Something still did not make sense. ‘How is it that you’re here?’ asked Sandra. ‘It’s just so strange.’
‘I needed to escape from Aberdeen too.’ Her voice betrayed her emotion. ‘I had been seeing a local boy and found myself pregnant. My brothers and I were close. I was sixteen at the time and when we lost Rhuaridh, Lachlan took over Alison’s tenancy of the croft for me. They were good men, my brothers Lachlan and Rhuaridh. Nobody knew me here. I had a fatherless child to bring up and with my mother dead, my father wanted nothing to do with me. So I came here. I’ve moved house on the island twice since, but never more than a mile.’
Their eyes met with a mutual understanding. ‘I think Alison would have wanted us both to be here for her today,’ said Sandra. ‘Shall we?’
Together the two women followed the stoney path toward the water’s edge. Removing the cap of the urn, Sandra shook the white powder briskly onto the wind and the two women watched as it dispersed like icing sugar over the restless expanse of water in front of them.
‘She’ll be happy again,’ said Sandra.
‘They’ll both be happy again,’ her companion corrected her.
18
THE COLD HEARTH
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse, Whiles night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.
William Shakespeare, Macbeth, 3.3 (c 1603–07)
On the fashionable south side of Glasgow, Will and Janice Laidlaw were thrilled when their offer for a tenement flat in Pollokshaws was accepted. Janice had always longed for a place of her own to redecorate to her own inimitable taste, and from the moment they moved in had set about re-traditionalising the interiors.
First of all there was the kitchen, followed by the bedrooms and living room. The latter was a big problem as its only decorative feature was a small, nondescript gas fire, whereas Janice was determined to have a spacious open hearth surmounted by an imposing mantelpiece. Fortunately, Will was a bit of a genius when it came to do-it-yourself and recycling, and he was prepared to go to any length to please his best beloved.
That first winter, they made do, but as soon as the clocks went forward at the end of March, Will announced he was planning to entirely rebuild the fireplace. ‘Don’t worry, it won’t cost us anything. I found a whole stack of stone lying unused in an old abandoned yard down the road. If nobody wants it, we might as well make the best of it.’
Janice was thrilled. As a van driver for the council, it was a relatively easy task for Will to pick up the necessary materials on his travels and soon afterwards large slabs of stone began to appear on the tenement stair. While this was going on, Janice retreated into the kitchen, leaving her husband and his pal to get on with the work.
It took several weeks and created a lot of noise and clouds of dust which filled the entire building like a sandstorm, but when the work was completed Janice was thrilled at the result. It was as if the entire wall of the sitting room had been replaced. Instead of the small, ugly stove there now stood the most magnificent opening of pink and white-streaked marble surmounted by a black marble mantelshelf, under which Will had inserted a flueless living flame fire. It was a marvel. ‘It makes me feel like royalty,’ Janice told Will.
Or at least that was her first reaction. Throughout the summer months she would proudly show it off to friends who dropped in for a visit, but after a certain amount of time had passed, it occurred to her that there was always something missing in their response. Nobody was ever as enthusiastic as she had expected them to be. They were polite, yes, but that was all.
And on further reflection she realised why. Despite the flame being turned on to its fullest extent, the room always remained inexplicably chilly. It was as if there were a permanent north wind hovering over the hearth. As autumn moved towards winter, the temperature continued to drop. Often Janice felt that it was considerably warmer outside in the street.
‘Why does the fire give off so little heat?’ she chided Will one day, shivering as she increased the flame. Outside the sun was shining, but inside the Laidlaws’ sitting room it remained as cold as the interior of their refrigerator.
Will too was puzzled. ‘Perhaps it’s the marble,’ he said. ‘Marble is supposed to keep things cool, isn’t it? That’s why they use it in all those eastern palaces and places like Dubai.’
‘In a warm climate, but not one like this,’ Janice responded. ‘It’s gae bitter here.’
