by Neil M. Gunn
Finn felt the sea-exhilaration come upon him. The wind was strengthening under the dark clouds. The crew sat very quiet, beyond comment. He should have been running before it for Clyth Head. But Finn and the Gannet had their own fight with the sea, before he said calmly, “I think she’ll do.”
She was very clean and sweet in her gleaming tar and new paint and grained wood of mast and oar, as she turned and flew before the wind.
“She is well named,” said the stranger of the crew, a middle-aged hired man from Stoer on the West Coast.
“You think so?” replied Finn, gratified.
“There’s nothing in Dunster will touch her for speed,” said Ian, on a lifted note of enthusiasm. “Nothing at all!”
“She has good lines,” nodded Finn.
“She’s as big as anything in Wick,” declared Donnie.
“I believe she is,” agreed Finn lightly. He was yet to own a boat of over forty feet, all decked, but such a boat for the herring fleet was still far in the future. “South-built”, with 30 feet keel, 34 feet 6 inches over all, and open from stem to stern, she seemed a large and splendid vessel to her crew. Finn would not have thought twice of reaching for the Baltic!
But now he was reaching for home. The headlands, cliff walls, slopes, inland valleys, Morven—the fisherman’s mountain, the whole flow and shape of that stern land looked well to Finn. An attractive country, very agreeable, thought the new skipper with appropriate calm; but, inside, his heart was singing, because his heart had fallen in love with his boat and his croft and—and everything. For they were a grand folk, taking them all in all. They moved in procession, many and differing characters, on varied occasions, from the old smuggler Wull to the youngest lad hunting a rabbit in fear.
“See the Bodach now!” cried Ian, interrupting Finn’s thought. And there was the needle rock standing out from the headland.
But Finn lifted his face to Morven, ran his eyes along the saddle-backs of the Scarabens to steady them on the Birch Wood.
“I suppose that will be your landfall,” said the Stoer man to Finn, gazing at Morven.
“Yes,” said Finn, gazing at the Birch Wood
“You’ll be able to see it a long way at sea?”
“You see it,” said Finn, “when you see nothing else.” And he smiled.
“Look at them waiting for us on the shore!” exclaimed Donnie.
Finn’s body quickened and his eyes gleamed.
*
That opening season turned out a good one for the Gannet. It was altogether memorable for Finn. The old crew had got broken up, except for Rob who was still with Roddie. Callum had gone half-shares in a boat with his wife’s brother, and they engaged two men from the West Coast to complete the crew. Roddie had two men from Harris. There were not sufficient local men now to man all the boats during the summer season. The number of “hired men” from the West Coast was steadily increasing, and Finn, because of his early wanderings ever had for them a special affection.
It was a pretty sight to see the boats reaching for the herring grounds, and folk would involuntarily stand and gaze: “The boats are going out.” At the ceilidh-house, a voice would say, “The boats are shot close in to-night,” or “The boats are shot off——” naming this cliff or that area. “Any word of the boats to-day?” “The boats were in early.” “The boats are coming in.” The boats. The boats.
George the foreman’s voice shouting, men quick-footed with the brimming creel, cascades of silver fish, bright eager faces of women and their swift hands, voices from Lewis drawn-out and soft and rhythmic; voices from Wick uplifted, direct, ironic; voices from Banffshire easy-going and full of diminutives. Bodies threading the maze of the busy hours of landing and gutting, the gleam of human life.
Una was there, and Meg, and Barbara, and Betz, and a shoal of young women besides, with older women, too, and greying-haired women tight-shawled and quick-tongued. And amid this plenty, the witch drew her share, for when it came to the hidden forces and the dark ones, as they affected the sea, the men of Banff had knowledge over all others, and the Lewis men had special knowledge, and ach, dash it! the sea loves the spendthrift hand anyway!
“Well, Finn, what luck to-day?” shouts Meg.
“Not bad,” cries Finn.
