‘Ach, him! I doubt but he’d have X-rayed it through the bottom of a whisky bottle,’ commented Morag and looked round the gathering for their appreciation.
‘’Tis wonderful indeed these X-rays,’ asserted Fiona. ‘They tell me they can look right through your bones with them.’
‘Aye,’ someone affirmed. ‘They’re clever, right enough, these days with their inventions.’
‘Not so clever as in the old days,’ objected Fiona. ‘There was folks then that could look through the years without any machines to help them an’ they’d tell us what was goin’ to happen. I’m thinkin’ it must be a lot easier to look through bones.’
‘That reminds me,’ I began, ‘has anyone here ever had a pet raven or had any experience of a raven behaving in a very peculiar way?’
Their eyes were fixed on me. ‘No, why do you ask?’ they demanded and I told them of how that very afternoon I had gone for a long walk over the moors and that when I had reached a certain valley I had suddenly become aware of a raven which kept alighting a few yards in front of me and then rising to circle just above my head. Each time it had alighted it had croaked at me in such a familiar way that I thought it must have at some time been a tame one. I tried to return its croaking. When I had decided I had gone far enough I turned towards home but then the raven had seemed to become agitated and had flown several times in front of my face as if trying to get me to turn back. Being something of an amateur ornithologist I was intrigued by the behaviour of the bird and did turn back. Once again the raven resumed its antics, alighting a few paces in front of me and croaking. It was so persistent that I got the impression it wanted me to follow it and this I did for perhaps another quarter of an hour. However tiredness overcame curiosity; the bird seemed to be leading me on interminably and when I thought of all the work that was awaiting me at home I finally gave up the chase and turned in my tracks. Several times the raven flew across my path as if trying to divert me but ignoring it I kept steadily on. After a little while it alighted on a projection of rock, croaked at me three or four times with the air of a disgruntled hawker and watched me disappear over the brow of the hill.
It struck me as strange that though down in the quiet valley I had found the behaviour of the bird interesting and rather endearing the moment I gained the brow of the hill which looked down on to the familiar houses and crofts I started to think of the incident as being a little uneanny and began to wonder what they would make of it at the ceilidhs when I told my story. I thought that the most likely explanation would be that someone had once caught and tamed the bird and that it had since escaped or been allowed its freedom. But no-one knew of anyone who had at any time had a pet raven, neither in Bruach nor anywhere else on the island.
‘You should have followed it,’ Johnny suggested. ‘It might have led you to some treasure. Some of these beasts are supposed to know where there’s treasure an’ if they take a fancy to you they’ll lead you to it.’
‘Indeed she was wise not to follow it any further than she did, I’m thinkin’,’ Anna Vic shuddered and gathered herself into her chair.
‘What do you think was the reason for it then?’ Erchy asked.
I shook my head. ‘I can’t think of anything unless it had a wounded mate or something like that. If it had been in the spring I’d have thought it might be trying to distract my attention from its nest or a young one but that’s not likely at this time of year.’
Fiona said profoundly: ‘I’m thinkin’ it was no ordinary raven.’
As soon as she had spoken the atmosphere of the ceilidh was laced with tension; everyone waited expectantly, knowing, as I knew, what would ensue. How often had I heard a rich Highland voice prefacing a narrative with the carefully enunciated words: ‘It was no ortinary …’ The phrase was intended to convey that the ‘no ortinary’ animal was really a witch who had temporarily assumed that disguise for some specific purpose.
‘Never follow that bird again should you see it,’ Fiona enjoined me.
‘But Johnny thinks it might have led me to some treasure,’ I retorted, counteracting the solemnity that had settled on the gathering with an attempt at flippancy.
‘Johnny knows fine it is not to treasure it would be after takin’ you, but to some place …’ She looked up at me and sensing my scepticism she faltered: ‘… to some place you might not wish to see,’ she ended self-consciously.
‘An’ what might have happened to you then the dear only knows,’ Anna Vic was quick to reinforce Fiona’s warning.
‘There’s folks that’s not been the same since they followed some gey queer animal or other.’
