A Stranger Came Ashore

by Mollie Hunter

  Finn Learson shook his head at this. “The kind of deep-sea fishing I have learned,” said he, “is not likely to be the kind you practise.”

  “Och, we’ll soon take care of that!” Peter exclaimed. “We’ll teach you all you need to know. And just think of the money you could make at the haaf! Besides which, you would very likely enjoy it for its own sake, for it’s out there in the deep water where the big fish lie that you get the real fishing and the real feel of the sea!”

  “Out there in the deep water …” Finn Learson repeated softly, his eyes beginning to gleam with the excitement that lit them when he was dancing. He was silent for a moment, with everyone waiting expectantly for his next word, then suddenly he decided. “I would enjoy that,” he told Peter. “To be out there in the deep water with the sea all around me again – that would be fine. I’ll go with you to the haaf!”

  So that was another matter settled, and the night before Peter and his crew left for the fishing station in the north of the islands, they all met for a celebration in the Hendersons’ house. Peter filled glasses for everyone to drink a toast, but before he could utter one word of this, Nicol Anderson said, “Hold on, Peter. What toast are you going to give?”

  Peter stared at him. “The usual one, of course,” he said. “The one we always drink before we go to the haaf.”

  “Aye, I thought so,” Nicol answered. “But if that is the way of it, we cannot have a man in the boat who does not even know the meaning of the toast. And so, before Finn Learson comes with us, he must first guess the answer to a riddle.”

  Everyone began to smile at this, guessing riddles being a favourite game in Shetland. Nicol seemed to be in deadly earnest, however, which made the Hendersons realise that there was a bit of rivalry building up now between the two young men. Yet still, Peter realised, Nicol had every right to put out such a challenge. And so, even although he could see himself being short of a crew member at the very last moment, he had to allow it.

  “On you go, then,” said he; and staring Finn Learson right in the eye, Nicol said, “Right – read me this riddle, Finn Learson. What head is it that wears no hair?”

  Now this was such a very old Shetland riddle that no one outside the islands could possibly guess the meaning of it. Or so everyone thought, anyway; yet even so, Finn Learson took only a moment to think before he answered, “There’s no hair on the head of a fish; and so that is the reading of your riddle – the fish!”

  There was a burst of applause at this. Even Nicol applauded, for he was most certainly not the kind of man to hold on to ill-feeling. Moreover, Finn Learson had spoken in the most friendly and pleasant way, and so now Nicol answered him with his usual big sun-burst of a smile.

  “You’ve earned your place in the boat,” he agreed, and then turned to tell Peter, “Give your toast, man!”

  “I will that!” exclaimed Peter, relieved at this pleasant outcome of an awkward moment. Then, raising his glass high, he shouted, “Here we go then, boys. It’s off to the haaf, and ‘Death to the head that wears no hair!’”

  “Death to the head that wears no hair!” the whole crew echoed, shouting; and drained their glasses on the words.

  “And a tune or two before the night is out!” added Peter, reaching for his fiddle and starting up a reel.

  So the celebration began for everyone except Robbie, who was still puzzling over the way Finn Learson had solved the riddle; and under cover of all the noise, he said to Old Da, “There’s no one outside the islands has ever managed to read that riddle, Old Da. And so how did he guess the answer?”

  Now Old Da had been forming his own idea about this, just as he had slowly been forming ideas about other matters concerning Finn Learson – particularly those of the gold coin he had brought ashore, and also his love of dancing. Old Da’s thoughts on such matters, however, were all very sober ones which he had no intention of telling to anyone at that moment. Least of all did he mean to tell them to Robbie; and so now he got out of the situation by saying, “Maybe he already knew the answer to it, Robbie. Or maybe he guessed it just because he’s a clever man.”

  “Aye, maybe,” Robbie agreed; but he was not satisfied with this, and he went to his bed still puzzling over it.

  The next day when all the men had gone to the haaf, he was still thinking about it; and this kept his eyes going to the only reminder of Finn Learson that was now left in the house – the gold coin on the mantelpiece.

  Finn Learson had never actually denied that it had come from a sunken treasure ship, he told himself. And so, where and how it had been picked up on his travels was still a mystery. Moreover, Finn Learson himself was still a mystery, for no one knew a thing more about him than they had when he first arrived on the island. And that was six weeks ago, Robbie thought; which did indeed make him a clever man – much more clever, in fact, than anyone except himself seemed to have realised!

  There was his smile, too – that strange little smile which made him look as if he had some secret to hide …

  Robbie stared at the coin as if staring by itself could tell him how Finn Learson had come by it. But the more he stared, the less he could think of an answer to this, and the more the coin seemed to wink back at him like an ancient golden eye that had its own secret to keep.

  5. The Selkie Summer

  There was little to do on the croft once the men had gone, but Robbie and Old Da were still kept busy in various ways.

  The eggs and young of seabirds were in season, and these were needed to provide something extra for the pot. The different kinds of moss that Janet and Elspeth used for dyeing cloth had also to be picked at that time of the year; and of course, there was always fishing to be done. It happened to be an unusually fine summer that year, however, so that Robbie and Old Da were soon having a high old time to themselves.