“What’ll you do with all your fortune?”
“You’d wonder.”
“Not for long,” answers Meg.
Una flashes him her dark smile. The excuses he makes to pass her way wouldn’t deceive a kitten, though he must think they do, for sometimes he passes without either look or speech. He just passes.
But, over all, it was not a markedly successful season and the Gannet was only one of the many fairly well-fished boats. Roddie was leading Finn by thirty crans. To every fisherman, however, there comes, some time or other, his stroke of luck, and to Finn it came in the very last week of the fishing, and in so striking a fashion that he was never to forget it.
When, the nets shot, his crew had eaten their bite, pulled a fold of sail over them, and gone to sleep, Finn was invaded by a sleepless calm that left him inclined to sit and stare. Perhaps it was an aftermath of the sunset that had turned the clouds into vast banks of fiery red. The sky had indeed come alive in a wild and menacing beauty, and all the sea had run red in molten currents, and the red had come off the sea and shone in the faces of the silent crew and glittered in their eyes.
Now the last blood-flush was dying from a cloud in the east, slowly draining out of it, as Finn looked, until nothing but the leaden death-hue remained, and the cloud hung cold and still.
There had been a touch of menace in that red—though of what none of them could have said. Nor did they refer to it. For it raised up no definite thought or image; just as a chance glance at the eternal Book would raise up no definite image of desert sands, or sacrifice, or crucifixion.
The flat sky deepened its cold leaden hue and the water darkened under fitful movements of the dying wind. Gulls still cried in the cliffs not a great distance away, yet in cries distant and cavernous and forlorn. Once, by some trick of reflected light, Finn saw three of them float ghost-white against the black rock.
As he turned his eyes eastward, he saw over a hundred craft, masts lowered, riding to their nets. Those in the distance seemed very close together, but Finn knew there was little likelihood of their drifts getting entangled because along this coast—unlike the bays and inlets of the West—the tide moved in a slow steady stream. He was still haunted by the feeling that he had come too far west, for he was indeed the westernmost boat in the fleet. Yet there had been that curious secretive impulse to get into a clear space of his own, the impulse that had often haunted the boy. Over and above, however, there had been another impulse springing out of a superstition that he would not have put words on for worlds. As they sailed out westward, he had kept her going, while boat after boat took up a fishing berth, until, with Tomas from Stoer restless and Donnie on the verge of comment, Finn opened out the western side of the Birch Wood and so, in his mind’s eye, Una’s cottage.
Night settled down on the sea and the near boats loomed indistinctly. A haze smothered the wood, and wiped away the image of the cottage, and slowly but surely carried away the hills. Finn did not feel that he was being unfair to Una. It would not occur to him to blame her as an unlucky talisman, should he draw blank nets and the other boats be well-fished. This was only his fancy; this was a secret tribute from far down in the deeps of his mind. As he thought of her, he saw her eyes darker than the night, but, unlike the night, they were dark wells of light. They glanced and lived, flashed away and came back, smiled and grew warm. He could see them now without seeing any other part of her.
He stirred restlessly. High time he was asleep. But now at sea, when her eyes came before him like this, they exercised an extreme entrancement.
Held in this thrall, time, too, for Finn was wiped away. He was brought back to his normal self, however, by a curious phenomenon, which his eyes had been stari
ng at without consciously seeing. It was a large patch of glassy light on the dark sea. To his staring eyes it was like a window let into the blackness of the water. Not that in form it was square. On the contrary, it was irregular, but rounded, too, into a clearly defined shape. It was when this shape took the likeness of a woman’s head and shoulders that Finn was wakened by the finger of wonder. The woman’s head was bowed; beneath the face was an inlet of darkness; then the light came again on her breast. The likeness was in fact, quite clear, and Finn’s preoccupation merely gave it a vivid and personal quality. But, astonishing as this phenomenon was to him, what next affected him was even more astonishing. They had, of course, shot their nets across the tide and nets and boat were slowly ebbing eastward. But this great figure—it must have been thirty yards across—was coming against the tide and towards his drift of nets. It was visibly moving over the windless sea. The head of the woman bowed right down as her breast touched his nets, and in a sinuous movement the whole rounded form flattened and ran along the drift As Finn watched, first one buoy, then another, gave a spasmodic upward jerk, like a living head struck under the chin, then fell back and slowly
As if struck himself, Finn fell upon the dead men and shook them to life, his voice harsh with triumph. “Boys, we’re in them!”
