‘We had snow after that. My father used to cough at night, on and on, keeping us awake through the thin partition. A week or so into the new century he got the pneumonia, and just before Lent he died. He was fifty-eight. I was twelve.
‘James was in India with his regiment. The rest of us talked about what we should do. My mother wanted to keep the land going until James should come back from the wars to claim it. Tomas said that was a lost cause. He said we should buy a share in one of the new herring busses at the fishing station. My mother said she didn't believe in a town which was naught but a drawing on paper; there'd been too many promises made and too few kept. The land had been ours for twelve generations, and she would hold it for James, as my father would have wished, if it was the last thing she did in this world. Tomas said, how would she do that, with the rents fallen by half, and two more families leaving us this very springtime? He and I knew enough about boats, more than the tenantry, at any rate, and we should go together and speak to Mr Innes before others got in before us. My mother said, no, Alan would stand by his family and hold the land until James came home. I sat there, with hot words about my future flying to and fro over my head, when my sister Ann, who'd been as silent as I up until then, suddenly said coolly, “Why don't you ask him? What do you want to do, Alan?”
‘No one had ever asked me before what I wanted to do. I looked at her and I think my mouth fell open. The words came out before I knew I'd thought them. “I want to go to Edinburgh and work in Mr Creech's bookshop.”
‘They stared at me as if I had grown two extra heads. “Do what?” “What's that?” “Edinburgh?" “Who is Mr Creech?” “A shop?”
‘"Grandfather bought his books there. He writes it on the flyleaf, with the date. A shop, with books in. People go there. They read books, and talk about them. Grandfather told me.”
‘I'd never argued with my family before. It was as if, my father being gone, I suddenly discovered that I had a voice. When I was little, and knelt on the windowseat while my grandfather sat looking out over the loch with his plaid over his knees and his spectacles perched on the end of his nose, he would look up sometimes from the book he'd been reading to me and ask me what I thought. I don't remember what I said except once, when I asked if Mr Johnson had been the fattest man ever to go over Mam Ratachan, and could Grandfather and I go ourselves and dance upon Dun Caan? That amused him, and afterwards it was like a secret between us. If ever Dun Caan was mentioned, he'd look at me and wink, and say, “Our day will come, eh, Alan?” None of the others ever troubled to ask what we meant by that.
‘But Ann stood up for me now. “Why shouldn't he go to Edinburgh?” she kept saying. “If our uncle's still there, why shouldn't Alan go to him, and at least he can ask? If there's nothing in it, he can always come home again.”
‘My father's brother, with whom my grandfather had stayed whenever he was in Edinburgh, was a schoolmaster in the city. There had long been a coolness between him and my father, because he'd changed to the established religion in order to attend the University in Edinburgh. My family were all Episcopalian, which was illegal when I was young, because of the Penal Laws. It was allowed by the time I'm telling of, but that's why my uncle Alan first went over to the kirk, and my father never forgave him for it. Not having heard of his death, we had no reason to suppose he was not still living.
‘And so I went down to Falkirk with the brother of one of our tenants, who was a drover. It was a long, slow journey – we did no more than twelve miles on a good day – for cattle must feed and sleep, much more than a man. It was the first long journey I ever made, and prepared me well for le pays d'en haut – for the Highlands are un pays d'en haut of their own, and the drovers not so different from les voyageurs. They take what shelter they can and sleep in the wild, they live on porridge – there's not so much difference between oats and pease, hot or cold – they do their own work and speak their own tongue and sing their own songs, and people who live in houses and sleep every night in their own beds know nothing about it. I was used to the cattle, of course, and I don't think I was a burden to Ian Mhor, for all that I was in no way bred to the droving life. We had about two hundred head of cattle, mostly from Skye, but a good few from Lochalsh as well, and four of us to drive them. Through Glenshiel and Glenloyne we went, then east over the Corrieairack Pass. When I stood on the top of the pass and saw all the Highland hills around me I realised my own country was much greater than I'd ever understood, for all I'd looked at my grandfather's map often enough – but there are things maps don't tell you, and what you see from the bealach of the Corrieairack is one of those things.
