Song of the Selkies

by Cathie Dunsford

  ‘So what do you think about the sealfolk, Cowrie?’ Uretsete asks. ‘I mean after you told us all about Laukiamanuikahiki, the Hawai’ian turtle woman, I always associated her with you. You were both orphaned at birth and both were given sacred tokens to find your way back to your families later in life. So there must be some similar stories in your Maori and Hawai’ian traditions as in our Chumash one, right?’

  Cowrie pauses a moment, then replies. ‘Ae, Uretsete. Ka pae. You always manage to reach the heart of the matter. Maybe there’s a spirit guide within each of us and maybe it assumes different forms according to our recept ivity. But the selkie tradition is so strong here in these islands that I have begun to wonder about all this since coming. In the first week I was here, I picked up a book at Tam’s bookstore in Stromness where some fella from the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides had done decades of research into seal stories and made an interesting association between sightings of selkies and suggesting it could have been Eskimo or Inuit men in sea kayaks, which join the body at the waist, and who travelled this far down navigating by the stars. Few people believed him, but then again few believed that Pacific navigators could come from Hawai’i to Aotearoa in canoes and navigating by the stars until we did it again to prove the point. So he could have an interesting practical offering. Still, I like to think there are true selkies about too.’

  ‘So what’s this talk of selkies then?’ Morrigan stands against the stone doorway, puffing on her pipe. ‘You spinning yarns again Cowrie?’

  DK jumps to Cowrie’s defence and deflects the question back to Morrigan. ‘D’you believe in the sealfolk, Morrigan?’

  ‘Bloody nonsense, if you ask me,’ asserts Morrigan. ‘Tales told after too much whisky and in too much idle time with nothing better to do.’ With that, she saunters off to collect her lobster pots and packs up the van for the night’s fishing.

  Cowrie, in silence, watches her through the window as she lugs the huge pots and wonders why she answered so brusquely and in denial of her previous statements. It’s as if she is wanting to hide something. But what? And who is this man Kelpie? Did Morrigan have an affair with him behind the wife’s back, or was he just a friend? Fancy him being Shelley’s father.

  [15]

  ‘Ees it not rather strange how they have to keep discussing whether we exist or not, despite all the known evidence aboot selkies, when these Nofin humans will happily believe in aliens from space and even that they have been operated on by pale wee men with big almond eyes.’ Sandy munches on the green sea lettuce as he talks.

  ‘Soonds lyke yer average Edinburgh surgeon to me, Sandy,’ Fiona replies, recalling her one journey down south from the island to have an operation when she was a Nofin. ‘Mind you, I doot I’d have believed it meeself until yee dragged me from the beach and into the water that day.’

  ‘I was a bit rough, but I feared yee’d not come voluntarily then. Yee were a wee beet uptight and suspicious, if yee don’t mind me saying eet, Fe. T’was time for yee to change yer ways. Besides, yee’d often prayed to be released from the feudal lifestyle of yer family.’

  ‘How d’yer know that, Sandy?’ Fiona flicks some sand from her tail as she moves closer into the sea lettuce.

  ‘The women of Skara Brae told me. They hold all the secrets of the island and release them when needed. That ees why they weer buried between the walls of Skara Brae, to be witnesses to our ways of living from the Stone Age onwards, and to find living creatures capable of acting on the information they’ve heard.’

  ‘D’yer mean if they had not told you I was unhappy, yee’d never have known and come to rescue me?’

  ‘I’d seen yee walking the shores of the Bay of Skaill in blustering winds and sometimes late at night or early in the morning, so I realised yee had things weighing on yer mind. But I did not realise your domestic situation was so bad until they contacted me.’ Sandy spits out some shells that have attached themselves to a rocky ledge where he is searching for shrimps. ‘Damned limpets, theyer soo hard on the stomach lining.’

  ‘Why did they choose us to impart this knowledge to? Why not the longfins or gracefins?’

  Sandy thinks a moment, flicking his tail in the face of a school of young mackerel, sending them fleeing on another seapath. ‘I guess since we lived in the Bay and were close by, keeping an eye on things, and because we live on land and in the sea, then we were a perfect choice.’

