Entry Island Page 19

  He opened eyes clouded as if by cataracts, and I am not sure that he even saw me. His hand clutched my forearm. A grip like steel, before slowly relaxing. And a long, hollow sigh slipped from between his lips as the last breath of his life escaped his body.

  I had never felt such desolation. His eyes were still open, staring up at me, and I gently placed my hand over them to draw the lids shut. Then I leaned over to kiss him on the lips, and my tears fell hot on skin that was already cold.

  *

  The coffin was a crudely made oblong box stained black from the roots of water lilies. It sat on the backs of two chairs set on the path outside our blackhouse. More than a hundred folk were gathered there in a silence broken only by the plaintive cries of gulls driven inshore by bad weather at sea, and the ocean itself sweeping in on a high tide to beat its endless rhythm on the shingle beach.

  The men wore caps, and the women covered their heads with scarves. Those of us who could wore black. But we were a ragged collection of dispirited humanity, dressed in little more than tatters and rags, with faces starved of colour and hollowed out by famine.

  The wind had swung around to the north-west, banishing the last vestiges of summer. A mourning sky laden with low cloud prepared to weep its sorrow on the land. Old blind Calum, still dressed in his threadbare blue jacket with its faded yellow buttons, stood by the coffin. His face was like putty, and he placed his skeletal old hand on the wood. In the years since he had lost his sight he had committed much of the Gaelic bible to heart. And he recited from it now.

  ‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.’

  And how I wished with all my heart that it would be true.

  The coffin was fastened to oars on either side of it, and six of us lifted them, three to each, so that the coffin hung between us as we took my father on his final journey. Up over the hill and down the far side to the sweep of silver sand that curved around to the cemetery.

  Only the men accompanied him. Thirty or forty of us. When finally we arrived at the little overgrown patch of machair where stones grew among the grass, myself and two others set about digging a hole in the sandy soil. It took nearly half an hour to make it deep enough for the coffin. There was no ceremony, no words were spoken, no minister present as it was lowered into the ground and covered over. Turf carried from the croft was bedded down on top of the loose soil and small stones placed at the head and foot.

  And it was over. My father gone. Placed in the ground with his ancestors, existing now only in the memories of those who had known him.

  The men turned away and walked back along the beach, silently retracing their footprints in the sand, leaving me there battered by the wind just below the standing stones where I had made my first tryst with Kirsty. Death comes, but the struggle to live goes on. Beyond the headland I could see women and children on the far shore. Pathetic figures stooped among the rocks and the retreating tide, scavenging for shellfish. And I felt the first spots of rain, like the tears that I could not cry myself.

  I turned and was startled to see Kirsty standing there. She wore a long black gown, a cape with its hood pulled up over her head. Her face was as white as bleached bones. We stood staring at each other for what seemed like an eternity, and I could see her shock at my appearance. She said in a very small voice, ‘I wept for you when I heard the news.’

  I frowned. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Some of the servants told me a man had been shot during a raid on the deer forest. Men from the Baile Mhanais township, they said.’ She paused, struggling to control her voice. ‘For an awful moment I thought it might have been you. And then I heard that it was your father.’ She sucked in her lower lip and reached out to hold my face in both her hands. Soft, cool hands on my burning skin. ‘I am so sorry, Simon.’

  And her sympathy, and that moment of tenderness, broke my resolve to be brave, and my tears came at last.

  She said, ‘The Sheriff-Depute has been to take statements, but it seems no one knows who fired the fatal shot. They say it was an accident.’

  Anger flared in me briefly, but quickly subsided. Nothing could change what had happened. Nothing could bring my father back. All I could do now was be who he wanted me to be. I wiped away my tears. ‘My family and my village are starving. He was just trying to feed us.’

  Concern etched itself deeply in her frown. ‘I heard that the potato crop has failed again. But my father is giving you grain, isn’t he?’

  ‘Look at me, Ciorstaidh! The grain we get barely keeps us alive. I haven’t eaten properly in months. Children and old people are dying.’ Now my anger returned. My father’s anger burning in me. ‘Ask your father why people are starving to death while there are deer on the hill and fish in the rivers. Ask him!’

  I turned away and she caught my arm. ‘Simon!’

  I wheeled around to face her, tormented by the feelings I had for her, but distanced by everything that separated us. I pulled my arm free. ‘My family is my responsibility now. And I’m not going to let them die of hunger.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to bring home a deer to feed them. Or die trying. Just like my father did.’ I hurried off down the slope without a backward glance, and strode out in the rain across the flat wet arc of sand left by the outgoing tide.

  *

  When the rain came in off the sea it swept across the hillside like a mist, robbing the land of its summer colours and stealing away its warmth. It was more than an hour since I had left the village, a stout rope coiled across my shoulder, my father’s crossbow strapped to my back, a homemade quiver stitched together from an old trouser leg to hold the bolts he had laboured so long to make true.

  I was soaked to the skin and shivering. No body fat to protect me from the elements. But I was unaware of my discomfort, wholly focused on the parcel of deer grazing in the valley below me. Five of them, backs to the weather, heads bowed. It had taken me nearly twenty minutes crawling on my belly to get close enough.