‘By the time we came to Drumochter there were hundreds of beasts on the road before us: it was as great a migration as the caribou herds in Athabasca, only all contrived by men. The signs are the same though – a road through the hills fifty yards wide, where grass and heather are churned to mud and peat bog, and the grazing places bare and mucky for miles around. Everything's coated in peaty sludge, beasts and men alike, and sometimes it's raining so much you can barely squint through it to see where you're putting your feet. And other days it's like heaven up there, with the larks singing and all the blue hills around you.
‘We got to Wade's bridge at Aberfeldy, where we had to wait all day for our turn to cross the Tay, and soon after that I was looking down for the first time on the green Lowlands. We kept to the high ground as much as we could, over the Ochils and into Falkirk. There I parted from Ian Mhor, not without fear, for I'd never seen anything like Falkirk Tryst, and I was overwhelmed by the noise all about me and the crowds – for men and beasts would be shoving against each other, right up close, all the time – and Ian Mhor had told me to watch my purse and keep my wits about me, and I'd never had to go on in such a way as that before. I fairly wanted to run. But I didn't. I walked out of there, my money and dignity alike intact, and set off on the dusty post road to Edinburgh.
‘I can't explain to you how different it all was. When a stage coach passed me, with four horses to pull it and half a dozen passengers sitting on the roof, I fairly stopped and gaped. No one accosted me on the road, but I had trouble buying food at the inns. I'd thought my English was fluent – I could read anything I had a mind to, both aloud and to myself – but no one seemed to understand me, and as for what they said back to me, it could have been ancient Hebrew for all I could tell. Sometimes they were short with me, and occasionally they were kind, but by the time I reached Edinburgh I'd learned one thing – that in this land I was not only a stranger, but about as welcome among them as a stray dog. Before Falkirk I had a pretty good opinion of myself – was I not a gentleman's son, well-born and well-bred, and yet tough enough to work and sleep out on the open hill among the drovers? But when I picked a hot pie from a stall at the market in Linlithgow – with every intention of paying for it, you understand – the fellow swore at me for a thief, and they would have set on me, but I dropped the pie and took to my heels, and never stopped running until I was out of the city gate. To be honest with you, when I was far enough away to feel safe, I climbed through the dusty hedgerow and into a cornfield, where I just sat down and cried. If I could have gone back to Ian Mhor and asked him to take me home again, I would have done so, but for my own honour I couldn't turn back. I slept under a hedge that night rather than ask for shelter, and when I walked into Edinburgh I was dirty and hungry, and knew not where to go. I found myself among great houses six storeys high or more, all built huddled together on the sides of a hill, with hundreds of alleyways and steep stairs between. Sure enough, there was the castle at one end and the palace at the other, just as my grandfather had described to me, but what use was either to me?
‘In the High Street of Edinburgh my luck turned. The place was full of Highlanders, so I could ask the way in my own tongue, and the first lad I spoke to knew the address I had – it was a close just off the Canongate, he said. He led me to the very spot. To my dismay it was a great towering tenement, so high I couldn't c
ount how many storeys from the narrow wynd. The alley was filthy with slops and dark as a dungeon. I wished I'd never come, but the lad asked the woman in the cookshop on the ground floor – little did I know then what a friend she was to be to me – and she said Alan Mackenzie was not home yet, but he lived on the fifth floor, and if I wanted to sit on the step and wait for him he would be back before long. I gave the lad one of my pennies, and spent another on a slice of bread and meat from the cookshop.
‘And there,’ said Alan, ‘We can leave me. I've had enough of myself for one long evening.’
‘But tomorrow you go on,’ said Loic. ‘I have never heard a story like this before. You have never said these things.’
‘Of course not. Things have to be pretty desperate before one starts on one's life story. Goodnight!’ Alan rolled over, his back to the light, and said no more.
I too had never heard such a story before. I'd expected to find North America foreign, and indeed it was, but Alan's story disconcerted me, because it was equally strange, and yet so close to home. I knew dealers who came down from Falkirk Tryst each year to the markets in Carlisle and Penrith. I was familiar with the black cattle from up north; I'd talked to Scotch drovers before now. But the country they came from – the world Alan had described to me – all that seemed far more remote to me, now, than the lands of the Ottawa in which we dwelt.
