In the end it is simple. Everyone needs to eat, I reason. I am hungry and I do not have enough food to eat. When there is nothing indoors but stone walls and floors, the only place to go is outside. One day, standing in the garden, I hear my stomach churning and cramping with hunger. I reach out and snap off a small handful of greenery. I examine it, and then peer a bit closer. I find myself wondering how it would taste. I am shy of eating leaves at first. It feels too feral, desperate. But the advantage is that there are plenty of them. It is a reassurance to know that as long as the sun keeps shining and the rain keeps falling, this is one source of food that will not run out.
I turn the leaves over, holding them up to my nose to smell. I strive for words that will help me identify the plant. Fresh, green, herbaceous, a hint of citrus, I think as I rub a leaflet between my fingers. But these descriptions are too general. They could be applied to most plants. This makes me cautious. The leaf leaves a green stain on my fingertips, which I hesitantly lick. I want to be sure it is not poisonous. Plant identification is critical: you do not mess around or take a risk. Many years before, I studied herbal medicine in London. I have kept my old notes and materials and over the last months I have made my own practical quick checklist. I can tell that this plant is rowan. The leaves are long and oval, with a tooth-like rasped edge. I know it is safe. So I take a tentative bite, gnawing first at its edges, and then folding it over and crushing it in my mouth. It feels abrasive, like biting into rough paper, but I persevere. After a minute of running it over my tongue, I start to chew slowly so that its flavour comes through. It tastes bitter, acrid, sour in that first rush of sensation; a moment of doubt tinged by its sharp tang.
‘Here,’ I offer one to my dog, who is watching me closely. She sniffs it, licks it inquisitively and then turns away as if affronted, the look in her eye one of disgust.
‘Oh, come on,’ I tell her, ‘it’s not that bad.’ And then I look over my shoulder, quickly, and back the other way. Because it feels somehow savage, standing in my garden, cramming raw leaves into my mouth.
It takes a surprisingly long time to eat a leaf picked fresh off a tree. The thick sycamore leaf is the toughest. The beech is soft, ruckled, with tiny hairs like a downy skin. Blackthorn pricks your fingers on its jags if you are not careful, whilst the hawthorn is as coarse-textured and dense as the silver birch is thin and slippery-cool. Tasting those first few mouthfuls feels strange, like an illicit secret in my mouth. But it is more than that. It is a relief. I am ravenous, desperate for food. So the next morning, I get up early and go out furtively, this time with a deep basket. I make a promise that day to take only what I need.
Back in my kitchen, I crush hawthorn leaf with a stone pestle. It tastes nutty, sharp, tangy when it is pulped into a pesto with freshly picked ground cobnuts from my hazel trees. Some days I forage for nettle, chicory or the young shooting tips of beech, birch or oak that can be eaten raw like salad leaves. Out of season, when berries are scarce, wild raspberry leaf is high in nutrients, rich in natural iron, manganese and calcium. In the autumn, I go to the woods and short-cropped hills for chickweed and puffball. I am not sure of mushrooms. I read up on them but still I am wary of picking the small cups, ceps and apricot chanterelles.
In the winter, I raid the barn – there are some tools left behind in Rab’s workshop. Inside a chest I find a small, sharp knife. I make a sheath for it out of sheep fleece and take to walking with it tied about my neck on a leather strap. I use it to cut thin strips of sapling oak, just a few centimetres thick, removing the outer covering before slowly cutting along the length of the bark. The outer coating of the tree is tough, gnarled, denser than you might expect. It tastes coarse, like unshaven wood chips, and dents my teeth, so I leave it to one side. But I know bark is sustaining, so I persevere. Underneath the wood is paler, white like skin. I shred this and chew a piece. Its sap tastes sweet, like birch. At home the kitchen is full of steam as I slice it into strips, boil and strain it. As my cupboards empty of conventional supplies, they start to fill with these other different, wilder foods.
