by Dan Boothby
‘He used to be something in London,’ Ewan murmured.
The owner hailed Ewan, shook my hand. He seemed unsure of me, or farouche.
‘He lives on Kyleakin Lighthouse Island,’ Ewan explained. ‘Where Gavin Maxwell used to live.’
‘Oh yes?’ the owner said, vaguely interested. ‘We went to see Maxwell at his house down at Sandaig once. A strange fellow, I thought. He had some very strange friends too.’
The owner left us. Ewan unloaded gear from the Land Rover.
‘I’ve got this for you,’ he said, handing me a deerstalker. ‘It breaks up your profile on the hill.’
I’d brought a stick, walking boots and gaiters, an old waxed jacket, binoculars, and lunch.
‘Otherwise you’re dressed fine. It’s a long walk up.’
He shouldered a rifle case and a knapsack and we started up the side of the hill. The mountains above us cast a shadow over the fairytale turrets below. We slowly traversed the hillside.
‘I’ve travelled a fair bit myself,’ Ewan said. ‘China, America. I take my lads with me. Aye, we’ve seen some of the world.’
I thought at first this was mentioned defensively but, in contrast to many of the white settlers I had met, Ewan was comfortable in himself. He was happy to tell about his life and family and the more we blethered as we climbed, stopping now and then to rest, the more Ewan told.
‘When I was seventeen I got a job on a boat out of Kyle. Johnny Ach, you know, the harbourmaster in Kyle, got me the job. It wasn’t much of a job but it was money and we sailed down to England. I signed off the boat and worked a year or so down there, the usual – labouring, factory work, manual, unskilled. Then one day my dad phoned. He’d always worked on the railway, driving the trains between Kyle and Inverness. There was a job going as a train driver alongside him. He told me to come home. So I came back. I got married and we had kids straightaway. They’ve left school now, one’s a ghillie and the other’s an apprentice butcher.’
Driving trains seemed to me a dull job, trundling along the same length of track all week; like lorry driving, only worse because you were always passing the exact same places. Ewan’s obvious contentment with such a dull occupation depressed me a little.
‘Naw, it’s a good job! And the salary’s very good for up here.’
He told me how much he was earning.
‘Aye, I get by,’ he smiled. ‘And the trip changes with the seasons. There’s always something to see. The colours change, there’re eagles and deer along the way, walkers on the hills, rainbows, snow, all kinds of weather. I’m busy and well paid. I take my leave over the stalking season. I wouldn’t want it any other way. I’m lucky, and more than that, I’ve got the sense to know it.’
Ewan took paying guests out to ‘bag a stag’.
‘Some are arrogant, but most are fine. There’s good and bad everywhere. On the hill most of us are looking for the same thing.’
The guests paid well and were an important source of income. A Highland estate seems a grandiose, extravagant plaything: the preserve of the very rich; and of course it is. A rich man’s folly, for most estates run at a loss. And the Highland Clearances – which by the mass eviction of Highland families created these estates – were a crime. The remains of those settlements can still be seen in forgotten glens: stone walls and the outline of blackhouses – bumps on the ground under turf. North America was peopled by the refugees from these pogroms, many left by ship from the pier at Isleornsay. The hands on the world’s clock turn. Those settlements won’t be rebuilt, the emigrants won’t be returning. The past, like the Caledonian Forest, is gone forever. There is no going back. Today, whatever else we may think about the people who own them, Highland estates provide employment for local people and bring money into the local community.
Ewan knew everyone in the villages around Kyle. I told him what one of the locals had said one evening in the Lochalsh Hotel.
‘Where do you belong?’ she’d asked, and I couldn’t tell her. ‘Where are you from?’ or ‘Where do you live?’ was easy, but as to where I belonged . . . So I’d asked the woman where she belonged.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I belong down at Killilan in Kintail. It’s a small place. There were a few houses there when I was small – all gone – and an Arab owns the Killilan estate now, but I live in Kyleakin, since a long time.’
I understood the difference, but I still hadn’t an answer for her.
