by Morris West
It took a little exegesis to recognize it as the Forty-ninth Psalm in the version of the Scottish Psalmody; and it needed a more patient ear than mine to discern a melody in Hannah’s high, nasal rendition.
But she was happy and there would be scones for tea and a fruitcake and shortbreads and honey and strawberry jam. It had been a grand service. Minister Macphail had preached a wonderful homily on the duties of spouses one to another, and when he came to the big ranty bit about the defilement of the marriage bed, there were one or two red faces and some sniffles from certain people she could name but wouldn’t. The scones were from that young Mrs Sinclair, who had made a better fist of them now she’d taken Hannah’s advice about the sifting of the flour and letting the air into the mixture. The fruitcake came from Madame Jobson which was one of the few things she could cook and would be no better or no worse than it usually was. The shortbreads were out of a packet, but the Morrison liked to nibble then now and then. The poor mannie was better? God be praised. She would make time to see him tomorrow. One of Fergus’ boys would drive her up. Oh, and there was a call for me from that Ruarri Matheson, I was to meet him at the croft not a minute after nine in the morning and be dressed for the mountains. And would the doctor be good enough to call the district nurse in Harris? Nothing urgent, just for some advice, she said. The number was on the pad in the Morrison’s study.
When Kathleen went to phone, Hannah gave me a conspirator’s wink and beckoned me into the kitchen. There she took my hands and pressed them to her lips and still held them while she talked. She wasn’t rasping or chiding now. She was just an old lady, clinging and caring.
‘I prayed for you this morning, for the two of you, because you loved the Morrison when he needed it. The Lord spoke to me. He gave me words to say to you. You’ve had the light at the coming. If you go now, you can take it with you. If you stay, you’ll lose it. And there’s danger for you in the dark. That’s the Lord’s word, laddie, not mine. I don’t even know what it means, but I’m too old for Him to lie to me.’
‘I’ll go soon, Hannah. When Dr McNeil is finished, we’ll both go.’
‘I hope it’s soon enough.’
‘It will be. Don’t worry.’
Then I kissed her on the cheek and the skin was old and dry, like parchment, with a whole life written on it. For one brief moment she clung to me and then, always ashamed of tenderness, pushed me out of the kitchen and went back to her singing while the kettle boiled. Once again the odd experience was repeated. I heard the words, but did not understand them. I was an actor in the incident. The moment it was over, it was as if it had happened to another man. I walked back into the lounge, poured myself a whisky, picked up a book and read until Kathleen came down for tea. She could not stay the night, she told me. An elderly patient was showing signs of pneumonia. She had better see him and be on call during the night. It was a disappointment, but not a bad one. Our day had been almost perfect. Alone or together, we were ready for a quiet night.
When Kathleen had left, I hunted Morrison’s shelves for books on Cervus elaphus – which, in case you’re as ignorant as I was, is the red deer of the Highlands and Isles. I was a novice at the sport of stalking, and I didn’t want to make a complete fool of myself. Besides, Ruarri, with his boys in tow, would be stalking me as well as the stag. Like the lads of the Mafia, he mightn’t always get mad, but as sure as God made little apples, he had to get even, in joke or earnest. So I needed to be at least half ready for him.
Deer-stalking, I found, was a sport for gentlemen, with a very ungentlemanly history to it. In the old, old days, deer were the property of the king, the baron, or the laird, and any hungry lout who killed one was hunted and destroyed more savagely than the beast itself. They were hunted first with hounds that were slipped cold in packs to pull down any pasturing stag or hind. They were shot with arrows or crossbow bolts or, later, with leaden balls from a musket. Sometimes they were mustered into a valley by beaters, for a mass slaughter by hounds and men together.
In the more civilized days of Queen Victoria, the old nobility and the new gentry – brewers, shipbuilders, China-traders, coal-owners and iron-founders – built themselves castles, schlosses, châteaux, lodges, architectural follies of the wildest kind, in the wildest places, from which to stalk and kill poor Cervus elaphus. They ate his meat, coarse but exotic and therefore expensive; but, more importantly, they hung his antlered head upon their walls for a warrant of their manly prowess – though many a man with a hundred heads upon his wall had a small pair of horns which he wore in private after the stalking season.