It is one thing picking wild food to supplement your diet. It is another trying to live off the land. For months home-grown cabbage and fresh herring, porridge oats and soaked lentils are my staples. In the summer there are store potatoes and sweet greens, and other vegetables and fruits in the garden, but there are always gaps, due to failed or spoiled crops – casualties of the increasingly unpredictable weather – and my own lack of knowledge or experience of preserving and safe storage to maximise each crop’s longevity. Trial and error can result in wastage and the loss of a whole, carefully prepared batch.
My food crisis is heightened by a fifteen-day power cut to the island’s supply. Two years’ worth of meat, butchered on the croft and stored in the chest freezer, perishes. There is no compensation. Now I have no choice but to live off what I can forage and cultivate to survive.
Cultivation is a learning process, and harvesting and storage skills are as important as knowing how to plant. I dig holes in the dark soil and make natural storage pits lined with straw and fleece for my vegetable crops. I know they will keep safe here over the winter. The earth is not reliant like a freezer on mains electricity and it will not add to my box of bills.
There are failures as well as successes. I wait months for potatoes to grow, digging trenches, shoring them up. When I dig them up, I put them in a box, place it in a shallow pit I have prepared, filled with straw and grasses, and cover it over. But when I check on it some weeks later, I realise the store was too shallow. The potatoes are alive with white grubs and larvae, and spoiled by the hay and grasses, which are now riddled with weevils. It is a shameful waste of all that time and effort, and of a reliable staple crop on which I have been depending.
Foraging, too, takes practice. Initially, I walk too quickly and my eyes register only what is immediate or obvious. Not all of what you first see is edible or good to eat, and at first I am cautious, picking only the familiar. You have to thread your way through the wild orchids, harebell, wild scented grasses and flower of Parnassus, sitting shoot by root beside clouds of thistle, bramble barbs and blackthorn spike. I discover wild herbs – thyme, fresh sorrel, mint. When you look properly it is amazing what you can find.
One day I come upon a goose egg. I take it home and boil it. Its yolk is a rich orange-yellow, the albumen white and frothy, different from the eggs laid by my three elderly hens. It is a gift, this wild food. It reassures me that although I may be lean, I will not starve. With this wild land, the sea and the loch on my doorstep, gradually I start to feel a fresh affinity with the earth and air that teem with life. Each day I give thanks for what I have to eat. I make my own rituals, filling the emptiness with meaning that seems to offer renewed hope. It is strange to feel stronger, for my skin to toughen and hands roughen, as I learn not just how to live but how to survive. Wild foraging teaches you so much more than simply what you can and cannot eat. It teaches gratitude, resilience.
This wilderness is generous, forgiving; kinder than folk. When I think back to the woman on the road, and her anger, I am glad of its heat, for what it has taught me. What it may have taught both of us. It helps to burn the anger away and to look at the world again with love. To evaluate and re-evaluate friendships and acquaintanceships and to know which to hold on to and which to let go.
3
Auction Mart
The air is oppressive, humid and stifling. It is late October, late in the season for the lambing sales, and storms are threatening. I have caught an early ferry to the mainland and arrived ahead of the hordes, to ensure I am in good time to find the auctioneer and show him my lambs. But when I get there, it is not the one I know, and he is deep in conversation with others I do not recognise. As I come in they look up, but no one smiles, and I feel momentarily uncertain and awkward.
‘One hundred and six cross mule lambs – is that you, then?’ a stockman shouts across, swinging through the pens towards me.
> I nod. It is a relief to know they are safe in pens. My lambs arrived late off the Oban boat after a rough crossing and it has been a rush to unload them. I wipe my hand quickly across my eyes and glance at my ticket. It marks receipt of my movement document, which means I am legally permitted to trade, but even so I feel as nervous, jittery and skittish as the livestock straight off the lorry. My left hand is still strapped to hold it steady whilst the tendons and ligaments strengthen. It has visibly wasted so the orthopaedic surgeons have conferred over the results of detailed testing of the bones, fascia and nerves. The results confirm what I have known all along. Having been set incorrectly, it has remained dislocated all this time since the fall. It will be difficult handling my lambs because it is still weak, and simple movements are still difficult.
