Before I can react, Seòras stuffs a rag into my mouth. It tastes of fish and sweat, and I almost vomit. They wrench my hands behind me and tie me to the boat.
In the distance, a wolf howls.
• • • •
Seonag is not surprised to see Dòmhnall Geur striding into the clearing with no hint of wariness about him. She is not surprised by the gun in his hand, an old hunting rifle that belonged to her own father, who by now is far from the sight of land and crossing the Atlantic forever.
“You must have hidden your boat well,” he says.
“I swam,” she says.
He laughs.
Seonag is still naked except for the crust of sand on her right side, which itches. His laugh has always been a spiteful laugh, one that made her skin into bumps as if ready for anything that might follow.
“I’ve been wanting an excuse to come here for a very long time,” he says. “When I rid the islands of wolves once and for all, everyone will know my name.”
He does not seem to see the figure behind Seonag, or perhaps only Seonag can see them.
“And you will be put on the next ship to Canada where you cannot pollute my island any longer.”
“Your island?” Seonag hears all of his words distantly, like the waves barely audible over the whispers of the leaves around her. But that bit stays. “You are born to a place and believe you own it more than others who are the same as you.”
“You are not the same as anyone.” His voice is low and thick with disgust.
“Why do you hate me?” Seonag truly wants to know.
Dòmhnall takes a breath to answer, but before he can speak, a wolf howls behind him.
He raises his rifle and fires.
• • • •
I hear the shot ring out through the air. Seòras and Dòmhnall Dubh are out of sight already, following after with their own rifles.
There is another shot, then another. Closer—without reloading time. The others are shooting at whatever Dòmhnall Geur shot at. The sound of a distant snarl.
I jerk at my bonds. The rope is rough and made of heather. It digs into my skin like a flail. My father and I make this rope together. We may have made this one.
I let out a scream of frustration and rage.
The sound of breathing greets me when my scream dies away.
I turn.
A wolf stands at my right, soaking wet and staring at me with liquid amber eyes. In its jaw is a cod, still twitching.
The wolf looks at me. I forget to breathe.
They are real. The story my father told was real. It is large, far larger than the working dogs we use to herd the sheep on our island. It comes up to my waist.
I can smell its wet fur, full of brine and warmth and the manky smell it does have in common with the working dogs. I can smell its breath, hot and fishy.
It melds with the taste of the cloth in my mouth.
The wolf drops the fish, and fear spikes from my bound wrists up the nerves of my arms. My nose is half-stuffed, and my breath enters in gaps around the gag as much as through my nostrils.
The wolf stalks closer, close enough for its breath to glance off my skin and my still-damp clothes.
Its muzzle is cold and wet, its nose colder and wetter.
When it ducks behind me, between me and the boat, I almost cry out. Warm breath hits my wrists, then the wolf’s powerful jaws clamp down on the rope, pulling and gnawing. My skin warms with the animal’s saliva.
Another shot rings out. The wolf flinches against me, but does not stop.
When my hands pop free, I pull the spit-covered rag from my mouth.
“Taing,” I say, trying to thank the animal, but it has already taken its fish and gone.
I go after it.
• • • •
Around Seonag, a dance of chaos swirls.
Wolves partner with hunters, at least two fur-covered bodies to each of the three men. In its center, Seonag stands like a maypole, her body warm from something she cannot place. The figure recedes behind her, waiting, not intervening.
Seonag feels something well within her. She is certain of it, even though it comes to her without words, without voice. It is like the waves that lifted and dipped beneath her as she swam. It is like the impulse that made her turn and run from the ship the day before, an age before, and hide in the glen.
She has to make a choice.
She feels it again, then, as she decides. Her feet hold to the grasses she so longingly admired a short time ago. Toes dig into their young growth.
Seonag stands taller. Perhaps she is taller.
It comes upon her like the tide, creeping with every breath closer. The smell of leaves around her. The scent of seaweed and kelp. The grit of sand against her skin…and something else.
Her skin is flesh and not.
Her body turns with the swirl of air and breath and grunts around her.
She says one word: stad.
Everyone in the clearing does. They stop. They turn to stare at her, men and wolves alike. There is blood on the wind, human and canine.
“I told you, I told you,” Dòmhnall Geur says, stumbling backward. “She is not of our world, she is not—”
“I was,” Seonag says softly. She looks at Seòras, at Dòmhnall Dubh. “Go.”
Seòras looks over his shoulder once. He sees a glimpse of the figure beyond Seonag herself. Whatever he sees, it is enough. His face goes so white that it is he who will be named Bàn when he returns, though he will never tell anyone why.
This is the scene I come upon when I enter the clearing.
Seòras is half-dragging Dòmhnall Dubh with him. He does not look even to the side to see me. They stumble away.
What I see is this:
Seonag, and not Seonag.
Her arms are no longer pale flesh but the soft, sun-bleached grain of driftwood that curves with her muscles, her joints, her neck. She is naked, but her nakedness is no longer human nakedness. Where her black hair reached past her hips is now seaweed, lustrous and shining in the first rays of the early morning sun. Her eyes are obsidian, their whites abalone.