As December approached, the situation did not improve. Eventually, Will was obliged to invest in a portable calor gas heater. Then one morning, Janice, who had been examining the fire surround, asked Will where the stone had come from.
‘Look,’ she pointed out. ‘There are some words carved into the edge of this slab here.’
Will had not noticed these markings before and now studied them closely. They ran along a section of the fireplace surround and he could just make out the lettering, Dearly Beloved. He shook his head.
‘Well, I did tell you that somebody had abandoned this stuff,’ he said. ‘We did get it for free.’
Janice shook her head. ‘That’s all fine and dandy, but where did it come from? That’s what I’d like to know. And what does it mean, Dearly Beloved? I hope it’s not masonic.’
‘Would it help if I showed you where I got it?’ Will volunteered, recognising her irritation.
That afternoon, he took her to the abandoned yard where he had helped himself to the stone. It had seemed harmless enough at the time. He recalled a boarded-up shed and the large notice board advertising the site for sale. He knew exactly where it was, but when they arrived he discovered that the shed had been dismantled. In its place stood a property show-room with a sign announcing that the site was in the process of being developed into luxury apartments. Behind a desk sat an earnest young man in a suit who looked up eagerly as they entered. ‘Are you interested in buying?’ he asked hopefully.
Janice shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘We were just wondering what this place was before?’
The salesman looked disappointed, but did not wish to appear unhelpful. ‘Blythe & Thompson, Monumental Masons,’ he told them. ‘They went into administration and we bought the land. Nobody can afford tombstones nowadays.’
Janice looked at Will in horror. ‘You mean to say . . . ?’ Her voice trailed off as the reality of the marble’s provenance dawned on her. Glaring at her husband, she turned on her heels and headed back to the van, muttering under her breath.
‘Would you like a prospectus?’ the young man called after her.
Soon afterwards, a For Sale sign appeared on the Laidlaws’ flat in Pollokshaws. Will and Janice now live in a new-build apartment in Govan.
19
THE GREAT HECTOR
Hard, swift intelligence is so apt to hate and wish to cast aside what it cannot comprehend.
Annie S. Swan, The Land I Love (1936)
Hebridean islanders have a reputation for being tuned into the nonconformity of the elements. With the exception of the advent of electricity, the telephone, motor cars and air transport, nothing much has changed since the dawn of time on the far-flung land masses of the Small Isles, Harris and Lewis or the Uists. In this landscape of the moon, an acceptance of the supernatural is ingrained in the mindset of the Gael. From the sea come sealmen and sea monsters; selkies and water horses cavort in inland lochans; folk disappear into the peaty moorland without a trace; inexplicable lights are seen dancing in the back of beyond.
Overhead, there are the birds of the sky – the eagle, the raven, the capercaillie and the elusive corncrake. On the land, there are the red deer.
Nature is a cruel taskmaster. In the raw reality of death and rebirth, the interaction between man and beast becomes a pitiless challenge. For the red deer to regenerate, they have first to be reduced, and to this end exists a competitive breed who live for the chase, intent on pitting the skills of mankind against the instincts of the beast. The key stalking months are from August until October, and the annua
l cull quotas laid down in law by the Red Deer Commission are expected to be met.
Thus, the landed estates of these islands have earned an unequalled reputation across the centuries for the quality of their sporting trophies. No trees occupy a deer forest, only hostile expanses of scrub and peat. And as a result, some of the finest herds to be found anywhere in the world inhabit the gullies and straths of this often inaccessible landscape, providing an unequalled challenge to the sporting gun.
Morrison Drummond, a financial analyst in the City of London, was one such sporting gun. Since his uncle had given him a shotgun on his eighteenth birthday, Morrison had become obsessed with shooting and stalking, despite living in Essex; perhaps it had something to do with the sedentary nature of his work.
And it was only to be expected that as soon as he was financially established, he should join a syndicate, which, for seven glorious days in late autumn, rented a furnished stalking lodge on the north-west coast of Lewis. Here, under the tuition of Lachlan Mackenzie, the head stalker, Morrison and his three equally virile syndicate colleagues were able to happily indulge their macho appetites and, more importantly, hunt the deer.
