Sun Dance

by Iain R. Thomson

  Each day’s work a part of nature’s renewal. Spring air, I’d run to the jetty before breakfast to check the boat, the smell of the tide damp with salt from lines of tangle, bright orange in the keen light. Flocks of waders peopled the shoreline, dunlin or curlew, golden plover, dozens of tiny black legged sanderling running along the tidal froth edge, picking insects. Excited whistling, lisping bird talk, stretching their pinions aloft, a redshank zigzagging away, wing bars white and smart, by mid- morning the tide would covered their feeding, I’d look up from digging to smoke trails on the horizon, their flocks would be hurrying north.

  A climbing sun and warmth opened the first daisies, greened a land awaiting skylark song, whatever I put my back too each day there was time to straighten up. Work finished and supper waiting, on the hush of evening a drumming sound would resonate, sheep- like bleat floating from the hill pastures, an eerie wavering at great distance. I’d look up and spot a tiny dot of birdlife diving towards the ground, the snipe were back to their haunts of nest and chick. I’d call to Eilidh and we’d stand at the door listening and happy.

  Even with the first signs of her tummy expanding, Eiildh helped me to spread seaweed on the ‘lazybeds’. “I need plenty exercise,” she insisted, having already decided that the baby should be born on Sandray. Excited by just turning the soil, we worked side by side, luxury days which gathered their freshness from the sea. Eilidh had never appeared so bonnie, her clear skin shone tanned and rosy. Unhurried weeks of achievement, we slept the tiredness of simple, healthy work. Each night as I hugged her goodnight, out of the silence still the whistling birdlife hurried to their nesting lands in the north. Other creatures had home making plans, and we felt a part of their plans.

  Already the empty ground which surrounded the house was taking on the feel of a croft. Even the pastures, unploughed in a hundred years began to grow the sweet early grass. It needed lambing ewes. We made the decision to bring sheep across to Sandray. The island would be re-stocked, I’d rebuild the fallen stone sheep pens, and Eilidh on a trip to Halasay would speak to her brother. Alone that day of March I worked hard, enjoying the prospects of becoming a shepherd. March blow warm, blow cold, the wind, round to the east, had a searching chill. Any sounds apart from those natural to the island were exceptional. It took me a second to realise I was hearing the throbbing of a heavy engine.

  Looking up sharply from the digging I saw what appeared by its size to be an Army helicopter landing on the high ground above the raven cliffs. The birds were circling, obviously alarmed; I could tell from their rapid wing beats. Our raven, as we considered them to be, were very much part of island life. Some weeks previous, I’d shuffled to the edge of the cliff and spied down on their huge nest of heather stalks and seaweed; the site had been in use for centuries. Two young chicks with spiky feathers lay tight together for warmth; lucky parents, hardy birds.

  A helicopter on our island, the intrusion infuriated me. Throwing down the spade in rage I set off climbing the hill. Ten minutes from the summit, I could hear the racket of engine and flailing blades starting up. Damn it, I hurried. Moments later the contraption roared out to sea, heading east. Whoever it was, I’d missed finding out. I reached the flat top. Wheel marks on the thin turf. What in the world could they be up to? Some damn fool army exercise? I walked about, puzzled, until over on a large flag of bare rock, I spotted a heap of dust. Smoothing it exposed a small bore hole, only an inch in diameter but deep. Testing the rock? Possible reasons flashed through my mind. The ravens circled in great agitation, flapping and cawing. I left straight away, very uneasy, indeed very worried.

  Sighting Eilidh’s boat turning the headland down the slope I ran, arriving breathless to catch the rope as she came skilfully alongside the jetty. Mischievous eyes warned me, another surprise? She reached for a large cardboard box from under the thwart and passed it up. I put the box down to help her ashore, “Open it, open it.” Baler twine indicated a croft was involved. I undid the knot and lifted the lid. Two big round puppy’s eyes looked out at me. “Eilidh, you rascal girl, now we have to start a flock of sheep,” adding, “as well as a family,” and I hugged her, not too hard, the baby bump was beginning to show.

