by Neil M. Gunn
At his last stride the antlers lowered in combat, but before Alick had yet drawn both feet to a pause, the crook of the staff was in the air. It came down with what seemed no more than a firm rap fair on the forehead and the stag fell over as if it had been pole-axed.
The relief of that moment was one of the most exquisite Harry had ever experienced. Alick took out his knife at once. Harry lay down.
“That was the neatest thing I ever saw,” he said.
“What was?” Alick asked, at the stag’s throat.
“The way you hit him.”
“Oh that,” said Alick. “An inch higher and you’d have missed entirely.”
“He was just going to move.”
“So you pulled instead of pressing?”
Harry smiled. “I think so. Was he going to move?”
“Yes. His body was swaying to the first step.”
“There is that pause—just before the move—a lovely sort of suspense it is. It excites a fellow, I think.”
Alick began cleaning the stag.
“Did you ever use your stick like that before?” Harry asked.
“No, I don’t think so.” said Alick, his hands red.
Harry lay back and looked up at the sky, whose blue was swathed in a diaphanous milky film. There was a remarkable competence in this fellow Alick, an all-round sureness in the open. A mysterious affinity in some way between him and the stag! Harry could not fathom it, but some dim understanding of such a relationship moved him.
Alick cleaned his knife by stabbing the blade in a tussock of bent. The gralloch had rolled over beside a boulder.
Now they could examine the head at leisure, and it was a noble head of a deep amber-brown colour and bold sweeping curves, the tines long, elegantly shaped, and white-tipped. With his flexible steel tape, Alick took quick measurements of length, beam, span and extreme span.
“To tell the truth,” he said, “he’s better than I thought he was.”
“Have you ever seen a finer head?” Harry asked.
“Well maybe not very often,” replied Alick politely.
Harry laughed, but the head fascinated him. Something in its wild beauty touched his heart, struck some primal chord in him. With a quick embarrassed sincerity he said, “I’m very grateful to you, Alick. Oh hell, come on and have a drink. What time is it?” From his watch, he looked up in amazement. “Quarter to four!”
“Yes,” said Alick. “I thought if we stopped for lunch, you might miss your chance, and I didn’t want you to do that. You see, by the way the stags were feeding——”
He was being apologetic! Harry interrupted him with a laugh. “There will be the usual accident to the small flask at one fell swoop. Come on!”
There was nothing that Harry enjoyed more than the delicious languor that followed a long and successful stalk. An utter and benign irresponsibility washed softly through the flesh, the soft wash of warm fulfilled blood, half-drugged by the whisky. And it didn’t require much whisky. The milky veil over the blue had deepened. The air was cool, was growing cold. He always hated to hurry away after eating. In any case, there was nothing more to do. And it was delicious to let oneself sink down through the heather. On such an occasion he was always sure he never quite fell asleep, even if he completely let go for a second or two, though often he had to confess he was surprised at the speed with which a half-hour could slip past. He became aware of the pony, of young Donald and Alick talking together, of the stag’s neck bent back so that the tilted head looked across at him tragically. Through his lashes, he recognised the Landseer composition, toned down, less dramatic, but with some intimate quality added, as if with the beginnings of understanding he was in truth penetrating into the strange and wild.
Alick turned away from Donald with a little upward nod of the head, and came across towards Harry. Harry closed his eyes to get the full savour of his last minute. He heard Alick’s boots in the heather, then silence. He opened his eyes and saw Alick staring into the distance like a seaman. He watched him for a few seconds, then got up.
“The mist,” Alick said. “It’s coming.”
The horizon had bulged out, had drawn nearer, was lying in a hazed bank on the moor.
“I didn’t think it would come like that. We’d better go.”
After his warm nest, Harry felt the chill in the air and shivered.
“How did you think it would come?”
“I thought it might come in patches, white blankets of it, local. This is not that sort of mist. It will be thick about us long before we’re home.”
And so it happened. They were following a rivulet down a hollow in the hills when Alick turned and said, “Look at that!” It came in a billowing cloud down upon them, filling the valley, something ghostly about it, fearsome a little, especially where it grew ragged and curled over in fantastic whorls. Its cold breath touched their cheeks, and it was about them, thinly, not nearly so thick as it had looked, and passing on.
They could see things in the immediate vicinity quite well. There was no difficulty at all in walking.
“You and I could push on ahead, if you like?” Alick suggested.
“Not at all,” said Harry. “There’s no hurry.”
“All right, then,” replied Alick at once. “We’ll keep by the pony for a bit anyway.”
The track was clear and made walking easy, even if the surface was rough and here and there water-scored. Harry commented on this and Alick explained it was part of their duty, before the season came on, to see that all tracks and culverts were in a proper state of repair. Harry took out his cigarette case and held it to Alick. When they had lit up, he turned towards Donald to find that he and the pony had vanished. He hurried forward a step or two and they loomed upon him so like mythical figures that he involuntarily hesitated before calling Donald and offering him a cigarette.
“It’s mist all right!”
