The Blackhouse l-1

by Peter May

  It was mid-afternoon by the time we had transferred all our supplies to the top of the rock, and Artair and I climbed our way wearily up to join the others. There we saw for the first time, crouched among the rocks and the boulders, the remains of an old blackhouse, built more than two centuries before, and maintained each year by the guga hunters to provide their shelter. It comprised just four walls, and the sun- and salt-bleached struts of a non-existent roof. I could not believe that this was to be our home for the next two weeks.

  Mr Macinnes must have seen our faces. He grinned. ‘Don’t worry, boys. In an hour we’ll have her transformed. She’ll be a lot cosier than she looks now.’ In fact the transformation took less than an hour. To reach the blackhouse we had to stumble across the chaos of rocks on the top of the island, slipping and sliding in the spinach of lichen, guano and mud that covered them, trying to avoid the nesting fulmar petrels tucked into nearly every crevice. The whole crown of the rock seemed alive with birds, nests woven from frayed scraps of coloured string, the debris of broken and discarded fishing nets scavenged from the sea. Green, orange, blue. Entirely incongruous in this most primeval of places. As we blundered among them it was impossible to escape the vomit of the fledgling petrel chicks, an involuntary response to our sudden and unexpected presence. Their vile green bile spattered over our boots and oilskins as we passed, the stink of it almost as bad as the shite that coated every treacherous surface.

  Within the walls of the blackhouse, great sheets of corrugated iron wrapped in tarpaulin were recovered and unwrapped, and we set about nailing them in place between the angled beams of the roof. Then we threw the tarpaulins over them, and fishing net weighed down by boulders that were left to hang all around the walls. Now our blackhouse was weather-tight and waterproof. Inside was dark and damp, the smell of guano almost overwhelming. The floor was strewn with discarded nesting materials, and our first task was to clear it out, and remove the nests built into every nook and cranny of wall space, carefully re-siting them somewhere out among the rocks. Half a dozen peat fires were lit in open-hearthed barrels to dry out rain-soaked walls, and we transferred all our supplies into a room at the far end of the blackhouse where, in a traditional home, the animals would have been kept.

  Thick, choking smoke quickly filled the place, a fumigation, driving out the smell of shit, and forcing streams of earwigs out from every crack and crevice in the walls. Our eyes were streaming. Artair dashed outside, airways reacting to the smoke. He was gasping for breath. I followed him out to find him sucking desperately on his puffer, panic subsiding as his tubes reopened and oxygen flooded his lungs.

  Gigs said, ‘Go and make yourself familiar with the rock, boys. There’s nothing more you can do here just now. We’ll give you a shout when grub’s up.’

  And so, with the wind whipping around our legs, and the rain running in sheets off our oilskins, we made our way slowly and carefully across the rock, heading north to the third promontory, a huge arc of smooth rock almost severed from the mother island by a deep gully. We had seen the stacks of cairns there, silhouetted against the grey sky, piles of stones laid meticulously one on the other to create columns three feet high and more, like gravestones. Out there on the promontory, next to the cairns, we found the remains of a small beehive-like dwelling, its roof long since caved in. We found flat rocks to sit on and with some difficulty lit ourselves cigarettes. Still, it seemed, there was nothing for us to say to each other. So we sat in silence and looked back across the length of An Sgeir. We had a marvellous view of the rock from here, rising up to its peak at the lighthouse, a short, squat, concrete structure with a maintenance hatch, and a strangely structured glass roof to protect the light. Seabirds gathered around it in their thousands. Next to it was the only flat and level place on the island. A square of concrete laid into the rock to provide a landing pad for the helicopters that brought out maintenance crews twice a year. We could see the ocean all around us, grey-green and leaden, breaking against the rock in wreaths of creamy foam, rising and falling into a distance obscured by rain. Despite the presence of ten other men on the island, and my best friend sitting beside me, I cannot ever remember feeling so alone. Depression fell over me like a shroud.

