by Neil M. Gunn
Finn, flat on his breast, filled his mouth with water, held it a moment, and let it slide down. Ah-h! He filled it again, he worked it round his gums, and let it go. The water was clear and with the velvet softness that peat gives. It tasted like the water in the burn at home; it was full of memories that did not quite come, that stayed on the other side of knowing, gently as a hand in sleep. “Oh, boys, it’s good!” he said to himself. About to lie over, he pulled up and brought forth the bottles, as if the little well might vanish should he close his eyes. After rinsing them twice, he filled and corked them, then drank again. He could not get the dry stickiness out of his mouth. Stretching himself on the turf, he let his nostrils breathe in its earthy fragrance. The land!
There was no hurry. He needed rest, against the earth. The sea came, heaving him, a ghostly sea, with all the boat’s motions. And sleep—he had to lift his head, to sit up. It would hardly do if he fell asleep!
At last he arose with a cool feeling of being renewed. At the high points to his right, as he faced from the little house to the ruins, the cliffs were three hundred feet. He did not care to go too near their edge because the wind was so strong. But away to the west side the turf sloped in a gentle breast and there the sea hammered the cliff inward to a horse-shoe bend, with sheer sides two hundred feet high. The wind, too, was now in his face, holding him back.
Finn saw a ledge a little to his right crowded with guillemots, but knew he could not climb down to it. On his hips he advanced carefully, however, just to investigate. A whirl of wind came sideways at him. It was treacherous, the wind in the rock-faces. But what an incredible number of birds! On both hands the ledges were crowded with them. Whole screaming colonies—with each kind keeping to its own ledge! Finn smiled at that. Each to its own township, its own parish! Crowded, shoulder to shoulder, and shouting their rights at the tops of their voices! The drink was doing Finn good already. His head was clear and steady, and the flesh on his bones was perhaps fine in the feel but ready and keen. He had often found that what looks like the very edge of a cliff a yard away, is not the final edge when you come to it. So he went on, very carefully, until his feet pushed out over the abyss.
The birds saw him; the guillemots went hoarse, the kittiwakes demented, the razorbills lower down stretched their noisy necks as if fish had stuck in them, the air darkened with wheeling gulls and fulmars, the sea-parrots blinked sideways and bit each other.
Finn saw an egg on a ledge.
The wind buffeted him. It was difficult but it might not be impossible to get at the ledge. He drew back, circled some fifteen yards, and then began again his advance on the cliff.
No, he could not get to that ledge, although it was only just over the crest, because the sloping ground behind was burrowed and treacherous. Still, he could push out, inch by inch. The ground seemed firm enough.
He got within two feet of them, and they still sat blinking at him, broad yellow and red beaks over white breasts, squatting orange legs. They were bird-fools that would not get up. He saw that. He realized that he could catch them with his bare hands.
There were only one or two bannocks of bread left. Under the birds would be their eggs. He knew he was going to take a chance that he should not take. Excitement dizzied him slightly and he lay back to get cool, thrusting out his hands behind, the left one entering a burrow. In the same moment he yelled and whirled over on his face. The back of his left hand was bitten to the bone.
Instinctively he sucked the wound and spat red, his heart hammering. Had this happened to him while he was sitting up peering precariously into the awesome cauldron below, he would probably have gone over. He now drew himself up on his breast until he faced the burrow. Swathing his right hand in his bonnet, he thrust it tentatively into the shallow burrow. Out came the parrot beak. Down came Finn’s left, swift as a beast’s paw, and caught the head. A twist and a pull, and the bird was dead. In went his right hand, and the fingers touched, closed gently upon, and drew forth an egg, whitish in colour, with vague ashen spots. He gazed upon its miracle of beauty. It was warm. He shook it by his ear. It was firm. He picked up a sharp pebble from the mouth of the burrow and cracked a small hole in each end of the egg. He sniffed, introduced the pointed end to his mouth, and sucked. Slimy, soft as velvet, came the white; a pause, and the yolk broke along his palate in a wave, a choking fullness, a rich gluttony; more wet velvet, and his breath whistled inward through the vacant holes. He regarded the empty shell with a slow smile and tossed it over the edge to play with the wind. His eyes turned, searching for burrows. Most of them were arm-deep, and when a bird shoved out its egg to meet his hand, swathed in his bonnet, he could not help laughing.
In a little while, he was walking towards the boat, with two bottles of water, three dead puffins, and twelve eggs in his round bonnet. As he hove in sight, it was almost ludicrous to see how the four faces were gazing up. He laid his gear at his feet and waved a bottle in one hand and a dead bird in the other.
Their hands rose and fell, but otherwise they showed no animation. For a moment Finn, in the flush of his triumph, felt disappointment. Setting down bird and bottle, he turned away from them back to the well. He was thirsty again, and the two bottles were little enough for four mouths.
The next time they saw him appear he was astride a sheep, holding it by the horns.
It was a joke on Finn’s part, for he knew they could do nothing with a sheep. Still, if Roddie showed they wanted the sheep by making to bring the boat in, he could try to force it down, and if it refused to jump, he could give it a push. Suddenly the joke passed from him, and he let the sheep go.