‘Aye, aye,’ there were varied murmurs of confirmation. I already knew the story of the men who had played with the Fairies and their subsequent fate. I knew too of the lucky escape of Erchy’s uncle after he had once been foolish enough to follow an otter that ‘wass no ortinary otter.’ There were many such stories and nearly everyone in Bruach appeared to know of a relative of theirs who had been involved in some mysterious adventure.
‘What might have happened to you we can only guess,’ Fiona resumed now with a surge of confidence. ‘Did you no hear, Miss Peckwitt, of the man that met the cat while he was ridin’ back to his croft one night?’
‘No,’ I lied. I had more than once heard the story but not hitherto from Fiona and experience had taught me that the tales varied according to the narrator.
‘Then you should know of it.’ Fiona’s grey eyes stared into the fire and the palms of her work-ravaged hands moved incessantly backwards and forwards over her skirt as she told the story of the local girl who had been jilted by her lover when it was proved to him that the girl’s mother was an indisputable witch and that the daughter would surely become a witch herself. A few weeks after the jilting the lover was riding home one night just before dark when as he was approaching a narrow rocky pass he noticed a large black cat running in front of his horse. He tried to rein the horse away from it but the animal refused to obey and carried on into the pass. Here the cat suddenly turned and leapt at the horse, frightening it so that the man had almost been thrown. He had lashed at the cat with his whip but it had easily evaded him. The following night approaching the same spot the same thing happened but this time the cat succeeded in clawing the neck of the horse. The man was quite sure that on this occasion his whip had found its target but the cat made no sound of distress and he concluded that once again he had misjudged his stroke. He became so much troubled by these incidents that he had taken his story to the local seer, a seventh son of a seventh son, who was himself possessed of strange powers. The seer had at once identified the cat as being ‘no ortinary cat’ but in fact the jilted sweetheart who, being the daughter of a witch, had been able to assume this disguise in order to wreak revenge on her ex-lover. ‘First she has lured your horse and frightened it; next she has clawed your horse, the third time it will be yourself she will be seeking to injure.’ The seer then advised the man to carry a gun with him when he was riding home at night and to be sure to load the gun with a silver bullet—it was only silver that was effective against witches. He further cautioned him not to shoot to kill but only to wound and that immediately he had fired the gun he must gallop his horse straight for the house of the doctor and tell him everything that had happened. The man promised to do all this and before he again ventured to ride home in the dark he made a silver bullet from a sixpence and loaded it into his gun. Arrived at the place where the cat had attacked on the two previous occasions he held his gun in readiness. Sure enough there was the cat and this time when it leaped it was indeed into the man’s flesh that its claws dug deep. He fired the gun and saw that he had succeeded in wounding the cat high in the right hindleg. He spurred his horse and raced for the doctor’s house. The doctor, who was of course a son of the croft, listened attentively to the story and decided that they should get the local policeman to accompany them to the house of the witch. The policeman had knocked on the door and demanded entry s
everal times before it was unbarred and opened by the old woman.
‘We wish to have speech with your daughter,’ he told her.
‘My daughter is not well,’ replied the old woman. ‘She is in her bed.’
The doctor then stepped forward. ‘If she is not well then I am here to cure her,’ he asserted and pushing his way into the room he stood beside the recess bed where, sure enough, they found the ex-sweetheart. When the doctor drew back the clothes to examine the girl they saw the wound—which was just like a bullet wound—in her right thigh.
Fiona finished telling her story and there were a few seconds of silence before the shuffling of feet, the sniffings and spittings and the changing of positions began. Janet threw a couple of peats on to the fire and turned down the lamp which had begun to smoke.
‘It was a strange thing the way that old witch could work,’ said Hamish meditatively. ‘I mind my grandfather was the only one hereabouts that she couldn’t put a spell on.’ He looked around for confirmation. ‘She said so herself,’ he added.
‘Aye, that’s right enough. Your grandfather was never afraid of the woman, I mind that,’ affirmed old Roddy, ‘Though I was never able to understand why.’
‘I know why,’ announced Hamish mysteriously.
Everyone looked at him. ‘You do?’