  Fiona pauses. ‘Besides, there’s been a long history of Nofin and seal exploits. I recall the butler discussing this with the maid when I was in the kitchen at Skaill. His coosin was out fishing one day. He never came home and two days later his upturned boat was found drifting off Finstown. Evidently, he’d been laying nets irresponsibly and many seals had been caught in them and died very slow and painful deaths. They tried to warn him by biting into his lines a few times but he simply strengthened them with steel wire. Finally, they obviously decided to get rid of him.’ Fiona swims over to a more succulent piece of kelp.

  ‘Steady on, Fiona. It wasn’t thart hasty. From my recollection, they simply wanted to rock the boat a wee bit to scare him, let him know it was us seals protesting his actions. They swam up to the boat, nudging against the side gently. He started beatin’ tharm with his oar, yelling oot that they were greedy bloody seals, eating fish meant for him. One youngfin was badly battered and blood flowed from his head. When the other seals saw this, they rocked the boat more, swimming under and around it, bumping the sides and bottom, in an attempt to stop him. The fisher got angry and cursed them, beating his oar over their heads. It was chaos, according to Scarpy, and it ended when he reached out too far, trying to hit the seals, and fell into the warter, upturning the boat. One of the seals tried to rescue him, nuzzled up to show him how to breathe, but he poked her in the eye and so they let him go, and watched, helpless, as he sank to the ocean floor. Scarpy says he’ll never forget the man’s eyes. They were cold, dark, terrified. Days later, they returned to the same spot and his eyes had been eaten by the shrimps. All that remained were eye sockets, and the mackerel were chewing into them with glee. None of the seals would touch the flesh. They knew it would be right tough and mean.’ Sandy plunges his nose back into the sea lettuce, ripping off large chunks at a time.

  Fiona stares into a rocky crevice searching for shrimps. She wonders what might have been her fate if she had not been so charmed by Sandy. Maybe she too would have been left on the ocean floor, with shrimps aiming for her eye sockets before her body had begun to decompose. She shudders at the thought, the movement of her fins alerting the shrimps to their intended fate, and they swing around and head back into the heart of their sandstone cave.

  [16]

  ‘Hey, look at this!’ Uresete points to a column in the Orcadian and reads. ‘Call for weekend workshops. Literature, art, meditation, gardening, archeology, Orkney walks. You devise a course and we’ll help you organise it. Please apply to Dotty Network at PO Box 193, Stromness, or email Dotty@Stromness.demon.co.uk and check out our web site below.’ Let’s organise a storytelling workshop, and combine local stories with our own performances in a festival for the public later.’

  ‘Right on! That’s why we came in the first place,’ adds DK. ‘Well, part of the reason.’ She glances at Uretsete, winking.

  Morrigan glances up from her work. ‘Bloody wankers, those academics. Dotty couldn’t organise a piss up in a brewery.’

  ‘Morrigan. Watch your language,’ admonishes Camilla, ironing Morrigan’s fishing jumper.

  ‘Beats the hell out of me why you are doing that, woman,’ Morrigan says. ‘The bloody sweater will be full of fish guts and crab claws within twelve hours and buggered if they care whether it’s ironed or not.’

  ‘Well, I do, Morrigan. And you should have more pride in your appearance. You’re a very handsome woman when you clean yourself up.’

  Morrigan laughs and winks at DK. ‘She’ll be wanting to marry me soon.’ She grimaces and returns to her paper. Camilla irons
on, taking no notice of Morrigan’s bit of lip. She’s used to it at home and somehow, despite the roughness of this place, she is getting to like its honesty. And Morrigan surely needs a steady woman to look after her. She has a heart of gold, even if she lacks a few refinements, admits Camilla, as she works her way carefully around the buttons, making sure she does not miss any creases.

  ‘I think the workshops are a grand idea.’ Sasha glances from her sketch pad, which is covered in kayaks and seals and designs of sealskin boats where the paddlers inside look like humans with seal bodies, entering into the water from an iceberg. Cowrie looks at the drawings over her shoulder and admits that early Inuit paddlers in sealskin boats could easily have appeared to be selkies, especially as they entered the water or when they skimmed up the beach to peel off their spray skirts, leaving the sealskin kayak behind. To early islanders, who had not seen kayaks before, it may look like they are one creature shedding its skin. Then again, the theory does not explain all the other sightings and stories of selkie women that had nothing to do with the Inuit kayakers, she ponders.