It was not so much that Morrison enjoyed killing wild animals: it was the challenge it presented, he told himself, coupled with the exercise and the fresh air, all of this being in such marked contrast to his chosen desk-bound vocation of making money. On these Hebridean islands, so he had been told, existed the last truly wild animals on earth. As wild as wild can possibly be. Although colour blind, a deer can sense the approach of a human being at a distance of ten miles. If anyone manages to come within two miles of one, it becomes a major triumph. This is man pitted against nature in its rawest reality.
There is also the extreme physical challenge of crossing this godforsaken landscape of sodden umber-coloured peat and springy, scratchy heather. However, nothing compares with the thrill of reaching a summit and the sense of wonderment engendered by an uninterrupted vista of lochans, gorges, hills with a distant ocean slicing into the sky. It is at such moments that everything in God’s plan falls into place.
And it was on just such an occasion that through his spyglass Morrison caught sight of the Great Hector. Raised high on a plateau, with a canyon of rock and rivulets between them, stood the noble beast, a shaft of sunlight spotlighting his royal crown of antlers.
‘Look! Look there!’ Morrison whispered audibly to Lachlan. ‘What a beauty!’
The stalker raised his telescope and smiled benignly. ‘That’ll be the Great Hector,’ he said softly, with a knowing look. ‘But he’s long gone.’
Sure enough, when Morrison turned to look again, all he saw was an empty hillside. ‘He will have seen the Uists,’ said Mackenzie. It was not his practice to indulge those who employed him with his innermost thoughts.
That night as Morrison Drummond slept, he had a vivid dream in which he came across the Great Hector sheltering with a herd of hinds in a deep gully. The wind was blasting through the bleak scrub as mountain burns frothed white in spate. As the sky darkened, Morrison saw himself raise his gun, at which point the Great Hector turned his fine head directly towards him and let out an almighty roar.
The force of the roar deafened the wind. Morrison awoke in a cold sweat.
Sustained by a filling breakfast, Morrison and Lachlan Mackenzie set off to climb Ben Bholly the following morning. It was a steep ascent, but the dry weather held until they were over the top. Far below, they could make out the ragged coastline and ocean. Indeed, had the rapidly changing visibility allowed, they might even have been able to identify Rockall or the dots of the archipelago of St Kilda, far out into the Atlantic.
For a while, it looked as if it would be yet another one of those energetic, demanding days on the hill, with spurts of repetitive, all-enveloping showers of rain punctuated by blasts of hot sun. Alternately soaked and scorched, Morrison and Lachlan continued their pursuit with intermittent sightings. As the afternoon drew on, the weather closed in.
To this day, neither Morrison Dummond nor Lachlan Mackenzie can say for certain what happened next. Mackenzie, whose knowledge of this terrain was inherited from his father and grandfather before him, insists that Morrison had, against his explicit instructions, wandered off. Morrison is adamant that Lachlan abandoned him. ‘That simply would not happen,’ Lachlan argues in his defence, and everyone who knows him concurs.
‘Lachlan Mackenzie is far too professional a stalker to allow anyone in his charge to stray off by themselves, no matter how preoccupied he might be,’ I was told by the owner of the lodge.
‘It’s the stalker’s charter to look after his guns,’ Lachlan protests angrily whenever the subject of Morrison Drummond is raised.
However, Lachlan is also only too well aware that what occurred on that wet afternoon in August was totally beyond his control.
Bent low so as not to be seen against the hillside, Morrison was following Lachlan on a steep downward path when he noticed movement on the far side of the gully. It was a handsome stag with several hinds. Morrison’s knee-jerk reaction had been to fall to the ground and to signal to Lachlan who, as it transpired, was nowhere to be seen.
