Song of the Selkies

by Cathie Dunsford

  Eventually, they make their way through abundant deer-grass along the narrow path until finally they are rewarded by their first glimpse of the huge rocky stack of stones that rises in a steep vertical cone 450 feet into the sky from a rugged shore, waves crashing around its base. The path lowers them down through alpine bearberry, cowberry and crowberry growing out of the rocky soils. They are flanked by the small Loch of Stourdale to their port and huge boulders to starboard and great skuas diving above, until the wild wind increases, warning them they are nearing the cliff edge, laced with marsh orchis and icelandic moss. Now, the vast cathedral spire of nature towers before them and the Old Man of Hoy glows in pink, red and ochre shades.

  They are speechless, witnessing this magnificent sculpture created by the wind and sea working on the red sandstone of the cliffs of Hoy, reminding them of the twelfth century church of St Magnus they saw in Kirkwall shortly after arriving, with its pitted, sculpted, curving sandstone shapes. Both are living entities, full of spirit, one sculpted by sand and wind and sea and men, the other by nature alone.

  They brace themselves against the wind as fulmars and skuas glide over their heads, in awe at the vast, towering skyscraper before them, little realising that a battle between life and death is now taking place in the humble seaside cottages they left earlier this morning. That the links binding humans and nature are fast dissolving in the space between the place they lay their heads at night and the sea crashing into the Bay of Skaill below.

  [21]

  ‘Och, aye, he’s as weighty as a sunken ship,’ admits Squiddy, as he helps Morrigan haul the wounded seal off the back of the truck and into the old wheelbarrow. He looks up at them plaintively, moaning with pain as he is moved.

  ‘Always was a bonnie wee lad,’ Morrigan replies, as if he’d commented about a son rather than a seal.

  Squiddy grins at her turn of phrase. He’s always loved Morrigan like the son he didn’t have, never mind her being a woman. She fished like a man, drank like a man, smoked like a man, and could haul up as many lobster creels as a man, so in Squiddy’s eyes, that qualified her as a man. And she never indulged in that boring small talk of the women when they sat about drinking tea and eating oatcakes after the morning’s housework. Squiddy hates gossip. It ruined his life and it nearly ruined Morrigan’s and that would be enough to bind them had they not liked the same whisky and loved the same career as fishers to boot. He sighs, looking down into the bay and wishing he was out fishing today, despite the strong wind.

  Morrigan holds the wheelbarrow carefully with the sick seal balanced inside and now propped up with blankets. Squiddy trots along beside her as she follows the rocky path from the cottages down to the far shed, once used for ploughs and tools when the land had been a working farmstead. Every now and again, Squiddy looks into the seal’s eyes, wondering where he has seen that look before. He’s spied many a seal, but none with eyes like this one, as green as the sea on a sunny day.

  ‘Buggered if I know how yer gonna heal this seal, Morrigan.’

  ‘It’s useless letting those environmentalists look after it. They’re as likely to treat him like a pet and he’ll never be able to return to the sea,’ replies Morrigan. ‘No, far better he is in my care.’

  ‘What’ll yer do if he gives up the ghost, lassie?’

  ‘I’ll bury him here, Squiddy. Give him a decent send off where he can look out over the Bay of Skaill and hear his kin calling for him.’

  ‘Have the others pulled through that you’ve tried to save?’ asks Squiddy, who has helped Morrigan bring more than a few wounded seals back to the shed under the light of the moon or when nobody was about.

  ‘Some’ve made it, a few’ve decided to lie at rest here in the bay,’ replies Morrigan, looking out over the restless waves, hoping the seals will know he is safe with her.

  Together, they carefully lift him from the barrow onto the sand which Morrigan always had piled up in the corner next to the door leading out to a farm pond, once used by cattle and sheep to drink from. ‘He’ll be as happy as a bull in a pile of hot shit here,’ remarks Squiddy, rubbing his hands down his overalls and extracting some tobacco from his hip pocket to light up his pipe.