  ‘Me too,’ replies Cowrie. ‘I’d enjoy listening to more stories from these islands, other than those I’ve heard and gleaned from a few past Orcadian newspapers. And I’d like to share some Pacific stories with Orcadians. Most of their knowledge of Aotearoa is South Island, New Zealand, where their relatives live in the colder climes of Christchurch or Dunedin, and that’s very much white folks’ territory other than a few Kai Tahu descendants. I reckon they’d enjoy some Maori and Pacific Island myths and talkstory. I mean, we are all fishers and island people with much in common. From what I see here, it’s very like the wild West Coast of the South Island, Hokitika to Westport. Similar climate, similar culture, similar humour and a strange mixture of anti-bureaucratic left-wing union politics with a dash of right-wing church parish morality. Throw in a few beautiful, rugged wind-swept beaches and a wild passion for whitebait that here might be lobster, and you’re pretty much at home.’

  This raises a chuckle from Morrigan. ‘Reckon you’ve got us figured out, eh, Cowrie? You’re pretty accurate on most counts, but you forgot the whisky.’

  ‘So I did! There’s more than one whitebaiter with a whisky tale or two. A Kai Tahu Maori and Kirkwall Orcadian writer, Keri Hulme, it is said, was working on her second large novel, Bait. The one after The Bone People, that scooped the Booker award and caused some controversy, mainly among jealous writers who felt they should have won it. Anyway, she signed up with the publishers for the sequel, Bait, but still wanted time to work on it. Evidently they kept sending faxes asking when it was coming, so eventually she dried a small whitebait, about an inch long, placed it in cotton wool inside a matchbox, and sent it off to them. She then faxed saying, ‘Bait is on its way at last. Arohanui — Keri.’ Luckily they thought it was funny and gave her some space to finish writing the text. Well, I reckon she’d had a dram or two of Highland Park to pull off a feat like that, though I may be wrong. She has a bloody good sense of humour sober too!’ Cowrie laughs at the memory of the story and the others love it too.

  ‘Now that’s the kind of woman I’d like to hang about with.’ Morrigan chuckles at the idea of pulling off such a stunt.

  ‘Here’s a start, Morrigan.’ Cowrie extracts her battered, well-read copy of The Bone People from her backpack. ‘Check this out and then tell me what you think.’ Morrigan takes the book and fingers the artwork on the cover, admiring it.

  ‘That’s Keri’s work too. She was an artist exhibiting at the Women’s Gallery in Wellington before she was well known as a writer.’ Cowrie points to the acknowledgments in the book.

  Morrigan is impressed. She opens the book at the preface and reads aloud: ‘They were nothing more than people, by themselves. Even paired, any pairing, they would have been nothing more than people by themselves. But all together, they have become the heart and muscles and mind of something perilous and new, something strange and growing and great. Together, all together, they are the instruments of change.’

  ‘Wow,’ says DK. ‘That’s awesome. That pretty well sums up why we exist, I reckon.’ The others agree. ‘Isn’t that the book you set us to read at UC, Cowrie? Where the young boy gets washed up on the beach and it turns out …’

  ‘Yeah, DK, so don’t wreck the story for Morrigan,’ Uretsete injects.

  ‘Ooops, sorry Morrigan’.

  But Morrigan is too engrossed in the writing to notice. She wanders outside to her favourite reading place under the sycamore tree, one of the few which has withstood the Orkney storms, and slides her back down the tree until she reaches the sandstone rock ledge below, never taking her eyes off the page. Cowrie watches from the window. ‘Well that’s Morrigan taken care of for the day.’

  ‘Didn’t The Bone People come out in Germany as Unter dem Tagmond a few years ago?’ asks Monique, still examining her photos of Skara Brae.

  ‘I think so,’ replies Cowrie. ‘What does it mean in German?’

  ‘Hard to translate literally. It’s something like “under the day moon”. An unusual and captivating title.’

