I counted twenty slowly, then glanced up at the hill.
“That’s enough,” he said sharply. “What did you see?”
“I didn’t see anything,” I said, puzzled. “Only something flashing in the sun about half-way up.”
“Aye, something flashing in the sun,” said Duncan Mòr grimly. He rose to his feet. “We had best be going. Some fellow up there has the glasses trained on us!”
Chapter 15
Until I was ten, my mother and I used to spend the summer holidays with an aunt of hers who lived in Tunbridge Wells. Then her aunt died, and the trips to Kent stopped, and we stayed in London during the holidays.
I don’t remember much about Tunbridge Wells, except eating cream cakes in tea-rooms that smelled of furniture polish, but the memory of the long, empty days I spent in the town remains clear in my mind. There was never anything for me to do and the days seemed to be interminable. Every night when I went to bed I would count the number of days to the end of the holiday. I looked upon each day as a gate; an old, rusty gate that creaked open slowly, inch by inch, on protesting hinges. There seemed to be an endless succession of such gates, barring our way to the station and the train back to London.
But it was different in Achmore. It was over a fortnight from the day Duncan Mòr took me to Loch Liuravay to the time of the clipping, but it seemed to me no more than one long summer’s day. The day of the clipping is a day I can never forget, so I have made no mistake about the time.
I think the time passed so quickly because there were no minutes and hours, no days and weeks; only sunshine and cloud and rain and wind. There was some talk, but more friendly silence, and much laughter; and all the sounds and smells of the hills and moors. It seemed as if it must go on forever, but I had forgotten that forever belongs to Peter Pan and the nursery. And I forgot the brooding bulk of the Hill of the Red Fox, looking down on dark Loch Liuravay.
Every morning I ran across the moor to the house by the river, and Duncan Mòr took me for long tramps into the foothills. Sometimes the sun was shining, but there were days when the wind tore down from the hills, flinging the rain into our faces. It made no difference. Wet or fine, we tramped the moors, and I could feel the spring coming into my step and the hardening of my calf muscles.
Sometimes after a few days of rain, a bluish mist drifted in from the sea and hung about the hollows of the hills, so that there was absolute stillness in the air and the world seemed to have stopped turning. Then the mist would lift for a moment, and the long purple shape of Rona would emerge, seeming to float in the air, and the peak of a hill would loom up, black as ink, and surprisingly close.
Once, in a fit of remorse, I asked Murdo Beaton if I should stay on the croft and help him, but he urged me to go, and seemed glad to be rid of me. But whenever I was in the cottage with him I knew that his pale, restless eyes alighted on me the moment my back was turned. He never looked at me directly, but I was certain that he was watching me all the time.
One day Duncan Mòr took me into the hills south of Loch Cuithir. We scrambled up a rough scree, and he led the way along a narrow ledge around the shoulder of the hill. Two rabbits started up in front of us and went bounding down the hillside until they were lost among the reddish brown boulders at the foot of the hill. There was bare rock all around, furrowed with the course of the winter rains, and pitted with the scars of ages.
Somehow or other, two stunted rowan trees had managed to grow on the ledge and a tiny stream trickled down the hillside from a cleft in the rock behind them. Duncan Mòr pushed the trees aside, and I saw that they covered a deep fissure in the rock. He squeezed his way in and motioned me to follow.
The opening in the rock widened into a cave, and I shivered in the dank air. When my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, I saw that we were standing inside a gigantic hollow in the heart of the hill. A spring bubbled out of the rock and coursed across the sloping floor to the entrance of the cave. I dabbed my fingers in the water and drew them away quickly. It was icy cold.
“Alasdair Dubh knew this place,” said Duncan Mòr, “and not another man in Skye, save myself.”
I wasn’t really listening, for I was looking at a big black pot lying on its side in the far corner of the cave. There was a length of twisted copper pipe behind the pot and a heap of mildewed peats.
Duncan Mòr laughed his great, booming laugh, and the echo came back eerily from the roof of the cavern.