There was excitement then, but in restrained low voices, lest mystery or wonder overhear and be frightened away. Finn began to haul on the swing-rope, and at once in the water it turned into a rope of fire, a rope that threw off phosphorescent flame, streaming downward, as Finn put forth his strength; when the pressure came on the first net, the flame ran into sheets, swift evanescent fires, with the pale green light that is sometimes seen in the moon; but more intense, and always vanishing, elusive, instantly evoked and blown out by the uncanny magic of the undersea.
But the meshes of the net came up into the hands black and dripping and empty.
Then, fathoms away, there was a gleam from a solid silver bar, and amid the swirls of light that glowed and died it remained constant. It came with the net, came up out of the sea, in a little silver dance, and passed down into the hold.
It was not, however, until they began to haul the third net that they struck the first of the shoal. And now the silver bars formed in banks, banks of show that swayed in living mass, throwing off spindrift of elfin-green light. The crew’s excitement increased as the weight called forth their strength. Slowly and carefully, now, steadily. Here they come! And they came in their companies, fluttering up out of the sea, the silver darlings, dancing in over the gunnel with small thin cries.
The great happiness that came upon the crew was kept in control by their eager labour, drawn taut as the back-rope upon which Finn and Tomas hauled, hauled until their necks swelled and the blood congested in their faces.
Now Finn felt like a great hunter, like the leader of hunting men. Assurance of his strength and power was in him like a song. But when he spoke, he spoke quietly, as if deep in his throat was a gentle laugh.
And still in the nets the banks offish glittered, and from the banks shot away pale green arrows of light—the herring that had not been meshed and now vanished into the black deep.
Altogether out of that small shoal they drew, Finn estimated, about thirty crans. When the nets were hauled, they rested from their labour for a while, but in silence, listening.
“I can’t hear any of them moving at all,” said Tomas.
They would not wish poor luck to any boat; still, as they hearkened to the dead silence, a glee of conspiracy and close comradeship came about their hearts.
“I’m thinking,” Finn said, “that they are maybe too far east and a little too far out.”
“They may be indeed,” Tomas admitted, “though one never knows.”
“We know one thing now whatever,” said Donnie, and each face smiled in the darkness.
“We have drifted a good bit, hauling,” Finn said presently. “It’s yet only the dead of the night. What do you say if we go west, a little beyond where we were, and shoot again?”
There were now, however, no landmarks to be seen, and none of the boats carried riding lights. Finn had accordingly been careful to note many small signs such as the direction of the last net, a scarcely discernible lightening in the sky that could be the rising of the waning moon, an occasional wash of water like a soft choking sigh from a skerry this side of the Great Cove. The sweeps dipped and stirred the water into vortices of silver that swirled towards Finn as he leaned forward, his right arm along the tiller.
Black the water, invisible the black rock, gone every last outline in the black of the world’s night. Finn felt this deeper darkness come from impending cliffs. It shrouded away his crew so that he lost sight of them, lost sight of that lightening of the sky which he had imagined in the east, lost sight of everything but the radiant pearls that fell from the oar blades, and the two whirling silver cones, and the vanishing flames, spectral green.
“Stop!” he cried softly, and for a hushed moment they floated at the core of darkness.
“Ah!” said Tomas, hearing the faint wash of the sea over the cliffs’ feet. There was relief in his voice at the known sound. They had it on their starboard side where it should be. Its faint murmur felt solid to them as a towrope.