  In the distance, we saw a figure approaching across the rock. As he got nearer we realized it was Artair’s dad. He called and waved and began climbing up towards us. Above the sound of wind and rain battering my hood I heard Artair say, ‘Why the fuck can’t he just leave us alone!’ I turned to see if the remark had been directed to me. But he was staring straight ahead at his approaching father. I was startled. I had never heard Artair speak like that about his dad before.

  ‘You shouldn’t smoke, Artair,’ were Mr Macinnes’s first words when he reached us. ‘Not with your condition.’ Artair said nothing, but continued smoking all the same. Mr Macinnes sat down beside us. ‘You know the story behind the ruined dwelling?’ He pointed to the collapsed beehive. We shook our heads. ‘It’s the remains of a twelfth-century monastic cell inhabited, some say, by St Ronan’s sister, Bruinhilda. There’s another just like it on a rock called Sula Sgeir ten miles or so west of here, close to North Rona. Legend has it that her remains were found in one of them, whether or not it was here or on Sula Sgeir I don’t know. But her bones were bleached as white as driftwood by the elements, and there was a cormorant nesting in her ribcage.’ He shook his head. ‘Hard to believe that anyone could live out here on their own.’

  ‘Who built the cairns?’ I asked. From our position I could see now that there were dozens and dozens of them, stretched across the curve of the promontory like a cemetery.

  ‘The guga hunters,’ Mr Macinnes said. ‘Every one of us has our cairn. Each year we add another stone, and when we have been for the last time, they are the reminder to all those who follow that we have been before.’

  A shout from the direction of the blackhouse drew our attention, and we saw someone waving us back.

  ‘They must be ready for us to eat,’ Mr Macinnes said.

  By the time we got to the blackhouse, there was smoke billowing out of the hole in the roof left for its escape. The interior was surprisingly warm now, and less smoky than it had been. Angel had his cooking fire burning in an open keg in the middle of the floor, a pot hanging over it from a chain in the roof, a mesh grill set over the flames for making toast, a large frying pan bubbling with oil set on top of it. Gone was the stink of guano and bird vomit, to be replaced by the smell of kippers cooking in the pan. There were potatoes boiling in the pot, and Angel had made a stack of smoky toast for us to mop up the juices. There were two big pots of tea to wash it all down.

  Three-foot-wide stone ledges all around the walls had been covered with tarpaulins and laid with the big mattresses we had dragged up the rocks earlier in the day. Our beds. By the flickering yellow light of candles set at intervals around the room, I could see beetles and earwigs crawling all over them. I shuddered at the thought of spending one night here, let alone fourteen. Or more.

  Before we ate, we washed our hands in water preserved from last year’s trip, a brown, cloudy soup in a cut-down keg, and then gathered around the fire, squatting on the floor, as Gigs opened his bible and read to us from it in Gaelic. I barely listened to the monotonous drone of his voice. For some reason I was filled with a sense of dread, of anticipation, premonition perhaps. Somewhere, programmed into the time-space continuum, it may be that deep down I knew what was going to happen. I began shaking, and when Gigs had finished reading, ate my fish with trembling fingers.

  I don’t remember there being much talk around the fire that first night. We were a solemn group, battered and bruised by the weather, calling on reserves of fortitude and stamina to face the days ahead. We could hear the wind howling around our ancient stone shelter, and the rain hammering on the roof. I don’t even remember going to bed, but I can recall very clearly lying on a damp mattress on that unyielding stone shelf, fully dressed and wrapped in blankets, wishing that I was youn
g enough to weep with impunity. But big boys don’t cry. So I held my peace and drifted away on the tide of a shallow, troubled sleep.

  I felt better the next day. It’s amazing what a few hours’ sleep can do to restore a broken spirit. Sunshine slanted through the tarpaulin draped across the doorway, blue peat smoke hanging in the light. I tumbled out of bed, blinking matter from my eyes, and squeezed into the circle of men gathered around the fire. The warmth of the glowing peats was almost soporific. Someone spooned me out a bowl of porridge and I dunked thick chunks of smoky toast into the hot goo of it and filled my mouth. I poured scalding tea into my mug and thought I had never tasted anything so good. I guess the first night is the worst, like maybe your first night in a prison. After that, you know the worst, and you just get on with it.