It doesn’t help that I have never sold my own animals alone before. Last year, after Rab left, not only was I too unwell, but my father’s death coincided with the lambing sales and, in the aftermath of that awful summer, I was too stricken with shock and grief. The large auction mart lorry collected my lambs at the pier and the auctioneer sold them, unattended, in the ring. My absence was reflected in the prices they fetched. You never make as much for your lambs if you don’t present or show them in the ring yourself. This year, I promise myself, will be different. I am ready to take ownership of my livestock. It is important not just for my self-esteem and confidence, but to demonstrate my capability and credibility. Yet for all my determination, I am inexperienced.
‘Right, move it!’ the stockman yells to the lambs, flapping his blue apron skirts. ‘Come on, move it!’ He starts hissing through his teeth. I hear the crack of that fabric, like a whip. And then his stick whistles down, hard edge flicking on to a soft back. ‘Don’t,’ I say urgently. ‘They are not used to it.’ But he is not listening. I see the dark pools of the animals’ eyes glazing over with adrenaline, and some inner vigilance switches on its tense glimmer as they dart their fear at me. You have to push those thoughts away, I think. The auction mart is no place for the fainthearted. Meat is meat.
It is a whirl and a blur as we flow, fast-moving as a single body, stepping swiftly down the narrow metal race, cold aluminium ringing loudly as pens are slammed open and closed on either side. The air is close, thick with the scent of stressed, perspiring bodies, hurly-burly, heavy voices shouting, and above everything the rattle and scream of the tannoy in the ring. At last, we are in a larger pen, with two adjacent smaller ones ready to take the separated males and females.
‘Hope you can tell a ewe from a wether,’ the stockman winks at me. He nods at the bright lights to my right. The noise coming from the auction ring is deafening. ‘Fifteen minutes, no more, and then you’re in.’ As the gates are clanged shut he strides away. I stare at my lambs. I am trembling.
The annual auction is something the crofting year runs forward to relentlessly. It is the only time of the agricultural year that I dread. I love the lambing, working closely with my sheep and immersing myself in the land, seasons and weather. Yet I would wish for a different end for the livestock. One that was gentler, with animals dispatched quietly by a skilled, licensed handler who might come to the island, involving less stress, less travel and less rough handling. In the old days, animals were led calmly to a barn they knew, and meat was produced as needed, rather than butchered on a mass scale.
The pen we are in has already been used, so there is no hay or water. The sawdust is thin, sparsely scattered, and sticky underfoot where it is drenched in urine. My boots fall hard on to bare concrete – in the places where it is not slippery with brown splashes of dung. An animal that is relaxed sheds hard pellets; these droppings are thin, sticky, wet with fear.
It always takes a few minutes to separate the lambs according to their sex, and it is harder now they have had no time to settle. Some trust has been broken. They scent the air rapidly. Their jaws are clenched and a thin, glassy film dulls their eyes like an inner lid closing, a combination of exhaustion, adrenaline and fear. It makes me realise we are no different from each other. We are all animals, lit up by an instinct that tells us when to feel at ease, when to feel wary or afraid. Every creature knows when it is safe and when it is not. I hate the market for this reason. It forces me to witness and to contribute to the animals’ fear and stress.
There is also a deeper, human struggle that gives rise to different emotions. Each year I work hard to integrate with the farming community, to be part of it and, now that Rab is gone, to become accepted in my own right. It is not getting any easier. It feels as if there is always a fine line to tread, and not just because of my gender. In seeking to be part of the system and community, it is difficult to walk this shifting line whilst keeping my identity, beliefs, thinking and voice intact. I am surprised and dispirited to find that, as I gain experience and show myself capable in my own right, this balancing act seems to be becoming even harder.
Working as fast as I am able to sort the lambs, I fear my inexperience and my handicap show. In the old days, Rab would have been standing here in my place. There are never any other women in the great auction hall as the livestock arrives. The few women who attend usually turn up later and sit in the gallery overlooking the ring. They rarely go into the makeshift café where their menfolk are gathered, clustering over rounds of steaming coffee and hot rolls, gossiping about the likely day’s trade. I know this because, mostly, I used to sit up in the stand, too.