Behind her I see a figure like her, smiling with seal bone teeth. This figure leans against a yew.
Seonag walks to Dòmhnall Geur, who stands rooted to his place on the earth.
When I step closer, flanked by two wolves I hardly notice, I see that rooted is not a metaphor.
Where Dòmhnall Geur’s feet were, now his toes have entered the earth, punching through the leather of his boots and digging deeper by the second.
He writhes where he stands, but he does not scream. I think he cannot scream.
When Seonag touches his face with gentle nails of shining scales, he flinches away.
“You will stay here, like the others before you,” she says absently. I cannot tell which language she is speaking, if any.
I look around me at the trees, so many different kinds.
“Dair,” Seonag says. “Darach.”
Dair is the name for D, the first letter of his name. He will become an oak.
Already his hair has sprung free of its tie.
Seonag has an acorn in her hand. She places it in Dòmhnall Geur’s open mouth.
It sprouts before his lips close, a sprig of green reaching out, another sprouting from his nose.
A wolf howls, so close to my side that I jump, a stick cracking under my feet.
“A Chaluim,” Seonag says, looking over her shoulder at me. Then, sadly, “You shouldn’t have come.”
Like the others, I cannot seem to speak.
The figure behind Seonag moves forward. Slowly. I think I hear the brittle crack of wood.
“Who are you?” Seonag asks.
The figure is like her, like this new Seonag, and not. Where Seonag’s seaweed hair hangs straight and glossy in ripples, the figure’s is wild, covered in barnacles and fragments of shell and motes of sand embedded in the leaves that sparkle in the sun.
Perha
ps this figure is simply older.
“A guardian,” says the figure. “I was.”
I understand before Seonag seems to.
“Was,” she says. “Of what?”
The figure gestures around her. “Of whom do you think?”
Those who are hunted.
For the first time, I see a dead wolf. The figure gazes sadly upon it. There is a knife in its side, and a cod by its mouth.
I cannot make words, but a strangled cry escapes me.
The figure seems to understand.
Seonag goes to the wolf and pulls the knife from its chest. She walks to the new oak tree, now reaching up higher, higher. Flutters of fabric wave in the wind. Seonag tears away what was Dòmhnall Geur’s shirt.
She wraps the knife in it, blood and all. She walks to me. “Carry this home.”
Before I can try and ask her how, she pushes it into my chest. In through my shirt and in through my skin and ribs. I feel it, harsh and heavy and sharp inside me, against my heart that beats so quickly.
Seonag looks at me once more. If she is sad, I cannot tell.
Her sudden smile is fierce.
I blink once, and she is gone. I hear the beat of wings above my head, in the branches of a tree.
The figure remains.
My voice works again. “Who are you?”
The words sound strange in the air, like they are not words at all.
“Old,” says the figure. “Tired.”
I look upward. My hand massages my chest. I can feel the knife there. It feels like panic just out of reach.
“Tell your father thank you,” says the figure.
When I jerk my gaze back down, they are also gone.
• • • •
You will wonder, I suppose, how I made it home. Seòras and Dòmhnall Dubh returned, days after I did, silent for days after that, jumping every time they saw me.
The wolves swam me out past the breakwater, the pack leading me around the riptides and into the open sea with yips and broken notes. Some peeled off to hunt on a small chain of rocky islets; others waited until we reached a place I could never find again no matter how I tried. Hiort appeared in the distance.
Oh, how the fear gripped me then. It coated me more heavily than the water, ready to pull me under with its weight.
I swam, though. I swam through the length of the day. They say the journey back is shorter than the journey there. I think in this they are wrong.
When I arrived on the shore of Uibhist a Deas, I collapsed and lay for hours before one of the crofters found me and carted me home, naked and shivering, on the back of his horse.
I did not hear what he said to my father.
Father built up the fire and closed all the shutters and when the heat from the peat warmed me enough, I rose to my hands and knees and began to heave, spots swimming in front of my eyes and a terrible ripping feeling in my chest and when tears stung at me, I heard a thud, and to the floor fell the knife that had killed the wolf.
My father picked up the small parcel and opened it. The blood appeared as fresh as if he had stabbed me with it himself.
“Dòmhnall Geur killed the wolf that freed me,” I told my father then, unthinking of how absurd my words would sound in any language. “He became an oak.”
“A life for a life,” was all my father said in return.
I think of the many trees on that island sometimes.
I think that is why I am telling you this now.
When Seonag came to me not so long ago, she came with a warning. I do not think it was meant for me.
Perhaps it is meant for you.
There are no mic-thìre left in Scotland, but there are madaidhean-allaidh. They are wild and they are free, and they found that freedom in the sea.
Their hunters are the ones to fear.
Sometimes, when the winds are still and the tide pulls back far, far from the shore, I hear their song echo across the waves. I am not the only one who hears them; perhaps Seonag as their guardian strengthened them after the strength of their old guardian flagged.
On those nights, it is whispered that Seòras and Dòmhnall Dubh hide with their pillows over their ears, but no matter how they try, they cannot escape the sound. They forgot her, but they still remember that sound.
I am old now, and Seòras and Dòmhnall Dubh are older still. But you are young, and the young have the chance not to repeat the mistakes of their elders.
