hill of the Red Fox

by Allan Campbell McLean

  Iain Ban passed me a rod with the line uncoupled.

  “But it’s only got one hook,” I said.

  “Just as well,” laughed Iain Ban, “or it is yourself would be after getting mixed up in the hooks and not the fish.”

  Roderick showed me how to grip the rod, and he told me to swing it in as soon as I felt a tug on the line. At that moment he swung in his own line and landed five gleaming fish in the stern. I almost dropped my rod in the excitement of seeing them threshing wildly about my feet. There were four sparkling mackerel and a smaller fish I had not seen before.

  Roderick unhooked them deftly and tossed them back into the well of the boat. When he picked up the small fish, I asked him its name.

  “That’s a saithe,” he said, “the nickname for the men of Raasay.” He grinned. “Mind you, Alasdair, you would need to be as big as Duncan Mòr before you dared call them that.”

  I felt a tug on my line and almost overbalanced as I swept the rod up into the air. I saw the gleam of silver on the end of the line, but the long rod was difficult to handle, and the fish wriggled off the hook before I could guide it into the boat.

  “Hard luck,” said Iain Ban, busily unhooking six big mackerel.

  But almost at once there was another tug on my line, and Roderick safely guided a saithe into the boat at my feet. I tried to unhook it, but it slithered through my fingers.

  “Take my rod,” said Roderick.

  We exchanged rods, and he bent down to unhook the saithe.

  I felt a tremendous tug on his line, and heaved it clear of the water. In a fever of excitement, I swung the rod round and landed a heap of threshing fish in the stern. There were six mackerel and a much larger fish, rather like a saithe.

  “Good for you, Alasdair!” cried Lachlan MacLeod, and I was pleased indeed to be praised by that dark, silent man.

  “You have got a lythe,” said Roderick, unhooking the big fish and looking appreciatively at its bronze-flecked back. “One day we will go to Holm Island and Bearreraig. That’s a rare place for lythe — the real big fellows. We need rubber eels to bait those boys.”

  We fished steadily, catching mainly mackerel and saithe. Sometimes the fish rose constantly to our flies; at other times our lines trailed in the water with never a tug. Then Lachlan MacLeod would swing the boat round with a few powerful strokes, and head back for the patch of water where we had struck the last shoal.

  Once he rowed far out from shore, and I saw a break in the cliff face, and a sheltered bay by the gorge below Achmore Lodge. Iain Ban pointed out the Kilt Rock to the north. It rose from the sea like a giant kilt spread out over a flat surface, and a waterfall dashed over its top to the sea far below.

  It was growing dusk, the long dusk of a Hebridean high summer, and Rona rose like a black shadow from the still waters of the Sound. When we spoke our voices seemed to carry loudly over the water, but we were all silent when Lachlan MacLeod finally pulled for the shore.

  I leaned over the side, trailing one hand in the water, listening to the rhythmic splash of the oars. Roderick filled his pipe and I heard the spurt of a match and saw the spent matchstick go bobbing away on the tide. Then there was silence again, except for the cry of a gull and the steady creak of the rowlocks as Lachlan bent to the oars. I had often wondered why my father had gone to sea, but it was at that moment, I think, that I realized why.

  Iain Ban started to whistle a catchy reel, and I said suddenly, speaking as soon as the thought flashed into my mind, “Were any ships wrecked off the coast during the war?”

  Roderick shook his head. “No, it was quiet enough here,” he said. “They hardly knew there was a war on.”

  “What about the plane crash?” said Iain Ban.

  Roderick laughed. “We were all away at sea,” he explained, “but there was some excitement right enough. A plane crashed on Sgurr a’ Mhadaidh Ruaidh.”

  “The Hill of the Red Fox,” I murmured, half to myself.

  “Aye, that’s it,” he said.

  “It is a wonder the Red Fellow didn’t tell you about it,” said Iain Ban. “He was the first to get to the crash.”

  “What was it carrying?” I asked, trying to keep the tremor out of my voice.

  “Och, I don’t rightly know,” said Roderick carelessly. “Just the crew, I suppose. At any rate, they were all killed.”

