The Hill of the Red Fox

by Allan Campbell McLean

  As we drew near the pier, a seaman in the stern tossed a coiled heaving line ashore. Two men on the pier seized it, and hauled in the heavy mooring rope and secured it to a bollard. Another line was tossed from the bows, and the steamer drew in to the pier.

  I scanned the faces of the people on the pier as I walked down the gangway, but nobody gave me a second look. I had a curious sinking feeling when I realized that Murdo Beaton had not come to meet me, but I tried to shrug it off, and made my way past the rickety turnstile to the road. The red bus was parked by the side of the road a little way from the pier. I asked the driver if he would let me off at Achmore, and he nodded and went on talking to a thick-set man in plus-fours with a collie at his heels. I sat down on the front seat and watched the crowds streaming past.

  Two hikers, bowed down under the weight of enormous packs, boarded the bus, but the rest of the passengers seemed to be local people. I noticed that most of the men were dressed in blue serge suits and cloth caps, and I looked in vain for the bright flash of a kilt.

  After a while, the driver climbed into his seat and the bus moved off up a steep hill. It turned left into a street with shops on either side and swung into a wide, open square, joining the line of buses already parked there. The driver got out and I watched him cross the square and enter a shop. When he returned he carried an armful of newspapers and magazines, all done up neatly in small bundles. He arranged them in some kind of order, tucking them behind a leather strap below his window.

  The driver started the engine again and was about to let in the clutch when a man dashed across the square and boarded the bus. He was carrying two large cardboard boxes and when he set them down I heard the muffled cheeping of day-old chicks. The driver spoke to him in Gaelic, and the man laughed, and they chatted away together. One by one the other buses in the square departed, and I began to feel their conversation would never come to an end. But at length the man with the chicks took his seat, and the bus moved slowly out of the square.

  We took the road out of Portree, and I could see the whole expanse of the bay laid out far below. I saw the roofs of the buildings at the pier; the bright green of the petrol storage tanks, and the Lochnevis lying still at her moorings. At that distance, she looked like a toy steamer set against a toy pier.

  I glanced at my watch. It was half past six. When I looked up again we were moving across open moorland without a house in sight.

  The road was narrow and winding, and from time to time the driver had to pull into a passing place, a shallow arc of levelled ground extending from the road, in order to let an approaching car go by. We travelled on and on over featureless moors, scarred here and there with the fresh black face of newly cut peat banks. The cut peats were stacked in small cone-shaped heaps along the top of the banks. Small, black-faced sheep grazed in the heather by the side of the road, sometimes scampering hastily across the road when the bus suddenly rounded a bend.

  We passed a long narrow loch, leaden and grey under the drizzling rain, and the water lapped the banking of the road. There was a house by the side of the road, built out on piles over the loch, and a boat was moored under the gable window. There was another boat in the centre of the loch, and the man in the stern looked up as the bus went by. As he moved, I saw the long line of his rod arching out over the still water.

  The road twisted and turned and we crossed small bridges under which foamed the rushing hill burns. There was water everywhere. Miniature waterfalls cascaded down the rocky hillside, and the flat stretches of peat bog were pitted with small pools. We passed a solitary grey stone house, and I laughed to see two geese go squawking up the path to the house in an indignant flurry of strong white wings. The bus driver slid open his window and tossed out a newspaper.

  The road wound round the cliff face, and I caught a brief glimpse of the sea hundreds of feet below. A low turf bank was all that separated the road from the cliff face, but the driver seemed unconcerned. He kept glancing over his shoulder and carried on a conversation in Gaelic with the man sitting behind him.

  We crossed a hump-backed bridge and rounded a sharp bend, and there before us, spread out across the road, stood a herd of shaggy Highland cattle. They made no attempt to move, but stood there firmly on their short stocky legs, gazing at us with large, incurious eyes. The driver braked sharply and changed down to bottom gear, but he had to sound his horn before they consented to move slowly out of the path of the bus. I saw the rain glistening on the long hair of their coats, and I was glad that the metal frame of the bus lay between me and their great sweeping horns.

