The Gathering Night

by Margaret Elphinstone

  I looked round at my family. Every face was turned to me. I searched each one. It was quite clear what they all wanted. ‘Yes,’ I said to Hodei, looking him in the eye. ‘You can make your journey from my hearth, if you think that will put things right at last.’

  Nekané said:

  Night fell. Thaw Moon was a little curl of light above the treetops, paler than the Evening Star. The stars under the Evening Sun Sky were cloud-hidden; the salt wind smelt of rain. We fed the fire with dead leaves and pine branches until it crackled and smoked. Dark crept among us and wreathed around the hearth. The children knuckled their smarting eyes. Bakar began to cry. People were blurred shapes moving through shadows. I fetched my Drum from its sleeping place. I came back to the hearth and took Basajaun from his mother’s arms.

  Osané clutched my arm as I held her baby. ‘You won’t let the spirits hurt him!’

  ‘He’s as safe with me as with you, Osané.’

  People hear what they want to hear. My words comforted her. She let me take her boy. I tied his sling inside my cloak so both my hands were free. Hodei and I stood downwind of the fire. Beyond the smoke we felt the eyes of the People turned towards us, although there was nothing they could see.

  I awoke my Drum. As soon as it began to beat, Hodei’s Drum echoed back to mine.

  We drummed the heartbeats of the earth. Our Helpers came. Fox barked from the wood behind us. Swan’s wing gleamed through a mist of smoke. Through the wintry air came the honey-smell of heather, like a shaft of light in a dark cave: pee-wit pee-wit called to us from far-off summer moors. Even as my Dolphin rolled through the unseen sea, I glimpsed the shadow of Snake gliding through the hearthstones. She coiled herself once around my feet, and vanished. A breath of cold air sighed against my cheek. That Snake had led me on many journeys; I knew I would never see her likeness on this earth again.

  My Drum never faltered. For Basajaun it was the familiar beat of his mother’s heart. Too young to fear the spirits – too young to have forgotten – he fell fast asleep.

  Stars surrounded us like glittering fishes when Dolphin dives into deep water. Deeper and deeper we flew, into the high darkness. We drifted among the stars. The stars go down deep as the sky itself: no earth-spirit ever reaches the far depths of the sky beyond the Moon. At last we turned and saw our earth far-off, which the spirits gave to Animals and People at the Beginning. We looked through the web of stars that held us. We saw how the kind earth stretched from sea to sea. We saw shores and woods, rivers and lochs. We saw how the mountains divided one part of the earth from another, and how the waters flowed away from the hills towards many different hunting lands. We saw Birds and Animals living joyfully on the earth below us. We saw how they spoke with the spirits, and how the spirits knew every one of them. We saw how the People lived on the earth among the Birds and Animals. We saw how the spirits watched them, even though the People had forgotten how to speak to the spirits in the way they did at the Beginning.

  I gazed far away to the drowned lands of the Lynx People under the Morning Sun Sky. I saw white beaches, and the waves breaking. I couldn’t see who moved across the earth. When I tried to peer into the darkness the stars dazzled me. I looked towards the Sunless Sky. I saw rocky islands rising from the Open Sea. Those were the hunting lands of the Seal People. But even as I looked the cloud came over, like a hide drawn across the door, and hid the islands from me. I turned to the High Sun Sky. I saw the sharp ridge of Grandmother Mountain outlined against the stars. She wouldn’t let me see beyond her. The hunting lands of the Heron People were closed to me. But when I looked down at the hunting lands of the Auk People I saw with the eyes of the Swan that flies from the Sunless Sky. I saw the white-fringed coast and the salt flats beckoning, and gleams of water shining in the folds of the hills. I saw smoke rising from many hearths. Every one of those hearths was open to me. There were no names among them that I did not know.

  ‘Anyway, why shouldn’t we?’ A shrill voice broke into my mind like a shower of freezing rain. The voice was clearly arguing. ‘I thought we were all cousins anyway. It was two sisters that came from Grandmother Mountain to begin with. And my name comes from the Seal People. You told me so. So everyone’s our cousin anyway. Anyway, why can’t we have cousins wherever we like?’

  At my ear I heard Hodei’s mocking laugh. ‘I think we have our answer, Nekané!’

  Esti said:

  I’ve heard that story so often. I don’t actually remember saying those words. But the others all say that I did. My father says we were sitting by a cold fire, because the Go-Betweens had smothered it in wet leaves. I was complaining – so he says. He was trying to make me understand what the Go-Betweens were doing, and why Nekané had taken Basajaun with her. My father also says I was born arguing. Well, that shows he doesn’t always speak the truth! All I can tell you now is that I don’t remember.