Ewan and I rested for a moment, looking out from the shadow of the mountain down to the frost-sparkled pasture and sunlit lochans far below. A car sped along a black road that ran parallel to the mountainside, the timbre of its tyres deepening for a second as it zipped across a cattle grid. Three or four smallholdings ran in a neighbourly line along the roadside.
‘My family are from there,’ Ewan said, pointing at the crofts with his stick. ‘My dad was the stalker here before me, and my granddad before him. It was a different country up here, even just a few years ago. A lot’s changed. Donald John used to be the shepherd here. He lived in that byre we passed.’ A derelict barn, its frameless window sockets open to the wind and rain, its floor knee-deep in compacted sheep droppings.
‘He slept on a platform above the sheep and at night the heat coming off them kept him warm. He had nothing really. No one did, except the landowners. When my parents were getting married my dad came up the hill to ask Donald John to their wedding. Donald said he wouldn’t go but wouldn’t give a reason. So my mum went to him and eventually he said it was because he didn’t have the suit to go in. My dad went back to him. “If I get you the suit, will you come?” Donald said he wasn’t sure, what with the sheep to look after and so many things to get done while the weather held. But my parents got him the suit anyway and took it to him and Donald went to the wedding. After the dancing he kissed my mother and said he’d not have missed it for the world. We buried him in that suit.’
‘Talking of sheep,’ I said, ‘I was walking along the Plockton road once in a bit of a bad mood and passed a load of sheep. “Look at you,” I said to the nearest one, “by God you’re stupid,” and as one they all stopped chewing and glared at me. Spooked me, it did. I apologized immediately and they all turned away and got chewing again.’
‘Aye,’ Donald chuckled, ‘they’re not as glaikit as some suppose.’
We passed an Argo – an all-terrain amphibious vehicle with outsize knobbly tyres. We were approaching the summit now and we walked in silence.
Ewan slowed his pace, extended an arm and motioned that we stop. We dropped into the heather.
Following Ewan’s lead, I put my binoculars to my eyes. We were high now and looked over the tops of the mountains on the other side of the glen to the mountains beyond. The sun had breached the crest of the hill we’d been climbing and shone on moorland some distance away. Three hinds lazed in the sun, chewing the cud, their backs to us, looking towards the other side of the glen. I ranged my binoculars right. A stag was swaggering crazily, strutting about near the hinds.
‘See him?’ whispered Ewan. ‘A seven- . . . eight-pointer.’
Between us and the deer lay muddy peat hag and bog.
Ewan slid his rifle from its case, checked it and slid it back.
‘Keep behind me. The wind is coming from them to us. They can’t smell us.’
We scrambled around the peat hags, bent low, moving slow, keeping an eye on the deer. The hinds remained oblivious. The stag trotted towards the hinds. The hinds stood.
‘He’s getting ready to have a go at one of the hinds. We’ve to be quick.’
We moved forward and came to a neck-high bank. Ewan crouched and withdrew the rifle from its case. I squatted. Ewan rose and fired two rounds.
‘I’m sorry,’ Ewan said, turning to me, ‘I wasn’t thinking. Did you want . . . ?’
I stood and saw the fallen stag, the hinds cantering away.
‘No. I’d have missed,’ I said. ‘You’re the stalker.’
‘It was a clean sho
t. He was going for a hind, full of testosterone and adrenalin. He wouldn’t have felt a thing.’
The stag was massive. A strong musky smell, not unpleasant, thick and heavy, hung in the air. I stood by his antlers, his majestic head. Ewan poked one of the open eyes with his stick. ‘It’s best to check. Beautiful, isn’t he?’
I knelt and brushed a hand across the warm pelt, matted from rolling in peat hags.
‘It’s one of those things. You only get close to the beast by killing him.’
He pulled a knife from his knapsack, felt his way along the belly and slid the knife in. Steaming entrails spilled into the heather.
‘Gralloching. It’ll give the ravens something to eat after we’re gone.’ He finished the gutting and bound the stag’s back legs together with rope from his knapsack.
‘I’ll get the Argo and we can drive him part-way, then I’ll drag him the rest of the way down the hill. We do the butchering down at the lodge. You’ll stay here?’
