The Hill of the Red Fox (4 page)

I suppose he must have popped up suddenly from behind a dip in the ground below the road, but I never knew for certain.

He was wearing a faded blue denim jacket over a fisherman’s jersey, torn army trousers tucked into homespun stockings, and big tackety boots. Everything about him was long and lean, and I noticed how all the lines of his face drooped downwards, as if his mouth had long since forgotten how to lift in a smile. Even his dog had a lean and hungry look. It sniffed around my heels, but every time I moved it slunk away, its ears down and its tail between its legs. It was only when I shifted my feet again that I realized it had crept back to sniff my legs. Like its master, it had acquired the art of moving silently, unobserved.

My eyes wandered back to the man’s face. He had a long thin face, and his arms were so long that his hands seemed to hang loosely below his knees, but this may have been due to the forward stoop of his shoulders. He had small, almost colourless eyes, deeply set below bushy, sandy eyebrows, and a jutting beak of a nose. He took off his cap, and settled it firmly on his head, and I caught a glimpse of wispy red hair. But the stubble on his chin was white, and he looked as if he had not shaved for a week.

He stood in the centre of the road, plucking at his long upper lip, his eyes fixed on a point above my left shoulder. I knew who he was before he spoke, and from the very start I disliked him.

I suppose only a minute could have passed from the time I first saw him until he spoke, although it seemed longer.

“Well, Alasdair,” he said, and his great paw of a hand swallowed mine in a brief clasp that had neither warmth nor friendship.

There was an awkward silence, and I had the feeling he was fumbling for the right words.

“I am Murdo Beaton,” he went on, “your father’s cousin.”

“Yes,” I said, not caring if he thought me rude, knowing only that I was tired and lonely and miserable.

He picked up my case without another word, and set off across the moor in long, slow strides. He did not seem to hurry but I was almost running as I tried to keep up with him.

I picked my way as best I could, trying to step from one tuft of heather to another, but now and then I stumbled into a wet patch of bog and sank in up to my ankles. Before we had gone twenty yards my feet were soaked.

We crossed a swiftly flowing burn by means of a single wooden plank lashed to an iron stanchion with tying wire. The ground grew rougher and there were heathery hillocks, bright green patches of sphagnum moss and tiny streams bubbling through the bog. We skirted a long straight peat cutting with an exposed face of black wet peat fully five feet deep. There was a tiny lake at the bottom of the cutting where the water had collected.

Murdo Beaton led the way up an earthen bank topped by two strands of barbed wire, and we jumped down across a drain and were on to firmer ground. The grassland sloped steeply upwards, cut by the long fingers of parallel open drains.

There were five houses spread out at intervals across the top of the hill, and he saw my eyes on them.

“This is Achmore,” he said. “We are at the foot of the crofts now.”

“Which is my house?” I cried, suddenly excited.

He glanced at me directly for the first time, and I sensed the smouldering resentment in those small pale eyes, but all he said was, “It cannot be seen from here.”

We climbed steadily, moving away from the other houses in a diagonal line. When we were level with them we topped a rise in the ground and there, in a sheltered hollow hidden from all the other houses in Achmore, I saw the cottage where I was born.

It seemed to grow out of the ground as naturally as the clump of rowan trees beside it. The cottage was built of unhewn mortarless grey stone, and the thatched roof was secured against the fury of
the winter winds by a covering of wire netting. Large stones were tied to the netting at intervals of a few feet, so that it was firmly anchored. The walls of the cottage sloped slightly inwards and the corners were rounded. Two deep-set, foot-square windows peered towards the main road, like empty eye-sockets. A thin line of smoke curled up from the single chimney-pot, and I sniffed the fragrant, never-to-be-forgotten smell of burning peat.

Murdo Beaton ducked his long frame under the massive slab of stone forming the door lintel, and I followed him through the tiny lobby into the kitchen.

It was dim in the kitchen, and I stumbled over the uneven stone flags of the floor. He gestured me towards the long wooden bench under the window, and I sat down and glanced around the room.

The walls were lined with rough boards, which had probably been painted once long ago, but were now darkly stained with peat smoke. There was a plain deal table opposite the open-topped black range, and two home-made wooden chairs on either side of the fire, and a small cupboard facing me against the opposite wall, and that was all.

Two tin tea caddies stood on the mantelpiece in the centre of which hung the faded printed text
GOD IS LOVE
. Murdo Beaton leaned against the mantelpiece, picking his teeth with the end of a matchstick.

There was a rough wooden door in the far corner, leading into another room, and an old woman shuffled through it. She was wearing a shapeless black gown and had a woollen scarf tied round her head, and I had never before seen anyone who looked so old. Her face seemed to have shrunk, so that the skin hung around her cheeks in sagging wrinkles. She took no notice of me but sat down in a chair by the fire, and I noticed with a start of surprise that she was wearing men’s boots.