“This is where the old bodachs made the white whisky,” he said. “There is not a finer still in the whole of the West, barring one I came across over Gairloch way. You can light a fire here and no man will see your smoke, and no man can say where it goes.”
His words echoed round the cave, and I cupped my hands to my mouth and called, “Alasdair Cameron.”
Back came the echo, “Alasdair Cameron.”
“You would never feel the time long in this place,” laughed Duncan Mòr. “There is always a voice to keep you company.”
I shivered.
“My, but it’s cold,” I said.
“Aye, it is cold, right enough,” he admitted, “but many a poor hunted cratur made for this place in olden times. The cold never worried a man with the law on his heels. Besides, you could lie up fine and snug. Give me a rabbit from the hill, and a trout from the loch, an’ a puckle o’ meal, and all o’ the men o’ the western world would tramp the tackets off their boots looking for me.”
“Well, I wouldn’t fancy it,” I said, never knowing that one day I would be recalling his words with a sob of relief.
Sometimes I sat on the wall outside Duncan Mòr’s house and practised on the feadan, as the chanter is called in the Gaelic, for he said he would make a piper of me. He would lean on his crossed arms, his pipe in his mouth, guiding me over the fingering exercises.
One day I got hopelessly mixed up and I threw the chanter aside in disgust.
Duncan Mòr puffed thoughtfully at his pipe for a minute or two, then he said slowly, “How long have you been at the learning?”
I thought for a moment, and said, “Seven days. This is my seventh day and I’m no better than the day I started.”
He laughed and laughed until the tears ran down his cheeks.
“Oh, Alasdair Beag, Alasdair Beag,” he sighed, wiping his eyes. “Have you not heard the old saying? To the making of a piper go seven years of his own learning and seven generations before. Mind you, at the end of his seven years one born to it will stand a chance of making good, but not before, a bhalaich, not before.”
I laughed and picked up the chanter and tried again.
That was the way of Duncan Mòr.
Another day, when we were in the foothills, he pointed out the rabbit runs and showed me how to set snares.
“You could be doing wi’ a good breeze o’ north wind for this job,” he explained, “so that your snare goes back with the grass, then the poor fool of a rabbit will never see it.”
“But why a north wind?” I asked.
“Well, in the autumn and winter a north wind will bring showers o’ hail,” he explained, “and the night you get the hail is the night you will do well at the snaring. Once the hail showers start, the rabbits make off for shelter, and they are so daft to get to their holes that they have never a thought for the wee snare dangling over their run.”
We had a spell of sultry weather, and Duncan Mòr looked up at the hot, leaden sky, and said, “The first fine day there is a breeze o’ wind we will need to make a shot at the clipping. This is bad for the maggot, and bad enough for the sheep without the maggot when you think o’ the poor craturs labouring around under the weight of their winter fleece.”
“But why not do it right away?” I wanted to know. “Why wait for a wind?”
“Think o’ those poor craturs being rounded up by the dogs,” retorted Duncan Mòr. “And herded all the way up to the hill fank for the clipping. Supposing there wasn’t a breeze o’ wind to cool the air, they would be near dead before the
y got the length o’ the fank. Aye, and others forby the sheep would be suffering.” He grinned. “For it’s hot work at the clipping.”
We started early one morning, when the grass was heavy with dew, and a cool breeze came down from the Quiraing. Every man in the township turned out, and all the dogs milled around, barking and snapping and eager for work.
We fanned out in a wide semi-circle, sweeping the ground systematically; the dogs working the sheep in a solid phalanx towards the hill fank.
Glen suddenly shot off at a tangent, making for five ewes and their lambs who stood in a frightened bunch on a near-by hillock. Duncan Mòr shouted and whistled him back to the gathering.
“Why are you leaving them?” I asked, seeing other ewes and lambs in the flock.
“We’ll not be shearing the milk ewes for another fortnight or so,” he answered. “The rise in the wool comes later on them. The ewes and lambs we have got here” — he pointed to the solid mass of sheep the dogs were herding — “were mixed up with the wild ewes and hoggs and wedders. When we get to the fank we will let them away again.”