They seemed dull and heavy in that boat! After the run he had had to corner the sheep in the ruins, too!
And how he was going to get this cargo of tender eggshell and glass down to the sea-edge was a problem!
Roddie was now bringing the boat in below him, lest he fall.
Finn, on his knees, leaned over the short but perpendicular face of rock that had cost him so much dangerous effort in climbing up, and pondered. He had had the vague idea of lowering his bonnet by his long woollen cravat, and trusting the bottles to stick in his fairly tight waist-band. He lay on his breast, holding his scarf at arm’s length. It was not long enough to reach the slanting rock track below. And, anyway, the water was more important than the eggs. He must take no risk with the water. But his heart was so set on bringing them the eggs!
There is never a difficulty but there is a way out, was an old saying. He could not take the bonnet in his teeth, with cheek and mouth scraping the rock at the corner. It would, in fact, be more difficult to go down than it had been to come up. Finn knew this so clearly that he did not let his mind dwell upon it. Even the bottles would clog his hips.
And then the idea came to him, beautiful in its simplicity.
Stripping off his jersey, he tied the end of each sleeve in a firm knot and let down a bottle against the knot. The top of the bottle in the right arm he padded with two puffins and set his bonnet of eggs on top. The third puffin he pushed against the bottle in the left arm. Then tying one end of the cravat round the waist of the jersey, he lowered away slowly, lying flat, head and arms over the rock. They touched the slanting track, and by gentle manipulation he got them to incline inward. When they were resting securely, he dropped his end of the scarf.
That’s that! he thought. Whatever happened to him now, he had brought them relief, for he had shown them how to land and climb so far.
Sitting with his feet over the edge of the outer rock, he carefully wiped the blood of the left-hand wound from his fingers, until they were dry to the tips. Then he rubbed the toes of each foot against the other leg. Turning over on his stomach, he began the descent, the boiling water green and white far below.
Again Roddie went through his agony; and now, indeed, from exhaustion, the other three members of the crew were caught in the fascination of horror, as Finn moved slowly, with that blind searching and pawing of the toes.
The faces and bodies in the boat, heaving and falling on the long motions of the sea, remained still and wordless, eyes held by the lad taking his ease against the rock. They were like a group paralysed in a nightmare. Finn smiled, raised a hand in salute, and released them.
But he did not move from where he was until they had the boat in position. He thought to himself, with common-sense, and perhaps a little vanity, that they would understand why he delayed. For it was clear to Finn that the great wall of water which had all but caught him on the way up—a yard lower down, and he would have been swept away like a fly—was one of those monstrous seas, which they had seen outside, happening by chance so to hit the curving rocks on the west side that it was funnelled through the narrow walled channel between the two islands. It would not happen often—but it was bound to happen.
A thought struck his inventive mind and he made a fixed noose of his cravat, then spreading the weighted jersey against his back, stooping, with right hand free, he made down the slanting broken way as quickly as he could.
“An oar!” he shouted to Henry, who was waiting to receive him, and then made clear his intention by a mimed handling of the noosed cravat. On his knees, Henry stuck out the oar as the boat came up and Finn slipped the noose over the blade, shouting, “Eggs! Canny!” Slowly Henry swung the burden away, over the gunnel, into the hold, where Rob let it come to rest gently at his feet.
“Good, Rob!” shouted Finn and waved an arm in delight.
With his right palm, Henry held Finn back; with his left hand he motioned Roddie still inward. Finn smiled. It was so much easier to leap on to the boat than off it! Then Henry, from the depths, looked up at him with strained face. Finn laughed as the stern came heaving, and leapt. In his anxiety, Henry gripped him and they both rolled head over heels into the hold, where Finn lay choking with laughter.
With an expression arid as the dark rock, Roddie never looked at him; ordered the lifting of the anchor and the rowing to mid-channel.
“What kept you, boy?” asked Rob, in a gentle yet aggrieved voice.
“Kept me?” said Finn. “What do you mean?”
“You were hours. We thought you had gone.”
Finn stared into Rob’s face and his brain worked. Then he reached for his jersey, as Henry made fast the anchor-rope, and laid out the twelve eggs (two were cracked, none broken), the three birds, and the two bottles of water.
“That’s all I could manage,” he said, with pardonable irony, and moved up to where he had left his clothes. As his head appeared through the neck of his jersey, it stared out over the sea. Then he sat down and began dressing slowly.
Callum was now in a pretty bad way, because his quick, self-sensitive mind had endured the agony of having sent Finn to his doom.
“Finn, my hero,” he croaked huskily. “God damn it.” And the tears came down his face.
“Cold iron!” wheezed Rob solemnly.
“Oh, hell,” muttered Callum and leaned back, his head falling sideways.
Roddie came beside Callum and uncorked one of the bottles. Gently he fed Callum out of its neck as if he were a child. “Hold it in your mouth for a little,” he urged. “That’s the way. Take your time.”
“Have you a snuff?” Finn asked Rob casually.
“Surely, boy.”