Regardless, Morrison unslung his rifle, checked the distance, and lined up a shot on the stag in preparation for a clean kill. As he did so, he recalls the rain became a torrent and a sickly, sticky mist began to rise from the heather beneath him. To make himself more comfortable, he rolled over slightly and was on the point of squeezing the trigger when there was a surge of movement from under his thighs and everything around him collapsed. Helpless, he found himself tumbling over and over, down a long, steep, agonising slope, and landing with a thud on a pebbly foreshore at the edge of the sea.
Unable to stabilise itself, Morrison hit the shingle with a sickening thud. A searing pain surged through his femur and he realised that he must have broken his left leg. Petrified, he cried out for help, but heard no sound other than the swishing and shifting of rain, and the hush of the waves.
Then, to his astonishment, his attention was caught by the movement of several hundred deer. To his utter amazement, he saw that leading them was the Great Hector, and they were following him impassively, like lemmings, into the water, where they vanished out of sight. As a spectacle it was both breathtaking and incredible. Morrison had never seen or heard of anything like it ever before. As soon as the last of the herd had nimbly passed below the waves, everything fell very quiet.
With admirable presence of mind Morrison remembered he had two signal flares in his jacket pocket and, having extracted them, fired them into the sky. The burst of red smoke exploded high above, throwing a rosy sheen over his surroundings, but there was no sign of the deer, only the tide.
An hour later, a motor vessel arrived and Morrison was lifted on board. He was taken to the hospital in Stornoway and released, with his leg in plaster, later that night. Still entirely baffled by what had occurred, he determined to give up stalking in favour of some alternative, non-blood sport pastime such as golf or tennis. ‘It was an omen,’ he informed his friends.
‘I was nurtured in my mother’s womb with tales of the Great Hector,’ said Lachlan Mackenzie when I joined him for a dram at McNeill’s Pub in Stornoway. ‘Both my father and my grandfather spoke of him, though neither clapped eyes on the brute. These city folk, you know, they come here with their fancy tailored tweeds and their pricey guns, and they think they know it all. It does no harm to give them a jolt now and then.’
Yes, but did Lachlan Mackenzie seriously believe in a ghostly herd of deer led by a phantom stag?
He tapped the side of his nose, swallowed his dram, and winked. ‘He’ll be far away on the Uists by now,’ he said.
20
THE DARK LORD
I’ve heard my rev’rend grannie say,
In lanely glens ye like to stray;
Or where auld ruin’d castles grey
Nod to the moon,
Ye fright the nightly wand’rer’s wa
y,
Wi’ eldritch croon.
Robert Burns, ‘Address to the De’il’ (1785)
Anecdotes about phantom animals – rogue dogs, wolves, inexplicable footprints in the snow – occur throughout Scottish folklore. In most cases there is a perfectly logical explanation. Some of the tales relate directly to animals which have escaped from zoos; others to an Act of Parliament passed in 1976.
The Dangerous Wild Animals Act was introduced to control the number of exotic pets being kept in the United Kingdom, but to some extent it backfired as several owners simply released their pets into the wild. This was the explanation given back then for the numerous sightings of large cats roaming the countryside. Whether or not any them have survived, or succeeded in breeding, remains undetermined, but their continuing metaphysical presence in the landscape cannot be denied.
Galloway Forest Park, the vast area of woodland that covers the 250 square miles where Dumfriesshire spills into the roof of Galloway, is a favourite retreat for walkers, cyclists and lovers of the great outdoors. It was this indeed that brought Andy Gallagher and Donald Drummond, two young friends from Ayr, to the Forestry Commission campsite a couple of miles from Loch Trool.
Both in their early twenties, they had already explored most of the Lake District and Southern Uplands, but this particular corner of Dumfries and Galloway, despite it being situated virtually on their doorstep, was so far unknown to them. Having ascended Glen Trool to inspect Bruce’s Stone, they turned off the main road and soon afterwards found their way down a plunging track towards Loch Dee, where they threw off their clothes to swim off one of the pebbly beaches before spending their first night in sleeping bags at the White Laggan Bothy.
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