The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy

by Gavin Maxwell

  5

  Bitter Spring

  I was away from Scotland for some months during which my mother died, after a protracted and distressing illness, and when I returned to Camusfeàrna in April it was with a feeling of deep foreboding. It would have been better if I had paid greater heed to this and closed Camusfeàrna then, but the desire to resist and to fight against misfortune was still strong in me.

  There was only one encouragement, and it was brief. The wild grey geese came back to Camusfeàrna for the last time. Year after year, since we had brought a brood of unfledged goslings from the diminished flock on the great loch at Monreith, these and their progeny had been wont to return to us in the late spring; having wintered, miraculously unscathed by human hand, in some southerly region unknown to us.

  Their origins went far back in my life, to the days before the war, when I had built up at Monreith a collection of the wild geese of the world; when snow geese from North America and bar-headed geese from Tibet grazed the grassy slope below the old castle and the garden itself held exotic rarities. There had been the little lesser whitefronts that I had myself brought back from Lapland the last summer before the war; they would answer to their names with a shrill clamour that reminded me of the vast tundra and of the shine of still lake water under the midnight sun, of the sour tang of reindeer grease and the smell of trout cooking over a camp fire.

  There had been a Cape Barren goose, I remember, who would walk in through the open French windows of the library and squat in front of the fire, her delicate dove-grey argus-eyed plumage quivering with contentment, and at the hour of the evening flight the air would be full of the wild wings and the desolate music of the greylags and the snow geese from the loch. During the war, when all good grain was needed for human consumption, there had been terrible mortality among the rarer species, nearly half of their number dying in twenty-four hours of aspergillosis caused by a consignment of mouldy wheat. Despite this disaster, mine had been the only collection in Europe to survive the war somehow, and it was thus, though somewhat depleted, unique. By then I had transferred myself to the north-west of Scotland, and Peter Scott had decided upon Slimbridge as the perfect site for what is now the world famous Wildfowl Trust. He had acquired the site, but there were no very obvious means of acquiring quickly anything but the British-wintering species of wild geese to stock it. He came to Monreith and found some twenty species still surviving, three-quarters of them the sole representatives of their race upon the European continent. It would have been hard to resist his eagerness even if I had had any real reason for refusal, which I had not. So they went to Slimbridge – all, that is to say, but for the flock of full-winged breeding greylags, the descendants by many generations of birds that I had wing-tipped on Wigtown Bay in the days when I was an ardent wildfowler.

  So the greylags were left, and they bred about the loch shore and on the island until the numbers which were grazing the agricultural land of the estate drew adverse attention. At times there were more than a hundred, though the flock may have been augmented by truly wild birds wintering on the estuary of the Cree and the Bladnoch rivers. Their fate, in any case, was the same; they were treated as vermin, and their comparative tameness made their destruction the easier. By the time that I brought the brood of unfledged goslings to Camusfeàrna there were only four breeding pairs left on the loch at Monreith, and now there are none.

  In due course the greylags began to breed at Camusfeàrna, always on the little reedy lochan a mile above us, across the road from Druimfiaclach. Morag MacKinnon used to feed them and make much of them; she had names for them all, even when the original five had increased to thirteen. That was the highest number they ever reached; not only because there were always more geese than ganders, resulting in a proportion of infertile eggs, but because there was never a spring in which the whole flock returned from their unknown wintering haunt, and once we had to bring a fresh brood from Monreith to prevent our stock dying out. Some must inevitably have been shot; others, perhaps, remained with the flocks that had adopted them, and flew north in the spring to breed in the wild laval mountains of Iceland.

  We had become used to waiting for their return to Camusfeàrna late in April or in May. It was always a dramatic event; someone, while we were about our usual tasks either in or outside the house, would suddenly call, ‘I hear geese!’, and we would gather together searching the sky for confirmation. Then the sound would come again, the wild, haunting call that seems to hold within it the image of vast windswept spaces, mountain and salt marsh and limitless sky, the very utterance of the north and of untamed places; a lone voice first, like a bugle on a falling cadence, then joined by others in a tumbling cascade of silver trumpets, and the small flock would come into focus still high and far off but with wings set for the long spiral glide down to the greensward of Camusfeàrna. Then they would circle the field low over the house, the great wings audibly fraying the air each time they passed; and at last with a great flurry of pinions beating as the flock braked steeply to alight, they stood again before our door, as unafraid as if they had never encountered a human hunter. One of us would go to the kitchen to bring them bread, and the old gander who was their leader, the one whom Morag used to call George, would ruffle out his plumage and advance towards us with his neck held low and parallel to the ground, setting up a great gabbling clamour before beginning to guzzle the bread from our hands.