*
The sun rose out of the sea to find the fleet hauling their nets. The sky was high and arched and of a blue lighter than cornflowers. The clouds had been herded away to the west where a last few galleon sails were going down the horizon. The dawn spangles glittered upon the water, and the level light was reflected in the chilled faces of the fishermen, who acknowledged its thin warmth in a delicate shudder.
“It’s a fine morning,” said a mouth in one boat or another, and the words were quiet as a line of poetry.
Presently an air of morning wind darkened the surface of the sea and here and there a brown sail went up.
On the edge of the beach in front of the gutting stations, girls and women and a few men slowly gathered in prospect of the day’s work. But the boats first to arrive were blank. Then one came with three crans and her skipper said the herring were very spotty. Callum had two creels and Roddie four crans. When all the boats had returned, except one, the fishing was seen to be very light. The biggest shot was eight crans.
The boat that had not arrived was Finn’s. But after an hour or more they saw her coming. At once there were many voices, crying: Look how low she is in the water! But George’s voice rose above them all, triumphantly applauding a young runner in a great race. The girls of his curing station laughed with excitement. One gutting crew had their arms interlocked, and the middle one of the three, with dark eyes and flushed face, had to suffer elbows in secretive merry stabs. She swayed like a young full-foliaged tree, lissome and lovely in the warm morning sun. “Be quiet!” she said to Meg.
But as the Gannet drew near, drew slowly near, helped by two sweeps, for the wind was light and she was indeed deeply laden; as she drew still nearer, slowly and inexorably, with Finn’s head and shoulders steady and his arm along the tiller, and a voice crying, “She has over fifty crans if she has a creel!” there came upon Una through the expectant silence of the crowd a momentary strangeness and everything stood still in that moment as in a fated land. The dark eyes glimmered deeply, and an irrational happiness quivered, all in an instant, on the verge of tears.
*
As Finn dropped a net from his shoulder on to the drying green, he saw Rob and Callum approach. He expected that they would express their congratulations by way of pulling his leg. And this they did. But then Rob began to scratch his beard and Finn grew wary.
“Of course there is a saying,” said Rob, “that the man who goes forth always with his net will catch birds now and then.”
“Why birds?” asked Callunu
“Haven’t you been hearing anything?” Rob asked him in solemn astonishment.
“No. What?”
“Oh, in that case, nothing,” answered Rob, “
nothing. Only a fellow will be hearing a thing sometimes.”
“Who were you hearing it from?”
“Och, maybe it was just only a small bird,” replied Rob, with the wrinkled face of his special brand of antique humour.
“A small bird? Oh?”
“Ay.”
“And where was the small bird from?”
“They say she’s got a nest up somewhere about the Birch Wood——”
Rob yelled as Finn tackled him, and his voice grew angry, reminding Finn that this was not Stornoway and that he should be ashamed of behaving in such a way before his own people. The gleam, however, remained in his eye, and Callum’s delight was absolute and complete.
*
On a harvest evening, Finn moved stealthy as a wolf through the Steep Wood, over the grey dikes, round the edge of the little field, and up on to the knoll of the House of Peace. There, lying flat, he gazed around with a hunted look, and down towards the river path, commanding the approach to his home.
When he was assured that no-one was after him, he performed the mental act of describing the circle of sanctuary around the ground on which he lay. Then his eyes fell on the circle of low flat stones and he crept into its heart.
At once the hunted look caught a gleam of cunning relief. They would never find him here. They would never think of looking for him in this haunted spot. He would escape them yet.
The way in which men who had been his friends had specially leagued against him produced a new vision of humanity. He saw their dark relentless bodies, conspiring against him, not to be deflected from their purpose, mercilessly closing in, like that image in the Bible of the fowler with his net.
From his own home he was an outcast. He had seen the alien gleam in the eyes of women; even in the eyes of his mother, conspiring beyond him.
