Rannoch stared at the wolf and after a good while he nodded his antlers.
‘Yes, you must live,’ he whispered as he backed away. Rannoch was gone for a short while, but when he came again to the rock and laid the berries beside the wolf, he didn’t stir until the deer was clear of his teeth. He stretched out his tired muzzle gratefully and gobbled up the sparse food.
With the coming suns Rannoch brought the wolf more berries and watched him from a distance as he gradually began to recover his strength. At last he was just able to drag himself to the pool and drink long and deep from the icy water. It quenched the burning thirst which the wolf had only been able to hold at bay by lapping at the rainy puddles that had formed on the rock beside his sickbed.
On the next sun the wolf tried to stand up. He managed it for a while, but then his legs gave way and he collapsed again. That evening Rannoch was feeding on the mountain when he saw two hawks fighting high above him and something drop to earth. Rannoch ran up to see what it was and found a dead field mouse on the ground. He picked it up by the tail and carried it down to rock where he threw it to the wolf. Rannoch turned away with disgust as the wolf took the dead Lera in its mouth and bit in to it, tearing the flesh and gnawing on the small bones. But the meal restored him even more and that Larn he stood for longer on the rock.
As night came in and a few stars peeped through the swirling clouds, Rannoch came to see him again.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked quietly from above. The wolf licked his paws and nodded.
‘You’ve saved my life,’ he said. ’I’ll be well soon.’
‘Then it is nearly time for me to be on my way,’ said Rannoch.
‘Yes, that is well,’ said the wolf in a strange voice. ‘But tell me. I do not understand. Why have you done this?’
‘Because you needed my help,’ said Rannoch quietly.
‘Because I can and. . . and because. . . because I want to know.’
‘Want to know what?’ said the wolf.
‘Many things. What I am. What you are. Why you hunt me.’
‘Why I hunt you?’ said the wolf, smiling. ‘Because I want to run with the wind and have a full belly. Because I want to win a mate with sleek, silver fur and listen to my brothers howling their song to the sky. Because I too want to know. . .’
‘Then tell me something about you,’ said Rannoch.
The wolf looked oddly at the deer and then he too nodded.
‘Very well.’
So Rannoch came further forward over the ledge and listened to the wolf below the rumbling waterfall. He heard of his brothers who ran in great packs across the high mountains, of their calls and their quarry. He learned of the hard, bitter winters that strangled the earth and made their coats grow thick and coarse. Of how the wolf had nearly died in the foothills to the north when he had been separated from the others and had wandered for days through the snow without scenting a single Lera.
Rannoch trembled as the wolf told him of the chase and what signs they looked for when they went out to feed. Of how the pack would worry their prey and bring it down, then fight and argue over the carcass. Of how, after days of fruitless hunting, to find and catch just one small hare could bring the greatest pleasure.
But Rannoch heard too of the she-wolf and her flashing eyes. Of the song of the storm on the mountain top and the joy of running free at mating time. He heard of the wolf’s love of his cubs and how the little ones would gambol and tumble in the snow, until their paws were tired with playing and they would run back home and bury their tiny silver muzzles in their mother’s fur. He heard too of the loneliness of the wolf and his bitter cries when the wind told him that he must fight or die.
As he told the deer this he began to growl and his fur bristled, for the wolf was remembering his home and the world that was his own. He grew silent and sullen after a while and eventually stopped talking. So the two Lera were left to listen to the sound of rushing water.
Rannoch set off early the next sun to collect berries for the wolf and when he returned and looked over the edge, he saw him lying with his head on his paws. The deer trotted down to the pool and was approaching the flat rock when the wolf began to growl. The hair was standing up on the back of his neck and suddenly he arched his spine and stood up. Rannoch froze.
‘Don’t run,’ whispered the wolf in a sleek, cold voice. ‘It would be more than your life’s worth.’
Rannoch dropped the berries and tilted his antlers forward.
‘You’re well again,’ he said.
The wolf nodded and looked at Rannoch slyly.
‘I’m glad,’ said Rannoch.
