‘There’s not such a creature in these parts,’ they said.
But it was difficult to conceal such a figure as Lachlann. 16 now, he could not be hidden within the walls or below the rafters of any house in the district.
Soon they were able to see him, his dark head and chest bobbing as he walked down the track that ran through a field of barley. For all his youth, he had the beginnings of a thick, dark beard on his upper lip and chin. An old man from the distant isle pointed a shaking finger in his direction.
‘There he is…’ he grinned, unable to believe what he was seeing. ‘The man of legend. The special one.’
The men of the district stiffened and glowered when they heard this. For all that they had once mocked and jeered Lachlann, they now saw him as the most valuable man in their community. He provided the largest portion of food for their homes, prevented both young and old from starving through the harshest of winters.
‘You’ll not lay a finger on him,’ Ruaraidh declared.
‘N-n-n-or touch a hair on his ch-ch-chiny-chin-chin…’ Tormod Glugach added.
One of the small, thin men from the remote island smiled and shook his head. ‘No,’ they said, ‘We just want to talk to him. You can trust us. It’s all we really want to do.’
* * *
No one was able to listen to all the conversation the far-off men had with Lachlann that day. Some caught whispers on the wind, overhearing the occasional word or phrase passing from their mouths. One claimed that he had overheard the islanders boasting of the fine food Lachlann could obtain if he moved there.
‘Not for nothing did a Skyeman call us the best-fed people in Creation,’ one of them, even smaller than the rest, declared.
Another told of how the newcomers had mentioned the fulmar, the seabird that was only found at that time out on that distant edge of the world.
‘It brings us oil…’
‘And feathers…’
‘And the sweetest and pinkest of meats…’
There was further talk too. Alasdair, the greatest imbecile in the district, had sworn that these tiny figures from the far periphery of the Hebrides had spoken endlessly about the beauty of their womenfolk.
‘There is none like them. The most beautiful women, they say, anywhere in the world. And they have the most wonderful of talents, the greatest of grace. You know they can give a man greater pleasure than any who live anywhere else. They can lift a man up to the greatest of heights. Our womenfolk have known and practised these delights for generations.’
They mocked Alasdair when he told them of that, striking and punching him with their fists and feet.
‘You dirty beggar…’
‘Keep your foulness to yourself!’
Yet there was no doubting the truth of what happened the following morning. They watched Lachlann disappear, seeing him sitting in the stern of the islanders’ boat as they rowed west across the Atlantic towards their home. As they did so, his giant hand rose and fell, rose and fell, waving goodbye to those who had provided for him throughout the days of his youth, piling food upon his plate, greeting his arrival in their homes with the same phrase, again and again and again, words that were uttered in the end more in desperation than in any hope that they might be proved correct.
‘Siuthad! Ich an aired! Eat more! It’ll feed you up… We’ll have you healthy looking in no time.’
* * *
That should have been all there was to the story.
Except some 50 years later, after the most horrendous storm, Ruaraidh’s grandson, Ruaraidh Beag, found himself washed up on the far-off island. Recalling the stories his grandfather had told him, he asked the bearded men who gathered round him if they had heard of Lachlann the giant figure who had disappeared the morning after the visitors had come to their district.
‘Och, yes, yes…’ one of the islanders said. ‘He lived here all right. The best fowler of them all, a wonder on the cliffs, but he died some 20 years ago.’
‘Aye. I would’ve expected that,’ Ruaraidh Beag nodded. ‘It’s been a long time since he disappeared from our place.’
It was then he looked around him, examining the figures of the men who filled the shadows of the house that had granted him shelter. For all the differences in their sizes and shapes, even the looks on their faces, they all had the same thick beard. Their feet were extraordinary too. There was the length of their toes, the thickness of the bare ankles that could be seen, white and naked, below the legs of their trousers. Once or twice, he saw how they were able to grip and hold with this part of their body, stretching towards a corner of the room to lift a pipe or a bonnet.
A thought came to him then – about the words that Alasdair had said he had overheard that day. He smiled as he considered them and wondered for the first time if they might be true.
Caliban in St Kilda
You taught me biology, anatomy
and my profit in it
is to become conscious that my feet
were not designed to fit your shoes
and mark me as an oddity,
a foul, wide-ankled freak.
You taught me geography
and my profit in it
is to learn how to leave
these shores and seek a brave new world
that has such people in it
who will bring me death, disease.
You taught me English
and my profit in it
is to feel it faltering on my tongue,
the sense of framing words within my mouth
which make me sense the certainty
that I can never quite belong.
You taught me history
and my profit in it
is to be aware my feet are lodged within the past,
to make my path past houses
and touch roof-beam and door-jamb
and know they are not built to last.
Epilogue / Crioch-sgeoil
‘Calum! Calum! It’s time to go back to the mainland. We’ve got the boat tied up and waiting for you!’
He gaped at them in disbelief. For the last few days, he had been sheltering in his family household, listening to their stories of how his ancestors had gained their wide ankles and long, gripping feet, how a toymaker had come to the island with his gift of wind-up, clockwork fulmars, how one of his fellow-islanders had sent a letter to a girl in North Uist by petrel post. Despite the fierceness of the weather, the way the wind buffeted and bullied the roof, he had enjoyed sitting there, enthralled by all their tales.