  The bus jolted down a steep hill, and the driver slid open his window and pitched out a bundle of newspapers. In the distance I saw two houses, solitary sentinels in a waste of moorland.

  We crossed an iron bridge over a deep gorge, and beyond the gorge I saw a large grey house surrounded by a stone wall. A wide drive led from the road to the house, and at the side of the drive, a little way back from the road, stood a wooden post-box. Across the green door of the box, in white letters, were the words ACHMORE LODGE. I looked back at the lodge until we climbed the hill on the other side of the gorge, and it could no longer be seen.

  When the bus stopped on a deserted stretch of road, with not a house in sight, I sat there stupidly, not moving.

  “This is Achmore, a bhalaich,” called the driver.

  I scrambled to my feet and paid him, and stepped down on to the road. I watched the red bus disappearing into the distance, and my heart sank when it rounded a bend in the road and vanished from view. There had been something warm and friendly about the driver’s ready laugh and the Gaelic voices, and the smell of strong pipe tobacco, and the cheeping of the chicks, but now I stood alone and was conscious once more of my isolation.

  I put down my case on the wet road and gazed around. A faint smirr of rain was drifting down and a grey mist crept in from the sea. The moor rose sharply to the west of the road, and I saw several stone houses high up on the hillside. The fall of the hill below the houses seemed to be cultivated ground, and I picked out the line of a fence between the bottom of the hill and the great expanse of bare moor stretching to the road. There seemed to be no path to the houses, and I gazed up at them in a mood of hopeless despair, not knowing what to do.

  When I looked round again a man was standing on the road a few feet away from me.

  Chapter 6

  I suppose he must have popped up suddenly from behind a dip in the ground below the road, but I never knew for certain.

  He was wearing a faded blue denim jacket over a fisherman’s jersey, torn army trousers tucked into homespun stockings, and big tackety boots. Everything about him was long and lean, and I noticed how all the lines of his face drooped downwards, as if his mouth had long since forgotten how to lift in a smile. Even his dog had a lean and hungry look. It sniffed around my heels, but every time I moved it slunk away, its ears down and its tail between its legs. It was only when I shifted my feet again that I realized it had crept back to sniff my legs. Like its master, it had acquired the art of moving silently, unobserved.

  My eyes wandered back to the man’s face. He had a long thin face, and his arms were so long that his hands seemed to hang loosely below his knees, but this may have been due to the forward stoop of his shoulders. He had small, almost colourless eyes, deeply set below bushy, sandy eyebrows, and a jutting beak of a nose. He took off his cap, and settled it firmly on his head, and I caught a glimpse of wispy red hair. But the stubble on his chin was white, and he looked as if he had not shaved for a week.

  He stood in the centre of the road, plucking at his long upper lip, his eyes fixed on a point above my left shoulder. I knew who he was before he spoke, and from the very start I disliked him.

  I suppose only a minute could have passed from the time I first saw him until he spoke, although it seemed longer.

  “Well, Alasdair,” he said, and his great paw of a hand swallowed mine in a brief clasp that had neither warmth nor friendship.


  There was an awkward silence, and I had the feeling he was fumbling for the right words.

  “I am Murdo Beaton,” he went on, “your father’s cousin.”

  “Yes,” I said, not caring if he thought me rude, knowing only that I was tired and lonely and miserable.

  He picked up my case without another word, and set off across the moor in long, slow strides. He did not seem to hurry but I was almost running as I tried to keep up with him.

  I picked my way as best I could, trying to step from one tuft of heather to another, but now and then I stumbled into a wet patch of bog and sank in up to my ankles. Before we had gone twenty yards my feet were soaked.

  We crossed a swiftly flowing burn by means of a single wooden plank lashed to an iron stanchion with tying wire. The ground grew rougher and there were heathery hillocks, bright green patches of sphagnum moss and tiny streams bubbling through the bog. We skirted a long straight peat cutting with an exposed face of black wet peat fully five feet deep. There was a tiny lake at the bottom of the cutting where the water had collected.