“Ay,” said Donald. “It’s getting thick.” He was a shy lad, dark and sensitive. His gratitude for the cigarette showed in his smile. He went on at once. Harry knew that neither of them would have lit a cigarette in his presence without permission—and they would never ask permission.
Donald’s smile remained with him. “Full of charm,” he said to himself; “crawling with it.”
He began to wonder about this, to try to understand it. Often the most charming were the least trustworthy, like the inn landlord—who might cut your throat.
Now why had he thought that? And at once some part of him answered: The landlord would more readily cut someone else’s throat for your sake. If you were his friend, that is. That sort of loyalty. But how do you know that? Harry asked himself. Heaven knows? was the reply. And the idea of loyalty hung about in the mist.
Neither of these two would care to speak to him the whole way home, unless first of all he spoke to them or unless practical advice or caution had to be volunteered.
That stoical quality! Donald and the pony and the beast on the pony’s back assumed legendary shape, like what’s-his-name, thought Harry, going down into Egypt! With Alick, the tribe’s Seer, bringing up the rear! In the midst of this convoy, he felt himself a stranger, a visitor from another, more lighthearted clime. Light was the word, indeed; a light-weight.
Yet that was not true; not quite true, anyway. For he was getting an understanding of the background, and suddenly he remembered Alick’s smile, the slow glimmer in the eyes, when he slid back and said, “He’s there.” That moment when their minds recognised each other, that evanescent moment of communion.
Moments. Well, of course.
The mist was smoking out of the heather roots by his side and the silence was really pretty eerie. Even their footfalls were muffled. He realised how utterly one could be lost in it. And he thought of Geoffrey—refusing to be conquered, making up Angus’s mind for him—onward! He got some pleasure out of the thought, for there was no cause for alarm, no real danger. If Geoffrey had to spend a night on the hill, it might cool him a bit; an
d if he fell into a bog and got hauled out it might cool him still more! If only he had some ghostly experience to turn his fleshly assurance a haggard grey! But no such luck!
Soon the mist overcame these wayward thoughts and Harry sank down through his mind into the movement of his feet. This mindlessness, of which he was vaguely aware, held some bodiless quality of delight that he could not make an effort to grasp, and, not grasping, enjoyed the more. His dark-brown eyebrows were beaded with the mist, and when he looked up the rising ground on his left hand, his face was grey and damp, with the jawbone moulded more firmly and the eyes almost black.
Chapter Six
“Listen!” said Helen.
Sir John slowly lowered his newspaper and removed his glasses. Lady Marway listened without moving. Marjory’s head went up. As Harry’s pipe left his lips they remained apart.
Yes, it was a car.
Helen dashed to the window and drew the curtain aside. Marjory followed her, and Harry. They stared at the fogged lights that glowed white, like shrouded eyes, and swung away and vanished, to a muffled roar and fade-out of mechanism.
“George and his ghost-train!” cried Helen. Everyone smiled.
“Thank goodness!” exclaimed Lady Marway. “I felt George might have been trying to break a record in the mist or something.”
“He probably has,” said Marjory.
As the talk went on they became aware that George and Joyce were taking an unduly long time to come from the garage, but no one quite liked to say so. At last Helen, because she was excited by the new strange coldness between Harry and herself, dramatised the affair by standing forth and saying in hushed tones:
“What if it was a ghost car?”
But it did not quite come off. And when her mother gave her a pointed look, Helen’s cheeks caught a slight flush. She knew she had lost some element of self-confidence, was not perfectly sure of herself, inclined to that overstress at the wrong moment that was very annoying. Harry got up and smiled, without looking at her; which annoyed her intensely. “George will be tinkering at something just to know why it didn’t do it quite right,” he said, and closed the gun-room door behind him.
They listened to his footsteps; they heard the outside door rattle open. They continued to listen, as if waiting for something to happen.
It happened so dramatically that the high-pitched woman’s scream lifted Lady Marway to her feet. The scream cracked into a harsh squawk and died. The terror in the scream made their skins crinkle. Sir John swung open the gun-room door and hurried outside.… They could hear voices, the broken voice of a woman. It was Joyce.
“Joyce!” called Lady Marway, making into the gun-room. “What is it, child? What is it?”
Sir John was bringing her in. “Oh!” she was crying brokenly. “Oh, what a fright I got!” She flopped into a chair, her ghastly pallor emphasised by smudged geranium lips.
“Where is George?” Lady Marway asked.
But Joyce did not hear her. She was trying to laugh. “I was coming—feeling my way—my hands out. Something moved near me. My hand touched—a hand—in the air.” Her laughter was growing hysterical.
Lady Marway spoke soothingly to her, but Sir John in sharp cold tones said, “Now, Joyce, steady up!”
Lady Marway at once stopped caressing her.
“Joyce!” called Sir John peremptorily.
Joyce made a real effort. “I’m sorry,” she spluttered on the verge of a breakdown.
“Where is George?”
Joyce gulped. “In the garage.”
Sir John ignored her, speaking coolly to his wife.
Harry and George came in.
