“Die,” he said. “For Christ’s sake, die.”
It surfaced again, very slowly, and Gillon, not wanting to pound it once more, not sure any longer what he wanted to do, seized the fish in his arms and slipped and went down into the pool, still holding the salmon when it thudded heavily against the stones. He tasted gravel and pebbles and something of salmon—its seed, he realized, the milt being poured out in the water to fertilize unknown eggs, the ritual being played to its end, life being served while death waited. Gillon felt the mouth and slid his hand along the head until he felt a gill and knew he had his fish then. His hand went into the gill until he felt it in the cavity of the mouth and he did have it then, his salmon, and rose, stumbling and trembling from the pool, clambering over the brattice, and carried it out of the stream, through the boulders by the edge and up the slippery bank onto the path. The fish barely moved. It lay in the snow and waited, one eye seeming to follow Gillon. It must know, he thought. He found the walking stick and with one neat quick blow to the back of the head, Gillon killed his salmon.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I am truly sorry.”
* * *
He went back to the salmon stream and looked at the prison he had built. Without the fish it looked much larger than it had before, like a window naked of its curtains, and he was astounded at the work he had done. It had been his plan to break down the brattices so the water bailiff would never know what had taken place but now he wanted him to know. He wanted him to be astounded, too, and it occurred to him that the story of the miner—because sooner or later by the packing of the stone they would discover it was a miner who had done the work—would enter the legend of the stream and be told for all the years he would be alive, and after.
25
Before the fish froze he threaded his twine through the gills and bent the fish in a bow, tying the tail to the head so that he could carry it on his stick, then fed the fire and crossed the stream and made a trail out of the glen in the way opposite to which he would eventually go. When he got back he took off his clothes and stood in his plaid and dried them, the way he dried his pit duds after working a wet stall. Now that he had his fish, the fire frightened him, the flames seemed enormous and the shadows from the fire danced down the glen for what seemed like miles. But he had no choice; the drying would be done or he would die.
They dried more quickly than he thought they would. The only problem was that his feet had begun to swell while he was standing by the fire, and that alarmed him. When he was dressed again he picked up his fish, amazed at its dead heaviness, and carried it up to the top of the glen, then came back down again with a pine bough and began backing up the path, brushing it as he went. With the help of the wind that would start up the glen in the morning, his footsteps would be covered. He let the fire burn itself out, he couldn’t face the water again, and several hours before the sun was due to rise, Gillon turned his face south for Pitmungo.
When he reached the edge of the forest the sun was almost up and before going out onto the open moor he sat down in the last row of trees to study the land out ahead. Off to his left, a half mile away perhaps, a thatched farm lay open to the moor, smoke rising from the chimney, warm-looking and inviting. They would have bacon and eggs there, he knew that, but it was still too close to salmon country to trust, and then his father had once told him that any crofters who lived open like that to the moor winds were bleak, even dangerous people, made that way by the beating of the wind. So he sat then, his back to a pine, and waited to see if anything revealed itself to him and wondered what the dangers were in crossing the moor with the great fish on his back. Who would know it had been taken illegally and who would care, once away from the salmon streams?
He may have slept. He never heard the man come on him, only felt the tap of his boot on his swollen feet. The crofter carried a bundle of wood under one arm and an ax in the other hand.
“All right, let’s go with it,” he said.
“What do you mean, let’s go with it?”
The man motioned toward the fish. A hard, ugly face, the kind, Gillon thought, you expect to find in jail.
“The saumont. I’ll have my share the now.”
Gillon was more amazed than angry.
“You’re trespassing on my property. You stole the fish from Crown waters. Care to know what Maccallum would do to you if I told him where to find you?”
He kept swinging the blade of the ax in front of Gillon’s eyes. An act, a bluff, Gillon thought. If his feet weren’t so painful he’d call it.
“What do you want?”
“What’s its weight? Forty, forty-five pounds. A bull you got. How’d you get him?”
“I went in and got him with my bare hands.”
“Fewkin liar.”
Which was the moment Gillon understood that no one was ever going to believe his story of the fish, that it would always belong to him alone.
“Ah, well, keep your fewkin secret; I wouldn’t tell you how I got it, either. Five pounds fish, that’s your passport price.”
“Five pounds?”
“Five pounds or I go to Maccallum now. Do you know what my reward would be?” Gillon shook his head. “If you did you’d know how cheap five pounds fish is.”
Gillon untied the knot that held the fish. It was so beautiful lying there in the snow among the pines.
“What are you carrying the head for?” The man brought down his ax and the head was gone.
“Bastard,” Gillon said. The man paid him no attention. He was right about the head, but wrong, too, because there was more to a fish than food.
“And the tail.” The ax came down again. With the blade, he made a mark along the lower part of the fish.
“I would say about there is right,” the man said, and before Gillon had a chance to examine it, a chunk of the lower part of the fish, perhaps an eighth of the whole, was gone.
“Goddamn good saumont, I’ll say that for you. Clean. Just in from the sea. You can see by the sea lice on the gills. Next time you better come out by night.”
“Thank you,” Gillon said.
