Summer of the Red Wolf

by Morris West

  Then I found myself singing: an old song remembered out of a lost childhood.

  Ruarri came on deck with two pannikins clasped in his fist: black coffee, heavily laced with malt whisky. He handed one to me, checked our heading, then fixed me with a bright and quizzical eye. ‘So you do have the Gaelic, seannachie!’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘The song. That’s the tune they call “Morag of Dunvegan”, and you were singing it in the Gaelic.’

  ‘And I don’t understand a word of it. I learned it by rote, like a lot of things. I was taught by an old Irish monk who was a harpist, and who claimed to know every tune of the Irish and the Scots and who wanted to turn us all into missionaries or junior Fenians.’

  He seemed relieved, as if he had suspected me of a lie and was constrained to make amends. ‘You’re a good helmsman.’

  ‘I had a boat of my own. I used to race her, but I was never a real contender. I don’t have the killer instinct.’

  ‘That’s an odd word to use.’

  ‘Just a phrase.’

  He was a wary one this, soft-footed, edgy as a forest animal, every sense alert all the time. He was young to have seen war service, but he had that watchful, sidelong attitude of the commando, the leery eye and the quick reaction and the ready smile to hide the tension inside. There was a chameleon quality even in his speech. Most of the time he had the soft, singing burr of the Isles; he would turn the phrases as a Celt does. But there were moments when the accent slipped and there were hints of alien tonalities. He would never settle down to a subject the way a mountain man does, talking round and about it, under and over and through and back again, weaving the talk like a piece of cloth. His conversation was a series of sallies, now at one subject, now at another, so that you never knew quite what he was driving at.

  ‘Tell me, seannachie, what’s between you and this doctor-woman?’

  ‘Nothing. She broke her car with damn-fool driving. I offered to bring her to Uig.’

  ‘Not interested?’

  ‘Not in that one particularly.’

  ‘She’s damty good-looking.’

  ‘There are lots of good-looking women.’

  ‘She might be willing as well.’

  ‘I didn’t ask her.’

  ‘I might ask her myself one bright day.’

  ‘It’s a free country.’

  ‘The hell it is, laddie!’ He emptied his liquor at a gulp and set down the cup with a clatter. ‘I’ve been back three years and I’ll tell you we’re castrated with regulations, bloated as eunuchs with this bugger-you-jack disease they call British socialism. Even out here, round the Long Island, where the seas are jumping with fish and crawling with lobsters that would bring a fortune in Europe, what’s happening? It’s still hand labour on the crofts, and the weaving subsidized by the government, and the herring fleets dwindling because you can’t get hands to run the boats even for a share of the catch. It’s a tourist country, they tell us! Best salmon fishing in the world, but you can’t get a bedroom with a bath from Berneray to the Butt o’ Lewis. The money goes into the hotels all right – weavers’ money and crofters’ money and the money the Highlands Development Board pours in. But it all goes back to the mainland – across the bars and into the brewers’ pockets. So the women still work like dray horses, and the men drink like fiddler’s bitches on a Saturday and they all troop off to the Free Kirk for sulphur and molasses on a Sunday! Except on Eriskay and Barra, that is, because they’re Romans there and Jacobites and a mite more tolerant of the lusts of the flesh – though it’s hard to find much to lust after, because the girls go into service on the mainland and down to London, where they can use the new abortion laws!’

  ‘So why do you stay?’

  ‘That, seannachie, is a big question. One of these nights, if you can get me drunk enough, I’ll try to answer it. Meanwhile, that’s Score Bay to starboard, and the headland is Rubha Hunish. We’ll hold on this course till an hour after we lose it, then we’ll reach up towards the Shiants, where I hope to make rendezvous with a client of mine from Trondheim in Norway.’

  I didn’t ask him who his client was or what kind of business needed to be transacted in the middle of the Minch. I was happy to sail the boat and watch the cliffs blur slowly into the summer haze.

  But Red Ruarri had a mind to talk and talk he would. ‘Yourself, now. What brings you to the Isles?’

  ‘I’ve been sick. I’ve had a bellyful of cities and arguments. Morrison suggested I come. Simple as that.’