I sat on the heather beside the stag and drank from my flask. I breathed in the musk and the slight sweet smell of the entrails. Flies flew in.
‘Poor old bastard,’ I whispered. ‘None of us know when it’s coming.’
In the Land Rover, driving back to Kyle, Ewan said, ‘Do you know what the meaning of life is, Dan?’
Of course I didn’t.
‘For me it’s stalking.’ He indicated the mountains surrounding us. ‘You see all this, the hills and lochs and burns, more than a hundred square miles of it? It’s mine.’
He let out a laugh.
‘Of course it’s not mine really. But in a way, it is. I walk it every year. I know where the golden eagles’ and the ravens’ nests are. I know the deer. I know its birds, its plants, where the badgers and foxes and otters are. I know it better than anyone; better even than the “owner”. Stalking gives me that. Gives me life.’
Once, during a calm period of my own life, I went to a wedding where I sat for a time chatting drunkenly with a young woman, a stranger to me. I told her what I was doing with my days just then, and enthused about how completely contented I was with my lot. I thought she’d be pleased for me – so many people are just struggling on – but she wasn’t. She was disbelieving, became bitter, then stomped off. You can keep your contentment, she implied, and you can shove it. I didn’t understand. I hadn’t been crowing, just sharing. Shouldn’t we have been rejoicing?
I envied Ewan, his knowing where he belonged. I hadn’t a clue.
Ewan dropped me off at the island and went to Kyle to fetch his wife. It was still early afternoon. When they returned we stood in the sun for a while, gazing down the loch to the Kintail hills.
‘We used to come here when we were kids,’ Ewan said. ‘We’d sail or row across from Kyle and annoy the lighthouse keepers. They always kept a visitors’ book at the top of the lighthouse and when we arrived we had to sign it.’
‘Did you ever come here when Gavin Maxwell lived here?’ I asked.
Ewan shook his head. ‘It was all “Private! Keep Out!”’ Ewan’s wife said. ‘It put a lot of people’s backs up.’
I showed them around the island. Looking at the photographs in the Long Room, Ewan’s wife said, ‘He was always with young boys, Maxwell, wasn’t he though?’
‘Not so young,’ I said. I hadn’t quite made up my mind about all that.
That evening I drove over to Skye to see Susan Browning and her husband. (‘A pederast!’ the husband proclaimed when the subject of Maxwell came up.) I couldn’t tell them about the stalking; I knew they’d disapprove. The scent of the stag’s pelt lingered on my fingers, like the trace of sex. As we ate dinner, whenever I lifted food to my mouth I could smell it.
Susan told me she’d resigned from the Trust. She was tired and felt she’d done enough. She planned to dedicate more time to her art and gardening. There’d be someone else looking after the visitors’ centre and the house lettings when everything reopened at Easter. Susan looked younger that evening, smiling and laughing, and after dinner she became expansive – enthusing about the wildlife that visited her garden, about the blackbird that pecked impatiently at the kitchen window whenever she or her husband were tardy in putting out food for it, about their new life in the Highlands.
‘And a decision has been made,’ she told me. ‘You can stay on the island if you wish. The trustees are very pleased with what you’ve achieved. But actually,’ she added, ‘it was so bad before, they couldn’t fail to notice a difference.’
There’d been a vote. The Trust still couldn’t pay me a salary but grant applications were being prepared. With luck, money would come for renovations and improvements to the visitors’ centre and the island, maybe even for salaries. What did I think?
I had savings to last me a year, if I were careful. I sang as my car bounced over the hills back to the island and I slept very little that night, kept awake as I was by possibilities running through my mind.
With no one booked to stay in the cottage until Christmas and the tours finished for the year, it seemed a good time to get on with some major repair work to the house. The bathroom needed replastering and the kitchen and bedrooms repainting. Wind-driven rain had soaked through exterior mortar and brickwork. The plasterboard wall above the gable-end fireplace in the Long Room was bubbled and falling apart; that whole end of the house needed drying out.
I was lying on the sofa in my room when a shadow fell across the book I was reading. Sandy’s rosy face loomed large as he put a hand to the half-window door and peered in.