  It was thus that they returned for the last time in the late spring of 1965. We heard them far away, thin and clear at first, then fainter and buffeted by a stiff southerly breeze that drove before it big shapeless white clouds above an ink-dark sea beginning to break into a chop of short steep waves. The little flock of five passed high over Camusfeàrna, heading inland in a perfect V formation; they checked in answer to our call to them, but resumed and held their course, so that there was nothing but that brief hesitation in answer to our voices to tell us that these were the Camusfeàrna geese. They passed out of sight in the direction of Druimfiaclach; then, five minutes later, they came back in a single straight descent on stiff outstretched wings, slanting steeply down from the horizon hilltop above the house.

  There were two ganders and three geese; the third goose, whom Morag had in previous years named Cinderella, was unpaired, and remained at some distance from the others; she had always been small and silly looking. There was nothing to show that this was the last time the wild geese would ever come back to Camusfeàrna; but their epoch, which had been part of the idyll, was over.

  George and his mate took up residence, as they had in previous years, on the lochan at Druimfiaclach, and from there they paid us irregular but almost daily visits. The other pair flew further inland and we assumed that they were nesting on one of the many hill lochs above us. We never saw them again. Cinderella stayed alone about the Camusfeàrna beaches, until one day we came upon her remains, eaten by a fox or a wildcat.

  Then one day, visiting Druimfiaclach to collect stores (the cottage was now empty and shuttered, the MacKinnons gone) we saw that George had a broken wing. It trailed out from him on the water as he swam, and he tried constantly, both by its own helpless musculature and by his beak, to put it back into position. We carried a small fibre-glass dinghy up to the lochan, and approached him closely enough to assess the damage. It seemed a simple fracture of the ulna, caused, I thought, by striking the telegraph wires in a half light, and I thought it would heal by itself. But it meant that George could sire no goslings that year, for the act of copulation takes place in water and requires the use of both wings to maintain balance.

  In fact his female did not even lay, and a few weeks later I was told that George was dead, his carcass floating near to the edge of the reeds. We went up and launched the fibre-glass dinghy again and recovered his body. The wing had set perfectly and he had been able to fly, but there were twenty pellets of No. 5 shot in his neck and that was that. The concentration of shot showed that he had been killed from very close range, and sinc
e he had no fear of men this was in no way surprising. His mate lingered about the lochan for a week; then she too disappeared, and no wild goose ever came back to Camusfeàrna again. With their absence something, for me mystic, had gone for ever.

  6

  Isle Ornsay Lighthouse

  The two lighthouses, which had been my main focus of attention in all leisure moments since I was crippled, had become my property by curious coincidence. Camusfeàrna itself stands on the mainland shore of the Sound of Sleat, and from it leads north-westward a mile-long chain of small islands, some grassy and some heathery; on the furthest out of these, the largest, is a minor lighthouse erected in 1909. There was no house attached to this; the light was operated by gas cylinder, and tended by the occupant of Camusfeàrna croft, a shepherd; for the work was far from being a full time job. When, before my arrival, Camusfeàrna had stood empty, the light had become the responsibility of Druimfiaclach, the cottage on the road a mile up the hillside. When I came to the place in 1948 the incumbent was Calum Murdo MacKinnon, who was also the local roadmender, and he held the post until he and his wife Morag left the district in 1965.