  ‘Hope so.’ Morrigan looks anxiously into the seal’s eyes as she bends over him, stroking his head and neck. The seal looks up at Morrigan, begging her to continue. For a short moment in time, Squiddy wonders if there is some strange attraction between Morrigan and the seals — maybe she’s into animals, y’know, in that weird kind of way? Some folks said so, coz she was always hanging about the seals, and she was different from the other girls. Never married, never had any boyfriend, except for Kelpie. Then again, they said Kelpie was taken away by the seals, and his missus later on. You never could tell.

  Squiddy puffs on his pipe, watching Morrigan tend to the seal more like it was her lover than a fish-stealing mammal. Takes all types, I s’pose, he reckons, and buggered if I care what anybody does in their own time, so long as they act friendly in the pub, fish fair and get along with their mates. Morrigan’s a good sort, for sure. He dismisses the errant thoughts, as if they have never crossed his mind, and peers out the empty stone window frame, across the barley hills and down into the Bay of Skaill.

  [22]

  A dark cloud obscures their vision for a few moments, until the sun breaks through and penetrates the upper levels of the water, revealing the squid propelling themselves forward by their small, powered jet-packs. Sandy skims up and catches one in his mouth, only to get a face full of ink spat out at him as the squid’s protection. Fiona laughs, pulling some succulent seafood from under the toothed wrack kelp, their shells breaking easily between her teeth. Emerging from a cloud of ink, Sandy still holds the struggling squid between his teeth and looks triumphant as he wolfs down the wriggling fish head first so its tentacles cannot propel it forward again.

  After he has finished eating the squid, Sandy dives down to greet Fiona amid the saw wrack and dabberlocks swinging gently in the current. ‘Yee turning vegetarian again, Fe? Yee’ll never survive the winter just nibbling seaweed. Yee need some good fleshy halibut and sea salmon to sustain the next season.’

  ‘Yee eat too much of that Sandy. Yee could do with some nutritious kelp. There’s nothing more luscious than a taste of crinkled, frilly sugar kelp on a warm sunny day, or a bite of that delicate, olivy, ferny leaf of dabberlocks. I remember seeing it near the low water line in my Nofin days and now I regret never having the courage to taste it then. Yee need more greens.’ Fiona tugs at another frond of the toothed wrack, keen to savour the spiral seashells that cling to its underbelly, floating the first leaf over to Sandy and taking the second for herself.

  ‘Do yee know who it was caught in the fisherman’s net last week, Fe?’ asks Sandy, watching as the kelp floats slowly past his nose.

  Fiona glances up from her intense concentration on finding the small spiral seasnails, ‘I have no idea, Sandy, but I’m sure we would’ve heard if it had been any of our clan, now, would we not?’

  ‘Sure enough, Fe. Then again, not all the deaths have been noticed of late. So many from floating plastic and nets and did I tell yee about that time when some schoolboys battered one of our young ’uns to death? They’d heard their fisherfolk complaining about us seals eating all their fish and the father had mentioned it was a pity the days of clubbing were over. The young lads got it into their heads it’d be fun to club the poor creature to death and they battered her with stones found at the beach until they were all covered in blood. Some grey seals watched it from their wee skerry off the coast and they were horrified. They never let any of their clan near that beach again, remaining on the skerry or out at sea.’

  ‘How did yee know about their motives, Sandy?’

  ‘A week later, some grey seals pulled the father of one of the boys into the sea and he admitted what he had said. They asked him if he would like to be a seal for two years without any possibility of returning. They would not grant him selkie sta
tus until he had earned it. He refused, so they let him float to the bottom of the sea. It’s said he tasted like a fish, he’d eaten so many of our relatives, like a big, rotting jellyfish covered in beer batter. He liked his ale, did Jimmy McDonald.’ He laughs.

  Fiona wrinkles up her sealy nose. ‘You can talk, Sandy. I bet yee’d taste the same right now. Like a slithery squid, with squiddy ink flowing through your selkie skin.’ She flicks her tale flukes near his belly to emphasise her point.

  ‘Not as nasty as slithery seaweed, rotting in your gut, all curling around inside you like a mad seasnake in the stomach of a vegetarian selkie.’ Sandy wrinkles up his whiskers, enjoying teasing her.