  Murdo Beaton led the way up an earthen bank topped by two strands of barbed wire, and we jumped down across a drain and were on to firmer ground. The grassland sloped steeply upwards, cut by the long fingers of parallel open drains.

  There were five houses spread out at intervals across the top of the hill, and he saw my eyes on them.

  “This is Achmore,” he said. “We are at the foot of the crofts now.”

  “Which is my house?” I cried, suddenly excited.

  He glanced at me directly for the first time, and I sensed the smouldering resentment in those small pale eyes, but all he said was, “It cannot be seen from here.”

  We climbed steadily, moving away from the other houses in a diagonal line. When we were level with them we topped a rise in the ground and there, in a sheltered hollow hidden from all the other houses in Achmore, I saw the cottage where I was born.

  It seemed to grow out of the ground as naturally as the clump of rowan trees beside it. The cottage was built of unhewn mortarless grey stone, and the thatched roof was secured against the fury of the winter winds by a covering of wire netting. Large stones were tied to the netting at intervals of a few feet, so that it was firmly anchored. The walls of the cottage sloped slightly inwards and the corners were rounded. Two deep-set, foot-square windows peered towards the main road, like empty eye-sockets. A thin line of smoke curled up from the single chimney-pot, and I sniffed the fragrant, never-to-be-forgotten smell of burning peat.

  Murdo Beaton ducked his long frame under the massive slab of stone forming the door lintel, and I followed him through the tiny lobby into the kitchen.

  It was dim in the kitchen, and I stumbled over the uneven stone flags of the floor. He gestured me towards the long wooden bench under the window, and I sat down and glanced around the room.

  The walls were lined with rough boards, which had probably been painted once long ago, but were now darkly stained with peat smoke. There was a plain deal table opposite the open-topped black range, and two home-made wooden chairs on either side of the fire, and a small cupboard facing me against the opposite wall, and that was all.

  Two tin tea caddies stood on the mantelpiece in the centre of which hung the faded printed text GOD IS LOVE. Murdo Beaton leaned against the mantelpiece, picking his teeth with the end of a matchstick.

  There was a rough wooden door in the far corner, leading into another room, and an old woman shuffled through it. She was wearing a shapeless black gown and had a woollen scarf tied round her head, and I had never before seen anyone who looked so old. Her face seemed to have shrunk, so that the skin hung around her cheeks in sagging wrinkles. She took no notice of me but sat down in a chair by the fire, and I noticed with a start of surprise that she was wearing men’s boots.

  Murdo Beaton spoke to her in Gaelic, and she got up, muttering to herself. She took a plate from inside the cupboard and filled it with soup from the iron pot over the fire.

  He picked up the other wooden chair and set it in to the table.

  “Take your food, boy,” he said. “There is nothing great here, mind you. We are poor folk in this place with nothing fancy in the way o’ food or anything else. But eat up. Dulse soup is good for you.”

  I sat in to the table, protesting feebly that I was sure it was very good soup, and waited for him to join me. But he sat down on the bench and I realized that I was expected to eat alone.

  The soup was greasy and sickly, and the taste of the dulse turned my stomach. But I willed myself to eat it, and swallowed each mouthful quickly, determined not to show my distaste.

  When I had finished, I heard him speak to the old woman again, and she placed an enormous dish of boiled potatoes on the table and a plate of cold meat. I helped myself to potatoes. They had been cooked in their skins and I sat looking at them, not quite sure how to proceed.

  I could feel Murdo Beaton’s eyes on the back of my neck, and I felt the colour rising in my cheeks.

  “Maybe you don’t like potatoes in their jackets, boy?” he said.

  “No, I like them like that,” I replied, and plunged my knife into one of them and proceeded to eat it, skin and all.

  I think that was the most uncomfortable meal I have ever had. It was worse than my birthday treat, when Aunt Evelyn took my mother and me to lunch in a smart restaurant, and I upset my soup plate over Aunt Evelyn’s new spring dress.