  “It’s a bitch pup, Iain kept it for us, his good breeding bitch had eight, this is the pick of the litter. He said if ever we get married it’ll save him a wedding present.” The wee black and white thing made a little whine and licked my finger, “What a beauty, has she got a name?” Eilidh had given it thought, “I heard them say the last collie on Sandray belonged to Eachan’s father, she was Muille, it’s a pet name in the Gaelic.” “Muille,” I said her name as I lifted her out of the box and put her down on the jetty. She sniffed my boots and wagged a tail no longer than my finger, and Muille she became at once, a wee pet.

  The helicopter intrusion remained very much a concern but reluctant to cast a shadow over the arrival of an apprentice sheep dog, I said nothing and we laughed our way up to the house, Eilidh with the puppy in her arms, me carrying boxes of food. Later that evening, Muille, having explored the house slept on Eilidh’s lap, I described the incident and gently mentioned my fear. “Drilling the rock, testing its soundness, for what?” I hadn’t dared to tempt the fates by mentioning my true concern, but I sensed she herself had the same dread. “I knew something had happened Hector, something to do with the island was troubling you.” The colour left her cheeks, a sadness I hadn’t seen before filled expressive eyes. I cursed myself for causing her worry, at the same time startled again by the ability of our emotions to behave in empathy.

  After supper she began to talk quietly, the helicopter visit clearly behind her thinking. “I sometimes wonder, Hector if we are being selfish in cutting ourselves off from an outside world that’s heading for turmoil and may need our help in some way. We’re abandoning your expertise in nuclear physics and my work on models of climate change. Somebody else my have read my paper to the International Conference, it’s set to fail anyway in getting a legally binding agreement on carbon reductions but I feel guilty letting them down.” She stroked the puppy, “I wonder, are we being defeatist by hiding here on Sandray?”

  The chill of Eilidh’s misgivings struck home. I fought off qualms of uncertainty. No longer the island crofter, she began to speak as the eminent scientist I knew her to be, “Even if the politicians can reach an international agreement which is practical, and more difficult, one which suits the finance markets, then the species is embarking on its most critical experiment so far. By attempting to regulate the amount of atmospheric CO2, the hope is to stabilise global temperature at an ambient level which suits western society’s current behaviour patterns.”

  The scorn in her voice grew, “Major modifications to western lifestyles are required, will be forced on us before too long, and tomorrow isn’t too soon. Less air travel is certainly one aspect, ordinary folk won’t be able to afford to jet off to the sun anyway. Sadly we’re too stupid to prioritise, we imagine that temperature control alone will enable us to continue with our consumer affluence. That’s a myth, our profligate living is oblivious to the finite resource base on which it depends” I enjoyed scope of her views.

  How like Eachan she sounded, I watched her bonnie face flush with passion, “In spite of CO2 level rising steeply, there’s plenty of vested interests who whip up sceptics through the media, dismiss the data as scaremongering, scientists fiddling the figures to up their research grants. Of course the temperature rise is due to naturally occurring solar trends but for human activity to be adding to this increase is highly dangerous.”

  Darkness had fallen as she spoke, “We can’t easily destroy the basic fabric of the planet, it will spin on regardless of the excesses of the American Dream, many microbes will survive no matter what we do, but for us humans to survive then depending on diceing with the atmosphere really is a shot in the dark. There are too many variables over which we will never gain control, the crucial role of volcanic activity in affecting the climate is one
and the stability of the earth’s crust is certainly beyond our control. Already some of our operations in that area are liable to trigger activities which will be hard to plug once they take off.

  Her tone became decidedly emphatic, “Make no mistake, this will be a bold attempt at global temperature manipulation, climate control if you like; what’s still to dawn on politicians and even on some environmental specialists, is that we are endeavouring to manage our planet’s climate, insulate it from the impact of solar emissions, sunspot cycles or the planets long scale elliptical orbit, wrest power from the major phenomena ruling the entire solar system.”

  I stroked her hair and though she smiled, a tear glistened in the lamplight, “An arbitrary cut in consumer lifestyles applied on a socially fair basis is unlikely to happen. The wealthy will survive the longest, the poor will go to the wall. Only a survival attitude based on altruistic behaviour has any hope of saving us. Greed is gobbling the planet.” Her final words were the measure of her true sympathies; they lay with the approaching plight of the poor she’d witnessed struggling to survive on the flood plains of a river delta, those fighting the encroaching deserts, those who will go to the wall, as she’d put it.