  The rocks that provided my cover were halfway up the hillside, and I was spreadeagled on a flat slab of gneiss that lay slightly inclined on the slope of the hill. It kept me almost perfectly hidden, but provided the perfect angle for a shot.

  I slid back on the rock so as not the break the skyline and armed the crossbow, nocking a bolt into place before sliding forward again to bring the deer into my sights. I wanted a nice clean shot.

  Then a movement caught the corner of my eye, breaking my concentration, and I saw a party of five or six men crouched low and moving forward through the glen, downwind of the animals and hidden from their view by a cluster of rocks. They were almost obscured from me by the rain. A hunting party from the castle. I recognised a stalker from the estate, and some way back a gillie holding the pony that would carry the carcass of whatever they shot.

  And then with something like shock I realised that among the hunters was Ciorstaidh’s brother, George, betrayed by his distinctive red hair.

  Their focus was on the deer, and I knew that they had not seen me in my elevated position. I altered the angle of my line of fire, and lowered my head to bring George fully into my sights. I held him there for several long moments, remembering how he had humiliated me in front of Ciorstaidh, my finger dangerously close to lifting the trigger and releasing the bolt that would take his life, just as my father’s had been taken by someone in his father’s employ. But every fibre of my being fought against it, and in the end I removed the bolt and released the tension from the crossbow.

  I rolled out of sight to lie on my back, staring up at the pewter sky, and cursed my luck. Another few seconds and I’d have loosed my shot and the beast would be lying dead in the valley. But then the hunting party would almost certainly have stumbled upon me as I went down to perform the gralloch. So perhaps Lady Luck had favoured me after all.

  A si
ngle shot rang out in the cold and wet of the late morning and I rolled over and crawled back to my vantage point. One of the hunters had shot the single stag in the group, and in that moment I realised that they were not shooting for food. They were after the trophy. A set of antlers.

  But whoever had fired was a poor shot. The beast had been hit high up and towards his back end. He had fallen as the other deer scattered, but was thrashing now and struggling to get back to his feet. Head and front legs first, like a horse. A second shot missed altogether, and the animal was off and running, weaving and distressed, hunched over and clearly in pain. Up the slope and away through the heather. A third shot was fired, and in the time it took the first shooter to reload his flintlock the stag was out of sight.

  All caution dispensed with, they were up and after him, running through the peat bog, splashing through the soft, wet ground. One of them fell, and picked himself up dripping with peaty brown water.

  I watched them as they went up and over the rise, George and the stalker well ahead of the others. But there they stopped, surveying the wilderness that lay ahead. A deep valley strewn with boulders, the hills rising steep on both sides. The valley floor was strength-sapping marsh, and the primal landscape beyond was quickly lost in the smirr that drifted through the hills.

  From where I lay I could not see what they saw, but it was clear to me that they had lost sight of the stag. The stragglers caught them up on the rise, and there was a short and heated debate before they turned reluctantly and headed back the way they had come.

  I could scarcely believe it. My father would have tracked a wounded animal to the ends of the earth to deliver it from pain. And it was clear to me that the poor beast was in agony as he stumbled off into the next valley.

  I waited until they had gone back down the glen before breaking cover, then ran down the slope to the place the stag had fallen. The peat bog was churned up where his hooves had fought for grip to get him back on his feet. There was blood in the grass. Dark red, almost black. My heart went out to him. If he had to die, then the least he deserved was a quick dispatch. Only to wound him, then leave him to die in wretched torment, was unforgivable.

  I knew what I must do, and set off at a trot in pursuit of him.

  Beyond the rise, I picked up his spoor. Although there was a good deal of blood at first, it gradually became less apparent, the wound coagulating, and I was hard pushed to spot any at all. But I knew that the animal would be bleeding inside, and the thought drove me on through the mist and rain, stumbling now, weakened by my hunger and the cold. I looked for broken heather roots and hoofprints in the peat marsh, dropping down to a desperately slow pace, knowing that every wasted moment meant more pain.

  After a time I began to despair, not even certain that the water-filled hoofprints I saw were his.

  I was close to giving up when I saw him. He had fallen down in a hollow by a small loch. I could hear his distress in the shallow bark of his breathing. I knew that the loss of blood would have starved him of oxygen. He would be dizzy and weak, and in considerable pain if the bullet had clipped the liver.

  But I also knew that if he saw me coming he would panic and try to get back on his feet. And if I got too close, those antlers could be lethal. I dropped to one knee and stayed stock-still. He hadn’t seen me, and I was still downwind.

  Very slowly I approached him from the rear. One soft, careful step at a time I gained on him, until I saw the steam rising from his coat, and his stertorous breathing filled my ears. I laid down my crossbow and quiver and took out my father’s long hunting knife. I would have to be quick and accurate.

  Close enough now to smell him, I was on him in a single move, my knee pushed hard into the back of his neck, pulling his antlers towards me with my left hand. I reached around under his chin with my knife to draw the blade across his throat, severing both the jugular vein and the carotid artery. What little life there was left in his heart pumped the last of his blood out on to the grass.