  The boat grounded on the shingle, and Iain Ban leapt out and hauled the bows clear of the water. We hauled her up on the wooden rollers until she was under the shelter of the overhanging cliffs, but all the time I was thinking of the aircraft that had crashed on Sgurr a’ Mhadaidh Ruaidh. Murdo Beaton had been the first man to get to the scene of the disaster. What had he found there? Perhaps the answer to that was the key to the riddle of the Hill of the Red Fox.

  Iain Ban was tossing the fish out of the boat into four heaps. He looked across at me and said, “Tired, Alasdair?”

  “No, I was just thinking,” I said.

  Roderick walked in front of the fish, and turned his back on them. Iain Ban pointed to one of the heaps, and said, “Who?”

  “Lachlan,” said Roderick.

  He pointed again.

  “Alasdair,” said Roderick.

  Once more Iain Ban pointed.

  “Myself,” said Roderick, and when he turned, smiling, they were busy stringing the fish.

  There was nobody in the kitchen when I got back to the cottage. I dumped the fish down on the table, wishing that Mairi could have seen me come in with my catch. The room looked cosy in the dim light cast by the paraffin lamp, and I sat down on the bench. I was tired after the stiff climb from the shore, and I stretched out full length with my feet resting on the arm of the bench. Murdo Beaton’s blue denim jacket was hanging over the arm of the bench and, in moving, I knocked it to the floor. I bent down to pick it up, and as I did so a folded newspaper dropped out of the side pocket.

  It was the first newspaper I had seen since coming to Skye, and I picked it up and glanced at it. It was dated 1 July, the day after I had arrived at Achmore, and it was folded in such a way that a small paragraph under a single black heading caught my eye immediately. I read it quickly.

  UNKNOWN MAN FOUND SHOT

  The body of an unidentified man was found near Lochailort late last night. He had been shot in the back. According to a police statement, the man was between thirty and thirty-five years of age and of medium build. He was wearing a light fawn raincoat and a dark grey suit. There was a distinctive scar on the back of his left hand, stretching from the knuckle joint of the little finger to the wrist.

  I carried the paper over to the lamp and read the last line again. I remembered only too well that clenching hand with the vivid red scar.

  My head reeled. If the man with the scar was dead, who was the stranger who had visited the cottage in the middle of the night?

  Hardly knowing what I was doing, I replaced the newspaper in the jacket pocket, and hurried into the safety of my bedroom.

  Chapter 11

  I sat on top of the green mound of Cnoc an t-Sithein, wondering what to do.

  It was midday, and the sun blazed down from a Mediterranean sky. Murdo Beaton had left for the hill with Caileag loping along at his heels, and Mairi and the cailleach were working at the peat stack.

  All morning I had felt the need to get away by myself to try to sort out my tangled thoughts. After Murdo Beaton had left, saying he was going to take stock of the lambs, I slipped away.

  The township cows and stirks were grazing all around me, and I watched a bunch of ewes with their lambs moving up and down by the drain under the dyke. They had wandered down from the hill, and were trying to find a break in the dyke in an attempt to regain the sweeter pasture of the crofts.

  I was searching as desperately as the sheep, not for a gap in a dyke, but for a way out of my encircling troubles. Everything had seemed crystal clear until I read the paragraph in the folded newspaper. Now I was back where I had started, but the mystery had taken o
n a more sinister aspect with the death of the man with the scar.

  He was the man who had been silenced, there could be no doubt about that. And whoever had shot him must be working in league with Murdo Beaton. What would the murderer do if he discovered that I carried a message from the man with the scar? Despite the heat of the sun I could not repress a shiver. Anyone desperate enough to commit murder would not shrink from it a second time in order to achieve his ends.

  I had struggled on alone for too long; my only thought now was to whom should I tell my tale. I thought of Hector MacLeod, but he was an old man, and this was no undertaking for old men. I remembered what he had told me about Duncan Mòr. Big Duncan. Even Roderick MacPherson’s laughing eyes sobered with respect when he spoke of him. Well then, Duncan Mòr it should be, I decided. Any action was better than tormenting myself with my own troubled thoughts.