If you look around you, you might see someone like Seonag, who wants so desperately to belong. Let her sing at the cèilidhean. Invite her to share your meals.
You know who I mean and who I do not. Those someones like Seonag are not like the hunters who prowl for something they decided was their own, to take, to steal, to kill.
Someday perhaps someone else will take that swim to relieve Seonag of her duties. I have thought sometimes that it might be me, but I am still a coward.
Sometimes, on those nights, I think of her.
Sometimes, on those nights, I walk the glen.
Sometimes, on those nights, I hear her singing again.
There are hunters among the sheep of the machair, a ghràidh.
But there are wolves, too.
* * *
Writer, singer, artist. Evan sings and writes in Gàidhlig and in English. You can find their bilingual work on Tor.com, in Steall (2020), and Uncanny Magazine, with poetry in Poets’ Republic and elsewhere. Evan sings with the Glasgow Gaelic Musical Association, the Alba choir, and Fuaran. They live in Partick with two cats and dreams galore.
Dave's Head
By Suzanne Palmer
I know what Dave wants even before he says it, before I’ve even taken off my stupid work cap or thrown my keys on top of the pile of crap beside the door. He’s taken his head off again, somehow, and I never can figure how he does it with no thumbs or even fingers, and I know my uncle didn’t help, but there it is on the rug waiting for me, Dave’s head, and he opens his gigantic mouth wide and looks at me with his big, brown fake eyes, and says, “Road trip?”
“I’m a senior porter now,” I say. “I can’t just skip work.” This is true.
“I looked at your schedule on the fridge. Your next shift isn’t until Tuesday,” Dave says. This is also true. “So, road trip?”
“You know I can’t leave Uncle Marty alone that long,” I say.
“Marty is at the party,” Dave says. “Throw him in the back seat and he’ll be fine.” Back seat of course because Dave’s head is fucking huge—life-size, as advertised—and he wants to see out the front window and “feel” the wind as if he had real fucking skin, real nerves, rather than just a better imagination than most actual people I know. Someday if I ever meet his maker, I don’t know if I’d hug them or kick them in the nuts.
If Marty is at the party, I wasn’t gonna get much done here at the house, because he’d always be milling around and in the way and he’d notice me moving or taking stuff. It’s much better when he’s at the garage, and mostly just sits on the couch staring at nothing and mumbling to ghostly coworkers, and then I can sneak off the nasty stuff, old food wrappers and anything likely to go bad or attract bugs or mice, and maybe even sort out and ditch some papers if I take a little from one spot and a little from another so the stacks and piles don’t seem to change much all at once.
At least my uncle never collected actual live animals; I’ve seen too many pics of those horrors and we’re not nearly so bad. The closest he got was Dave and a couple of Dave’s friends, the rest of which were too broken to fix. I think it’s because most of the animatronics were indoors when the fire took out their park, but Dave was so big he’d been built to be outside and weatherproof, sturdier all around. One of his knee joints is locked up from an exhibit collapsing against him, but he can still walk around with a stiff limp if he has to, and with Marty nowadays mostly forgetting there was an outdoors I’ve managed to get most of the junk out of the backyard so he has some room to roam.
Still, as D
ave likes to remind me, the backyard wasn’t all that big to start with, and there wasn’t all that much interesting to look at even when your head is normally as high up as Dave’s is. And he gets lonely when Marty is somewhere out of his own head, which is most of the time now.
Dave knows when I’m vulnerable. My job at the airport carrying bags for the few rich fuckers who can still afford to fly anywhere, furiously trying to buy time for the status quo, makes me resentful, and half this week was double shifts. “Road trip?” he says again.
Whatever it was I had been thinking I should get done this weekend I can’t remember anyway. And I get lonely too; not like I can invite people over, with my uncle’s stuff everywhere and imaginary people taking up whatever room is left. “Fine,” I say. “But not too far.”
“Awesomesauce!” Dave answers, which, really, is a weird thing to hear from a giant detached theme-park dinosaur head, but at some point you just let the weirdness own you and go with it.
• • • •
My car is an old retired police cruiser, which means nothing much except that it has a reinforced frame and when I get up a little too close to someone on the highway and get myself into a predator mind-set there’s a vibe that surrounds us and they get paranoid and move the hell over to the slow lane. Mostly I don’t do this because it seems a dick thing to do, but I have a personal bias against anyone driving a Luxauto because of my shit of a father, especially if they’re the fucking beige armored ones. And nine times out of ten when you overtake them and they glare at you, you can tell just from that one look that they’re just the sort of douchebro who needed, at some point in their life, to get owned on the road by a green-haired skinny chick with a lip ring and a grease-converted V8 and a fucking dinosaur head in the passenger seat.
Most people stick to the publics—around here in dead-end post-suburbia that means pretty much electric buses—so those out on the road in private cars are either loaded with money, or looking to take some. Or they’re taking their damned dinosaur head for an outing in a car their uncle pulled out of the junkyard and fixed you for your sixteenth birthday and you’re gonna drive it ’til the bitter end.
The Long List Anthology Volume 6 Page 27