  I slid off him, to lie in the hollow by his head and watch his big doe eyes cloud over, just as my father’s had done. He looked at me now, his life draining away, his pain dying with him. And all I could feel was guilt at the length of time it had taken me to find him.

  When he was gone I got to my knees and rolled him on to his back. I grasped the skin of the scrotum and pulled it away from his body to cut it off, and remembered what my father always said when he performed this first, ritual act of the gralloch. You’ll no be needin’ these nae mair. And I ached again at his loss, and the loss too of this fine animal. I was sick of death.

  But I forced myself to concentrate now, remembering how my father did this. It was vital, he always said, that the guts be removed intact. Any spillage would contaminate the meat.

  I made a small incision and inserted two fingers, palm up, to stop the blade of my knife from catching the intestines, and slid it up towards the base of the sternum, opening up the abdominal wall. And so the gralloch began.

  I worked in concentrated silence, with only the sound of my own breathing for company. It was hard, stomach-churning work, and I tried not to think too much about how this had once been a proud, sentient creature.

  The fat of the deer was thick and soft when still warm, but it solidified in the cold. It covered my hands and forearms, gore from the cavity congealing in it so that it seemed as if I wore bright red gloves. I grabbed handfuls of sphagnum to try to clean it off, but it was an almost impossible task.

  Finally the organs and intestines of the beast lay steaming in the grass and I rested for a while on my knees, leaning forward with my elbows planted in the peat, my forehead buried in the grass. I wanted to weep. But there was no time for self-pity. And just as I had seen my father do before me, I used mosses to wipe out the cavity, and rolled the creature over on to its back. I removed the coil of rope from my shoulder and tied it around the antlers, and along the top of the nose to loop around the jaws, hoping this would keep the head straight and stop the antlers catching on every rock and heather root as I dragged it.

  But I had not anticipated just how weak I was. Even with all its insides removed, the beast was unimaginably heavy. I looped the rope around my chest beneath my armpits so that I could lean my whole body weight forward to pull it over the uneven ground, but I managed no more than two hundred yards before falling to my knees, physically and mentally spent. There was no way I could get the beast home.

  Tears flowed then, and I gave full vent to my frustration and despair, knowing that both God and my father would be witness to my failure. My anguish echoed around the glen in the rain.

  Ten minutes or more must have passed before I started to think what would my father have done. He would never have accepted defeat. Whatever the problem, he used to say, there was always an answer. And when the answer came to me it was simple. If I couldn’t take the whole animal, then I would take a part of it.

  The best meat is at the rear. The haunches. And I realised that somehow I needed to separate them from the front end of the animal. So I steeled myself to do battle with the beast once more.

  But even after I had cut through the flesh and skin and hair along the bottom edge of each of the last ribs, the two halves of the animal were still attached by the spinal ligaments. To expose them to my knife I was forced to twist the rear half in one direction and the front half in the other. Exhausting work, and it took me several minutes to recover before seeking out the ligaments with the tip of my knife to sever them. Then one final push, twisting the haunches through a full 360 degrees to completely disarticulate the spine. And at last, with sweat almost blinding me, I had separated them from the rest of the carcass. They were, of course, still connected at the pelvis, but I hoped that would allow me to use my back and shoulders to carry them, with one leg crooked over each shoulder.

  And so it proved. I sheathed my knife and heaved the remains of the creature on to my shoulders, straining my thighs to take the weight as I straightened my legs. I was
up and mobile, and from somewhere found renewed determination.

  I could not afford to stop, or to think, or to listen to muscles that were screaming at me to give up. I kept my head down, so as not to see the distance still to be travelled. One step at a time.

  I thought of Ciorstaidh as I walked, and how I had carried her all that way to the castle in the knowledge that giving up was not an option. And I felt the same thing now. I owed it to my family, to my father, and to the animal whose life I was determined would not be wasted.

  I have no idea how long I walked in that almost trancelike state. I had left the glen behind me and was up and over the rise, heading for the Sgagarstaigh hill. I had lost the feeling in almost every part of my body and was amazed that there was still any grip left in my hands.

  By mid-afternoon there was a slight break in the clouds, sunlight appearing in transient daubs across the moor. I saw a rainbow, vivid against the blackened sky behind it. And away to my left, a first glimpse of the sea. I was tantalisingly close to home. Which was not a thought that I dared allow enter my mind.

  My biggest danger here was in crossing the road to reach the path that led over the hill to Baile Mhanais. For I would be in full view of any passer-by. And there was often traffic on that road going to and from the castle at Ard Mor.

  It was only now, as that thought crossed my mind, that I realised, with a sudden stab of panic, that I had somehow mislaid my father’s crossbow. That thought alone robbed me of any physical control. My knees gave way, and I dropped to the ground, twisting as I fell to unload the weight of the haunches, and I lay there on the sodden moor with the remains of the stag tipped over at my side.

  I tried to recall what I had done with the crossbow. I remembered laying it down with the quiver before leaping on to the neck of the stag. Which was where I must have left it. Lying among the grasses next to the front end of the deer, among all its guts and entrails. How could I have been so careless? It was my father’s prized possession, and I knew that I could not go home without it.