  Three miles away, W.S.W. across the Sound of Sleat, is Isle Ornsay Lighthouse, on the Isle of Skye; at night its signal, a double flash every seven seconds, were the only lights in sight from Camusfeàrna shore. This was a much larger lighthouse than the one on the Camusfeàrna island, built at the seaward extremity of a small green islet, and it possessed a big cottage to house two lighthouse keepers and their families. I had never landed at Ornsay Light, though one of the keepers was an acquaintance, for on calm evenings he would sometimes visit us after he had been fishing for mackerel. On one such still summer evening in 1963 when the peaceful evening light had lingered long on the hilltops, he came in at dusk, bringing a present of fish, and as we sat in the kitchen–living-room he said:

  ‘I’m afraid this is the last dram I’ll be taking with you – Ornsay Lighthouse is to be made fully automatic, and I’m being transferred to Ardnamurchan. I’ll be sorry to leave; I’d got kind of fond of the place, but in our job you have to go where you’re sent. Anyway, I’m glad it’s not Hyskeir or any other one of those rocks where there isn’t room to stretch your legs if you step outside the house. They say Ardnamurchan is not a bad place at all, and it’s certainly an important one, being the most westerly point of the whole mainland of Scotland. Still, I’ll miss Ornsay.’

  I asked him what was going to happen to the house.

  ‘Oh, the Northern Lighthouse Board will put it up for sale, no doubt, and it’ll be a lucky man who gets it. They put a whole new roof on it a year or two back, and that cost them several thousand pounds. It’s quite a big place too, built for two families, though I suppose anyone buying it would need to do a bit of alteration, because in a manner of speaking it’s got two front doors and there’s no connexion between the two halves of the house. There’s a big walled garden, too, though we haven’t done much with that for the last few years back, since tinned vegetables came into fashion.’

  All this had touched off in me an immediate train of thought. I was a grace-and-favour tenant of Camusfeàrna, with no ultimate security of tenure; the terms of the lease stated specifically that there would be no compensation for improvements, and that at expiry the house must be left as I had found it. I had brought in the telephone and electric light – the latter at great cost – and during the time of my marriage a great deal of money had been spent in the way of extensions to the house: bathroom and sanitation (neither of which it had possessed before), deep-freezes, and other bulky and expensive electrical appliances. I had realized that if I were required to leave Camusfeàrna the removal of all these things by land would present insurmountable problems; they could only be taken out by sea, and even then only by a considerable number of journeys in Polar Star. All this added up to looking for an alternative cottage on the coast, and I had already found out that this simply did not exist. Isle Ornsay, only ten minutes distant from Camusfeàrna at Polar Star’s maximum speed, appeared an ideal insurance policy against possible future homelessness.

  Anonymous enquiry to the Northern Lighthouse Board elicited three salient facts: that the prospective purchaser must meet with its approval; that the house would not necessarily go to the highest bidder; that, other factors being equal, preference would be given to someone who would also buy the houses of Kyleakin Lighthouse, eleven miles north of Camusfeàrna by sea. Kyleakin was a major lighthouse on a narrow shipping thoroughfare, connected by a causeway to a substantial hilly island of rock and heather in mid-channel between Skye and the mainland at Kyle of Lochalsh. The lighthouse keepers’ cottage, also built for two families, stood high on this heathery island, with a fantastic view northwards to the Red Hills of Skye and southward right down Loch Duich to the hills called the Five Sisters of Kintail.

  At that time my earned income was almost indecently large, so large that if for no other reason than fear of disbelief I shall not mention the sum. This strictly temporary affluence had not in any essential changed my way of life or thought, but it did mean that for those few short, foresightless and improvident years I just did not have to think about money at all. It is an interesting experience to have had once in a lifetime, even though the lack of foresight brought the disastrous consequences my hubris deserved. With this attitude of mind, which fully deserved the good Scots noun ‘fecklessness’, I should have bought the lighthouses even had the Northern Lighthouse Board asked from me a considerably larger sum than they did.