“Don’t think a thing about it,” the man said, and headed down the path to the moorland farm. Gillon’s father had been right.
He didn’t want to get up. He wanted to lie next to his fish on the snow and pine needles and rest, and with a spurt of fear he got up. If the man hadn’t come, he would have sat there, his back to the tree, and frozen to death.
“Hey!” Gillon shouted. “You saved my life. Thank you.”
Let that bewilder him for the rest of his wind-raddled life. He started across the moor as fast as he could force himself, because who was to say the man wouldn’t go to Maccallum anyway? The wind was steady with a body to it and he remembered days at sea like that, but then the wind had always worked for him and now it only seemed to hurt. Miles of moorlands stretching ahead. He wondered if he could make it across, and then he thought of the women carrying the creels of coal up out of the mines. They did it every day; he could go on.
* * *
After a time, he didn’t really know how long, he was aware that the snow on the moor had thinned and that there were islands of green out on the moor where the snow had melted. There were patches of pines, little pockets of green darkness out of the wind, but he was afraid of them. He needed a root cellar or cow byre or hayrick to crawl into. Finally he came out onto a rise that dipped down ahead of him and saw Loch Leven miles off to the east, deep blue and partly ice-covered. He had gone miles to the west, he, the old seafaring man who could dead-reckon on the water.
There was nothing to do but confess to the error, and he faced west and started down what they called the rough grazings, clumpy rutted moorland that Blackface sheep did their best to rip apart. He came upon a track heading east so he took it, because a track would mean a road and a road would mean the Cowdenbeath turnpike. He could see a few scattered crofts tucked away in creases on the moor and in late afternoon he came into a little cla
chan of five or six houses. A few people, very shyly, came out to nod at him but they really came out to look at his fish. They probably never saw anything larger than a one-pound trout from some moor stream.
“How far to the Cowdenbeath road?” Gillon asked. He could smell oatmeal cakes being cooked somewhere in the hamlet.
“I’ll trade part of this fresh saumont for oatcakes.” They looked at him. “It’s all right, it’s a legal saumont. Salmon for bannocks, what the hell do you want?” he shouted at them.
Some signal had been given. The people went inside their white little houses and shut their doors on him, and left him alone with the smell of hot bannocks stinging his nose.
“What’s the matter with you people?” he shouted. He knew he was making a spectacle of himself, but he had come too far now. He could see them looking at him through their leaded windowpanes and suddenly realized that they were Gaelic speakers, a lost cultural island isolated on the moor, frightened by anything they couldn’t understand, Gaelic innocents safe only in themselves. He could see they lived with cows in the house in the old way, and he knew their fuel would be sharny peat, cow dung mixed with peat or coal dust, and the idea of cooking his fish over that disgusted him and he went on. A man came out of a byre with a muck rake in his hand and stopped and stared at him. The man was from another century entirely. He was wearing a dung-stained kilt.
He walked down and down until there was no snow. He couldn’t remember going up so high. He would need a large farm with outbuildings, and somewhere near Loch Leven he found it, a large house with two floors and a bothy for the hired hands behind it, and all kinds of outbuildings beyond that, a byre for the cows, a cote for the sheep, and he knew this was the place. They had finished the milking, Gillon could hear them shouting something about feeding turnips to the cows, and then the door to the milkhouse clanged shut, men with a lantern went across the yard to the bothy, and the door opened and shut and it was still. The byre would be empty. He could go far around and come from behind or risk walking across the yard and going directly to it, and he did it that way, too tired to worry. A dog barked but he paid it no attention. There was a flood of light in the yard and Gillon kept walking. Border collie barking, some footsteps, surprisingly close, running in the muck, a man shouting something about fox in the sheepcote, and then Gillon found the door, slid it open, and pulled it quietly closed behind him.
Safe.
The smells, the animal heat, the urine and dung and cowiness took his breath away. For a moment, in the dark, he couldn’t find the hayloft and grew terrified that they didn’t have one—there must be hay or he would die, he thought—and found the ladder. He made a nest in the hay and covered himself with the plaid and lay down next to the fish to rest in the grassy warmth. He felt the fish. His hand slid down the silver flank. Still fresh, still frozen. He patted the fish as if it could feel his kinship to it.
26
In their wildness, in their savage greed, they woke him. Not the noises, the little squeaks of anger and excitement, but the scurrying feet, first over his chest and finally over his face, their stealth abandoned in their rage for fresh food. He couldn’t see them but he could feel them, everywhere, all around him. Rats. They had smelled it out, come scurrying from every part of the farm, twenty of them, thirty of them now, tugging at his fish, nibbling at the rock-hard flesh, tearing, clawing at his fish.
“Get away,” Gillon screamed. “Get away! Get away!” but they only darted to some other part of the salmon’s body and began their assault all over again. He found his walking stick and struck at the rats. He heard them scream and squeal as the staff thudded on their furry bodies, but it didn’t stop the others from coming. He was swinging wildly, at anything moving, any shadow, any noise, shouting at them, when he became conscious or light and of men in the doorway below.
“What in name of God is this?” one of the men called up.
“They’re eating my fish!” Gillon shouted. “The fucking rats are eating my fish.”