  A hush fell on the group as Gigs opened his bible, a well-worn tome scarred and tashed from constant use. His voice rose and fell in soft Gaelic incantations as he read from it and we listened in the solemn first light of the day. ‘Right, then,’ he said as he closed it. And it was his signal, or so I thought, that the first killing spree of the trip was to begin. ‘Fin, Donnie, Pluto, you’re with me.’ I felt a great sense of relief that I would be with Gigs that first day. Artair was with another team. I tried to catch his eye across the fire and give him a smile of encouragement, but he wasn’t looking my way.

  I had expected that we would make straight for the cliffs to begin the harvest, but in fact we spent most of the morning constructing a bizarre network of struts and cables across the top of the rock, from the killing grounds to the processing areas up by the cairns and down again to the top end of the chute. These aerial wireways, in hundred-metre lengths, were mounted on crude wooden tripods and cranked up to the correct tension with a jockey-winch. Operated by pulleys, this ingenious network would allow sacks of dead birds, suspended from hooks, to be whizzed across the island from one place to the next with minimum effort. Everything was dependent on the angle and tension of the cables, so that gravity would do most of the work, and Gigs was meticulous in getting each of these factors just right. Each bird weighed around nine pounds, and each sack carried ten birds. To have attempted to manhandle such cumbersome loads across this treacherous and uneven rocky moonscape would have been madness. And yet, before Gigs came up with his idea for pulleys and cables, that is just what the guga hunters must have done for all the centuries they had been coming here.

  At midday, we were out near Lighthouse Promontory when I saw Angel making his way over the rock towards us, performing an extraordinary balancing act. In one hand he carried a large black kettle of hot tea, in the other, dangling from a plastic box of cake and sandwiches, were our mugs, tied by their handles to the ends of twelve lengths of string. Each day at noon, and at five, we would look for his lumbering form picking its way across the island with hot tea and sandwiches to keep us going. Much as I disliked Angel Macritchie, I had no complaints about his food. He was punctilious in everything he did, as all the veterans said his father was before him. He had something to live up to, and he made certain that he did. And I suppose that is why, although nobody liked him, he succeeded, at least, in earning their respect.

  We sat around the lighthouse then, eating sandwiches and cake and washing it all down with mouthfuls of hot tea. Cigarettes were rolled and smoked, a comfortable silence among the group as sunlight flitted in and out of low, broken cloud, taking the cold edge off the wind that still blew out of the north-west. In a few minutes the slaughter would begin, and the taking of all those lives was, I think, the subject of quiet reflection. It is hard to start the killing, easier once it has begun.

  We commenced among the colonies on the east-facing cliffs of the Lighthouse Promontory, two teams of four starting at either end and working towards each other in a pincer movement. A third team of three worked its way across the top. As soon as we climbed down on to the cliffs, the parent birds rose in their thousands from the nests, shrieking and wheeling overhead as the killing of their chicks got under way. It was like working in the midst of a snowstorm, the flashing white of gannet feather filling your eyes, your ears full of their anger and anguish and the beating of their wings against the wind. And you had to be careful, as you climbed level with the nests, that the chicks did not take your eye out, a reflex jab of the beak if you startled them.

  Gigs led our group along ledges and cracks and shelves of rock, examining each nest for its contents. He carried a catching pole, more than six feet long with a sprung metal jaw at one end. He reached out with it to pluck the chicks from their nests, quickly passing them back to the second in the group. Donnie was a veteran of more than ten years, a quiet man probably well into his fifties, always with a cloth cap pulled down over his brow, silver whiskers bristling on a face ravaged by time and weather. He carried a stout stick, and when a bird was swung round to him on the end of the pole he seized it and killed it with a single, well-practised blow. I was next in the chain. Gigs had decided to blood me in the truest sense of the word. I carried a machete, and it was my job to decapitate the birds and hand them back to Pluto, who arranged them in piles for us to collect on the return. At first I was sickened by my task, and slow at it. I was squeamish about the blood that ran over my hands and spattered my overalls. I felt warm splashes of it on my face. But they started coming so fast that I had to let go of my reserve, to free my mind of all thought and fall into a rhythm, both mechanical and mindless. Thousands of gannets and fulmars screamed and wheeled in endless eddies about our heads, and two hundred feet below the sea boiled and thrashed against the green collar of algae on the lowest rocks. Gradually my blue overalls turned black with blood.