The first thing he said to me was: ‘Bit of a playboy, wasn’t he, Maxwell? A toff. Liked to play the big man. All those racing cars and Mercs, trips abroad, nice flat in the posh part of London paid for by Mummy. He’s not so well remembered round here, not from what I’ve heard.’
The second thing he said was: ‘Oh good, someone with a decent coffee-maker. Cold day, brrr . . .’ One of the trustees had talked him into carrying out the repairs to the house. He’d come over to see what needed doing, brrr . . .
‘Oh, would you li—?’
‘Milk and two sugars’ll be fine.’
He sniffed, looked around, studying the contents of my room.
‘Treated some people round here very badly, Maxwell did,’ Sandy said. ‘Always tardy settling his accounts with local tradesmen. Funny bugger, sounds like.’
And Maxwell was a funny bugger. I’d read he was neurotic, and manic-depressive, bedevilled. And queer. His attempt at marriage laughably brief, and rather tragic. I suspected that if he liked you or respected you, or could make use of you, he made time for you, otherwise you were nobody. But what did I really know? Only what I’d read in books and surmised. I’d never met the man. My imaginings of Gavin Maxwell’s personality traits were just that, imaginings. And we are all forever changing our masks to suit circumstance, busy keeping our other rooms out of sight.
Sandy leant against the sink and swigged his coffee.
‘I’ve never been on the island before.’
‘Would you like to have a look around, Sandy?’ I said.
‘Aye. Please. Always wanted to have a shufti but it’s always been like, “Keep Out!” No-one likes that attitude up here. Too English.’
He swilled the last of his coffee and washed up the cup. I followed him out the door.
‘How’s your little boat?’ he asked. ‘You hardly ever see a dinghy out and about anymore. Used to be awash with boats, the Hebrides – post boats and passenger ships, ferries where they’ve now put bridges, fishing boats. Now everyone drives everywhere. Nobody’s got any time to dawdle.’
‘It’s all changed,’ I said.
‘Almost all.’
I showed Sandy the area behind the cottage where the aviary had been and where the ghosts were said to walk on winter evenings.
‘Seen any?’
‘Not yet.’
We walked on down the cobbled path.
‘They could do so much with this place. That lighthouse
you’ve got there is the most accessible Stevenson lighthouse in the whole of the British Isles. Its historic importance is phenomenal. But nobody’s allowed on the island to visit it.’
‘That’s not true,’ I said, ‘The tours—’
‘The tours . . . Pah! Not everyone wants a guided tour. Most people just want to visit the lighthouse.’
I disagreed. ‘All sorts of people come here. Maxwell fans, otter fans, birdwatchers, local-history buffs, tourists just looking for something to do, and yes, lighthouse enthusiasts, and locals.’
‘Well, otters are everywhere up here,’ Sandy said. ‘As for Maxwell fans . . . such people exist? No. The main focus of the Kyleakin Lighthouse Island Trust should be the Stevenson lighthouse and the story of the lighthouse keepers.’
I’d had similar conversations. Everyone had a view on how the island should be used, skewed by their own interests. Repeat visitors to the island often buttonholed me with a list of things they thought needed improving. Sandy was no different in this respect.
I unlocked the door to the lighthouse and we climbed the stairs to the service room and clambered out onto the balcony. We were sixty feet up, the island spread out beneath us under grey skies, and encircling the island that 360° vista of mountain and sea. A car kerlumped over the bridge.
‘Living here,’ I said, ‘it’s a twenty-year dream come true.’
‘It’s a fine place, right enough.’
Sandy ambled out of sight round the balcony. Being up high – up a mountain or a hill, or a lighthouse – calms me, a tonic for my soul. I walked round to join Sandy.
‘Look,’ he said quietly, ‘out there by the green buoy. See it? Swimming this way?’
The otter swam underwater for a time, surfaced, glanced around, dived. The wind blew our scent far away over the sea; the otter had no idea it was being observed. It swam to the base of the lighthouse beneath us and slipped out of the sea to lollop along the rocks before lifting its rump to spraint. Then it slipped back into the sea and swam, porpoising, past the slipway. We stood gripping the railing and peering down into the bay until the otter swam out of view.