  For me one futile attempt at influencing myopic politicians had been convincing enough. In planning actions to combat a macro-environmental threat, they were neither free nor capable of making rational judgements. Eilidh was right, their masters, the major international financiers, thinking themselves safe in their counting houses, stay well out of reach of reason. Six billion people and rising to nine. How few people control the planet’s destiny. The smaller the number, the greater the menace of megalomania, the greater the danger of destruction. We sat quietly. My admiration of Eilidh’s views and values grew to new concepts. Her zeal for the cause of common humanity was infectious. I took her hand and sat thinking.

  The puppy wakened, I took her outside for a snuffle and stood awhile watching the changing shape of the clouds. Sometimes a passage opened amidst their beautiful roundness, tunnels into the sanctuary of an outer space which looks back in time. That night they changed imperceptibly, drifting one into another, layered as undulations in radiation merge time into motion. The splendour of their differing shades, cold white cushions hiding the moon slowly became the blue, black masses resting on an incurious sea.

  For a moment my belief in a life on Sandray had wavered. I knew the clouds as paramount to our climate’s stability, a safeguard against the sun’s rapacious energy; now I saw them differently, no longer a vital scientific fact, for as the oceans grow into clouds of seemingly aimless beauty so they restored my faith in simplicity.

  Whimpering noises at my feet aroused me. I lifted Muille and went inside. Tip-toeing into the bedroom I slipped her under the blankets.

  Tired of waiting for me, Eilidh lay sound asleep,

  I too snuggled in beside her warmth.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  “There is no present.”

  The message came via Eilidh’s visit that Eachan would have five sacks of seed potatoes ready for me to collect. I’d dug close to an acre of ground for our ‘Lazybeds’. The soil would be warmed by the decaying seaweed heaped beneath their long lines, planting the ‘tatties’ would be the next operation on the road to self sufficiency and my hands had calluses any man worth calling himself a man would be proud to own.

  A reluctant dawn awaited me on the Sound. To catch slack water I’d left early, the last stars bright enough to give me clear outlines. Once out in the open the morning became darker. A mist through which no sun would penetrate spread high above the Sound. The wind, slight as it was, backed round, I felt it on the nape of my neck and as animals will do, I turned to sniff the weather. It would not be a day to ceilidh too long at the croft of Ach na Mara.

  Ella shook my hand at the door, “We’re so pleased to hear about the baby,” and with a light dancing in her eye, “aren’t you the boy, and Eilidh determined to have the birth on the island.” Proud but a mite embarrassed, I blushed. “Anyway come away in, you’ll be needing your breakfast.” Presently Eachan appeared from the byre, together with a fine smell of cattle. He clapped me on the back, “Well, well boy, didn’t I say to herself the first day I saw you two together, it won’t be….” “Now Eachan,” guessing what he might say, Ella cut off further comment. Not to be outflanked, he went on, “I was going to say, I was the last child to be born on Sandray,” and turning to me for the first time, he told of the rest of his brothers and sisters. We were just a family of five, not a lot for those days, Hector boy. I’d two sisters, one went to Australia, the other to New Zealand, young women, off they went in the thirties’ depression. Never came back, my mother never saw them again. The Australian one lost her man in the second world war.”

  Not wishing to ask questions, I was pleased when he continued, “My two elder brothers, big strapping boys and only sixteen and seventeen; I might have been two years old, but I can see it as well as telling,” and speaking quietly, “you see the recruiting officer came to the door, on Sandray mind you, kilt and all, he didn’t question their ages too much, just offered them glory in the ranks and a silver shilling to fight the Germans. Off to Inverness they went, joined the Seaforth Highlanders. Nineteen fourteen, into the front line, the war to end wars they called it,” and giving a snort, “It was as much to keep England’s social order in place,” adding softly. “The trenches of France did for them both before they were twenty, and it finished the cailleach, mentally anyway, ah Dia, how my mother hated the English toffs.”

