Seonag and the Seawolves

by M. Evan MacGriogair

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  I know you’ve heard the story of An Duine Aonarach, who one day walked into the sea and never returned. And likely you have at least heard of Seonag as well, who did the same thing but to less collective memory.

  It’s been a long time since I’ve told a story, a ghràidh. It’s been a long time since I was our clan’s storyteller, but I think I’ve got one more in me, and I think it’s Seonag’s, because I remember her, and I’m the last one who does.

  The rest forgot, mostly because they wanted to.

  This is the story of Seonag and the wolves, and the wolves and the waves.

  She came to me, not so very long ago. She carried no bother on her about whether her people had forgotten her or not (they have), and she took no worries from her brief visit. But she did bring with her a warning.

  “Thoir an aire,” she said. “Thoir an aire a-rithist.”

  The simplest of warnings, really. Beware and beware again.

  I knew it was she the moment I saw her, even though what she has become is beyond what she once was. But that is for you to discover as I did.

  So let us begin. Come closer, for my voice weakens and soon will not be here at all.

  * * *

  Seonag is born on a day where the clouds race each other across the sky. They pile up, layer upon layer, like a stampede of red deer in the glen. Like the deer, the clouds that day kick mist into the air, only down and not up, and the mist falls lightly upon Beinn Ruigh Choinnich.

  It is low tide. The sea has drawn its breath to wait for her.

  Seonag is born on Là Buidhe Bealltainn as the women go out into the mist under that jumble of clouds to wash their faces in the morning dew.

  It is not dew that covers Seonag at her birth. It is more alive than that.

  And yet the midwife brings in a sprig of heather, flicking a tick from the sprig into the fire. The wind through the open door dries the sweat on Seonag’s mother’s brow. The midwife lets the winter-aged and browned bells dust their dew across the newborn’s, melding with the blood and the birth fluids, a shock of cool water after the heat of the womb and the birth canal and the smoldering peat fire, and Seonag opens her eyes wide.

  Somewhere the cuthag begins to call its gù-gù, gù-gù, and the midwife hurriedly dips a finger in ewe’s milk and places it against the lips of the baby to break Seonag’s fast before the bird can finish delivering its news of ill luck.

  This is a lot for Seonag’s first moments.

  Upon seeing the place she has just been thrust into, Seonag looks around. And then she goes to sleep.

  It is as if this world has already shown her all its faces, and she is just born and tired of it.

  This doesn’t change as Seonag grows older. Where the clouds raced each other on the morning of her birth, whispers race each other through the villages, from Loch Baghasdail to Dalabrog to Cill Donnain as she grows into an infant, and then a child, and then an adolescent.

  She is peculiar, they say.

  They think she does not hear them, because she is out of earshot.

  Seonag is beautiful the way the each-uisge is beautiful. She has no rosy cheeks or hardiness in her features, though she is hardy enough (she has to be, to survive on our island). But some say that that first touch of dew meant to bring beauty came at the wrong moment, or at the wrong hands, or at the wrong time. It is the early dawn of early summer when she is born, the sky lightening after only just having darkened—it was the in-between time, and Seonag becomes an in-between person. Like the water-horse, the people fear she will lure them off to drown.

  Sometimes Seonag sings when she is cutting peat in the springtime. Her voice unnerves the crofters and the fisherfolk who lift their own at the cèilidhean. Seonag never sings at a cèilidh.

  For all that, you will think that Seonag is not of this world, and I must assure you: she is.

  She feels those whispers even when she does not hear them. She wants to sing at the cèilidhean. Seonag wants to build a house for herself and cut peats with her own hands and work the machair like her father and mother. As Seonag grows into an adult, she learns the waterways of Uibhist the way she learns the waterways of her own body, and she loves this land.

  Remember that.

  * * *

  When Seonag has just passed her twenty-fifth year, her parents board a ship to Canada.

  Seonag is meant to go with them. They can no longer afford their rent for their croft.

  Instead, Seonag hides in the cleft of the glen, weeping softly as her tears drip into the bog under a sharp bright sky.

  After she has dried her face with the folds of her dress, she comes to visit my father.

  My father is Tormod Mòr, Tormod Mac Raghnaill ‘ic Aois ‘ic Dhòmhnaill, Tormod the Bard, Tormod Ruadh—sometimes I think my father collected a name for every year he lived.

  I see Seonag coming that day. I am some few years younger than her, and I’ve only ever really seen her in glimpses. I tell my father she’s coming when I see her crest the rise in the road.

  “Tha Seonag Bhàn a’ tighinn,” I say.

  My father leaves the Gaelic where I put it and answers in English, because he is trying to teach me. “Don’t call her that.”

  My father is a big man (hence that first name), but Seonag came to her far-ainm in a way I often forget. Bàn means fair, and while she is pale, her hair is black like a crow’s feathers and shines like them besides. It is a small cruel joke, one at the behest of Dòmhnall Geur (who is known for small cruel jokes throughout our island) and one I still don’t understand. I am a wee bit infatuated with Seonag. I also don’t quite understand that.