Murdo Beaton spoke to her in Gaelic, and she got up, muttering to herself. She took a plate from inside the cupboard and filled it with soup from the iron pot over the fire.

He picked up the other wooden chair and set it in to the table.

“Take your food, boy,” he said. “There is nothing great here, mind you. We are poor folk in this place with nothing fancy in the way o’ food or anything else. But eat up. Dulse soup is good for you.”

I sat in to the table, protesting feebly that I was sure it was very good soup, and waited for him to join me. But he sat down on the bench and I realized that I was expected to eat alone.

The soup was greasy and sickly, and the taste of the dulse turned my stomach. But I willed myself to eat it, and swallowed each mouthful quickly, determined not to show my distaste.

When I had finished, I heard him speak to the old woman again, and she placed an enormous dish of boiled potatoes on the table and a plate of cold meat. I helped myself to potatoes. They had been cooked in their skins and I sat looking at them, not quite sure how to proceed.

I could feel Murdo Beaton’s eyes on the back of my neck, and I felt the colour rising in my cheeks.

“Maybe you don’t like potatoes in their jackets, boy?” he said.

“No, I like them like that,” I replied, and plunged my knife into one of them and proceeded to eat it, skin and all.

I think that was the most uncomfortable meal I have ever had. It was worse than my birthday treat, when Aunt Evelyn took my mother and me to lunch in a smart restaurant, and I upset my soup plate over Aunt Evelyn’s new spring dress.

The old woman never spoke, but I could hear her shuffling around the room, muttering to herself. Once I dropped my knife and the sound of it clattering on the plate was so unnaturally loud in the silence of the room that I felt I had done something wrong, like laughing aloud during the silence on Remembrance Day. And all the time, although he never spoke, I knew that Murdo Beaton’s eyes were on me.

I had almost finished when the door opened and a girl came quickly into the room. She was small and dark and I could see no resemblance to Murdo Beaton in her eager brown face, although I guessed she must be his daughter. She stopped suddenly when she caught sight of me, and seemed about to speak, when Murdo
Beaton said something to her in Gaelic. She turned at once, with a final quick glance in my direction and went out of the room.

I finished my meal, and pushed the chair back from the table. Murdo Beaton was still sitting on the bench, but when I turned round his eyes were no longer on me. He offered no explanation for the girl’s sudden disappearance, but sat plucking at his long upper lip, gazing into space. The old woman was huddled forward in her chair, muttering to herself, and I wondered if anybody ever spoke in this house.

I was determined to break the awful silence.

“Was that your daughter?” I asked.

His eyes wandered to a spot above my left shoulder.

“Yes, that was Mairi,” he said, and added, “She has gone to fetch home the cows for milking.”

I wondered if he had sent her away deliberately, so that I could not talk to her, and I doubted if I could endure the long summer holiday in this cheerless home.

At length he rose to his feet and said, “Well, boy, you had best get some rest. I expect you are tired now.”

He ushered me into a tiny room on the other side of the lobby, and stood in the doorway watching whilst I unpacked my case.

“You won’t be thinking much of this after city life,” he ventured at last.

If I could have been granted one wish at that moment it would have been to be back in the comfort of our flat in Chelsea, but there was something about him that made me want to hide my feelings, so all I said was, “Oh, I expect I’ll soon get used to it.”

“Aye, maybe you will,” he muttered, in a voice that left me in no doubt that it was the last thing he wanted to happen.

Then the door closed behind him and he was gone.

I looked around the room. It was lined with the same rough boarding as the kitchen, broken in places and unpainted. Most of the space was taken up by an old-fashioned brass bedstead, and the stone flagstones between the bed and the door had no covering.

I undressed quickly and got into bed. There were no sheets and
the coarse grey blankets pricked my face and neck.

I thought of my foolish boasting; how I had scoffed at my mother’s forebodings, and urged her to let me come to Skye. If I were to return home now, I knew she would be sympathetic, but I could not face Aunt Evelyn’s jibes. Come what may, I resolved grimly, there could be no going back for me until the holiday was over.

My thoughts drifted to the mysterious message in my wallet.
HUNT AT THE HILL OF THE RED FOX
. What could it possibly mean? My mind went round and round on what was now a familiar track. No matter how hard I tried, I was no nearer a solution. But whatever the meaning of the message, I decided, Murdo Beaton would not hear of it.

I wondered how my father could have let such a man take over the croft. It was obvious that he did not like me and resented my presence at Achmore. But it is my croft, I told myself fiercely, and he has really no right to be here. But there was no real conviction in such thoughts. It was simply my dislike of the man finding expression. For all I cared, he could have the croft and the cottage as well. It was the most miserably depressing place I had ever seen.