  I scrambled to my feet and tramped quickly over the moor in the direction of the river. The moor resembled an enormous basin, and when the ground dipped I lost sight of the river, but I carried on steadily until I came to a high wire fence. I crawled under the fence, crossed a rough cart track leading to the hill, and came up against a broad earthen dyke. The crofts of Mealt lay beyond, slopping gently to the river.

  When I clambered up on top of the dyke, I saw Duncan Mòr’s house at once. It was a stone-built bungalow with a slated roof, facing east, and built close to the river bank. There was a walled garden in front of the house, and a man was sitting on the wall watching me. A big black and white collie started to bark furiously, and I heard the man say, “Quiet, Glen.”

  I ran quickly down the croft and stopped a few feet from him. He slid off the wall and stood looking down at me. I had a sudden strange feeling, foolish as it may seem, that we had met before.

  We stood there looking at one another, and I grew uneasy, waiting for him to speak. If I scowled — and he maintained I did — it was to cover my shyness at his silence.

  He was easily the biggest man I had ever seen, but he was even taller than he looked for the great breadth of his shoulders took something from his height. He was wearing blue denim trousers supported by a broad leather belt, and I noticed the narrowness of his waist and the flatness of his stomach. The sleeves of his open-necked shirt were folded above the elbow, and whenever he moved his arm to brush away a fly, I could see the easy play of muscles beneath the brown skin. I knew that his eyes were on my own painfully thin arms, and I scowled harder than ever, and gazed stubbornly at my feet, determined not to be the first to speak.

  “Aye, you are a Cameron, right enough,” he said at last, “a dour looking black beggar like your father before you, and like as not ye’re as thrawn as he was.”

  He had a deep, booming voice. The words seemed to rise from the depths of his diaphragm, gather volume in the great barrel of his chest, and be flung out on the air.

  I took a deep breath and hoped he had not noticed the nervous clenching of my hands.

  “Thrawn or not,” I said, “my name is Alasdair Cameron, and I am told you were a friend of my father’s.”

  “A dhuine dhuine,” he cried. “I saw Alasdair Dubh in the dark scowl of you, and I growled, to see if the London life had taken the Hielan’ blood from you, and you stood your ground like a man.”

  He stepped forward and gripped my shoulders, and I was forced to look in his eyes. They were grey eyes, set wide apart, and I noticed with a start of surprise that his hair was grey too, lying close to his head in tight curls. His body was the body of a young man, and for all his grey hair there was something about his face that would never age like the face of other men.

  “Aye, I was your father’s friend,” he said, “and it is the hard task you have before you to live up to that brave man.”

  No man had ever spoken to me like that before. Sometimes, usually on Remembrance Day, Aunt Evelyn would dab her eyes and say something about “your poor brave father,” and although I knew it was wrong of me, I felt embarrassed, and made some excuse to leave the room. On such days, my mother stayed in her room all day, and she never said anything at all. But it was different the way Duncan Mòr spoke, looking me straight in the eye, and speaking the words in his loud, ringing voice.

  I felt his strong fingers probing my shoulders.

  “The good Hielan’ bone is there,” he went on, “and if the bone is right the flesh and muscle will come in the Lord’s good time. It is wonderful what hill air and sun, on top of a bowl o’ brose in the morning, will do for a man. Sit you down, Alasdair Beag. It is high time you and me had a crack together.”

  We sat with our backs to the garden wall, watching the lazy flow of the river to the sea. Achmore Lodge was hidden from view, but I could see the break in the cliffs where the river tumbled down the gorge to the sea.

  I heard the sound of a car and looked up with surprise. A Land Rover was jolting over the rough track to the hill. The driver was wearing dark glasses, and a white haired man sat beside him. Two other men in tweeds were in the back.

  “That’s a party from the Lodge,” said Duncan Mòr. “The fellow with the white hair is Major Cassell and the other two will be guests I suppose. They will be after trying the loch for trout.” He chuckled. “It would scunner you to see some of those lads from the south, Alasdair. Many’s the time I’ve seen them wi’ gear costing a small fortune; hollow glass rods, Ambidex Reels, nylon lines, cast pouches and boxes o’ flies, and some o’ them there not fit to catch a cold, let alone a good brown trout.”