However, because they were civilized then, and used children only for hauling coal or cleaning chimney stacks, they gave up stag hounds and bred collies, handsome, intelligent creatures that would herd the deer but never pull them down, leaving that gentle task to their masters. The best kill was the beast with the biggest antlers – a curiously phallic thought since the size of the antlers, according to eminent authority, depended on the amount of male hormone in the stag. Rich gentlemen paid high prices for a good kill, so it was good business to drive the land clear of sheep and people to make room for the high priests of fashion and their sacrificial victims. It was good business to spread fodder for them in the winter so that they would kill better and bigger in the summer.
After Victoria died and Edward and George, and many millions of serfs, villeins, merchants, squires and nobles, minor and major, in a brace of wars, the killing of Cervus elaphus still continued, but with more refinement in the ritual. Now the killing season was more rigidly defined, and justified with clearer reasoning. The herds must be culled lest they devour too much land. The hunters must be controlled lest they destroy the best stock and leave only the worst to perpetuate themselves. The price of a gun must match the rise in taxes and the cost of labour. In the small islands of Great Britain – diminished but still great – the population of deer, like the population of humans, must be kept stable, and a little judicious murder was the best way to manage the operation.
Which brought me, close on midnight, to a consideration of my outing with Ruarri. It was, in essence, an exercise in tracking and killing a living creature. It was an exercise in which, once upon a time, I had been fairly expert. I had been trained to kill. I had been sent charging at a sack with a bayonet, leaping at a man with a naked knife, creeping to strangle a dozing sentry with a cheese wire. I had killed in fact and I had sworn I would never kill again, beast or man, though I still ate meat – which is a sad commentary on the value of human logic.
The stalking? Yes, I could accommodate that. Stalking was an exercise without penalties: human brain against animal sensors, reason against instinct and no violence threatened or done. There would even be a certain Godlike magnanimity in the victory: to know that one had won and yet exact no woe from the vanquished; to know that one could kill and yet not kill. A noble affirmation, surely? A small defiance of the dog-eat-dog world in which I wanted no further part?
Of course you can laugh at my sad and shallow argument. I could take a fish but not a stag. I could eat dead meat, provided another had killed it. I beg you, please do not laugh – not openly at least, and not contemptuously. I am trying to tell you as honestly as I can – but who is ever wholly honest? – my own part in this story of an island summer. I am not proud of it, though I am a proud man by nature. Why tell it, then? I suppose because every man must come some time to his own Canossa with a halter around his neck, and ask forgiveness of the man he might have been….
So I would stalk, but I would not kill. Or would I? Or should I? We would, with luck or skill, come upon the stag; Ruarri and I, half brothers, half enemies, with Ruarri’s henchmen for witnesses. I would be the guest. Ruarri would, as courtesy dictated, offer me the first shot – and the last, too, because if I missed, the stag and the herd would be gone, devil take the hindmost. I could take the shot and fire high or wide; but he would know, even if the others did not, and he would be shamed and hate me more. I co
uld tell him before we set out that I did not wish to kill, only to stalk and see. He would accept that; but he would laugh in his sleeve, as you are laughing now, and despise me, because neither the logic nor I would stand up in his eyes.
What did I decide? Nothing. I closed the books and put them neatly back in the shelves. I found myself a good, anaesthetic thriller, full of blood and guts and sudden death, poured myself a large whisky and took them both to bed.
Which brings me to another point. If you find in this very personal narrative that there is much talk of drinking, it is not by artifice or literary contrivance. I was drinking then, too much and too often. The days were long. My time with Kathleen McNeil was short and I had a deal of forgetting to do in between. Of course I wasn’t a toper. I was on holiday in the Heather Isles, which were colonized by great, whoring warriors who drank their way to Valhalla. I had a long way to go to catch up with them, even with their twentieth-century descendants; but I was running. Praise the Lord, brothers and sisters, I was running… !