‘Damn you!’ cried the wolf suddenly. ‘Why are you glad? Don’t you know how dangerous it is for you?’
‘I’m glad all the same,’ said Rannoch calmly. ‘Besides, you won’t harm me.’
The wolf looked at him carefully.
‘No,’ he whispered bitterly, ‘I won’t harm you.’
‘Then perhaps we have learnt something,’ whispered
Rannoch. ‘Both of us.’
‘No,’ snapped the wolf, ‘we have learnt nothing. Except that the world is stranger than we think. Now go quickly, for I may not be able to help myself.’
The wolf was straining forward, the tendons in his legs quivering violently as he looked at the red deer. He was beginning to show his teeth.
Rannoch nodded.
‘Very well,’ he said softly, ‘but I will not forget this time we have spent together.’
‘Go now. Hurry!’ cried the wolf suddenly.
Rannoch turned and ran back up the hill and when he looked back from the ledge above, the wolf was standing gazing at his broken reflection in the pool.
‘Goodbye,’ called the deer.
The wolf didn’t answer at first but as Rannoch turned to leave, he swung round and called up to the deer.
‘Listen to me,’ he cried. ‘You have saved my life and for that I thank you. So go, and may you run free and may your antlers grow. I will not forget you. No, nor that strange mark on your forehead. But mark me too, do not fool yourself. For we are enemies, you and I. That is how it is and how it must be. Nothing may change that, for that is the law. So when I run with the pack again and my belly is empty, when my cubs growl for food and the she-wolf demands meat, I will hunt you. You and your kind. Then I will forget this strange meeting. Yes, and be glad to forget it too.’
The wolf was snarling now as he tried to master his feelings. Without another word Rannoch dropped away from the rock and set out across the mountainside. He trotted slowly at first across the steep slope, but then the deer began to run, his head up, his antlers swaying in the breeze. Soon he was hurtling across the heather as the wind scoured the scent of the wolf from his nostrils.
Only when the deer was a long way away did Rannoch stop and look back. The mountainside was empty but as he looked Rannoch heard the wolf’s call come to him across the wind. Where once it would have only made him start in fear and run for his life, now the deer heard something else in it. Some new complexity. Rannoch heard both hunger and need. But in this call, in this low angry note that rose to meet the air, Rannoch also heard pain.
The deer turned back and looked out toward the mountains rising above him. The clouds and the mist hung low over the day and their dark edges were heavy with rain. On the deer ran. But as he went something else came with the biting loneliness that descended to greet him. A terrible sadness.
13 Reunited
‘Mountains divide us, and the waste of seas— Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland.’ John Galt, ‘The Lone Shieling’
The weather was changing rapidly now and as Rannoch travelled further north towards the Great Mountain and Herne’s Herd, looking all the time for signs of Bracken and the others, great splinters of rock rose around him, stone screes scarred the green and the mountains loomed ever higher through the hanging mist.
Down their slopes ran seemingly endless streams and rivul
ets as their tops shed the weight of the autumn rains. They turned the valley bottoms into vast bogs that Rannoch slopped and waded through as he went. The rain seemed never to stop, so that when the skies did clear for a while, grumbling with thunder, Rannoch felt as though he had swum through a huge sea that had soaked into his bones. Rannoch swung west, following the contours of the mountain behind him, and after a while he began to catch a now familiar scent on the wind. Again he smelt the breath of the sea.
It was morning when the deer came to another sea loch. The sides of the mountain he was on plunged sheer to the water and all around they rose up again in walls of stone. The cold wind lashed the surface of the lake and through the mist Rannoch saw a strange sight. He knew instantly it was the work of man. It stood on a promontory, its squat granite walls black and forbidding – a castle. As he gazed at it Rannoch was reminded of the men in the gully with their swords and axes.
Rannoch followed the line of the loch now and after a while he saw tracks. He knew immediately they were the slots of red deer. In the soggy ground Rannoch made out the marks of at least five animals and as he examined their size and shape and the distance between the fore and back hoofs, his heart leapt, for he realized that they weren’t just stags that had been this way, there were hinds too. He began to scent the air but could smell nothing, so he pressed on excitedly. It wasn’t until he had travelled for a good while more that Rannoch saw them in the distance, through the mist. There were six of them, grazing together. Rannoch’s heart began to race.