  “I thought she was gone,” I say softly. English feels wrong in my mouth. It lives in a different part of it.

  My father understands both my infatuation and my words even if I do not. He also looks out the window and understands Seonag.

  He opens the door before she can raise her hand to knock. He speaks Gaelic to her, even if he only speaks English to me.

  “Madainn mhath, a Sheonag,” he greets her.

  “Madainn mhath, a Thormoid,” she says as if she did not just let her parents sail across an ocean without her. “Ciamar a tha sibh?”

  “Tha i teth,” Father says. “Fosgail an uinneag, a Chaluim.”

  This last is to me, and it is a dismissal. I open the window as he asked, letting in the cooler air. And then I set myself in the corner to mend a net and listen, pushing their Gaelic words into English so I can prove to my father that I’m doing two useful things instead of one, if he asks (he won’t).

  “I had no expectation of seeing you here still,” Father says.

  “I had the expectation of leaving,” says Seonag.

  She sits on a
small stool by the peat fire. Her eyes are the color of that mòine, of that peat, and she does not use them to look at me. She looks at the peat instead.

  Seonag puts her head in her hands.

  “The ship has gone to its sailing already,” my father tells her softly.

  “That is why I am here.” Seonag looks up.

  I watch as breath moves her stomach, filling it. She holds her left hand out to the fire. And then she begins to speak.

  “This is my home, a Thormoid,” she says. “Even if you or anyone else think I do not belong. There is nowhere else for me.”

  “There could perhaps have been a life for you in Canada.”

  “My life is here.” She says it with the heat of the fire, that low burning smolder that will not be put out, and she glances toward the open window as if she is looking through it and down through the years that have not yet had the chance to touch her.

  My fingers still on the net in my lap and I hear her words in Gaelic as she said them and not how I clumsily pasted English on them. ‘S ann a-bhos a tha mi beò. It is here I am alive.

  “There will be more ships,” Father tells her. “Full of more people. The rents are too high and the food too scarce. Death will find us in Uibhist. You may yet change your mind.”

  She will not change her mind. Anger reaches tendrils across the floor from Seonag to me, and now she does meet my eyes, as if I summoned her. I feel something like indignation and fury meld together on my face, and to my absolute shock, Seonag smiles at me. Her teeth do not show. Her lips are straight and even, despite the expression.

  I am seen and understood. I will never forget this moment.

  “Very well,” my father says in English, looking back and forth between us. I think he knows that in this moment, my allegiance has shifted. “In that case, I think I should tell you of the wolves of Uibhist.”

  “Ach chan eil mic-thìre ann an-seo, Athair!” I fall into Gaelic and hurriedly say in English, “But there aren’t wolves here!”

  My father smiles in the way of parents who know more than a child who assumes, in childish folly, that they know more than their parents. That smile turns back in on itself much like that sentence.

  He holds up his hand, watching Seonag. “Ah, but there are madaidhean-allaidh.”

  Madadh-allaidh, faol, sitheach, faol-chù—they are all words for wolf. This is why I need my Gaelic. My father has used these words as though he means there is a difference and in English there would be none. What is it that he means?

  Seonag is now watching my father, too.

  My father is a bard, and I almost expect him to sing. But he does not sing. Instead, he goes to Seonag, kneels at her feet, and takes her hands in his.

  “Listen,” he says.

  And I know neither Seonag nor I intend to do anything else.

  * * *

  It was two hundred years ago that we chased the wolves from Scotland, two hundred years, they say, since the last wolf howl was heard, but sometimes, just sometimes, in the Western Isles beyond the Minch, you will hear a sad and stolid song. In Steòrnabhagh, perhaps, in Leòdhas. Or in Èirisgeigh when the moon is healthy and bright, or in Beinn na Faoghla, or the Uibhist to the north.

  I have never heard their voices, when Father begins to talk. I have thought the tales of their howls were only their ghosts, or the songs of selkies twisted by the gales.

  “When the hunters come, it is their job to move through the land and push their prey out in front of them,” Father says. “They will go from place to place, here and there, over and under, yonder and back. They will seek out their prey and while their minds will be heavy upon it, the object that they seek will not be of consequence.”

  Father is telling two stories at once. This is a power of his that I envy.

  The wind coming through the open window is cold, but I cannot get up from my seat to close it. The net in my lap holds me faster than a fish in the sea—or perhaps what holds me is Seonag’s face.

  “Hunters who hunt only to kill all have that in common. They seek no nourishment from it. They have a wider goal, and a narrower. It is prey that understands their minds that can survive. The wolves understood. The wolves scented the hunters on the wind and they found their survival in the waters.” Father pauses. For a moment his cheeks are slack, the weathered lines curved instead of taut, his jaw hanging although his lips are closed. When he speaks again, his lips part audibly. “They will have your answers, a Sheonag.”