  ‘Now I remember some fuss regarding the title reported in the media,’ Cowrie puts in. ‘As I recall there was some debate over whether a German audience would take to a title like “The Bone People”, given their nervousness about bone imagery post-holocaust.’

  ‘That wouldn’t be surprising,’ admits Monique. ‘It wasn’t only the Jews and gays who were hunted down and taken to the death camps. Heaps of African-Germans were gassed to death and others were sterilised in a desperate attempt to prevent more of us being born. It was all-out ethnic cleansing. But few of our parents spoke out against it. They were terrified after that and tried to remain as inconspicuous as possible.’

  ‘How come we’ve not heard about it in the African-American community then?’ asks DK.

  ‘Different issues. Africans living in the States have their own battles to fight. But in Germany, our communities are fewer and more closeted. It has only been more recently, and since Katharina Oguntoye’s film about Black Survivors of the Holocaust, that more of us have spoken out. My father was sterilised after he had me and it devastated him. My mother said he was never the same again. He’d at least had one child. Many younger men were sterilised as teenagers and never had the chance to have families. Family and kinship is vital to our culture and the Nazis knew this. They figured if they sterilised the men, their spirits as well as their bodies would be affected. It worked. But now, more are speaking out and others are learning the courage we have together. Kosovo showed us it can happen all over again with the so-called ethnic cleansing of Albanians.’

  ‘True enough,’ adds Uretsete. ‘I’m all for speaking out. The silence and patience of my own Chumash tribe never did us any good. And I wish the media would stop calling the brutal extermination of races “ethnic cleansing”. It is violent racism, and all forms of racism have the potential to lead to this. So when they call us ‘politically correct’, we need to answer that Hitler and Milosovich and Sadam Hussein were allowed to flourish because people were lax and not politically correct or astute or whatever word you like. Once your people or family are exterminated, sterilised, tortured, then you can never make light of such terms again.’

  ‘Language is power, and how we use it reveals the power structures,’ Cowrie offers. ‘So what can we do? I believe that education is a part of the answer and storytelling is an entertaining way people can learn about other cultures without being as threatened as they might at a political rally or similar.’ She finishes the dishes with a clang against the saucepan, as if to emphasise her point.

  ‘Yes. It puts one in a more relaxed state.’ Camilla stops her ironing to join in. ‘Years ago, I could never have imagined sharing space with such radical activists and storytellers as you. But despite my inherited conservatism, I agree with you on the power of education, though we approach it differently. I’m all for us organising a workshop and I think we should listen to Morriga
n’s advice on the best approach to involve local Orcadians.’

  ‘I agree,’ says Sasha. ‘It’s crucial we have local support for this. I reckon we should run it like a workshop, hearing the local stories first, and just include our work in the evening performance sessions, so that we do not take over their event. That way, the different approaches will come across and we just facilitate the groups. It’s more a matter of careful listening skills all round.’

  ‘Wunderbar!’ claps Monique. So how will we organise the sessions and who wants to take what?’ She gets out a sheet of paper and begins taking notes as they gather around and plan the workshop, intending to run it by Morrigan later to see what she thinks.

  Under the sycamore tree, Morrigan is captivated by the crustaceans in the rock pools of Aotearoa, by the waves pounding the west coast beaches, the call of the wild, the strange presence of the mute child and the aikido-happy guitar playing, whitebait-addicted Kerewin. She wonders what it would be like to be Orcadian and Maori at once, whether the two tribal links are warring within or similar at heart. Maybe it’s like being part human and part seal. But which part is which? She chuckles at the thought and burrows her nose back into the book.

  [17]

  The sheep lie in the fields munching their cud. It is three in the morning, still light and the sun is beginning to rise. Over the hill come five women warriors, armed with sketch books, cameras and binoculars. The leader of the troupe is playing a bone flute and its haunting sounds shimmer out over the valley, waking the drowsing cows and black-faced sheep and peedie Shetland horses. The music enters into the twenty-seven frozen shapes standing still in a circle. As the sun rises over the Loch of Harray it causes long shadows to emanate from the towering stone as the women walk silently around the perimeter of the ancient, sacred Ring of Brodgar.