‘I’m s-s-soaked through,’ said Bankfoot miserably as he stood there in the rain, and the mist swirled around the little group of deer. Bankfoot was a six-pointer and his antlers were growing stronger.
‘I know, Bankfoot, it’s horrid,’ said the hind next to him. Willow had grown into a very fine deer. Her smooth coat was the colour of fire-bracken, while her clear, black eyes glinted like jet.
‘Th-th-thistle never stops grumbling,’ said Bankfoot, looking towards the young stag who was talking to Tain and Peppa a little way away. They had all grown since their escape over a year before. Peppa looked even more like her sister and both Tain and Thistle had their third heads too, though Thistle’s antlers looked stronger than Tain’s.
‘Yes,’ agreed Willow, ‘and I’m worried about him. Though he hates the Sgorrla, he seems to hate running from them even more.’
‘Yes,’ said Bankfoot, but then he added, ‘But when Thistle decided on es-es-escaping with us he did throw his whole heart into it. We wouldn’t have made it this f-f-far without him. Remember the fight at the burn?’
‘I know,’ said Willow.’He’s a natural leader.’
‘M-m-more than an Outrider,’ agreed Bankfoot.
‘Not more,’ said Willow, ‘just different. But it’s Bracken I’m most worried about. Her leg’s very bad. It’s slowing us up terribly.’
They both looked over to the hind. She was standing on her own, grazing half-heartedly across the soggy ground. Her leg had been wounded over two moons before and it still wasn’t healing.
‘It’s n-n-not just that,’ said Bankfoot.’Some days she hardly seems to know what’s happening at all. She’s never got over Rannoch.’
Both of them still hated to think of that terrible day. The day the riders had come.
Willow gazed out into the mist.
‘I still miss him terribly,’ she said quietly.
‘M-m-me too,’ nodded Bankfoot.
‘But look at us,’ said Willow suddenly, affecting a cheerfulness. ‘As gloomy as Herne’s Wood. Come on, we’ve got to keep moving.’
Bankfoot began to move over towards the others. But he suddenly stopped dead. Like all young bucks his sense of smell had grown more and more acute and now he had scented something.
‘What is it, Bankfoot?’ said Willow when she saw how tense his face was. ‘Is there danger?’
‘I d-d-don’t know. I th-th-think it’s another deer.’
‘Sgorrla?’ whispered Willow, staring fixedly through the mist.
Suddenly a gust of wind cleared the mist away and the two of them saw a young stag running straight towards them. But now Willow, whose eyes were especially sharp, was shaking and shaking uncontrollably.
‘W-w-willow,’ whispered Bankfoot, ‘what is it?’
‘It can’t be.’
‘W-w-what?’
‘Bankfoot,’ whispered the hind, hardly daring to breathe.
‘Look at his forehead.’
Bankfoot strained his young eyes and suddenly he too was trembling.
‘It’s im-im-impossible,’ he stammered.
But as the deer drew closer Willow could now clearly see the white oak leaf on his brow. Then Willow was running towards him, bounding as fast as her legs would carry her.
‘Rannoch,’ she cried, ‘Rannoch, you’re alive!’
Of all the strange meetings that Herla can face in the wild, that was possibly the strangest. Rannoch, returned from the dead, surrounded by the little party of deer, themselves at their nerves’ end from the strain of their flight. Months of fear and flight, the mystery of Rannoch’s disappearance, the strange explanation that he gave of a pit high above the loch and Rannoch’s own unbounded joy, all blended together to produce an overwhelming mixture of exhilaration and wonder.
The deer could hardly stop talking, the friends quizzing Rannoch about everything that had happened to him and marvelling at his account of Rurl and the wolf. Rannoch asked each of them in turn about the loch and Tharn, Colquhar and their journey, and they had so many questions that they hardly had time to discuss where exactly they were going. It was approaching Larn when Rannoch reminded them that the Sgorrla were close and that it was better if they talked as they travelled.