  “The wolves.” Seonag looks at me over my father’s shoulder where he still kneels on the floor. “In the water.”

  She sits up even straighter, body tight; I could likely use her spine to draw a straight line against the wall.

  I know that tightness. Even in my glimpses of her throughout the years, I have seen it. I’ve seen it when Dòmhnall Geur calls her Seonag Bhàn, I have seen it when she turns away with her wares at the shops and knows she leaves whispers in her wake, and I have seen it when I caught sight of her in the glen, when she was mid-song and her voice died at the sight of me. I swallow.

  “How am I to get answers from wolves when even their hunters have no words of kindness for me and I am neither wolf nor hunter myself?” She asks the question in a low tone, the lilt of her words in English almost sarcasm.

  I do not know what I expect from my father in this moment, but whatever it is, it’s quite something else that I get.

  He gets to his feet and points to the west, toward where the ship would be sailing off with Seonag had she gotten on it, toward the open sea.

  “If you came to me for advice, this is what I can tell you,” my father says. “You will go to the west, into the water, and swim until you can’t see land. You will pass Heisgeir. Do not come close to it. You must keep swimming until you hear them. Only then will it be safe to seek land.”

  “Is this a joke?” Seonag is completely shuttered now, and my fingers have given over any guise of mending this net.

  What is my father doing?

  Tormod Mòr, Tormod Mac Raghnaill ‘ic Aois ‘ic Dhòmhnaill, Tormod the Bard, Tormod Ruadh—for all my father’s many names, right now I do not know him. He shrugs once and goes to shut the window.

  “You could have had a new life in Canada,” he says.

  It is then I see that he is angry.

  He is angry at Seonag, but I do not understand why. He loves this land. He drinks its waters and taught me how to recognize the eggs of the cuthag where they push them into the nests of other birds. When I look at him looking at Seonag, I wonder if he sees her as a cuthag, thrust into his nest when he expected only eggs of his own.

  But this is Seonag’s story, not my father’s.

  She gets up from her seat quietly. Seonag leaves without looking at me.

  My father stares after her, his expression like the lochans before the stirring of the breeze. I get to my feet and run after Seonag.

  “Wait,” I say, just as she reaches the edge of the heather.

  Seonag looks at me once, then out to the west. The sun is trying to burn off the mist this morning, but I have a feeling Seonag sees all the way through it. I am nineteen to her twenty-five, and in this moment she has a lifetime on me. I follow her gaze to the sea where my father just told her to swim to her death.

  “My granny’s house,” I say. The words tumble from my lips like drips of wax over the edge of a candle. “You could go there. It’s just on the edge of the machair.”

  It comes upon me that I do not know what Seonag can do to live, alone, with few friends (am I her friend?) and no husband, and in that moment the urge to propose to her nearly overtakes me. It renders me so confused that I forget what I was saying about my granny’s house.

  “Tapadh leat,” she says, her voice the equivalent of my father’s expression.

  And then she leaves, and my gut twists itself into a semblance of the tangled net I threw on the floor to catch her. Just before she goes out of sight around a hillock, though, she looks once over her shoulder
at me, a sad smile painted with one brush stroke on her lips.

  * * *

  I am filled with anger.

  At the time, I thought this was my story. I was wrong. It was hers. It is still her story. I am merely a player in it, and what happened to me next is also what happened to her.

  I spend an hour walking by the edge of Loch na Liana Mhòire before I return home. When I do, I hear voices through the open-again window.

  One voice is my father’s, naturally.

  The other is Dòmhnall Geur’s.

  “It is to you to report her,” Dòmhnall Geur says. “She cannot be allowed to stay like a ghost, stealing from crops and honest working people.”

  “You have decided this will be her future, then?” My father’s voice is that wry, flat calm I know too well.

  “She has no land or husband or property; what is it you think she will resort to?”

  “She may make another choice.”

  I know my father is referring to the wolves, to these creatures that do not even exist. At this moment I think the only wolves in Uibhist a Deas are the two men in my house.

  “And what is that, a Thormoid? Are you going to marry her? Or perhaps Calum will—I’ve seen his eyes on her. She will drain the life from your boy; it would be best for your sake to keep him from her.”

  I have never known Dòmhnall Geur to have a kind word for anyone who was not currently licking his boots. His words are too close to my own thoughts this time, and I slink back farther from the window to avoid being seen.

  “I told her of the wolves.”

  Dòmhnall Geur does not scoff. He goes quiet. “And you expect her to believe this tale.”

  Dòmhnall Geur believes this tale. I hear it in his words.

  “‘S dòcha,” says my father.

  My father believes Seonag will believe it.

  Which means my father truly does believe it.

  I hear the crack of Dòmhnall Geur’s knuckles and can picture the expression on his face even though I cannot see it. His weak chin does nothing to reduce the harsh lines of his cheeks. His lips he holds at a constant half-sneer except when he has made a decision—usually one few will like—and then light reaches his eyes as if causing harm to others is the one thing that brings him joy.