Next morning I was walking.
I was walking my feet raw and my shanks to numbness up fifteen hundred feet of peat slope and scree and slippery gneiss in the hills of Harris. That fifteen hundred feet was only the first slope. Beyond it was a saddle and then another peak which we must cross before we came to the corrie where the deer should be found. I hoped that the deer and Ruarri were in agreement on the location because, if they weren’t, I might very well lie down and die and let the boys build a cairn over me for a monument.
Let me tell you about these hills of Harris. Did you know – but of course you wouldn’t, such being the decay of knowledge – that Noah’s Ark landed in these very hills, in the neck between Clisham and Uisgna Val More? Whether that was before or after it landed on Ararat, nobody knows for sure. But it landed here for certain. Everybody knows that. Noah sent out a magpie to scout around for him, and the magpie didn’t like what he saw, which is why the magpie in these hills is a messenger of bad omen – especially if you see four of him together. Did you know also that these great, round stones on which I’ve been barking my shins all morning were once the castle of a giant who stole maidens and could only be bought off with sea pearls? Well, that’s a fact too. And another is that to walk uphill on peat is purgatory, to walk on glacial scree is a fool’s pastime and to scramble over tors and granite outcrops, greasy with moss and lichen, just to get a look at a deer eating his dinner is sheer hellish lunacy.
The pace Ruarri set was punishing. I thought I knew who was getting the punishment, especially when the two lads protested that he’d have us all with broken ankles if he didn’t slow down. So he rested us at the first saddle, where to my other agonies was added a plague of midges. That, Ruarri explained with sardonic patience, was why we had to go high. The deer were wiser than we; when the weather was warm and humid they took to the high ground to be free of insects.
He further explained that in humid air scents carried farther and the animals were more acutely aware of them. So from this point we must stay downwind of the high valley for which we were headed. Up or down, it made small matter to me so long as I had wind left to make the climb, and enough control of my muscles not to make a fool of myself when the quarry was sighted and the stalk began in earnest.
We moved on, scrambling over the ridge that would lead us to the last summit, below which lay the deer forest, which was not a forest at all, but only a high basin in the hills covered with moss and grasses and not a tree breaking out of it. I was up with Ruarri now, striding more freely, breathing more easily, if only because I had to meet the challenge of him. We talked little and in low voices because the sound would carry across the peaks and startle the out-runners of the herd: the stags, cropping far from the hinds, and the matriarchs who would unsettle the whole group at one hint of danger. The rutting season was still a month away, so males and females grazed apart and the older hinds were still the group leaders. When we made our last halt, under the lee of a great tor, Ruarri explained the stalk itself:
‘When we see the herd, they’ll be grazing and quiet. The art is to get as close as possible without rousing them. We’re downwind, and the breeze is steady, so they won’t get the scent of us. But they have keen eyes and their ears prick up at any new sound, even the scrape of a shoe or the snap of a rifle bolt. So we pick out the leaders and watch them – all does, they’ll be. If one of ’em gives a bark, you’ll know we’re spotted and you’ll freeze. The herd will freeze too – forefeet planted together, heads up, waiting. If they start grazing again, don’t move until every head is down, because the leaders will still be alert. You might get a bold one who’ll come walking over towards you to get a better look or try to pick up a scent…If we get close enough for a shot, I’ll pick the buck we want. You can take him. Have you got all that now?’
‘I think so. I hope I don’t make a mistake.’
‘Stay close by me for signals. The boys can look after themselves.’
‘It’s the army all over again.’
He gave me a quick, suspicious look. ‘Does that worry you?’
‘Hell, no!’
‘How’s your shooting?’
‘I haven’t handled a gun since I gave mine back to the government. So you might lose your stag.’
‘If you want him badly enough, you’ll drop him. On your feet now and quiet from here.’