The next evening I was outside the wigwam wiping our mugs and bowls in clean snow. The storm had subsided. All life seemed to be suspended in the windless night. I heard a branch crack. When I breathed in, the freezing air tingled my nose and burned inside my chest like fire. The stars blazed above my head like chips of ice. God made this night exceedingly beautiful, I thought, but if he had done all this for men, he would not have made it too cold for them to stop and look. I ducked under the curtain of deerskins, and went back inside.
‘Here's Mark,’ said Loic. ‘So now, Alan, you can tell us of your father's brother, Alan Mackenzie, in Edinburgh.’
Alan lay back against a bale, his striped trade blanket huddled round him. ‘If my uncle Alan were here now,’ he said, ‘He would say, “This all seems exceeding odd to me.” He wouldn't like it.’
‘Go on,’ I said, after a pause. ‘Thee can't stop there.’
Alan sighed. ‘My uncle Alan? What's he to thee, or I to Hecuba? Very well, if you insist: he asked very little of life, and would be astonished that you wanted to hear a story about him. Sometimes – not very often – he'd get drunk at the tavern down the wynd, or, if he were in a different mood and hadn't drunk his money away, he liked to go to a coffee house and read the newspaper, but he couldn't afford that every day. If he were here he wouldn't mind the cold, or the dirt, or the discomfort – he was used to all that – but he'd miss the folk going by. Not his friends – he didn't have friends – he used to say friends were an expensive commodity, and very seldom gave value for money – he was a cynic, my uncle. A man of considerable wit, however, but not in a way either of you would understand.’
I was unaccountably irritated by that. ‘Hugh Chisholm is like that too, and I understood him.’ Honesty impelled me to add, ‘Once I got used to him.’
‘You wouldn't understand my uncle,’ said Alan firmly. ‘He wouldn't let you. You belong in different worlds entirely, and you'll never meet him.’
‘Then tell the story,’ said Loic. ‘That is what stories are for.’
‘Oh, very well,’ said Alan crossly, but I knew quite well he wanted to go on. ‘I lived nearly two years with my uncle Alan. I was happy. He had no money; he once told me that was why he'd never married. We had a bare little room on the fifth floor of the tenement. When we could afford it we used to eat our dinner at the Half Way House – that was the tavern just down the steps from our front door. For a country lad that was something of an education. The only food uncle Alan cooked on our own fire was porridge, which we had cold for breakfast, a cold slice wrapped in a paper for mid-day, and sometimes (for a treat) hot before bedtime on a winter's night. I went to school. Because my uncle was one of the masters I got a place at the Royal High School. I learned to tell lies, to fight, to keep my religion secret, and to speak Lowland Scots. (No one spoke my language, and they used to laugh at the literary English I'd learned from my grandfather. They didn't listen to what I said; they were just waiting to imitate my accent.) In class I learned Latin and Greek mostly, and mathematics. The other lads I didn't care for, but I was out to learn everything I could.
‘One of the first things I did when I reached the city was to seek out Mr Creech's bookshop by the luckenbooths, just up the High Street from our close mouth. At home I'd been allowed to read what I liked, but after my grandfather died there were no new books. At Creech's there were all the books in the world, or so it seemed to me, and journals, and, what I had never seen before in my life, a newspaper every day with that day's date upon it. I had never thought of news from the wide world as happening in the present before, and suddenly I became aware that Lochalsh was not the centre of the world, that the life I'd lived was not the measure of all things and made to last forever. I'd heard all my life that the best times were over, in the past, and that I was born too late. I'd been taught that the future was a place of fear and foreboding. In Mr Creech's bookshop I learned for the first time that there were other worlds, that they too were changing, and that every world was inhabited by beings like myself who thought their way was the right way, just as I did. I began to think about change without so much fear, more as a matter of interest.
‘Peace was declared on Tomas's eighteenth birthday. My mother had a letter from Sim the same year; he'd left the state of New York and gone to Montreal, where he'd got a clerkship in the North West Company. (The letter was two years old; Sim had been in le pays d'en haut two winters by the time we got it.) He said there were several of our name in the Company, and that there'd be a place for Tomas too, if Tomas wished to join him.
