Foxfire, Wolfskin

by Sharon Blackie

  But there was never going to be a handsome prince for that girl. This island didn’t do princes, and this township didn’t do handsome. It is hard to imagine that it ever did.

  She was the girl her family sent to the shielings that summer. Yes, they still packed up and went to the summer grazings on the island then. We kept the old traditions going, here. Longer than they did on the mainland. They used to spend the best part of three months out there, but in that girl’s day it was usually only six weeks. Because of the schools, you see. The children had to go back to school. Oh, it was a fine and joyous time – like going on your holidays, you know? Though none of us had the money to go on holidays back then. So that was our holiday, our time of freedom. There was something about being out together there, right out in the hills. We didn’t have much in the way of civilisation to escape from back then – no more than we do now – but we felt that we were escaping from it all the same. Freedom from the grind of crofting life, from the stifling intimacy of a tiny township in which all the houses were visible to all the others.

  We were a small group who went to the shielings; mostly women and giggling children, escaping for a while from the tight-lipped oversight of the men. Well, the occasional old man came with us who had no other need to stay in his winter house. The others would only come down from time to time – when there was physical work to do, like mending a roof. And the animals came, of course – it was all about the animals. We took cows, mostly, though in later years some of them brought sheep. The good land on the crofts had to be kept vacant to grow the crops. To make the hay, and grow the turnips. To regrow the grass to sustain the animals through the winter. So that is why we all went. The animals had to go to the geàrraidh – the summer pastures – and we went with them. To mind them, of course.

  We went as our ancestors had gone before us, for these grazing places were passed down through the generations, and our attachment to them was strong. A fine wee procession we made, walking along the main road before crossing the river, picking our way through the wet, low bog and on up into the hills – following the old stone cairns which marked the safest path. The men would come with us on the day we went, to help carry supplies. We carried our clothes and utensils in backpacks, and the dogs ran alongside us, barking as if they were happy to be going on their holidays too. An Iomaich, we called it – the Flitting.

  Not everyone stayed for the whole summer. The older women and children went back down after a few days, and only a handful of girls were left in the huts. They had charge of fifty or sixty head of cattle, and the same of sheep, for about six weeks. Once a week, people would come out from their villages to fetch back the cheese and butter the girls had made, and to bring out anything they may need for use during the following week. There would be stories and songs during those gatherings: the summer ceilidhs, we’d call them. The young men of the village would sometimes walk up too, and keep them informed about the local news. Many a romance has its beginnings up in the hills, and a good few old married couples look back on memories of shieling courtships. Do you know that old love song about the shielings? Kenneth McKellar recorded it, back in the day. Come closer, and I’ll sing it to you, though my voice isn’t exactly what it once was. I’ll sing you the English version, since you don’t seem to speak the Gaelic.

  Last night by the shieling was Mairi, my beloved,

  Out on the hillside by the shieling, my Mairi, my beloved.

  Mo Mhairi, mo leannan, mo Mhairi my beloved.

  On the hillside by the shieling, my Mairi, my beloved.

  Like the white lily floating in the peat hag’s dark waters,

  Pure and white as the lily in the peat hag’s dark waters.

  Mo Mhairi, mo leannan, mo Mhairi my beloved.

  Like the lily white, floating in the peat hag’s dark waters.

  Like the blue gentian blooming wet wi’ dew in the sunshine

  are the eyes of my Mairi, purple blue in the sunshine,

  Mo Mhairi, mo leannan, mo Mhairi my beloved.

  Lily white, pure, gentian eyed is my Mairi, my beloved.

  Aye, it’s a fine old song, right enough; we all sang it, when we were together there, in the hills.

  Well, the girls had a great time in the huts, playing house, and papering the walls with illustrations from newspapers and magazines. They usually liked to stay together, but that girl stayed in her family’s àirigh alone. None of them came up with her; her brother had gone off to the mainland for work, and her mother was ill as usual. Her grandparents were long dead, and her father had died too, the winter before. An Àirigh Fad Às – the Faraway Shieling – that was the name of her place; it was right on the edge of our pastures. Yes, it had a name, as they all did. Names mattered in those days. Everything had a name, for everything was known to us. Every lochan, every mound, all the big rocks. They tied us to the land, and to the people that had gone before us. We knew the land, then; knew its creatures. Its stories and its mysteries. Knew the names of things. And we navigated by those names, all summer long. As children, we could tell our parents exactly where we were going or where we had been. In which loch we had seen the big brown trout leaping; on which hill we had gathered long rushes for the plaiting. We knew that land by heart; we would never get lost there. But there were cautionary tales aplenty about the bog, too. We knew the places to avoid – the places where you’d be sucked down to the centre of the earth and never seen again. Or so our elders told us. To keep us away from the quaking bogs, above all. But that girl haunted those places. I watched her, crawling as close as she could to their waterlogged edges, that threshold place where dull moor-grass gave way to a trickster’s emerald green. As close as she could, without sinking.