  This story is nearly finished now. My grandmother – Nekané – says the story began with my birth, and that I should be the one to bring it to an end. You’ve all listened very patiently. This is the last night of Gathering Camp. Tomorrow my family are going back to River Mouth Camp. River Mouth Camp is my Birth Place. Four of my grandfather’s bones lie under the hearthstones there. I don’t remember my grandfather, but everyone in my family tells me I loved him. And he loved me.

  The Go-Betweens asked us to tell this story because last winter Edur met some Heron People hunting on the slopes of Grandmother Mountain in the Moon of Rushes. One of the Heron hunters had just been initiated – a Year ago now. His name was Basajaun. His father was Ekaitz, Kemen’s cousin of the Lynx People, who took a woman of the Heron People. This young hunter, whom Edur met, has the same name as my cousin who’s sitting over there, giggling and poking his brother and making trouble, as usual. Probably this other Basajaun of the Heron People is a bit more sensible. Anyway, now the other Basajaun has Heron written on his back.

  That’s what Edur told us all when we got to Gathering Camp, and that’s why the Go-Betweens asked us to tell you this story.

  We’ve finished it now. In the story I have the last word. Maybe that’s not fair, because I’m not the most important person in it. But the story began with me, and my grandmother says it has to end with me. Something Haizea said when it was her turn makes me think the story isn’t over yet. Haizea says there can’t be an exact end to any story. Every story really started at the Beginning – wherever you begin telling it from – and it can’t be properly finished until we come to the End.

  My grandmother says there are many more lives to be lived before the End.

  AUTHOR’S AFTERWORD

  The Mesolithic era in Scotland tends to be passed over in deafening silence. Six thousand years of human occupation – from the last Ice Age until the agricultural revolution of around 4000 BC – are usually represented in histories and prehistories by a maximum of a page or two on Scotland’s hunter-gatherers, with comments on how little we know about them. I was drawn to the early inhabitants of my country partly because, unlike ourselves, they left so little trace of their long presence. They lived long before agricultural peoples built stone circles like Callanish or villages like Skara Brae. My initial ignorance was great, but I soon discovered popular misconceptions were even greater. I’ve often been asked ‘Could these people speak?’ ‘Did they have fire?’ or ‘Did they have any art?’ I wanted to show that in evolutionary terms seven or eight thousand years is almost nothing. In other parts of the world people were already farming. These people were genetically the same as us; only the world they inhabited was different. Sometimes it seems so far away and long ago it’s like looking down the wrong end of a telescope.

  My search for these early peoples led me along various paths. I began looking at familiar Hebridean and West Coast land-scapes in a different way. I considered what I’d seen and read of Inuit, Native American and Sami traditions. I read about peoples in places I’ve never been to, like Mongolia, Australia and South Africa. These parallels help
ed me to see my own country through the eyes of people who were hefted to their land in a way that I can never experience myself. Mesolithic people wouldn’t have needed a separate word for ‘nature’: everyone – people, animals, birds, fish, mountains, rivers, seas – would have co-existed in the same holistic world.

  Nor were Mesolithic lives necessarily as ‘nasty, brutish and short’ as Hobbesian theory would have us believe. The stereotype of grunting cavemen wielding clubs lingers on, although recent hunter-gatherers have lived rich lives in marginal areas where no one could possibly practise agriculture. Resources must have seemed infinite before agriculture took over all the prime land. Mesolithic Scotland seems to have provided a living as plentiful as that enjoyed by, for example, the Native Americans of the north-west coast before their way of life was disrupted for ever. Mesolithic people in Scotland shared their land with red and roe deer, pig, wild cattle, wolf, bear, beaver, otter, fox and perhaps squirrels. Rivers were full of salmon and trout. All kinds of birds inhabited sea, cliffs, marshes and forests. Shores were rich in shellfish. The sea teemed with fish. Ray Mears and Gordon Hillman, in their TV programme on survival, have indicated the tasty variety of plants available for gathering, even through the long winters. I am not suggesting that Mesolithic Scotland was a Rousseau-esque paradise full of noble savages, but all the evidence suggests that human life was about far more than mere subsistence. People could make decisions about their lives, just as we do, based on social and spiritual considerations, and not just the material imperatives of where and how to find the next meal.