  Fiona drops the kelp she is nibbling and it floats gently to the sea floor. She fixes her eyes onto Sandy. ‘Yee just wait. I’ll make sure yee regret that.’ She swoops up and knocks him sideways, then dives into the kelp bed which she knows so well now. He flicks his tail and dives after her, but it takes him some time to catch up. Fiona weaves her way skilfully through the thick tangle and edges under a ledge she figures he will not know about. Sandy glides past gleefully, thinking he is hot on her trail and will catch her the next corner he rounds. She chuckles to herself. Then she notices the shape circling above and sending dark shadows onto the seafloor below. It is a great white shark and it is moving in the direction Sandy has swum. Sandy has rounded the rock ledge and she cannot see him. The shark swims steadily forward, edging its way slowly as it contemplates the easy prey ahead.

  [23]

  ‘Set into the floor, near the hearth, are stone boxes, the joints of which are luted, or cemented with clay, to make them watertight. It is likely they were used to soak limpets so they are soft enough to be used for fish bait.’ DK eyes the cute young woman who guides them through the ancient seaside village, wondering if she is a dyke. She has a labrys earring made from silver and wears a waist coat over a silk shirt. Her hair is cut short and spiky.

  ‘Calling DK. Back to earth, DK,’ Uretsete breathes into her ear. ‘Check out these limpet boxes. They must have used them in rotation since they have several smaller ones rather than one large box. Maybe we could try the same and see what we can catch from the rocks off Skara Brae?’ DK is too busy checking out whether the boots are Doc Martens or some local variety to reply.

  ‘Note the central hearth in each house. This was essential for warmth and fuel was probably a mixture of dung, heather, bracken, marine mammal bone which is rich in oil, and dried seaweed.’ The guide points towards the hearth, adding that what wood may have been available was too precious to burn and was most likely kept for tool making.

  Cowrie is busy looking closely at the carvings on the walls of the houses and passages linking them. The guide notes that the designs are abstract and have no meaning known to archeologists but did for the artists at the time. Cowrie peers at the two stones nearest her. They both have etchings similar to those on the ki’i pohaku or rock drawings found on cave walls in Hawai’i and Aotearoa. There the drawings depict animals and birdpeople and more recognisable figures, but here the lines are like the journeys described by scratches on the pahoehoe or lava rock with diagonals and crosses marking sites of interest. Aboriginals in Australia marked such sites with spiral and circular designs painted onto bark or etched in the sand or rock. A pity so many archeologists work only from their monocultural knowledge, thinks Cowrie, taking out a sketch pad to jot down the neolithic designs etched into the walls of the Skara Brae houses.

  ‘How come the village was preserved so well, and how did knowledge of it become known?’ asks a tartan-clad Scotsman, peering over his half-spectacles, his rich red eyebrows raised in expectation.

  ‘It was the winter of 1850,’ explains the guide. ‘A wild storm stripped the grass from the top of the dunes revealing an immense midden or refuse heap and the first glimpses of these ancient dwellings.’

  ‘How old are they?’ his wife asks, leaning on his shoulder.

  ‘Skara Brae was inhabited before the Egyptian pyramids were built and the community here flourished many centuries before work began on constructing Stonehenge. The original village, on which this now stands, was built about 5000 BCE and this one was inhabited about 3100 BCE to 2500 BCE.’

  ‘Awesome,’ says DK, referring to the embossed silver bangle the guide wears, where two seahorses erupt from two globes under which lie two celtic crosses. The crowd murmurs in assent, thinking she is admiring the houses, not discovering a partially closet Orcadian mermaid.

  ‘But how did they begin? I mean the houses are so strongly structured and have lasted 5000 years.’

  ‘They are built on refuse essentially,’ explains the guide, moving her hand out of DK’s vision. The people living in the earlier village under Skara Brae collected their refuse in a midden made from shells, broken bones, ash, stone and organic material. Together, it makes for strong building material. When enough of it is gathered, then they dug mounds in it and built stone linings inside the mounds for walls. The subterranean design kept away the strong Orcadian winds and sea salt and they built huge roof structures overtop from whalebone gathered from the beaches and covered with skins and natural fibres.’