Two men ran to the ladder and came up into the loft.
“Oh, Christ almighty, that beautiful fish. Give me the stick.”
With the aid of the light, without panicking, the farm hands began the destruction of the rats with a systematic savage joy.
“Never seen them this way before,” he shouted.
“Aye, and they never seen a saumont before,” the other said, putting the bodies in a tub. When the man with the brass-headed staff was finished, the turnip tub was filled with rats’ bodies. Gillon was trembling with the horror of it, which made the farm workers genuinely curious.
“What’s the matter, mon? You can’t be cold in here. It’s warm, mon.”
They couldn’t understand the feeling he got from rats running all over the body of his beautiful fish.
“This is my family’s Christmas dinner.”
“Ah, give me that.” One of the men picked up the fish, and a little later Gillon heard a pump working and the man came back with the fish, cleansed of its blood and rats’ blood, only little claw marks and teeth marks to be seen. No one would notice.
“Poacher, are you?” Gillon nodded. “Good man. Not easy to get one like that. Workingman, are you?”
“Coal miner.”
“Where?”
“Pitmungo.”
“Could you get us work down there? I hear they pay a man.”
Gillon shook his head.
“That’s why I’m here. There’s no work. Had to get food for the table. They have only salt cod for Christmas down there.”
“Och, that’s mean, man, that’s crude. Stay here and we’ll sneak you out with half a goose. Man doesn’t have goose for Christmas, he’s no a man and has no Christmas.”
“Aye, might as well put a stake through your heart, man without a goose on table.”
Gillon was a touch annoyed.
“A saumont will do very well.”
“Oh, aye, don’t know, never had one. We don’t get that here, that belongs to them.” They looked at his fish. Gillon pointed to the man’s knife and cut two steaks from the salmon.
“Broil it with butter on it, do you understand? Don’t boil it.”
The men nodded and thanked Gillon. One of them was at work looping a rope around the fish and soon they had it hanging from a beam, the way they did with their hams.
“Sleep in peace, man. But you got to be up and gone by day-sky. You hear the cocks and be gone, man, aye?” Gillon nodded. “Master see a man with a saumont, he won’t understand. Man who’ll steal a saumont will steal a sheep, aye, quick as you can say Jock Hector.”
“No, no,” Gillon said. They thought it was an act.
“Just don’t steal one here, man.”
They all thought he was a thief. It was, Gillon thought, a nation of thieves.
* * *
He had a deep warm sleep, sunk in the hay, feeling secure about his salmon for the first time since he had killed it. He woke from time to time listening for cockcrow, liking the waking because he could appreciate his nest. There was a window in the loft and he could see the stars; clean sky, the weather was holding. No sounds, no wind, no movement except the bumping of the cattle down below. When he woke again it was dawn and the cocks were at it all out. He arranged himself—his feet, he thought, felt better—and went down the ladder.
One half, almost exactly one half of his salmon was gone, as neatly trimmed as if a fishmonger had been at work.
The bastards, Gillon thought, the dirty filthy sons of bitches, coming back in the night to steal my fish. He thought of doing something terrible, setting fire to the byre, dry-mouthed with rage and impotence, looking at his beautiful fish dangling from the beam; and then a Galloway came across the floor and, as if she had been doing it all her life, rose up on her hind legs like a circus animal so that her nose and tongue just tipped what was left of the fish. The salmon had been trimmed to the exact height of the tallest and longest-necked cow in the byre.
Twenty pounds
of salmon left. Who, looking at it, could ever tell that this had once been a great salmon, a bull in the river, a cock among cocks?
Still, it was worth it, he told himself, no matter what had happened. Two pounds of salmon for each person, salmon just in from the sea. That was living, that was eating. Salmon wasn’t salt cod for Christmas. He found the Cowdenbeath road where the farm hands told him he would, and he started down it. If everything went right, he would be in Pitmungo before the stars came out again.
* * *
There was no warning about the blister. He was walking well with no apparent pain, and then there was pain, a great deal of it, almost as suddenly as if he had been hit by something. When he took off his shoe and his sock, he was frightened by the mess he found. The swelling of the foot had given birth to the blister and the freezing of it had masked the pain. The entire heel was swollen, a dangerous-looking red and purple circle on the back of the foot that burned in the icy wind. He would never make it on that. There was nothing to do but sit by the road and hope some merchant or farmer on his way to Cowdenbeath would give him a ride. The cold air was good on the foot and the burning had subsided when the cart came trundling down with tatties for the tables of lower Fife.
“Can you take a man down to Cowdenbeath?” He saw the farmer look at his foot. “I’m trying to make it home for Christmas.”
“I don’t know, it’s a weak horse carrying a heavy load. Perhaps if you made it worth his while?”
“His while?”
“His or mine.” The man kept looking at Gillon’s inflamed foot.
“Maybe he’d like a salmon steak,” Gillon said.
“Aye, he would. Fresh, is it? He’s gey fickle.”
“Stolen last night in the Firth of Tay.”
“Aye, then his master would like one too.” Gillon looked at the man and at his fish and at his foot.
The Camerons Page 32