  The old woman never spoke, but I could hear her shuffling around the room, muttering to herself. Once I dropped my knife and the sound of it clattering on the plate was so unnaturally loud in the silence of the room that I felt I had done something wrong, like laughing aloud during the silence on Remembrance Day. And all the time, although he never spoke, I knew that Murdo Beaton’s eyes were on me.

  I had almost finished when the door opened and a girl came quickly into the room. She was small and dark and I could see no resemblance to Murdo Beaton in her eager brown face, although I guessed she must be his daughter. She stopped suddenly when she caught sight of me, and seemed about to speak, when Murdo Beaton said something to her in Gaelic. She turned at once, with a final quick glance in my direction and went out of the room.

  I finished my meal, and pushed the chair back from the table. Murdo Beaton was still sitting on the bench, but when I turned round his eyes were no longer on me. He offered no explanation for the girl’s sudden disappearance, but sat plucking at his long upper lip, gazing into space. The old woman was huddled forward in her chair, muttering to herself, and I wondered if anybody ever spoke in this house.

  I was determined to break the awful silence.

  “Was that your daughter?” I asked.

  His eyes wandered to a spot above my left shoulder.

  “Yes, that was Mairi,” he said, and added, “She has gone to fetch home the cows for milking.”

  I wondered if he had sent her away deliberately, so that I could not talk to her, and I doubted if I could endure the long summer holiday in this cheerless home.

  At length he rose to his feet and said, “Well, boy, you had best get some rest. I expect you are tired now.”

  He ushered me into a tiny room on the other side of the lobby, and stood in the doorway watching whilst I unpacked my case.

  “You won’t be thinking much of this after city life,” he ventured at last.

  If I could have been granted one wish at that moment it would have been to be back in the comfort of our flat in Chelsea, but there was something about him that made me want to hide my feelings, so all I said was, “Oh, I expect I’ll soon get used to it.”

  “Aye, maybe you will,” he muttered, in a voice that left me in no doubt that it was the last thing he wanted to happen.

  Then the door closed behind him and he was gone.

  I looked around the room. It was lined with the same rough boarding as the kitchen, broken in places and unpainted. Most of the space was taken up by an old-fashioned brass bed
stead, and the stone flagstones between the bed and the door had no covering.

  I undressed quickly and got into bed. There were no sheets and the coarse grey blankets pricked my face and neck.

  I thought of my foolish boasting; how I had scoffed at my mother’s forebodings, and urged her to let me come to Skye. If I were to return home now, I knew she would be sympathetic, but I could not face Aunt Evelyn’s jibes. Come what may, I resolved grimly, there could be no going back for me until the holiday was over.

  My thoughts drifted to the mysterious message in my wallet. HUNT AT THE HILL OF THE RED FOX. What could it possibly mean? My mind went round and round on what was now a familiar track. No matter how hard I tried, I was no nearer a solution. But whatever the meaning of the message, I decided, Murdo Beaton would not hear of it.

  I wondered how my father could have let such a man take over the croft. It was obvious that he did not like me and resented my presence at Achmore. But it is my croft, I told myself fiercely, and he has really no right to be here. But there was no real conviction in such thoughts. It was simply my dislike of the man finding expression. For all I cared, he could have the croft and the cottage as well. It was the most miserably depressing place I had ever seen.

  I had a moment’s self-pity, thinking I had been born here, and my father, and his father before him, and no friendly smile or welcoming hand had awaited me. I wondered what could have happened to all my father’s friends, and I remembered my mother saying that every house for miles around would welcome the kin of Alasdair Dubh. I remembered her stories about my father. How he loved Achmore above all places; he who had sailed the seven seas. Why was I so different? I who longed so passionately to be like him in all things? Could it be that my upbringing in London had thinned my Highland blood, so that the city streets meant more to me than the wet moorland?

  I thought again of my mother’s words to me in Glasgow. She had said something about it not being all flashing tartans, and perhaps that was the reason for my wretchedness. Not that I had expected to see everyone wearing the kilt; indeed, it would be hard for me to say what I really expected to find in Skye. Whatever images my mind had conjured up had been swamped in the overwhelming greyness and gloom of the bleak reality.