  Each had an entirely different atmosphere and character. I went first to see Isle Ornsay, with Jimmy Watt and Alan MacDiar-maid. We took Polar Star across from Camusfeàma on an early summer’s day so glorious that even a grim Glasgow slum in the Gorbals would have seemed transfigured. At Polar Star’s moorings the still air was full of the sound of nesting sea birds, the white wheeling wings of the gulls patterning a blue and cloudless sky; the slender terns, the sea-swallows, with their dancing, ballet-like flight, screaming their disapproval of human intrusion in a series of swirling sallies from their breeding rock a hundred yards away. A big bull Atlantic seal showed his head above the smooth surface a stone’s throw distant, stared, and submerged with a heavy splash. An eider duck and her brood of fluffy ducklings made a pattern of spreading ripples on the clear shiny water, and there were black and white oystercatchers with their brilliant red beaks piping from the weed-covered rocks at the sea’s edge. All this was the essence of Camusfeàma as I had known it in the early days of the idyll, before the clouds formed and the storm broke, before the days of disaster and diminished vision.

  We found that it took twelve-and-a-half minutes to reach Isle Ornsay Lighthouse, keeping Polar Star at a high cruising speed but not at her maximum. We timed this carefully because with the engines burning nine gallons of diesel fuel an hour we wanted to estimate probable future expenses. We went to anchor a few hundred yards north-east of the lighthouse and rowed ashore in the dinghy. The lighthouse, the cottage and the walled garden, all dazzlingly white-washed, stood on a small, rocky, tidal islet, the very green grass grazed down to lawn length by black-faced sheep and their bleating lambs. We drew the dinghy up at a little concrete slipway, and began to walk up the short steep grass slope to the house; a sandpiper flew twittering from her nest of four eggs a yard from the pathway, and stood bobbing on a stone.

  I had lived in the West Highlands and Islands for many years by then, but never, except perhaps at my very first sight of Camusfeàrna sixteen years before, had any view affected me as strongly as the splendour and purity of the immense panorama spread before the islet. Looking eastward, directly across the Sound of Sleat, one could see far up Loch Hourn, its entrance guarded on the northerly side by the mighty conical peak of Ben Sgriol that rose behind Camusfeàrna, a vast scree slope plunging more than three thousand feet from its pinnacle into the sea, diminishing to doll size the tiny houses at its foot. On the southern side of Loch Hourn rose the great hills of Knoydart
, Ladhar Bheinn, Ben Ghuiserein and Sgurr na Coire Choinneachain, huge and mysterious in the haze of summer heat; further to the south the huddled houses of Mallaig made a faint white blur above miles of sea as smooth as pale blue satin. Beyond Mallaig, dim in the still blue distance, was the point of Ardnamurchan. To the north of Loch Hourn, Camusfeàrna Lighthouse looked tiny and insignificant on its island that seemed no more than a promontory, dwarfed like all else by the vastness of the hills that formed its back-cloth.

  It was as though I had found Camusfeàrna once again, the same sense of sudden freedom and elation, the same shedding of past mistakes and their perennial repercussions. Here, it seemed to me, where the rocks and the white stone buildings were the only solid things in a limitless bubble of blue water and blue air, one might be able to live at peace again, to recover a true vision long lost by now in the lives of other humans and in the strifes of far countries; here one might set back the clock and re-enter Eden.

  Alan looked around him over the sea and the hills and the open sky and said, ‘To think I’ve lived all my life just across there on the mainland and seen Isle Ornsay light flashing and never knew that this paradise was just across the Sound! Look, you’ve got another colony of terns on a rock a hundred yards away, and no big gulls to bother them. And seals too – just look at their heads coming up round the Polar Star. And if you wanted to have the otters here – look at that walled garden – plenty of space, and not even Monday could get out of that. This is a paradise right enough!’ It seemed paradise indeed; I did not know, though I was already in middle age, that you cannot buy paradise, for it disintegrates at the touch of money, and it is not composed solely of scenery. It is made of what many of us will never touch in a lifetime, and having touched it once there can be no second spring, no encore after the curtain falls. This is the core of our condition, that we do not know why nor at what point we squandered our heritage; we only know, too late always, that it cannot be recovered or restored. I did not know it then; this was paradise, and I was going to buy it for hard cash. But Isle Ornsay had no rowan tree, no guardian, only the four wild winds of heaven, no shelter. ‘She had put her hands upon the trunk of the rowan tree and with all the strength of her spirit she had cursed me, saying, “Let him suffer here as I am suffering.” Then she had left, up over the bleak hillside.’ I had not known this when I bought Isle Ornsay, all unprotected, and if I had known I should not have been much disturbed.