After much shouting and waving by the men, and excited barking and snapping on the part of the dogs, the sheep were safely penned in the fank. The fank, which was built of dry-stone walls, had been dug out of the hillside, so that the ground outside was level with the tops of the walls. A rushing burn tumbled down the green hillside alongside the fank, and the brown hills, coloured with shelvings of green, rose in a sheer wall to the south and west.
The dogs settled down around the walls of the fank, red tongues lolling and panting heavily. Although their work was done, they sat in a watchful circle ready to head off any sheep that might succeed in scrambling out of the fank.
I was given the job of guarding the gate to the fank, a few pieces of flimsy wood lashed together with pieces of stack rope. When the men came for their sheep, I held the gate open for them, blocking the opening with my body until they had passed out again.
Every man’s sheep had a different keel mark. Duncan Mòr’s sheep had a red keel mark across their ribs, and Hector MacLeod’s carried a blue keel on the back of their necks. In addition to the keel mark, which was really for identifying sheep easily at a distance, they all had a distinctive ear mark. Murdo Beaton’s sheep had a deep V cut in the right quarter of their left ear, and all Iain Ban’s sheep could be identified by the slit in the top quarter of their right ear.
Murdo Beaton was the first to start clipping. He dragged a struggling hogg from the fank, and tied its forelegs to one of its hindlegs. With the sheep lying on its side, he started clipping its belly working up to the shoulder and neck with swift strokes of the shears, then clipping down to the tail. Then he swung the hogg over to her other side, and I watched the brownish fleece being peeled away, revealing the dazzlingly white body of the newly shorn sheep. I looked at the spotless white hogg, and the dirty fleece, in amazement. A few minutes ago the fleece had looked perfectly normal, but now it appeared filthy, and I wondered how it was possible to produce hanks of clean wool from it.
Murdo Beaton dabbed some Stockholm tar on the places he had nicked with the shears, and painted his keel mark on the flawless white of the hogg’s back. Then he untied the rope, and the sheep struggled to her feet and trotted away, looking around uncertainly at her fellows in the fank.
Murdo Beaton deftly rolled the fleece, twisting the tail out to bind it in a compact roll, and I opened the gate for him while he selected another sheep.
As the clipping went on, I noticed that he was withdrawn from the rest of the men. He never joined in their banter, and I never once saw him speak or laugh. But I had to admire his speed at the shearing. From the moment he took up the shears until he set the sheep free, he never took more than six minutes. None of the other men were so quick, but they would often pause to laugh at some sally of Duncan Mòr’s, and Roderick MacPherson had them all laughing when he compared the faces of the sheep with the women of the township.
All afternoon and early evening the work of clipping went on, and the laughter died out as they settled down to work. There was the steady snip-snip of the shears, the low murmur of conversation, the bleating of sheep, and behind it all, the murmur of the water of the burn as it flowed down to the river. The sheep in the fank gradually thinned out, and the mounds of fleeces grew steadily in size.
Duncan Mòr had clipped all his sheep, and he started to help Hector MacLeod. Murdo Beaton had finished too, and he was packing his wool into a bag. When he had pressed the last fleece into the bag, he fastened the neck, and slung the bag across his shoulders. I watched him moving swiftly down the hillside to the track beyond Loch Cuithir where Mairi was waiting with the horse and cart. Hector MacLeod painted his blue keel mark across the neck of a shorn hogg and released her. He wiped the sweat from his brow, and looked across at Duncan Mòr who was clipping another of his sheep.
“Well, Duncan,” he said wearily, “we are near the last o’ them now, and no thanks to Murdo Ruadh. Myself and Lachlan clipped the cailleach’s sheep when himself was away from home, but he has no word of that now.”
Lachlan MacLeod nodded his dark head and said shortly, “What do you expect of the Red Fellow?”
“Allow the Red One,” said Duncan Mòr. “The same fellow would not spare a minute if it was not going to put a penny in his pocket.”
“Ach, we know him well enough,” commented Iain Ban.
“He is past changing now.”