‘Aye, He told my father an’ my father told me how he was able to manage it.’ He fished in his pocket for a cigarette, lit it, took one long puff and then nipped it out and replaced it in the packet. The grocer had run out of cigarettes and everyone was having to economise. The complete silence and attention encouraged him to go on with his story.
‘It was like this,’ he told us. ‘Every mornin’ my grandfather would read the bible for the family an’ give hay to the cow before he finished lacin’ up his boots. Not until he had done those two things would he pull up the laces an’ tie the knot. In the evenin’ it was the other way; then he’d see to the cow first, an’ read the bible before he’d undo his laces. He never forgot to do it this way an’ he never breathed a word to a soul that this was how he protected himself from the witch’s spells. Not until she was dead an’ he told my father did he mention it. But she knew all the same. He got a right scare when she said to him one day, “There’ll come a time, Hamish Mor, when you’ll forget about the lacings on your boots an’ then will be my chance.” ’
‘If he never spoke to anybody of the way he saved himself from her spells how did the witch come to know of it?’ asked Janet.
Hamish turned on her. ‘That’s just it, now. How would she know unless she was a witch and had been tryin’ to harm him?’
‘Was she never in his house?’
‘Indeed, no.’ The denials came in a chorus from the older folk who remembered Hamish’s grandfather. ‘Your grandfather would as soon let in the devil himself as that woman.’
‘She was a witch all right,’ Hamish asserted.
‘I’m damty sure she was,’ corroborated Erchy.
It was at another ceilidh held in Janet’s house that I heard Fiona again tell the story of the cat and the witch. This time the ceilidh had been an organized one in honour of a guest of Janet’s who was anxious to collect stories of the islands. He was an earnest young man wearing spectacles that Morag said were ‘like the bottoms of glass bottles’ and he sat with his legs crossed and a note pad on his bony knees. I do not know if he was too engrossed in the stories he heard to remember his note pad or whether it was there merely to impress the spectators but so far as I could see he made no single jotting during the whole evening.
When Fiona finished narrating the young man asked: ‘Surely it couldn’t have been a policeman they were supposed to have gone to? After all, policemen haven’t been policemen for all that length of time.’
‘Since my time an’ before,’ contradicted old Roddy indignantly.
‘Yes, but surely this story must go back a lot longer than you or your immediate forbears?’
‘Indeed no!’ argued Roddy. ‘How can that be when the witch is alive herself to this day?’
The young man managed to catch his pad as it slid off his knee. ‘Alive today?’ he repeated.
‘Aye.’ Roddy was firm. ‘You mind it’s not the old mother but the daughter that’s alive an’ she’s well, though she’s near ninety, I doubt.’
The young man had a very prominent Adam’s apple and it travelled up and-down several times before he spoke again.
‘Where does she live?’ he asked weakly.
Roddy told him. ‘She’s walked with a stick ever since …’ Roddy recollected himself, ‘ever since the accident to her leg,’ he continued, ‘an’ she doesn’t pretend to be a witch any more but she’s alive today an’ that’s as true as I’m here.’
‘An’ she still has the wound in her right thigh, plain as I don’t know what,’ put in Hamish.
The young man looked no longer incredulous but eager.
‘Would I be able to see her?’ he asked.
‘Surely,’ they told him.
The next day the young man said good-bye to Janet and continued on his travels. The bus driver reported that he was asking more questions about the witch and had expressed his intention of loitering around her croft. The driver had suggested that he call on the old lady. She was, he assured the young man, quite harmless now and willing to admit she had once been a witch.
The last news we had of the young man was that he was in hospital. He had fallen somewhere, quite near the witch’s croft it was said, and had injured his shoulder.
I could not help wondering if his injuries were the result of his going up to a strange woman and asking her to show him her right thigh.
Another intriguing story which I once heard at a ceilidh is worth recounting here because in a minor way I was involved in a sequel. It concerned an old shooting lodge which was situated in a lonely corrie some miles from Bruach and was supposed to have a haunted attic bedroom. In this lodge the river watchers stayed during the three months of the salmon fishing season but for the rest of the year it lay empty and unvisited. Though it was, it seemed, only the one bedroom that was haunted by a rather noisy ghost the watchers rejected all the rooms save the kitchen where they bunked together in front of a good bright fire. Only one man from Bruach had ever had the courage to sleep in the ghost’s bedroom. This was old Finlay who told the story himself.