  ‘Ingenious. Bloody ingenious,’ mutters the clan-man puffing on his pipe.

  Cowrie is by now examining the tools used by the villagers and found during the excavations. There are several bone points, from stranded whales, some with holes in the top, probably used for stitching skins. They’d also be excellent for drawing out lobster and crabmeat, thinks Cowrie, the juices in her mouth gathering at the thought. This was clearly a part of their diet from the archeological digs and midden remains. An impressive bone awl made from the leg-bone of a gannet is carved to a perfect point. Pots made of stone, bone and oyster shells and containing dried ochre may have been for skin painting or for decorating carvings.

  She moves to examine the jewellery, mostly marine-mammal bone pendants, in the shape of shark’s teeth and a huge number of beads and bone pins. She nudges Uretsete. ‘Hey, check these out, sister. Looks like some of your cuzzie-bros came this way too.’ She points to the jewellery which could have come from a coastal Chumash or Miwok village. Some of the pins are from walrus tusks, common in Orkney at the time. One of the pins has a dark, burnt texture, from heating the bone carefully, its effect similar to pit-fired pottery. The hand carving is beautiful, though none of it as complex or intricate as Maori bone carvings nor Celtic work. Nevertheless, impressive, as Uretsete agrees.

  ‘We can deduce from the archeological evidence,’ continues the guide, ‘that the Skara Brae village was egalitarian. The houses are similar in size and structure and thus no chiefs requiring larger premises were here. The house structures show a community bound by strong beliefs and able to live communally. There are no defensive structures and among all the tools and objects found in middens, there were absolutely no weapons whatsoever at Skara Brae, leading us to conclude that these were not warring people.’

  ‘Amazing. I like it,’ murmurs Uretsete and several agree with her.

  ‘Nowhere else in Europe can we see such rich evidence of how our ancestors truly lived. I hope you have found this tour of Skara Brae inspiring and I will be here to answer any further questions.’ The guide ends her spiel and is surrounded by eager questioners.

  Uretsete examines the artist’s drawings of the roofs of the houses, from the evidence gathered, and is amazed to see that there is little or no ventilation provided and that the archeologists assumed that the houses were very smoky. She reads the inscription: ‘There would have been little ventilation. The air inside the houses would have been very smoky.’ She points this out to Cowrie, asking her to recall the Miwok village she visited near Tomales Bay in California when they first met. ‘Didn’t Peta take you to the old village,’ she asks, ‘and you would have seen the deer-skin flap over the teepee roof to let out air when there was a fire. It is likely it was very similar here. They could never survive in smoke-filled underground rooms all winter. So
me of these archies really take the cake!’

  Cowrie laughs. ‘Yep, you’d think they could piece that together.’

  Meantime, DK has been working her charms on the delightful guide and after the visitors have left to return to their coach, she asks if it would be all right to wander about some more. Kerry, as she is called, says it is fine and, if they have any further questions to ask her, she will be in the cafe. They explore the village again, delighting in imagining the community which must have lived here, then join Kerry in the Skara Brae restaurant. DK buys her a second baked tattie filled with delicious tomatoes and local Swanney cheese melted on the top, and they ask her whether it is likely a group of women ever lived here alone.

  ‘Officially, no. It appears that there was a family settlement here. But the lack of weapons and hierarchy certainly makes me wonder, unless they lived a more matriarchal lifestyle,’ she offers, looking around to make sure none of the staff have heard her. ‘There are many local tales about the mythical women of Skara Brae, but they can never be proved nor disproved. One thing is for sure, they lived a peaceful existence and one based around ritual and ceremonies held at the Ring of Brodgar and Stenness. They killed only enough seafood or animals to survive and it’s likely they collected herbs, wild plants, fruits and nuts for eating, and maybe baked their own bread since they grew wheat and barley. The temperatures were warmer than today, lucky devils,’ she adds, with a grin.