  ‘But you’re not a simple fellow, seannachie. You’ve done a lot of living, as any man can read in that face of yours. And you don’t believe in the Isles of the Blest and all that medieval mist and moonshine.’

  ‘Maybe they had something we’ve lost. Maybe what they had is still left.’

  ‘In the Islands?’ He threw back his head and laughed. Then he stopped laughing and frowned over a new thought. ‘Well, you could be right at that. When I was – no matter where I was, but it was wild and woolly and the risks were high, but the money was a golden shower while it lasted – I used to dream about the old Norsemen. They were a bold and bloody bunch of hell raisers. But, you know, they were dreamers too. Look at a map and see where they took their longships: to the Faeroes and the Orkneys and Shetland and Iceland and Greenland and the coast of America, and down the rivers to Kiev. There are runic words on the floor of Santa Sofia in Istanbul – did you know that, now? – and they ruled the Hebrides till the middle of the thirteenth century, and half our beaches have Norse names, Tolsta and Seilebost and Taransay and Grjomaval. We’ve still got towheads and redbeards from their sirings and a memory that’s too mixed up with the Gael for our own good. You asked why I came back. There’s one reason. I was sick of the sun and the sweat that leaches all the salt out of a man’s blood. I wanted the dark water and the gale wind, and the deer in the high corries and the land that had to be made again, but could be made if a man put muscle and brains to work on it.’

  ‘So now you’ve got what you want.’

  ‘Not all of it, seannachie. But it’s coming. Meantime, I rove a little – and raid a little – and, if you want to stand well with the godly folk of the Lews, you’d best not spend too much time in my company.’

  ‘I’ll make up my own mind about that. What time do you expect to make Stornoway?’

  ‘If the wind holds, we’ll make it in eight hours under sail. Which means we’ll be home before the bars close. I’ll buy you a drink, find you a bed and introduce you to a little blond pigeon who’ll warm it for you any time you have a mind. And in the morning I’ll run you down to Tarbert to pick up your car. Meantime, you’ll do me a favour if you don’t mention this little meeting we’ll be having off the Shiants.’

  ‘That’s your business. I’d have no reason to discuss it.’

  He relaxed then. He perched himself on the coaming of the cockpit and began to read me, in companionable fashion, the lore of the northern seas. For all his quirky temper, there was a vein of poetry in him and a hypnotic lilt to his storytelling that matched the rhythm of the swell and the warm lift of the western wind.

  There were tales of the old whalers, and the fishing feuds and the seal hunters and wrecks in the great Atlantic gales. There were the legends of the giant Cochull Glas and the little dark pygmy men of Ness and the old, forgotten ones who raised the standing stones. There was the knowing of the sea birds, gannet and gull and fulmar, black guillemot and razorbill and Arctic tern. There were fishermen’s yarns, too, of the killer whale that could coast at thirty knots and the basking shark that could drag a boat for miles and him with a harpoon stuck in his dorsal muscles, of the grey seal with his Roman nose and his shy, segregate ways, and the mackerel shoals that made a whipcrack music when they ran through a flat summer sea.

  It was all rare and strange and wonderful, an ancient tapestry drawn between me and the world I had left behind. After a while I was drowsy with the wonder of it; so, when we had made our leg to the w
est and were reaching northward up the Minch, Red Ruarri took the wheel and sent me below to make a meal for us both.

  The cabin was clean and bright as a new penny. There were two bunks, each covered with waterproof vinyl, each with a head lamp and a bookshelf within arm’s reach of a resting man. There was a chart table, with a ship-to-shore radio above it. There was a big galley with a sink and a gimballed stove and a stool in gimbals for a rough-weather cook. Every movable article was bracketed, hooked, socketed so that it would not move even in the hardest blow. There was no bachelor clutter here, no shoddy carpentry. Every screw was tight, every lock oiled and secure. The pots were scoured, the cutlery was clean, even the dishcloths were rinsed white, and the head smelled fresh with disinfectant. Raw and randy and a rover he might be, but Red Ruarri the Mactire was a very systematic man. He ate well, too, and his liquor cupboard was stocked against the cold night watches.