  That girl loved the moor; she was made for it. It was in her blood. She loved the wildness; she loved the freedom. Loved the solitude, too, for that was a rare thing in a crofting community in those days. She had always liked her own company; found it easier than the noisy gossip of girls her age and the bullish boasting of the village boys. Boys they were, and oh, did she not long for a man. She was seventeen years old, and she knew what was ahead of her, all right. Marriage to a man who didn’t know how to navigate the soft maps of a woman’s body, to excavate the deep caves of a woman’s heart. A baby each year, till the black crows in their black-hearted churches frowned at their excess, and they started to sleep in different beds. Winter days spent navigating mud and dung to feed hay to the shivering animals, hands red-raw from liming the lazybeds. Cancer growing slowly from exposure to the sheep-dip. There would be no job for her – no escape that way; we were too far away from the big town, from Stornoway. And besides, she was the only one left to work the family croft. And to look after her ailing mother. She’d have no time for reading, not that girl. No time for dreaming. Not any more.

  Yes, she would end up like her mother, she knew. She’d watched her, stony-faced at her husband’s funeral. Women like that were not supposed to cry. Though the girl had heard her crying anyway, in the quiet of night when he’d fallen asleep in the peat-stained sheets of the bed she’d made. But mostly she soldiered on. Two children she had birthed, and the one they cut out of her womb on the fifth anniversary of their marriage. Hard enough already, her husband hardened then. The Word of God was the only word spoken in that house on a Sunday, when she would brush off his black suit for church, polish his black shoes. Soon the Bible displaced their wedding photograph on the mantelpiece, and while he was turning to God, she turned to the fields. She managed the crows on the croft just as she managed the crow in her house. She milked the cow for crowdie and fed the weaners to fatten them; she pulled dead babies out of eye-rolling ewes in the lambing snows of May.

  Women like that were not supposed to read poetry; women like that were not supposed to believe in mermaids. And daughters like that girl might sometimes look longingly out to sea … but they stayed.

  So anyway – that girl was sent to the shieling with the cows. Fine cows they were, too: the ver
y best pedigree Highland cattle. Shiny brown coats and sweeping, pointed white horns. You wouldn’t want to mess with them while they were nursing a calf, but the rest of the time they were quiet. They liked a bit of human company from time to time, and they liked her well enough. I heard her singing to them in the fields. The old laments, about lovers stolen away by famine and by war.

  Yes, that family’s shieling was in a beautiful spot. The old stone àirigh had been replaced by then, of course; hers was a new timber structure, coated with bitumen, with a tin roof. It was simply furnished, as they all were, with a box bed and a covered mattress of heather and straw. There was a rickety wooden table with the paint peeling off, and a couple of plain chairs; there was a fire at one end and recesses in the walls for storage. She was happy to be there, at first.

  It was beautiful all right, but strange stories were told about those hidden glens. Strange stories about the shielings. Did you hear the story yet of An Àirigh na h’Aon Oidhche – the one-night shieling – way up there on the hill slopes beyond Mealasbhal? I remember my Uncle Roddy telling me about it. It was a good couple of miles away from our pastures, but close enough that hearing the story would always make us shiver with fright. Something happened there on the very first night it was built, and since then everyone has shunned it. The ruin stands there to this day, exactly the same as it was when the bravest of us went there. Just around the corner is a cliff which, in high winds, is said to make loud, unexpected and frightening noises. It was a young woman from Mangurstadh who spent the first night there. Just think of it, young man – she’d have heard the stories which already abounded in that wild hill-place: stories of sheep rustling and murderous old ladies, stories of mischievous fairies. Of lochs brimming with dark beasts. Truth is, the moor itself is a great dark beast. The burns are its veins, the black buttery peat its body. Those mountains are its great, wrinkled brain. And some nights, when the mist comes down over Cracabhal, you can imagine that beast rising up right beneath you. Opening its great maw and swallowing you all the way down.

  Anyway, it is likely that the girl from Mangurstadh, on her first time at the new shieling, did not have a good night. There she was all alone, in unfamiliar surroundings, at the mercy of strange winds and hearing many strange sounds. Whatever else might have happened, she must have spent a terrifying night there, and as soon as it was light enough, she left the shieling and ran all the way back home. When she got there she was in a terrible state, rambling about big black beasts, and was adamant that she would never spend another night in that haunted hut. It would seem that the truth of her story was not doubted, because to this day no one else has dared to sleep in the one-night shieling for fear that the black beast will return.

  Yes, there were ghost stories aplenty, you can be sure. But the most common of the stories, the cautionary tale which was told to the girls every year before they took to the hills, was the story of the water-horse – the each-uisge. We all had our own each-uisge in those days, it seemed – one for every geàrraidh. Sometimes the each-uisge came as a Cailleach, and the visitation of that old woman foretold a death. But usually it came in the form of a handsome young man – a water-prince, wild and dangerous. Our each-uisge lived down at the bottom of the deep, dark loch at the far end of the glen, across from the fairy mound. And that, of course, was precisely the place that girl liked to go best.

  You think you know this story, don’t you? Think it’s no different, really, from all the water-horse stories you’ve ever heard, from one end of these islands to the other. From the Butt of Ness all the way down to Barra Head. You think you know this story.