‘They said I would never do it,’ he related. ‘But I knew so long as I had my bible with me I would come to no harm.’ Finlay was an exceedingly devout man. ‘I got into bed an’ I read from the good book, an’ I made sure before I settled myself down that it was right to my hand the moment I woke up. I must have gone to sleep then till about two o’clock in the mornin’ an’ I woke up in the dark, knowin’ that the door of the room had just opened. “Is that you, Neilac?” I called out, thinkin’ at first he’d come across some poachers an’ needed help. There was no answer. An’ then I felt a heaviness on my feet at the bottom of the bed. It came up over my body slow an’ heavy an’ pressin’ down. I could feel it was an evil thing the way it was affectin’ me an’ I was pantin’ with the fear of it. Then I remembered my bible an’ I picked it up an’ held it tight in front of me. As soon as I did that the heaviness started to move away down again. Down an’ away from the bed an’ the room, till the door closed again.’
‘An’ did you stay in the room?’ Anna Vic asked in a hushed voice.
‘Aye, I did. An’ I slept till the mornin’ then.’
‘I would have been out of my bed an’ the room an’ away down to the kitchen in no time at all,’ Hamish said with a laugh.
Finlay nodded understandingly. ‘Aye, but you have not my faith,’ he said. ‘I knew so long as I held tight on to my bible the thing, whatever it was, would be overcome. An’ it was overcome, an’ that’s the way of it.’
‘Would you ever sleep in that room again?’ asked Erchy.
‘No, I would not,’ replied Finlay.
Some two years after Fin
lay had died we heard that the shooting lodge had been let to a party of tourists. Hector took them and their luggage in his boat and as was expected of him reported afterwards on their eccentricities. Early the following morning I came across Erchy and Hector down at the shore hauling up their boat.
‘An early trip?’ I commented.
‘It was the doctor,’ supplied Hector.
‘An accident?’ We were used to climbers failing in the hills.
‘No, no. It was at the lodge.’ Hector seemed to be sulking, no doubt because taking a doctor was supposed to be an errand of mercy, and he liked his errands to be more remunerative. Erchy took up the explanation.
‘It was a man from that party of tourists Hector took over yesterday just. One of the men had a heart attack.’
‘Is he very ill?’
‘Aye, pretty bad, the doctor says.’
‘The foolishness of some people,’ I said, ‘to go to an out-of-the-way place like the lodge when they’re likely to be subject to heart attacks.’
‘That’s what I said myself to the doctor,’ replied Erchy. ‘He told me there was no sign of a bad heart. The man was perfectly fit.’ There seemed to be some significance in the way he was looking at me and I suddenly recalled old Finlay’s story.
‘Aye,’ said Erchy, seeing my expression. ‘That was what I was after thinkin’ myself, so I asked the doctor. It was quite right. The man was sleepin’ in the haunted room an’ it was just after two o’clock in the mornin’ when they thought they heard a noise an’ went to see if he was all right.’
Winter Food
The quiet November evening was pierced by the full-throated blare of the steamer’s siren. I hastened to pull back the curtains and set a lamp in the window to indicate to the crew that someone was making preparations to meet them. While I drew on gumboots I searched the darkness for the port and starboard and masthead lights which should soon detach themselves from the star-studded night. The steamer was scheduled to call every six weeks bringing us bulk supplies from Glasgow but circumstances made her visits erratic. She might be delayed for days at some other port of call; the captain might be deterred by the weather conditions off the always inhospitable Bruach shore but round about the time the boat could be expected we had to be constantly vigilant. As soon as we heard the siren’s warning of her approach it was necessary to indicate in some way our preparedness, otherwise the captain, seeing no sign of acknowledgment, would head straight out to sea again without pausing, leaving us to watch our much needed and long anticipated supplies being withheld for another six weeks or so. Sometimes our goods lay on the steamer for six months before we had an opportunity to collect them.
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