“I’m frightfully sorry,” Harry said, looking at Joyce. They noticed there was blood on his cheek. Sir John looked at Joyce’s hands. But George was the real attraction, for his make-up of oil, grease, and earth was quite striking.
“Wherever have you been?” Marjory asked.
“In the ditch,” said George. He glanced at Joyce, then brought all attention on himself by launching into a graphic account of their mishap in the mist. Though driving at a walking pace, with the utmost care, he had ditched the off front wheel on the narrow road where it bends at Clachvor. He had stopped instantly, of course. Then he described a manoeuvre by which he had hoped to drive the wheel out and had all but succeeded, when the front and rear wheels slithered on the grassy verge and both slid in. “I passed a few remarks to Joyce and she passed a few to me, and there we were. Looked pretty hopeless, didn’t it? But I said to Joyce it was a pity to give in on this, and she was sporting enough to agree. I crawled about and underneath and tried to think, and Joyce said there isn’t even a bally stone. And that gave me the idea. I thought what if we get some tidy-sized stones and jack her up on ’em, first one wheel and then the other, you see the idea?”
“Phew!” said Joyce, getting to her feet. “I feel all trodden on and filthy. Excuse me.” She wavered a step or two, but walked fairly out of the door, which Harry held open, murmuring to her, “I was a fool.”
“You’re telling me,” drawled her voice with surprising verve, and she departed, making it clear she required the help of no one, so that Helen and Marjory looked after her but did not move.
“She’s got a bit of a jolt,” said George.
“She took hold of herself remarkably well,” said Sir John.
Whereupon George grew exuberant. Now that he had his audience on a familiar topic, he could enjoy himself in a general show of exaggerated action and speech that was right in character.
“You know the story of the huge stone by the roadside at Clachvor?”
Marjory didn’t and George explained, “Well, once upon a time, that stone was over in the field, two or three hundred yards away, this side the first ruined cottage. The fields were tiny in those days and this stone took up a jolly lot of space. The fellow who lived in the cottage, he had whoo! the second sight. Went about mooning to himself and they all knew he had this power. Well, one morning when the people of Clachvor woke up, they found the stone gone from the field and resting in its present position by the roadside.”
“And he couldn’t have rolled it there because it must weigh a ton?” said Marjory.
“On a conservative estimate, it weighs twenty tons,” said George. “Am I right?”
“Near enough,” said Sir John.
“Well, I mean to say, there you are,” said George. “The folk were astonished, of course. Who wouldn’t be? However, the important thing for us was that we remembered the ruined cottage whenever we saw the stone, for I barged into the stone when scrounging around. So I said to Joyce I know where we’ll get tons of stones, and she said where, and I said over at the dear old cottage of the what’s-his-name. Now it’s pretty thick outside and I said to Joyce, you wait here in the car, and I’ll scrounge over, and you can give me a shout if I’m wandering off the straight and narrow. But Joyce said she would rather be doing something instead of sitting and doing nothing, so I said if she felt like that all right. So off we goes and sure enough we finds the ruined cottage—first shot. Extraordinary luck, wasn’t it? Though I only appreciated that afterwards.”
“Unless, of course, you were drawn,” Harry suggested.
“How do you mean drawn?” asked George. Then he laughed. “Oh, I see! That’s a good one. Dashed good! Because, you see, here we were at the ruined wall and I was keeping in touch with Joyce with my elbow and voice and what not, for of course you could not see your own nose. Slice it, wasn’t in it. I was tearing a nice flattish stone from the wall, when something hit Joyce’s foot and she said Ouch! and she stooped down and while she was in that position something solid hit her on the top of the head and knocked her clean on her beams. She gave a yelp naturally, and I let out a blood-curdling cry at the thing, to frighten the life out of it, for I heard it quite distinctly. It all happened so quickly that you didn’t know quite what was what for a second, if you understand me.”
“A sheep,” smiled Sir John.
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br /> “I said sheep, but Joyce said the thing was solid and hard, so we pow-wowed and wandered hand in hand, and found that the thing had come out of the door of the old cottage. However, to cut a short story long, I got hold of some stones and Joyce insisted on hanging on to one too, and we started back—but instead of arriving at the road we arrived at another ruin. Which meant we were going the wrong way. So we dropped our stones and turned back, meaning to pick up some more at the first ruin, though Joyce had no particular desire to see it again, I may say. Well, we went farther this time—or at least so it seemed—for we were going pretty carefully now. And once or twice I got down on all fours with Joyce driving me by the coat tail. Simply had to because of the awful feeling we were going to step over. How long we did our babes in the wood act I don’t know, but I estimate it at nearly two hours. We visited three more ruins. I was getting a bit desperate myself, and Joyce was nearly all in. I never experienced anything more utterly futile. It maddened you. And at last I got that awful feeling that we might wander right off the map the wrong way. A cold damp mist and Joyce’s teeth were positively audible. I shouldn’t like to spend a night in it myself. Really, it began to get serious. I felt that over a whole night Joyce might quite possibly pass out from exposure. And if we tumbled over something and broke a leg or anything, even the strongest man might give up without much fuss.” From looking at their faces, a thought visibly struck him.