  You don’t.

  So she went to the shielings, with her wild heart pounding at the walls of her chest like a bird who has just been caged and knows that its confinement is for life.

  What was a girl like her to do? She had no sympathy from her mother. Her mother’s only advice to her daughter was that she should not read poetry any more. It would make her want too many things that she couldn’t have. And there is no point to that: none at all, she said to the girl. There is no point in holding on to dreams that you can never fulfil. You make your bed, her mother said, and then you lie in it.

  You know how the old fairy tales go. The good girl does what her mother tells her, and then she gets her reward. But that girl did not want that bed. She wanted something different; she wanted something more. Yes, more. For sure she wanted more! What would a mainland man like you know about the yearnings of an island woman’s heart? We’re a fanciful folk here – fanciful and fey. What could you possibly know about our sea-longings, our hill-cravings? What could you know about the eerie half-light of midsummer nights in the glen? I knew a woman once who could not stand them, the never-ending days of an island summer. She said it drove her half mad. She was an incomer, though; the island drives them all mad, in the end. You never saw the stars, she said, for the best part of four months. And that is true enough, but there are mysteries enough on this earth without always looking to the stars. Mysteries enough in the midnight sun gleaming on Loch na Mna, or the wind carving a channel through the wild, dark waters of Loch an Eich-Uisge.

  That girl had an open and tender heart; she never learned to hide it. Never learned, like the rest of us did. But this island eats tender hearts. Gobbles them down whole.

  Well, she did her jobs that summer like everyone else. Followed the cattle around the moor to make sure they didn’t slip into the quaking bog and drown; fetched fresh water from the burn when it was her turn. Made her share of fine crowdie and smooth, silky butter. But she did not spend much time with the others. She often went off alone, and because she was an older, hard-working girl, and known always to have been a bit of a dreamer, no one thought anything of it. Well then, before we all knew it, the summer was gone. As the second weekend in August approached, we were all preparing to go up to the shielings to start the long process of closing them down for the season, and to bring the girls back home.

  But before we could set off on that fine, warm morning, that girl came flying down the hill to the township, face wet with weeping, long red hair whipping in tangles round her face. She was hardly able to speak a word of sense. Ran into her house, locked the door, and did not come out again till the following day. There was talk in the village of ghosts, and there was talk of monsters. There was talk of the one-night shieling, and black beasts that go bump in the night. But more than all of these, there was talk of the each-uisge, and the rumour of it spread through the district of Uig like wildfire.

  The men went up the hill alone to fetch the other girls back down; the women, they said, were to stay secure in the township. So that was it: the last of the summer ceilidhs up on the mountain ruined. It was always a grand event, you see, the departure from the geàrraidh. We would all go up there together to pack up; we would spend the night singing and dancing and storytelling, and we would come back down with all the supplies the next morning. Now, though, the men were playing it safe. If the each-uisge was on the prowl again, as happened at least once in the memory of every generation, then any woman might find herself his prey. So up they went for the girls, right away; they planned to go back again on Monday for the rest of the supplies. Well, you couldn’t work on a Sunday, you know. Not on the Lord’s Day. Not even to foil the each-uisge. And when they went on Monday, they would take their guns. They would take their guns to Loch an Eich-Uisge, and they would see to that fellow for good.

  She came to visit me, the next afternoon. That girl did. When the village was quiet and everyone sleepy from the after-effects of the Sunday roast. She told me all about it; she trusted me. Why me? Well, who else could she possibly tell? The Calvinist crows in their dark churches would offer her no succour. They would scream eternal damnation at her, they would probably exorcise her. They’d preach against her from their hardwood pulpits; they’d say she’d brought the sin upon herself. Why, the sin of attracting the attention of the each-uisge, I suppose. Why had he chosen that girl, and n
ot another? What wickedness had that demon seen in her which drew him to her? No, there was no logic in it. The crows didn’t need to do logic: belief was enough. Belief was everything. Belief, and fear. There was no compassion in those fine Christian men. Not then, and not ever to this day. I have never seen compassion in them. Not once. But I was priest enough for her; I was her confessor. She told me how it had gone; she told me the full story.

  It had gone like this.

  *

  The day was fine, the first time he came to her. The sky so clear and blue that her eyes ached to look at it; so warm and wide that there seemed to be room in it for any dream to grow. She stared out across the waters of the loch, watching four-spotted chasers swallow up midges; she smiled as moss carder bees grew drunk on red clover and bog asphodel. Yes, the day was fine, all right. The slow slap of water on flat stones at the edges of the loch, the distant cry of the golden plover, the hiss of the breeze through purple moor-grass and heather.

  They say that a man went fishing once, up in that loch. And as he put his hands into the water, a silver trout leapt out. The fish turned into a girl – the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Face like the moon and eyes like stars. And away he went after her, away. He never came back. He grew old searching for her. So tell me, then, fine young folklorist from the mainland that you are: what does longing do when it comes face to face with its own reflection in the dark, shining waters of a moorland loch? What wonders might you conjure up from the deep, if only you want them hard enough?

  The day was quiet and fine, and she thought that nobody was there but her.