  At first I had thought that Gigs was selecting the chicks at random. Some he took, others he left in the nest. It was Donnie who explained to me that the fledgling gannet went through three stages of development. The downy young chicks of the first stage produce very little meat, and so Gigs would leave them to grow to adulthood. The slim, black, young birds at the third stage of development were harder to catch. It was the second-stage chicks that were the real prize, easily identified by the three remaining clumps of down on the head, back and legs. Fine and meaty and easy to catch. Gigs had years of practice in identifying them at a glance.

  We moved across the cliff with astonishing speed, in a wave of killing, leaving piles of dead gugas in our wake. Until finally we met up with the second group. It had taken just over ten minutes, and Gigs signalled that the carnage was over for the day. And so we retraced our steps, carrying back as many gugas as we could, piling them up, and then forming a chain to pass them one by one to the top. There, the heap of dead birds harvested by the three groups mounted, and Gigs took out a pencil and a small notebook and carefully counted their number and noted it in his book. I looked back across the cliffs at where we had been, blood streaking red against the black, and realized that I had not even had time to be afraid. Only now did I become aware of how one slip, one careless move, would have led to almost instant death.

  Gigs turned to me, and as if giving up some great secret handed down to him across generations, said simply, ‘Well, Fin, that’s what we do.’

  ‘Why?’ I said to him. ‘Why do you do it?’

  ‘It’s the tradition,’ Donnie volunteered. ‘None of us wants be the one to break it.’

  But Gigs shook his head. ‘No. It’s not the tradition. That might be a part of it, aye. But I’ll tell you why I do it, boy. Because nobody else does it, anywhere in the world. Just us.’

  Which, I supposed, made ‘us’ special in some way. Unique. I looked at the pile of dead birds on the rock and wondered if there was not, perhaps, some better way to be special.

  We bagged the birds in hessian sacks, and I watched the strange spectacle of sack after sack swooping across the rock, dipping to a halt at the lowest point, and then being hauled on ropes up to the area by the cairns where eventually they would be plucked. There they were tipped out on to tarpaulins and left to dry in the
wind.

  I slept that night the sleep of the dead, and woke to find that the weather had changed again. Rain beat steadily against the rock on the leading edge of a blustering south-westerly, and it was mid-morning before an edgy Gigs decided that we could not afford to sit around any longer waiting for a break in the rain. So with silent resignation we got into our oilskins and headed out again on to the cliffs, with poles and sticks and machetes, feeling the icing of guano slippery beneath our boots as we worked our way through the colonies tucked away in the lower reaches of the Lighthouse Promontory.

  The pile of birds grew, covered now to save them from a soaking. The process of plucking them did not begin until the rain was by. Which was not until the Sunday, but since the guga hunters would not work on the Sabbath, all we could do was remove the tarpaulins and let the sun and the wind labour at drying the birds while we took our leisure.

  It was strange. During that whole two weeks on the rock, I was never once on the same team as Artair. Hardly ever saw him, in fact. It was almost as if they were keeping us apart, although I cannot imagine why. Even on the two Sundays I barely saw him. Or his dad. When I think back I can’t really remember Mr Macinnes at all. But I suppose that wasn’t really surprising. We were never on a team together, and the factory process of plucking, singeing, gutting and curing meant that groups of us worked on different parts of the process in different places at different times. The only time we were all together was when we ate, squeezed around the peats in the gloom of the blackhouse, too tired some nights even to talk. We were just faces in the firelight. It was not unheard-of for Gigs to insist that we went back out after our evening meal to catch up on that day’s plucking. There were occasions when we were out there by the cairns until midnight, pulling out fistfuls of feathers by the light of a tilley. We had little inclination to talk, and not much to say if we did.