‘Come on, Mackinnon! You’ve been here long enough…’
‘You can come back next summer…’
He shook his wild, unkempt head, the strands of fair hair flopping at the back of his neck and forehead. ‘I don’t want to go! Just leave me here!’
His voice echoed along Main Street. Picked up by the wind, its cry didn’t seem to end in the Bay but carried well beyond it – fading away in North Uist, Skye or Harris, perhaps.
‘Well, you bloody well have to,’ one of the four fishermen answered. ‘We’ve been sent here to get you and bring you back.’
‘We don’t get flaming paid if we don’t!’
‘I’m staying here!’ he yelled, thinking of Lochaline and all the trees that the other men had left had planted there. When they were gone, they would block the horizon, cast the long trail of their shadows everywhere.
‘Well, you can’t survive here all winter. Nobody could do it on their own!’
He ran away from them, away from Main Street, where he could be easily trapped within the walls of the houses and other buildings, caught and held by their outstretched arms. He raced from the place, fleeing further up the island in the direction of Oiseaval, hearing once more their voices in his ears.
‘Hell! Come back, you idiot!’
‘Get back here!’
When he didn’t respond, the four of them walked back in the direction of the quay. Two of them stopped at the Feather Store. Op
ening its door, they took up the two fowling rods that had been left there. ‘Not much of a point taking them with us,’ one of the islanders had said. The others had gone to their fishing boat, taking two pieces of fishing net from the vessel. They draped it around the necks, clearly determined to haul him back to the mainland if all else failed.
‘You don’t blame anyone for going mad here,’ he heard one of them say. ‘No one to talk to all summer. All on his bloody own.’
‘But I hadn’t been on my own,’ he felt like telling them. ‘I had plenty of company.’ When a place like the island had been peopled for centuries, the spirits of those who lived there lingered for a long time in its homes. Their stories are stored in the hearths of houses, remaining, too, within walls. The words they speak, however, are not solely about the past. Sometimes they even talk about the island’s future, what things will happen in years to come, how men will arrive there not to catch and eat the birds but to count them and ring their legs, how great guns and bullets will be aimed in the direction of its rocks, men living on its shore to measure their direction and force.
The men were coming for him. He could see them walk past some of the cleits on the slope of Oiseaval, the edge of the village. They dodged in and out of the stone walls, ducking occasionally as if this might stop them seeing him. Once or twice one of them slipped on the loose stone that was to be found on the hill leading to the cliff-top or stumbled on a dip or rise in the ground. They all looked as if they were still using sea-legs, not used yet to the earth below their feet. Bold, broad figures, low and muscular, they wore oilskin trousers that, for all they were suitable for a boat, slowed them on land.
‘Why are you bloody wasting our time?’ one shouted.
‘We’ll only get money if we take you with us. Get sod-all if we leave you here!’
‘Otherwise…’
For once in his life, Calum knew what the birds must have felt like, these nights they slipped down the crags on ropes to hunt them or bring back a harvest of eggs. He was aware of how he was disturbing them with his own presence. The terns snipped and swept down around his head. The fulmars circled, preparing to guard their nests. Stiff and unbending in the breeze, they possessed all the rigour and attention to routine of soldiers, reeling round and round.
Once again, he looked at the men who were following him. One of them had dropped and was settled on his haunches on a rock, watching him as he hid behind the monolith they called the Mackinnon Stone, touching it with his fingers. It looked as if this was part of their plan for catching him. One would leave the race to try and capture him for a while. Then another… Followed by the next one… This was part of their plan, wait and rest at certain spots from time to time in the hope that he might tire and exhaust himself. Sooner or later, they would manage to trap him in their nets or arms.
‘A bloody straitjacket, that’s what we need!’ he heard one yell.
‘Been out in the full moon too long!’
There was one place where they might not follow. For all he knew that its rock was brittle and dangerous, he snuck out from his position behind the Mackinnon Stone and headed for the edge of Oiseaval. It was the first time he had ever gone there on his own. On the other occasions a group of his fellow islanders had been with him, making sure the rope was tense and taut, the ground below his feet was firm and stable. Slowly, carefully, he slipped down the rock-face, watching the eyes of those who followed him track him as he dropped onto a ledge. Their eyes were wide and wondering; their mouths hanging loose.
There was so much that was familiar about the place where he stood. There was the tang of bird shit in the air, the surge of green water below his feet. Slowly he moved along the ledge of rock, stepping carefully in the way he had always been taught. He heard the cries of the other men around him, guiding and encouraging him, making sure his feet did not stumble or fall. He heard Murdo’s voice as he made his way along, reciting Psalm 121 as he always did when he was out on the rock.
‘Behold He that keeps Israel,
He slumbers not nor sleeps…’
There were others talking too. Angus shouting ‘Naire! Naire! Take care! Take care!’ Others yelling out a confusion of instructions. ‘Left! Left! Right! Right!’