Finn took a pinch and handed the horn back. “Thanks,” he said, turning away. Leaning over the boat, he washed the blood from his hand and forearm. Then he made himself ostentatiously comfortable against the nets and lay gazing out over the stern at the rocks and the screaming birds.
Perhaps Roddie thought he, Finn‚ had been deliberately keeping them in fear, showing off a bit, having his own back on Roddie in this way. Roddie could think what he liked; they could all think what they liked—while they drank the water and sucked the eggs.
He was suddenly maddened at the snuff for making him sneeze.
He could see that for a long time he had been afraid of Roddie, of a strange terrible power that was in him. Now he was no longer afraid. He could hold his own against Roddie. And would—however the challenge came.
As the flush of anger ebbed, he grew extremely tired, sick with tiredness, and let his head fall back. Henry called to him but he did not answer. He could sleep and forget them all. His re-clothed body was suffused with warmth, tingling. But anger like a red worm of hate kept threading up through his mind. He forced his mind from him, set it against the cliff … ranging restlessly, it came on the little house on the island and almost on the man who rested there. There was the curious kind of feeling he got in the House of Peace. But the House of Peace was pervaded by still grey light. It came out from the stone. The morning they had left home, he had arranged matters so that he could walk down alone…. Through the grey light, more gentle than the bitter self-pity that lies beyond anger, he fell asleep.
In the morning, tremendous seas were running and it was still blowing, but the sky had lightened. There was a premonitory freshness in the air, an inwardness of life, of exhilaration. During the long, dark hours, an awakened ear had heard the booming, the ravening roaring winds, as if held to security by a miracle in the centre of a crashing hell. And more than once the mind had rushed on wakefulness in a vast upheaving and plunging recession, a tearing loose, with a blinded moment of dread that could feel no more as it waited the smashing obliterating impact. Then the check of the anchor-rope and the invisible devils shrieking onward round the cliffs.
Roddie had plainly slept very little and was deeply quietened. They were all quietened, with darkened eyelids, but upon their bodies was a half-drugged ease, not unpleasant.
“Feeling a bit better, Callum?” asked Rob.
“I am doing as well as could be expected,” answered Callum, taking Rob’s simple question in good part. For he seemed renewed, if without the characteristic quickness of physical movement. Henry asked Roddie what he thought about the day. Roddie was hopeful, but it was agreed not to eat meantime.
The sun came out fierily, stinging their eyes. So they closed them, heads back, drinking in the light, lips apart, warmly drugged.
“Keep it from roaring, Rob, will you?” muttered Callum.
“Keep what?”
“Your belly.”
“It wasn’t mine,” said Rob seriously.
They could sleep now. Hours passed before they grew restless again. The sun was high.
Roddie motioned to Henry and a fair division was made of the last of the bread, which was a single bannock of oatcake. Each got a piece bigger than the palm of the hand. There were four eggs left and over half a bottle of water. Henry divided the water into bowls so that each could drink it as he liked.
“I don’t want an egg,” said Finn.
Henry looked strongly at him. Finn smiled, knowing Henry did not wish him to start trouble again. “I had four yesterday, and last night I nearly spewed.”
Henry smiled dryly. “You’ll be all right, then.”
“If you like,” said Finn, “I could easily go up the cliff again.” It sounded like a taunt.
Henry turned away, and handed one egg to Callum and one to Rob, but Roddie said quietly, “Keep it meantime.”
They could not keep one egg.
“Keep them all,” said Callum
. “We might want them yet.”
“Very well,” said Henry.
Finn flushed, and his eyes, flashing, looked through an unnatural smile at the cliff.
But Callum was having no nonsense, and set the talk going as they munched, and they all joined in with a word or two.
No one had asked Finn what it had been like on top of the island, and it was difficult for him to break down his own vanity and tell. Yet he made an effort by starting a private talk with Rob. “Remember your talking about Rona and the dead woman and child? I thought I was going to meet them up there,” he began.
“Why that?” asked Rob, interested at once.
Finn told about the little house and the queer feeling it gave when you cried if there was anyone in and there was no one, “So in I went.”
“Did you, though?”
Then he told about the other ruins and how he found the little well. It was a big island; it was over half a mile long if it was an inch, and one can’t find anything just in a minute. Besides, he had thought of Callum, which means, as Rob would understand, that he had thought of his most important part, in short, he had thought of eggs.
“For the belly.” Rob nodded. “Man, man, go on.”
Callum chuckled. They were all listening eagerly, Roddie with his eyes out to sea.
“So there I was, boy, hanging on by the seat of my pants and by the thought of Callum—when I leaned back for a second, sticking my hands out—like this—and at that moment it struck me, cutting to the bone. Look!”
Finn drew out the mystery and Rob’s wonder, until he started laughing himself.
Presently Roddie said, in a gentle voice, “Here, boys, I think we’ll give it a trial.” And somehow, in a moment, the boat was full of the old well-being and courage.
The masts were stepped, the anchor lifted, and on the oars they nosed out to the running seas. “Look!” cried Finn, pointing to grey seals that plunged off a skerry. A patch of sea had gone demented. Two bulls were fighting. Reefed sails were lifted. The sea, the wind, they heeled over, they were into it now!