  For days at a time the weather held. The sun made the grass look greener than green, the sky bluer than blue, and the two of them chose the rest of these fine days to get their bag of eggs and young seabirds. Not that they were intent simply on getting the best of the weather on these occasions, mind you, for it was on the ledges of the high cliffs above the voe that the seabirds nested, and Robbie could easily have been blown into the sea if he tried scrambling down there on windy days.

  With Old Da to guide him, however, Robbie never made any such mistake. He always climbed barefoot, too, which helped to give his toes a grip on the steep rockface; and since he had a good head for heights, he enjoyed all this scrambling about the cliffs. As for Old Da, he had done the very same climbs in his own young days; and so he was in his glory now, leaning over the clifftop to shout advice and encouragement on any one that Robbie attempted.

  Gathering moss for dyes was another ploy for the finest weather, for then Old Da would take Robbie and Tam on a whole day of wandering footloose among the hills where such moss was to be found. To Robbie’s great pleasure too, as they wandered like this, Old Da told him one story after another, and there was only one thing that could cast a gloom on such a day.

  It was always Tam who gave warning of such a gloom, too, and it always happened in the same way. Tam would start to whine, and then the other two would realise they were approaching a sort of long, shadowy hollow where no flowers grew; and here and there, in such hollows they would see a green mound with a doorhole that was screened by ferns,

  “Aye, the dog has a sixth sense about such places,” Old Da would interrupt himself to say then, and they would all hurry past the hollow; for these green mounds were said to be the homes of a small people called trows. And trows are creatures of the Otherworld which is not human.

  Once they were clear of such places, however, the feeling of gloom lifted from them, and Old Da would go on with his storytelling. Yet still he kept his voice low, for now his stories would be about the trows themselves, and these are creatures which are quick to take offence at anything that is said about them. Moreover, trows can make themselves invisible at will, and trowie ears are shar
p ears!

  “Have you ever seen a trow?” Robbie sometimes asked. But Old Da would not answer yes or no to this, and so Robbie had to be content with listening, and wondering, and keeping a sharp lookout on his own account.

  Mornings and evenings of every day were the times when the two of them went fishing, sometimes casting their lines from the clifftop, and sometimes rowing out in the small boat that was kept for this purpose; but it was the boat trips Robbie preferred, for there were always seals swimming in the voe, and this gave him the chance to follow his liking for watching these creatures at close quarters.

  The interest in seals was something else he had learned from Old Da, of course; for Old Da had long ago taught him the trick of holding the boat so steady in one place that they lost all fear of it. Little, feathery strokes of the oars were the secret of this trick, and as soon as Robbie mastered this way of “feathering” with the oars, he found the seals swimming quite close to the boat and surfacing on all sides of it.

  “They like music,” Old Da told him then; and to prove this, he began to sing. Immediately the seals reared chest-high out of the water to stare towards the sound of his voice, and Old Da laughed to see this.

  “I told you,” he remarked. “And now I’ll tell you something else about the Selkie Folk and music. They have a great envy of the way people like ourselves can dance to it; and so they gather sometimes on a lonely beach where they can cast off their skins and take human form. And there they sing, and dance to the music of this singing.”

  Robbie stared at this, for neither he nor anyone else could ever be sure how much was true in Old Da’s stories, and how much was made up. He was still curious to know more about the selkie dancing, however, and so he asked,

  “But how can they cast off their skins and change like that?”

  “You’ll have to put that question to a wiser man than me,” Old Da told him, “for the only answer I can give you is that selkies are a lot more than they seem to be. They are not animal creatures at all, in fact, but a kind of folk that have been doomed to live as selkies – a strange, gifted folk, who have powers we do not understand.”

  Robbie considered this, still feeling a bit doubtful. “What kind of folk?” he asked. And solemnly Old Da answered, “Fallen angels. Angels that sinned against Heaven, when Heaven was shining new; and for their sins, were cast out from all that glory.”

  “Oh!” said Robbie, feeling a shiver run up his back at this. “Oh, my!” And he shivered again, still not knowing what to believe, for it was hard to think of all these inquisitive creatures around the boat as fallen angels. And yet, when he looked at the wise, and somehow sad expression in their great dark eyes, he was more than half-persuaded that Old Da was speaking truly after all.

  “You’re forgetting to feather,” Old Da reminded him; which was true. And what with the way this had allowed the boat to rock, the seals were all beginning to dive out of sight.

  Old Da chuckled to see them scatter like this, and began to sing again in his quavery, old man’s voice,

  “I am a man upon the land,

  A selkie in the sea –”

  “What’s that song?” interrupted Robbie.

  “An old one that tells about the Great Selkie,” said Old Da; but of course, this only brought another question from Robbie.

  “Who’s the Great Selkie?” he wanted to know then, and Old Da told him, “Ah, well now. That’s another story, Robbie! He’s the King of all the selkies, he is; which means he’s the great bull seal that has his home deep, deep down in the deepest sea. That’s where the selkies’ own country is; and that’s where he rules, from a palace that has walls of crystal and floors of coral, with sea anemones for jewels, and a roof of waving golden weed. Or maybe the roof is made of waving golden hair – the hair of drowned girls. Nobody knows for sure, for people can enter that country, but they cannot come back again.”