  While the meal was heating, I stole a look at his books. Another surprise. Here was none of the dog-eared trash one found so often on a sailor’s bookrack. These were the books of a serious reader and a specialist at that. There was the Laing translation of The Olaf Sagas and The Sagas of the Norse Kings, Dasent’s version of The Tale of Burnt Njal, and an early edition of The Saga of the Men of Laxdale. There was Frank O’Connor on Irish Literature and a volume of the MacDonald Diaries on the folklore of the Lews, and a copy of Brøgger’s Ancient Emigrants. There were two grammars, one Norwegian, one Danish. Whatever he felt himself to be – homecoming Gael or throwback to the Norsemen – Ruarri Matheson was reading himself back to his origins; or was he reading them into himself to fill the vacuum of ten years’ exile? It was an interesting speculation, but I had no time to pursue it because the stew was coming to the boil and a hungry sailor was yelling down for his dinner and a mug of beer.

  I took the wheel while Ruarri fed himself, one-handed, cursing the while at his awkwardness. Then I ate my own meal and went below to tidy the galley. I was halfway through my chores when Ruarri yelled again. The Shiants were coming up ahead and his client was running down to meet us: an old-fashioned trawler, timber-built and belching brown smoke from very dirty diesels. I had to scramble then. Ruarri wanted the sails down and the fenders out. Then he took the wheel, while I handled the throttle and laid The Mactire alongside the trawlerman.

  I held her there with her engine idling while Ruarri went aboard the trawler. He was greeted by a burly fellow whom I took to be the skipper. Then they both disappeared below-decks. Ten minutes later Ruarri was back with a small leather satchel under his arm and a bottle of schnapps clasped in his fist. Then we were off again. When I had made sail and we were back on our northward heading, he poured me a shot of the schnapps and vouchsafed his only comment on the transaction.

  ‘Good fellow, Bollison. Twice as honest as most. Hard worker too. Trawls in the summer, hunts seal in the winter. That old tub doesn’t look much. She’s twenty years old, but he runs her up round the Arctic as if she were an icebreaker. I bought a half-share of her eighteen months ago and I’m in profit already.’

  ‘Where’s he off to now?’

  ‘West of the Isles. There are good herring grounds between Barra Head and Ireland. There’s cod, and whitefish, too, if he’s lucky.’

  We were back to fish stories again and I wanted to bait him. ‘So now you’re a shipping magnate.’

  He gave me a hostile look and then that facile smile. ‘You’re joking, seannachie, but you miss the point. In today’s world a man has to have one foot on the land, the other in the sea. The land’s for eating and for the capital gain and the national identity and all that, and for a place to retire when your sap dries out. But the sea’s the free place still, where the legislators can’t touch you, and the tax boys can’t read your private log, and your ship’s a kingdom, where no man has a right to set foot until the captain asks him. So long as you keep your nose clean in port, you get the best of every law and the worst of none. It’s the sea that feeds the oil refineries and the steel mills and the cotton spinners, and it’s the sea that’ll be feeding a hungry world when half the land is turned into a bloody desert.’

  ‘So what are you trying to make yourself, Ruarri? The Onassis of the Hebrides? Or an old-style Lord of the Isles?’

  He rose to that one, swift as a trout after a fly. ‘Maybe a little of each, maybe safer than both. Do you think I’m crazy?’

  ‘No. I just wonder where you see yourself at the end, when the sickness strikes, or the sap dries out as you said.’

  ‘And that’s the point you miss, seannachie! That’s what everyone misses. It’s the doing that matters to me, not the being. It’s the making that matters and not the thing made. Have you ever seen an Atlantic gale?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Then I’ll tell you how it comes – as it might come today – although it won’t because the glass will hold high for a while. But there’s the front first, cold sky, cirrocumulus, building and piling, until the wind hits and the sea rises and the spray starts freezing on your topsides. And there’s the boat and the crew and the sea, and yourself only to master them all. If you don’t master them, you’re dead. But if you do, there’s money in the bank – for another acre of sweet land, or the deposit on another boat – which gives you two chances next time – or a cargo that you can buy in Stockholm and sell at a profit some other place. That’s what the old Norsemen did. They were butchers in battle, but they were traders too. And they took England from the Saxons and Dublin from the Irish, and the Danes are still trading teak from Thailand, and you’re eating my haddock in Rome. Does that make sense or doesn’t it?’