‘Tomas is a good brother. He walked all the way to Edinburgh when the letter came, to suggest that I go with him. Oddly enough it was uncle Alan who insisted. He – mild man that he was – positively ranted at me, saying did I wish to live in poverty all my life, to struggle for my living, to lose the girl I loved, and come to a chilly old age and doubtless a lonely death? Did I realise there was no money for me to go to University, and even if there were, an education would not necessarily save me? I looked at him in alarm; certainly it was a grisly picture he set before me. Between the two of them they had me persuaded. Tomas and I took the long road home together, across the Forth from Queensferry, over the farmlands of Fife and Perthshire, across the Corriearrack and into the familiar hills.
‘We sailed from Fort William – our Scottish Fort William – in Lochaber on July 2nd, 1802. I've never forgotten that date. Nor have I forgotten the date we landed in Quebec: September 15th, 1802. Our ship was called Friends of John Saltcoats. There were two other ships: the Jean of Irvine and the Helen of Saltcoats; we were supposed to travel in convoy but the Jean and the Helen left us behind almost as soon as we were out of the islands. The charter was arranged by a second cousin of my mother's, Archibald Macmillan.
‘When we got to Montreal Sim was wintering out west, but he'd asked a friend of his, Hugh Chisholm, who had Montreal leave, to look out for us. Sim gave Hugh enough money to get board and lodging for Tomas, but of course he hadn't been expecting me. Hugh was like a brother to us: he got us a room in the house where he lodged, and advanced us money for my board. Tomas got a berth as clerk with the Company, and started paying Hugh back at once, but Hugh took this notion into his head that I must go on with my schooling. I rebelled – I wanted nothing better than to work for the North West too – but Hugh was adamant, and as he held the purse-strings at that point, he won. There's no High School in Montreal, just the Catholic schools. So I found myself huddled over the fire in Hugh's sitting room, construing my Caesar and Cicero, and solving what seemed to me to be quite unnecessary problems in Euclid. We read Xenophon
in Greek, and after that Thucydides. All I remember now is thalassa, thalassa. I don't know if I'll ever see the sea again – I mean the real sea. I read Hugh's English books too – Hume and Gibbon that winter, and Cook's voyages. I found novels on Hugh's shelves as well: my grandfather hadn't had Smollett, or Fielding, or Cervantes. It was the coldest winter I'd ever known. The snow was five-feet thick outside our door. I got my first snowshoes, and I learned to use them on the slopes of Mount Royal. It was up there that Hugh taught Tomas and me how to do dead reckonings, and survey with a compass. I didn't miss being with lads my own age. In fact, once I'd fairly settled down, I was as happy as a grig.
‘When Hugh went back to Fort William in May, Tomas went with him. I didn't see either of them until I got to Fort William a year later. I started as a very junior clerk at the Company offices, and lived in our rooms by myself. I was proud to be on my own and earning my living. I worked my way slowly through the list of books that Hugh left for me: Locke, Reid, Adam Smith. Each time I got to the end of a section, I'd reward myself with another story from the Arabian Nights. Apart from that, I was learning a fairly pragmatic view of love from Catullus, Ovid and Apuleius, green youth that I was. Most evenings I spent reading. I knew some lads from the office – I wasn't unsocial – but I'd never been alone before, and I liked it.
‘In the spring of ‘04 I left with the brigades. I was still only seventeen, but neither my brothers nor Hugh were there to gainsay me when the fellow asked how old I was. I got to Kamanistiquia for the rendezvous in July. (They changed the name to Fort William a few years later, in honour of William McGillivray, but naught else is different.) It was as busy as the Tryst at Falkirk, but this time I wasn't a frightened lad; I was a man among my own folk. For my own folk is what they were – Highlanders almost to a man, apart from the engagés – les voyageurs – and they were easy to deal with; my French was pretty fluent before I left Montreal. And it wasn't cattle we were dealing with, but furs. Kamanistiquia is where the hivernants bring the furs in from all over le pays d'en haut, and the brigades from Montreal bring in the trade goods in exchange. But we're all one Company. There's no buying and selling, just processing and re-packing the goods, and just as much revelry and banqueting as a thousand honest traders can fit into a fortnight. The Company was what my own kin should have been to me, but weren't – like the old days that I grew up hearing about, when all that Seaforth had was ours, and we were his – like the days before the Rebellions, which were hearsay even to my grandfather. And maybe it was never like that at all, not even in the clans – for who knows now? Anyway, at Kamanistiquia we belonged to no one but the Company, and any man might make his fortune if he could, whether he were born to it or no.
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