  “Why not?” asked Robbie, staring fascinated at Old Da. “Why can they not come back?”

  “Because the Great Selkie will not allow it,” Old Da told him.

  “And the drowned girls?” Robbie asked. “Who were they?”

  “Well,” said Old Da thoughtfully, “they do say that every now and then this Great Selkie manages to tempt some poor lass to enter his kingdom. And when she tries to escape back to her own kind – as she must sooner or later always want to do – that is what happens to her.”

  “I don’t believe that,” declared Robbie, deciding that Old Da was just making it up after all; but Old Da just laughed at this, and went on with another story.

  All this was long before that particular summer, however, and most of Old Da’s stories were dim in Robbie’s mind by then. He was not a bit less interested in the selkies themselves, all the same, and so Old Da patiently taught him a little more each day about the true life of these creatures.

  “You know how they come ashore each year when their pups are due to be born,” said he, on one of these occasions. “Well, believe it or not, Robbie, these same pups are all four weeks old before they even start learning to swim. Yet, for all that, they still grow up to be the most travelled of any sea creatures.”

  “Where do they go?” Robbie asked curiously.

  “Out into the Atlantic Ocean,” Old Da told him. “And if they are bull selkies, they spend the whole of the first seven or eight years of their lives wandering all the seas of the world before they come back here to rejoin their own kind.”

  Robbie sat watching the fishing lines they had cast, and thinking of all the selkie pups be had seen. They were such helpless little creatures, he remembered; and it was strange, very strange, to think of them growing up to be so adventurous.

  “We’ll go and have a look at this year’s pups, will we?” he asked, and Old Da agreed, “Of course, Robbie. Come September or October when the pups are born, we’ll go off as usual and watch them to your heart’s content.”

  And maybe then, Robbie thought secretly, he would get to do at last what be had always wanted to do – pick up one of the pups and hold it so that he could discover what a seal felt like. Old Da guessed what he was thinking, however, and said sternly, “But you’re not to try touching them, mind! You’ll only get a bite from their sharp little teeth, if you do that.”

  “Who said I wanted to touch them?” protested Robbie, trying to look innocent. “And anyway, you’ll not get me risking a walk into a nursery of selkie pups with two or three of those great, powerful selkies roaring away in the middle of it!”

  “Now that’s wise,” Old Da remarked approvingly, and went on to talk of how he had learned about seals in his own young days.

  So, in this way, Robbie managed to add quite a bit that summer to the store of information he already had about selkies; and when the menfolk came home for a weekend from the fishing station – which they occasionally did throughout the haaf season – he began boasting to his father of all he had learned.

  “Well,” remarked Peter after a while of patient listening to this, “I’m glad your Old Da is telling you useful things nowadays, as well as all those fanciful tales of his.”

  Old Da chuckled at this remark. Then he turned to Finn Learson who had also been listening; and with his face growing serious again, he asked,

  “And what do you think I should tell Robbie about selkies?”

  Finn Learson smiled the little smile that made him look as if he were enjoying some secret joke.

  “I think,” said he drily, “that you should tell him exactly as much as you think proper for him to know, for I also think that you are a very wise old man.”

  “And you could be right at that,” remarked Old Da, looking hard at him.

  Robbie stared at them both, wondering what lay behind this peculiar scrap of conversation; but nobody else seemed to notice anything unusual about it, and the weekend was so very quickly over that he had no time to ponder it as he would have liked.

  Very shortly after that particular weekend, also, something else happe
ned which put every other thought completely out of his mind. Old Da fell ill – very ill. And after a time it looked as if he would die.

  6. Old Da’s Warning

  There was nothing much wrong with Old Da at first – just a chill that he took after getting his feet wet one day; but it was soon plain that he could not throw off this chill, and Janet altered the sleeping arrangement so that he would have more room to toss and turn at night.

  Elspeth, she decided, would move in beside herself, while Robbie took Elspeth’s bed; yet even when this was done and Old Da had a bed to himself, he still could not get a peaceful night’s sleep. His bones shook with the fever that was on him, his breath came hard and painful. Watching him, Janet feared for the worst; and quietly, without telling the young people what she was about, she sent word to Peter of his condition.

  Each night after that she lay awake for a long time, uneasily listening to the way the old man’s breath wheezed and rattled in his chest. Through the day, Robbie and Elspeth took turns to sit with him; but it was Robbie’s company he liked best, and it was while he sat by the box-bed holding the hot, paper-thin old hand between his own strong young hands, that Robbie at last also realised his Old Da was dying.

  This was a hard fact to face; and what made it harder was that Old Da seemed so anxious to talk to him, yet still could do no more than wheeze out a few words at a time. Robbie kept telling him to rest, not to bother talking; but still Old Da persisted, as if what he had to say was important – even urgent – and Robbie got the strangest feeling that he was trying to utter a warning of some kind.