  There’s little material evidence of the hunter-gatherers of Mesolithic Scotland. The shell middens of Oronsay, caves near Oban and on Ulva, locations on Islay, Jura, Mull, Coll, Rum and Risga are the main west-coast sites. Microliths – tiny stone blades and points – are indicative of a Mesolithic presence. Food remains and tools of bone, shell and antler, and a few postholes where tents were once pitched, are really all that is left. The only human remains are odd finger-bones from shell middens. There is nothing in Scotland like the fishing traps, villages or cemeteries of southern Scandinavia. In a Danish Mesolithic grave a newborn child was found resting on a swan’s wing. At Starr Carr in Yorkshire archaeologists unearthed stag antlers attached to a mask. Their purpose remains a mystery; I’ve incorporated them into my fictional narrative. There are no such indications of spiritual or symbolic life in Scotland. That could either be because soil conditions are too acid, or because burial practices were different. My premise, as a storywriter, is that wherever there are people there will be emotions, rituals, metaphors, stories, art . . . in other words, a constant search for meanings.

  Hunter-gatherer cultures all over the world share remarkably similar spiritual practices that express deep affinity with the land to which they belong. Shamanistic religions are closely allied to hunting economies. My Go-Betweens’ spiritual practice is based on my readings in shamanistic spiritualities from many different parts of the world. To be Go-Between is to enact a role rather than to belong to a class. Go-Betweens have their own sort of power, but it operates through the natural world, within an egalitarian society. Forms of social control in hunter-gatherer societies sometimes strike me as being remarkably civilised and effective. However, if I’d been born eight thousand years ago, I would almost certainly have had fewer years in which to enjoy the cultural benefits on offer.

  In all the long years of Mesolithic Scotland we know of only one definite historic event. This was the tsunami that struck the east coast following an underwater landslide off the coast of Norway in c.6150 BC. I took this tsunami as the catalyst for my plot, and used first-hand accounts of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami as the basis for Kemen’s story.

  I use Basque names for my characters because, although no one has any idea what languages were spoken in Mesolithic Scotland, Basque is thought to be the only extant language of pre-Indo-European – which is to say, pre-agricultural – origin on the western seaboard of Europe.

  Most of my novels have maps. There’s no map in this book, partly because sea levels have changed in complicated ways: land around the Scottish ice cap lifted up after the huge weight of ice melted, while sea levels everywhere were also rising. But, more importantly, there shouldn’t be a map because my characters imagined their land in other ways.

  Mesolithic people, like hunter-gatherers today, attained a level of environmental understanding and practical skills far beyond the reach of our own culture. In trying to imagine Mesolithic lives, I looked for, and sometimes attempted, hunter-gatherer skills that are still practised today. I’m grateful to Peter Faulkner from Shropshire, who helped me to make my own coracle from hazel, willow and hide. Enid Brown of Scotlandwell explained how to harvest wild honey, and Eric Begbie from Clackmannan worked out my wildfowling strategies. Mark Lazzeri of Assynt, Douglas Murray of Aboyne and John Love of Uist contributed to the deer hunts, and Callan Duck of St Andrews to the seal hunting. I am indebted to Maurizio Bastianoni in Umbria for sharing his expertise in boar hunting. Bill Ritchie of Assynt advised on fishing, and Tess Darwin, Mandy Haggith, Linda Henderson, Pete Kinnear and Agnes Walker all contributed their gathering skills and ecological knowledge. Jonathan Sawday skippered the initial voyage up the Sound of Mull and Loch Sunart, and he and Martin Montgomery supplied sailing directions throughout the book. These people not only helped me to write this novel, they also helped to alter permanently my own perceptions of land and sea, and how to live from them and with them.

  I quickly discovered that, although Mesolithic Scotland is a closed book to most of us, there is a dedicated core of experts in the field. Both Caroline Wickham Jones of Orkney and Steven Mithen of Reading University welcomed a novelist on to their digs on Orkney and Coll respectively. The bit of hazelnut shell I found on the dig at Long Howe, and its implications for the early history of Orkney, have been one of the most exciting parts of this journey. I’m used to writing fiction, and in contrast that hazel shell was so real. Other archaeologists and geographers who have helped me on the way include Sue Dawson on the tsunami, Kevin Edwards on the Mesolithic environment and Karen Hardy on technologies. Clive Gamble of Reading University kindly read part of the manuscript.

  A residency at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, Italy, provided crucial uninterrupted writing time early in the project. I finished the novel in the ideal surroundings provided by a fellowship at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center on Lake Como, Italy.

  I am grateful to all these people who helped me to envision a Mesolithic world. Caroline Wickham Jones answered questions and read drafts with undiminishing enthusiasm, besides providing bed, board and library for weeks on end. And thanks, as ever, to Mike Brown for support in everything from coracle-making to copy-editing.

  MARGARET ELPHINSTONE is the author of nine previous novels, including The Sea Road, Voyageurs, Hy Brasil and Light. She lives in Galloway, Scotland. Visit her online www.margaretelphinstone.co.uk