  I laughed with him, and asked who Major Cassell was.

  “Major Cassell has taken the Lodge,” Duncan Mòr replied. “A naturalist, but a nice enough man by all accounts. I’m told he thinks nothing of sitting up all night on the rocks just to watch a bird nesting. Still, it takes all sorts to make a world, and he does no harm, poor man.”

  “Is he the landlord?” I asked.

  “Well, in the old days it was always the laird who stayed at the Lodge,” he answered, “but the Board of Agriculture’s your landlord today. St Andrew’s House, Edinburgh. Believe me, there’s some thrawn beggars in the Board, but mind you, the crofter is far better off than he was in the old days.”

  Duncan Mòr went on to talk of sheep and cattle, and fishing in the hill lochs and poaching salmon on wet dark nights. He told me of the feats of strength of my grandfather, in the days when there was no road from Portree, and everything had to be brought in by boat to Rudha nam Braithrean; of how he had once carried a boll of meal on his back all the way up the steep cliff from Rudha nam Braithrean to Achmore without pausing to rest on the way.

  He had me laughing and talking, with no thought that a short time ago we had been strangers, and when he said quietly, “What has the Red Fellow been up to?” it was not like disclosing confidences to a stranger.

  “But how did you know?” I stammered.

  “There was black trouble in the face of you before you spoke a word,” he answered, “and if there is trouble in Achmore look no further than that sly fox of a Murdo Ruadh.”

  There was one question, above all others, I had to ask.

  “Was he a friend of my father’s?” I wanted to know.

  “A Thighearna bheannaichte,” Duncan Mòr exclaimed. “Murdo Ruadh a friend of Alasdair Dubh! If the big black fellow were here this day he would take Murdo Ruadh by his long neck, and throw him out of Achmore.” He brooded in silence for a while, then added, “Not that I am against Mistress Cameron. She was not to know the man at all, at all.”

  “But what has my mother got to do with it?” I asked.

  “Well, it was herself gave him the croft,” he replied, “and him always grumbling about the big rent he was paying. Mind you, I know the fly tongue of the man, and I know Mistress Cameron would not be the one to be charging a big rent.”

  “But he has never paid any rent,” I said hotly.

  Duncan Mòr sat bolt upright.

  “Murdo Ruadh has never paid any rent?” he repeated.

  I
shook my head.

  “Then how did he get the croft?”

  “He wrote a letter to my mother after she had gone back to London,” I explained, “and said he was a good friend of my father’s and my father had told him he could have the croft as long as we were away.”

  Duncan Mòr sprang to his feet, his great fists knotting. A hot flush crimsoned the brown of his cheeks, and I could see the working of a vein in his forehead. I thought he was going to burst a blood vessel. Never had I seen a man so angry.

  Without a word, he started off across the croft. I ran after him and caught his arm.

  “Where are you going?” I cried.

  “Where do you think I am going?” he retorted savagely. “I am going to get my hands on that long cratur and break every bone in his miserable body.”

  I knew it was no idle boast, as I watched the muscles bunching on his powerful forearm when he ground his first into the palm of his hand.

  “But there is more to it than the croft,” I said wildly. “A man has been murdered and there is something hidden on the Hill of the Red Fox and if they find that I’ve got the message …”

  I broke off to draw breath, and my excitement had the effect of cooling him down. He put an arm round my shoulder and led me back to the wall and we sat down again.

  “A story should start at the beginning, Alasdair Beag,” said Duncan Mòr calmly. “Now then, let me be hearing it.”

  I told him everything that had happened from the time I had first seen the man with the scar clutching the bar outside the window of my compartment, to the whispered conversation I had overheard. He listened in silence, slicing a coil of thick, black tobacco with quick, dexterous strokes of his knife, shredding the tobacco in his hands, and filling his pipe.

  I told him how I had thought that the message must have been intended for Murdo Beaton, and that the man outside the cottage was the man with the scar. I did not disguise the fears I had known, thinking that they intended to silence me, and I described my consternation at finding the newspaper and reading that the man with the scar had been murdered.