As I work, I notice a white printed sales sheet discarded on the floor. I pick it up and pause briefly. The sale card, which lists the pens to be sold, is something you keep. It is not just a memento but a working document, used to make scribbled notes of each day’s high and low prices, pens inspected, sheep to watch or to beat. Today is the first time my name will appear in print as the registered sole keeper of the croft. I run my finger down the list. My lambs are marked Pen 56, but next to the entry, Rab’s name is typed. I think of all the cold, frozen mornings catching my ewes, or waking in the barn, stiff, at dawn.
‘Excuse me,’ I gesture to the steward apologetically, ‘I think there’s been a mistake. My name is not marked on the sheet.’
He points at the sheet and corrects me, ‘That’s it right there, next to Pen fifty-six.’
‘That is not my name,’ I say. ‘It should be the same name that’s listed on the crofting register.’
‘Why does it matter?’ he asks.
‘Because it does,’ I say. ‘Because I am the keeper, and it matters to me.’
He shrugs. ‘Well, your last name’s on it. That’s still your name, isn’t it?’
As the lambs press about my legs, I take a quiet breath and try to explain.
‘It’s my last name, but it’s not my initial. He doesn’t live with me any more.’
‘Oh, I see. It’s like that, is it?’ he asks, folding his arms.
‘Please, is it too late to change it?’ I ask hopefully.
He points at the sheaves of white, crisp paper folded and tucked into each metal stand. ‘Now, be a good girl, and don’t make a fuss.’
I stare at him, flushed with annoyance.
And neither of us moves or says a word. How can I tell him, I wonder, all the reasons it matters that it is my name marked as the shepherd of Pen 56 with 106 lambs? I want to say that when Rab left, I was not just a woman alone without a husband but that my very identity had been stripped away. How can I tell him it is because otherwise I am faceless? That even though I have been windblown, drenched in the seasons, this, the agricultural year, does not even know my name?
Eventually I sigh and turn back to the lambs. ‘Thanks, anyway.’
‘Who looks after your sheep, then?’ he calls after me curiously.
‘I work my own sheep.’
‘You’ll be needing a new shepherd, then,’ he laughs, heading off through the pens.
For a moment I feel strange and lightheaded. I take a breath, put those feelings aside.
‘OK,’ I say quietly to the lambs in the
pen, ‘let’s get this done quickly.’
I take hold of the next one, sliding my fingers under the hard, bony ridge of the jaw as my left arm lightly slips over the back. I bend over the lamb, soft wrapped, loose heavy over its body, so I can feel its flanks panting, its breath beating fast into mine. ‘Ewe lamb,’ I breathe, still bent over, willing her forwards, as I gently feel her rear end to differentiate her from the nearly identical young males. Over my shoulder, I am aware of a few loud voices telling derogatory jokes.
‘Looks like you know what you’re doing,’ comes a call.
I keep going and do not look up, yet instinctively my skin tightens, suddenly vigilant at this easy yet mocking tone.
Then I hear the metal pin of the gate click.
‘There’s no harm in a helping hand!’
Without warning, legs press up against me and there are hands on my hips. I struggle fiercely to twist around and stand upright but I cannot move, pinned down by the heavy weight of those hands.
‘Get off me!’ My voice sounds high-edged and panicky. With my head down and arm flung over the ewe, my shout is smothered, buried in her fleece. I can picture the ridiculousness of the scene, like one of those sick comedy moments, but one that crosses a line. It only takes a few seconds, him pressing me and the ewe forwards, driving us into the pen, and then it is over. His eyes gleam as I stagger, brace a knee and then heave myself up, breathless with the effort.
‘Not bad, lass. Not bad at all,’ he throws back at me.
My cheeks are burning livid, and I feel nauseous, giddy. ‘You fucking bastard,’ I whisper. I want to scream at him. But I cannot. I do not know why, but my voice is gone. And in some place deeper, there is a cloying feeling of humiliation, of having been muddied, shamed. Hot angry tears spring to my eyes. ‘Don’t ever touch me again,’ I snap at him, trying to mask my fear. And he sees that. And then he sees the brace on my hand.
I Am an Island Page 14