  We sat in to the table but I waited until the porridge plates emptied before telling of the helicopter visit and, for it seemed important to me, I went on to mention the raven’s distress. At this last, the old man looked startled. Although he turned to look out of the window, his eyes strayed far beyond the peak of Sandray.Their focal point appeared riveted on the image of some approaching terror.

  Ella sat silently, watching him closely. In the overcast light of that morning his face aged with a frightening suddenness. Out of its strange aspect materialised his grandfather, hovering in the form of Eachan, dull in the shadows, an apparition, its presence a trick of mind? I recoiled, shrank into my chair.

  Eachan rose. Possessed by another he walked round the table, his eyes burning with intensity. A vision gripped him. I knew it, the room closed about us, suddenly old, as from another existence. A shiver lifted the hair on my neck, playing over me, the stealth of a deathly hand; the coldness of a ripple in the unending curve of space-time where all existences are a stream of particles, and those that once have been, are cold; cold in the vacuum of death.

  Crossing behind me Eachan stood starring out of the window, his hands raised, his fingers spread, a patriarchal figure, white of hair and noble of feature, he remained motionless as though fending off a grotesque evil force, and then, in a voice not his own, “The raven of our forebears will return to the land of their ancestors, never again will they breed on Sandray.” His mental anguish, if it can be described as that, passed off as quickly as it had taken him and he sat back at the table; nevertheless his gaunt features had a greyness. Eating very little, he remained silent.

  Ella packed a box and with a hug of goodbye and, “Look after Eilidh,” Eachan and I hurried back to the boat without speaking. A tarpaulin covered five bags of seed tatties. He passed them down to me. Not a day for delaying. The wind strengthened from the south. Only then I did I learn his mind as he stood on the pier, rope in his hand, about to cast me off. I glanced up, ready to catch and coil. The man, his eyes unblinking, stared across the Sound to the Hill of the Shroud. I stood, rocking with boat, unwilling to intrude. Lines of gulls circled in from the Atlantic; their metallic screeching carried a warning which roused him.

  Still holding the mooring lines, finally he looked down, “Hector a’ bhalaich, about the croft, you’ll know I’m sure, our family are scattered to the four winds, doing well, the lot of them, Australia, Canada and where ever else, they
’ll not see crofting, no nor the Highlands, again. I’d like to keep the name Mackenzie on the place, know what I mean. Now then, there’s particulars in the house drawn up and agreed by the estate and the Crofters Commission which hands Ach na Mara over to you when I plough my last furrow.”

  He spoke in a manner surprising by its unaccustomed bluntness, “The house belongs to me and that will go to Ella. Sandray is more difficult, anyway you have just to agree if that’s what you have a mind to do. Think about it, Hector.” He looked down on me, eyes intent, searching mine as they had the night we first met. No words passed to offer my answer, none was needed. My eyes expressed a pledge beyond words.

  Home from a threatening sea the herring gulls sheltered in the lee of the dunes. Gusts of wind plucked at their feathers. One by one, stretching necks to the sky, their utterances carried over the bay in snatches of sorrow. Perhaps it was the mood that was on us, but their cries were of another age, another happening, of an undreamed desolation. Tautness came to Eachan’s jaw, his thin lips straightened, his voice had strength, “Remember Hector, when my hand is off the tiller, you’ll bury me on Sandray, in the grave out on the headland.”

  Our eyes met in that understanding which is transmitted by means greater than words. He threw the rope into the bow of the boat, shouting into the rising wind as I pulled away, “There’s tide under you now and this south wind’ll put up a sea, take the Sandray headland close for the shelter until you have to round it, make out in a trough and cross the crest well off and you can head in along the hollows!” Without more words and judging the sky by a glance, he turned for home. Neither of us had made reference to what passed in the kitchen. I knew no saner man. Was he the unwitting medium of a power beyond this earthly place?

  The old boy was far from wrong; once in the Sound wind over tide began to throw up triangular crests. They met with loud clapping sounds, vicious peaks jostling in the conflicting forces, tossing sheets of spray in the air. They stung my eyes. I licked the taste of salt from my lips, it filled my mouth. A big lump of sea sloshed over the gunnel. Tiller below an armpit I bailed smartly, weaving amongst the confused waters. Coming under the Sandray headland, I ran in close. Conditions eased and taking my eye off the seas for a second, I glanced up.