  I had to admit it did. I had to admit that the doing of Red Ruarri the Mactire was infinitely more uplifting to the spirit than the bleak, meditative ennui into which I had lapsed for too long. But there was still another question I had to ask him.

  ‘It seems to me, Ruarri, you’re walking in another man’s shoes. Leverhulme tried to do exactly what you’re trying to do, and he owned the island! He was going to organize the fishing and the whaling and the spinning and the crofting, and he had a ready-made market for all the products, but he couldn’t bring it off, for all his millions.’

  It was obviously no new argument to Ruarri, because he had his answer pat and ready. ‘And do you know why? Because he owned the island but he didn’t belong. And he tried to do it in an old-fashioned way, the rich laird bending to confer favours on his fiefs. They wouldn’t have that and I don’t blame them. My way’s different. I’m one of them. I’m the son of Anne Matheson, over by Gisla, but I don’t know who my father is and I’ve given up caring. I’m the wild one, sure, and the boys who work with me are wild ones, too, but we belong. And though we attract envy, and the ministers and the missionaries don’t like us, we mean hope, too, because we’re staying and we’re making good and we’ve got lots of brass in the bank. One fine day, when you’re sick of fishing with Alastair Morrison, I’ll drive you out and show you what we’re doing with the peat land that’s been sour for centuries. Come with me on a trawl and I’ll show you what we’re doing there. Give me a couple more years and I’ll have myself a fleet like the Russians, with a mother ship to tend the small boats and process the catch. Lord of the Isles? Maybe that’s what I’d like to be – but in the old way. Brother to all and better than all. And when I marry, if I marry, it won’t be as Ruarri Matheson, the son of Anne Matheson. I’ll be Ruarri Mactire, with the name changed by deed poll, and my sons will be the sons of the Red Wolf. So how do you read me now, seannachie?’

  It was a bad moment and I was to blame for it. I had teased him into saying more than he intended and more than I wanted to hear. So I tried to put him off with a compliment.

  ‘I read you as a driving man, Ruarri, and I think you’ll probably get what you want – most of it, anyway.’

  ‘But you wonder what the drive is, don’t you? You wonder whether there isn’t a touch of madness in it somewhere?’

  ‘A touch of the visiona
ry, perhaps. But that’s no bad thing, is it?’

  ‘It’s a haunting thing, sometimes.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘It’s a lonely thing too. It’s the loneliness of memories that other men don’t have, of dreams that other men would hoot at if you told them. And it drives you to be more like them than they are themselves, to drink more, and chase more women, and take bigger risks, just so they’ll believe the dreaming in the end. Or have you lost me already?’

  ‘No. I just wonder how long you can live in other men’s skins as well as your own.’

  ‘As long as I need to, seannachie! As long as it takes to make ’em believers and followers and builders, instead of chattels with a social security number in place of a name.’

  ‘If you think you can bring it off, good luck to you. But don’t expect flowers for every homecoming and a loving cup every dinnertime.’

  He took time to digest that one. I could see the anger in him and I understood why they had given him his name. Then the bright, easy smile was back again. ‘You’re too clever by half, seannachie. I’m glad we’re friends, otherwise we’d be giving each other a hard time. That’s Kebock Head coming up to starboard. Call me when you have it abeam and I’ll lay the homeward course for you.’

  He went below then and I was grateful to be alone for a while. He was too combative for comfort, and I had come away to be private from other men’s quarrels. Yet there was something enormously attractive about him, a heroic dimension that set him apart from the grey townsmen and the shrill intellectuals who strutted so confidently in the twilight of a discredited citizen. There was a challenge in him too: a challenge to go adventuring, to break out of the closed frontiers and the crippling conformities, to measure oneself as a man against the primal elements and the tyrannies of a time out of joint.