So the friends set off again. As they went it was Bankfoot who explained proudly how they had escaped from the Sgorrla and wandered south for moons, driven further and further away from the High Land by the pursuing stags. The going had been desperately slow, for the Sgorrla were hunting everywhere and Bracken found it hard to keep up. So, hiding in copses and caves sometimes for moons on end, they had eventually turned north again.
The most moving meeting of all was between Rannoch and Bracken. When Rannoch went up to her, Bracken looked quizzically into his face and as she stared at the fawn mark only the faintest flicker of recognition came into her sad eyes, mingled with a note of fear.
‘Mother, it’s me,’ Rannoch said gently, and the young stag licked her muzzle and tried to tell her what had happened to him.
Bracken said nothing as she listened and Rannoch knew that she barely understood him. But he examined her wounded leg and fetched some of the special leaves he had used on the wolf and, very gently, rubbed some of the healing tincture into the cut. From then on the hind hung on Rannoch’s every word and kept as close to him as she could.
Tain, Bankfoot, Willow and Peppa could hardly contain their joy at Rannoch’s reappearance though all of them looked at his fawn mark and wondered what it really meant. Only Thistle was a little colder than the rest, though he tried to hide it. He listened to Rannoch’s story carefully and when he gazed at his friend’s forehead and six pointed tines, his eyes betrayed a strange wariness. But by the time they had all spent a couple of suns travelling together, it was almost as though they had never been parted.
Larn was well passed and they had all sat down together to rest in the wet grass.
‘So you were travelling into the High Land too, Rannoch?’said Willow.
‘Yes, I’m looking for a herd, Willow. They call themselves Herne’s Herd. They live in the northern shadows of the Great Mountain. Rurl told me they might have some answers. I thought of coming to help you but. . . but first I had to know more.’
‘About the Prophecy?’ said Willow quietly.
All the friends looked at each other nervously. They were surprised that Willow had mentioned it so openly, but each of them had secretly wanted to ask Rannoch. They had been waiting for a chance to g
et him on his own. But Willow, knowing more of Rannoch’s heart than the others, wanted to bring it out into the open as quickly as possible. Rannoch knew immediately what they were all thinking.
‘The Prophecy can’t be true, can it, Mother?’ he said softly, looking at Bracken. The hind looked back suddenly with a fearful glance but she said nothing and Rannoch went on. ‘But maybe parts of it are true, and the seal told me this herd might know something.’
‘I’ve heard of them,’ said Tain. ’An Outrider above the loch used to talk about them, but nothing he told me made me want to meet them.’
All the deer looked at Tain.
‘What do you mean?’ said Thistle.
‘Only that there are strange rumours surrounding them,’ said Tain, already getting carried away with his own imagination, ‘dark legends. Of ghosts and cannibalism and—’
‘Stop it,’ said Willow.
‘It’s all right,’ Rannoch whispered in the darkness, ‘I’ve heard the rumours too. But there’s something else. The Sgorrla I overheard the other day said that Sgorr has forbidden any deer to go into the High Land. Maybe there’s something up there he fears. Something that could help us fight him.’
‘Well, if the l-l-legends are true about this herd,’ Bankfoot interrupted, ‘you’ll need some g-g-good friends with you, at any rate.’
Rannoch smiled.
‘Thank you, Bankfoot,’ he said, ‘but I can’t expect any of you to follow me there. Who knows what I’ll find. Tell me, though, what were you all planning to do in the High Land when you got there?’
‘Get away from Sgorr, first off,’ said Tain. ’Then, who knows.’
‘Find another herd,’ added Willow, ‘and join them. That was Thistle’s idea. Then,’ she went on, ‘rear some fine little Outriders, far away from the Low Lands.’
Rannoch looked back at Willow. It was only their flight and the strange adventure they found themselves on that had stopped her from finding a mate, Rannoch found himself thinking. But he wasn’t sad that she had not already stood with another.
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