If I wanted him badly enough…Clever fellow, Ruarri! Clever, clever fellow, with every sense alive and every synapse in that brain of his ticking out the right answer every time! I wanted him, not for his meat or his hide or his head, but for Ruarri, to prove that I was as good a man as he was, as calm a marksman, as male a swordsman, and as ready as he to shed a little blood to get what I wanted and hold what I had. The oath I had sworn to myself? A wafer cake. I had forsworn myself already on the night I drove home from Stornoway to Laxay and accepted the proposition that it was right to kick any man in the belly, provided you got in first. Still, there was a chance that the final act might be avoided. The stalk had not yet begun. It would not begin until we had topped the last rise and seen whether the deer were even there.
They were there. They had to be. Their presence was written at birth on the palm of my hand, but I had not the eyes to read it. There were perhaps fifty hinds, some with calves at foot, staggies and does, grazing in four groups. The groups were spread around the basin, and aloof from them were two big stags, with antlers spread like trees above their heads. We stood watching them from a cleft in the rocks, bunched behind Ruarri as he scanned the valley through the field glasses. He pointed out the matriarchs, speaking in a whisper, using only the most restricted gestures. When we had them marked, he studied the stags and settled on the far one as the beast we would take. Then he had us worming our way out of the cleft, flat on our bellies, to mark the ground: where the shale was and the rocks that would give cover, and where the peat moss began that would deaden a footfall.
The deer had all the advantage, it seemed. The wind was in our favour, to be sure, but we were on high ground and must come at them downhill, over rough and gravelly ground, until we hit the first humps of moss and heather. A hand’s touch from Ruarri sent the two boys moving slowly round to the right of the valley. Then, slow and watchful, he handed me the rifle, pointing to the safety catch and telling me it was already cocked, with a bullet in the spout. I would be behind him, and I had to carry the gun, crawling on elbows and belly in the old commando way. He would make the cover. I must make the kill.
Once and again we almost lost them. The first time one of the boys scraped a metal boot stud against a rock. Instantly one of the matriarchs lifted her head and barked and the whole herd propped and stood poised like runners on the starting line. We lay prone, hardly daring to breathe, until a long time later we heard a second bark, and then a third. Then with agonizing slowness they settled down again and we made another twenty yards in the heather hummocks. The second time a sprig of grass caught in my nostril and the tiny s
ound I made as I dislodged it put the hinds on the alert again. By the time they were cropping once more, my muscles were knotted and the weight of the rifle was almost beyond bearing.
Finally we made our cover, a small rock crusted with lichen, jutting out from the bog. Ruarri held up a handful of fingers for me, his estimate of the range: five hundred yards, give or take a little. The hinds were quiet now and the big stag was cropping with lordly disdain on the farther slope. Inch by inch, I eased myself into a firing position and set the sights and slipped off the safety catch. Then I got him in the lens and held him, with the tiny etched cross just where his heart should be. When I fired he went down clean, buckling at the knees, with hardly more than a shudder afterwards.
It was a beautiful shot. Even Ruarri said he was proud of it. I remember only one other to match it: when I knocked a Japanese sentry off a rock at six hundred yards, just as he was lighting a cigarette. I had exactly the same reaction too. I wanted to be sick.
Chapter 9
I WAS a hero for half an hour, which is long enough for any sane man.
We inspected the kill. We admired the cleanness of it: no pain to the beast, little blood, only a tiny damage to the hide. He was a true royal, with a full spread of antlers, just right to die because next year he would be on the downgrade for breeding. All of which was a perfect absolution for the man who had knocked him off in his prime. The boys trussed his hooves together, slung the carcass on the rifle, carried him up the slope and dumped him far enough away so that he would not spoil our lunch: beef sandwiches large enough to choke a giant, washed down with neat whisky and a beer chaser. We were all great fellows, ten feet tall, with myself overtopping the rest by a couple of inches. Then, because a killing is like a mating and you shrink after it and are weary, we stretched out in the shadow of the rocks and swopped stories which had nothing at all to do with the poor dead buck lying fifty feet away, with my bullet in his heart and the flies buzzing around the hole in his side.