They pointed out the nests of fulmars. ‘There’s one not far from you, Calum! Not far from you!’ He thought of all the stories he had heard over the last few days as he reached for his first egg. He saw the shade of fulmar shell as he slipped one in his pocket. Bright as a man’s soul. Luminous as the moon on these nights their ropes laced the cliff-face of Conachair like thread. There were times when his fellow islanders seemed to be like spider, trapping eggs and birds within the fineness of their web.
‘Suithad! Suithad! Get a move on! Stop dreaming!’
He shook his head. He had always dreamed, losing all sense of what he was doing while he was out with others on the cliffs. There was so much around him. The gleam of gannets as he dived into the water. The razor-bills and guillemots below. All the cacophony of noises echoing, mingling with the surge of the tide. There were times when he imagined angels among them, their gold wings flexing. Slowly he moved on, placing his feet carefully on a precarious edge of rock, testing it for weight.
‘Get the bloody hell up here! We want to go home too, you know!’
It was their shout that disturbed him. He saw the stone crumble, fall into the waves. A few moments later and he joined it, tumbling below. He heard the cries of alarm from the other men as he toppled, shouting out his name and mourning his passing long before he struck the surface of the sea…
The Cragsman’s Prayer
Let my fingers find
flaws and fissures in the face
of cliff and crag,
allowing feet to edge
along crack and ledge
storm and spume have scarred
for centuries
across the countenance of stacks.
Let me avoid
the gaze of guillemots,
the black-white judgements
of their wings;
foul mouths of fulmars;
cut and slash of razorbills;
gibes of gulls;
and let me keep my balance till
puffins pulse around me
and the glory of gannets
surrounding me like snow-clouds
ascendant in the air
gives me pause for wonder,
grants further cause for prayer.
Closing / Dunadh
To the writing of books about St Kilda, there seems to be no foreseeable end. As such, it is impossible to name all the titles that I have read over the years that inspired this book.
They include, however, Rewriting St Kilda – New Views On Old Ideas edited by Bob Chambers, especially the essays by Donald Meek and Bill Lawson, Tom Steel’s Life and Death of St Kilda, (which I read as a teenager) and time and conversations with my old friend, Calum Ferguson, who has written widely on the subject in both Gaelic and English. A debt is due, too, to Fraser MacDonald’s ‘St Kilda and the Sublime’ (Aberdeeen University) which challenged much of what I previously thought about that island. I also owe much to the guga-hunting tradition of my native Ness. It was my great good fortune to be brought up in that remarkable and distinctive community. It is not everyone who has Balaich a’Bhocsair and Domhnall Ruadh among their close neighbours.
The writer Mike Hughes – for his books about the effects of the Second World War on the Highlands and Islands – is also owed a tremendous debt of thanks. Some of these sequences would not have been written without his research and input.
Other works that inspired me include the poetry of Ian Duhig, Matthew Sweeney, Jo Shapcott, (especially her ‘Tea Poems’ in Of Mutability), The Book Of Dave by Will Self, and Jon McGregor’s collection of short stories, This Isn’t the Kind of Thing that Happens to Someone Like You. Two short stories in the ‘Tales of Alexander’ sequence owe much to that very unusual book.
Some of
these poems have appeared elsewhere. They include ‘Love- making In St Kilda’ which was first published in Gerry Cambridge’s magazine The Dark Horse and has since been anthologised elsewhere. One or two other poems were first printed in Praising the Guga (North Idea). Some of the ‘St Kildans in exile’ sequence have been seen in Gutter magazine. ‘The Cragsman’s Prayer’ first came to light in the pamphlet, Praising The Guga (North Idea). ‘Fowl Talk’ and other pieces appeared earlier in Northwords Now.
I also owe a great deal to the people whose company I have enjoyed over the years. These include the following:
Tom Clark, who, as a teacher, spotted some distinctive spark in a young lad. One can only wonder how.
Iain Morrison – a fellow exiled Niseach in Shetland – and Iain Mackenzie – now staying in Edinburgh – for their time and patience.
The late Charles Macleod (Tearlach Louis), my former primary teacher in Cross School, who encouraged me to write as a young boy.
Donald Anderson in his role as Literature Development Officer for Shetland Arts.
William MacDonald – the former Headteacher of Sgoil Lionacleit in Benbecula who helped to arrange (with the assistance of Qiniteq) my first long visit to Hiort.
The men and women who made my time there very rewarding:
Angus Smith of the Elinca who is going to try to get me there again one day;
Louise Hutcheson and Andy (AB) Jackson for their help in editing this book;
Gavin MacDougall, Kirsten Graham, Jennie Renton, Tom Bee and the rest of the staff of Luath Press for their help in the creation of The Guga Stone;
Jane Macleod, Catriona Dunn, Iona MacDonald and my son, Angus, who helped me out with a few Gaelic phrases;
Doug Robertson, whose artistry is such that it compels me to do my utmost. For all that I am very grateful to all the above for both their company and inspiration, there is a special debt owed to him.
But especially to Maggie… Who knows how she puts up with me? The depth of her love and her strength and belief in my talent causes me to marvel more with each day that passes.
The Guga Stone Page 13