“Aye, as Domhnull-nam-Faochag said when he was asked why he did not leave off gathering the whelks and take an easier job with the Hydro; ‘tis difficult to straighten the twist of an old stick,” remarked Iain Ban.
There was general laughter, and the men bent to their task and clipped the remainder of the sheep. When the wool was packed, I put the shears and the tins of marking fluid into a sack, and we made our way down the hillside.
The wool was loaded into Hector MacLeod’s cart, and the rest of us walked on ahead while he led the horse by the bridle.
Roderick MacPherson whistled a catchy reel, and Calum Stewart told of a man in Raasay who could poach salmon with a length of rabbit snare wire fastened to a long stick.
“Mind you, there is an awful knack in it,” he said. “I could never manage it myself.”
“Give me three hooks tied back to back, and a stout length of line, and you can keep your rabbit wire,” declared Donald Alec MacDonald.
Duncan Mòr nodded, and Iain Ban said, “Many a good salmon was lifted with the torch and gaff.”
“True enough,” assented Duncan Mòr. “There are more ways of lifting a salmon than there are days in the week.”
The conversation went from salmon to piping and from piping to the price of wool and from wool prices to a hill drainage scheme for the township that the Department of Agriculture was considering.
I was so busy listening to the conversation that I did not realize we had reached Duncan Mòr’s croft. He shouldered his bag of wool effortlessly, and bade us a cheery good night.
When we reached Achmore, Hector MacLeod wanted me to go in with him, but I owed my mother a letter and I wanted to catch Willie The Post with it in the morning, so I went straight to the cottage. I don’t know when I got the idea that I would give Mairi a fright; it was just one of the things one does on the spur of the moment. At any rate, I stopped in front of the kitchen window, and leaned forward and flattened my face against the glass.
There was no sign of Mairi, but Murdo Beaton was sitting at the table with his back to the window. There was a tin box at his elbow over half full of pound notes, and spread across the kitchen table, in neat bundles, was more money than I had ever seen before. As I watched, he slipped the elastic band from one of the bundles and started to count the notes carefully.
I don’t know how long I stood there, but I was just going to tiptoe away when he glanced over his shoulder and saw my face at the window.
Chapter 16
We looked at each other for
a long time, and for once his eyes did not waver from mine. Suddenly he swung round, scooped up the money from the table, and thrust it into the tin box. I walked the few paces to the door, and tried the handle, but it was locked.
I waited fearfully outside the cottage, wishing that I had never thought to play a silly joke on Mairi. Now he would think I had been spying on him, and he was bound to be furious. I wondered where all the money had come from. There must have been hundreds of notes in the tin box. Murdo Beaton walked about in rags, and had pleaded poverty from the first day I met him, but he had more money in the house than I had ever seen before, and I had often watched Aunt Evelyn checking the week’s takings.
I heard the key grate in the lock and my heart skipped a beat. The door was flung open, and Murdo Beaton beckoned me inside. He followed me into the kitchen and closed the door behind him. I stood in front of the fire, very much on the defensive. He had his back to the door. His cheeks were flushed and a muscle in his cheek started to twitch.
Before I realized what was happening, he sprang across the room and seized me by my shirt front.
“Who sent you to spy on me?” he hissed.
“I wasn’t spying on you,” I said indignantly. “I was playing a joke on Mairi.”
“A fine tale,” he snarled, “with Mairi and the cailleach away at the meeting.” He shook me violently, and his bony knuckles dug into my chest. “The truth now. Who told you to spy on me?”
“I wasn’t spying on you,” I repeated. “I was going to give Mairi a fright. I didn’t know she was out.”
“You know well enough that herself and the cailleach go down to the meeting every Wednesday night,” he insisted.
“I’d forgotten,” I said. “I didn’t even know it was Wednesday today. Besides, if I had known you were counting your money I wouldn’t have looked in the window.”
At the mention of money, his colour deepened, and he raised his right fist. I thought he was going to strike me, but he let his arm fall to his side and released his hold on my shirt. I glanced at the table but there was no sign of the tin box.
The Hill of the Red Fox Page 12