I had a moment’s self-pity, thinking I had been born here, and my father, and his father before him, and no friendly smile or welcoming hand had awaited me. I wondered what could have happened to all my father’s friends, and I remembered my mother saying that every house for miles around would welcome the kin of Alasdair Dubh. I remembered her stories about my father. How he loved Achmore above all places; he who had sailed the seven seas. Why was I so different? I who longed so passionately to be like him in all things? Could it be that my upbringing in London had thinned my Highland blood, so that the city streets meant more to me than the wet moorland?

I thought again of my mother’s words to me in Glasgow. She had said something about it not being all flashing tartans, and perhaps that was the reason for my wretchedness. Not that I had expected to see everyone wearing the kilt; indeed, it would be hard for me to say what I really expected to find in Skye. Whatever
images my mind had conjured up had been swamped in the overwhelming greyness and gloom of the bleak reality.

I pulled the blankets up around my head and tried to go to sleep, but I heard the outer door scrape open and the sound of voices in the kitchen. I strained my ears and heard a girl’s voice, speaking softly, and then the harsh tones of a man’s voice raised in anger.

There was silence again, and I turned on my side, wondering drowsily what it could all mean.

When I finally dropped off to sleep, I was thinking of my mother’s final admonition. Always remember, whatever happens, that you are Black Alasdair’s son … Try to be a man … like him.

Now I understood her words for the first time.

A shaft of sunlight, warming the pillow by my head, awoke me in the morning. I rubbed my eyes and yawned and stretched lazily. Blinking drowsily, I wondered how the sunlight had penetrated the high wall of the building outside my bedroom window. It was only when I opened my eyes properly, and saw my clothes hanging over the rail at the foot of the bed, that I remembered I had left London far behind.

I fished under the pillow for my watch. It was eight o’clock. Despite the lumpy chaff mattress and my troubled forebodings of the night before, I had slept soundly.

I dressed quickly and opened the door. No sound came from the kitchen. I tiptoed across the lobby, opened the front door quietly, and I stepped outside.

I stepped into a new world and the wonder of it stopped me short before I was a yard outside the house. Gone was the mist and the rain and the dismal grey of yesterday. The sun shone brilliantly from a bright blue sky flecked with wisps of the purest white cloud. The green crofts dropped steeply to the warm brown of the moor, tinged with purpling heather, and the moor ended in the sea. A sea as calm as a park lake, and of such an artificial looking shade of cerulean blue that I was reminded of paintings I had seen of Italian grottoes. It was the Sound of Raasay.

In the middle of the Sound, like a long Viking galley riding at anchor, lay the Island of Rona. I saw the silvery wash of spray, as the current creamed over the rocks on the northernmost tip of the island, and then my eyes wandered again over its dark purple shore. Rona of the long heather. But to me it did not seem possible that heather could grow on that jagged spine of rock.

To the south of Rona, clinging to the tail of the smaller island,
Raasay curved across the Sound, seeming to merge with the coastline of Skye. My eyes lifted to the massive outline of the mainland hills beyond the Sound. Blue peaks standing shoulder to shoulder, like the massed ranks of a giant army, all the way from Torridon in the north to Applecross in the south.

My gaze wandered back across the still waters of the Sound and fastened on the main road, a white thread against the brown of the moor. I followed it south and saw the roof of Achmore Lodge and the gorge beyond. The road climbed out of the gorge, and I traced it across the moor until it was lost in the far horizon.

To the west of the road a long line of hills swept round in a wide arc, encircling Achmore, and extending in an unbroken line as far as the eye could see. Strange outcroppings of black rock pierced the blue of the sky, and directly to the west of the lodge towered a conical-shaped peak, trailing a white wisp of cloud. Below the peak was a black hollow, shaped like a large saucer, and the hill itself seemed to incline over it. The air was so clear I could make out every scaur and hollow in the hills, every corrie and precipice. On one green peak I picked out the tiny white dots of grazing sheep.

Mairi Beaton must have been standing beside me for a long time before she spoke.

“What is the matter?” she said.

I started, and looked at her blankly. She was barefoot and her legs were tanned a deep brown.

“What is the matter?” she repeated shyly.

“Nothing,” I said.

There was a silence.

“I was just looking,” I added lamely.

“But your face,” she started.

“What about my face?” I demanded, suddenly feeling foolish. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing,” she said, curling her toes into the grass. “Only you looked as if you were still asleep and … and dreaming.”

She had a soft, lilting voice, and she spoke English slowly, as if she were thinking first in Gaelic.

“I was just looking,” I repeated. “I couldn’t see anything yesterday for the mist and the rain, and I was sort of surprised, that’s all.”

“Do you like it?” she asked.

I nodded. “I always thought Skye would be something like this, but I never thought I’d be able to see for miles and miles around.”

I could not put into words the feeling I had of freedom and limitless space, but how could she know what it felt like to be cooped up in a city street.

“What is it like in London?” she asked eagerly.

“Oh, just streets and people and fog in the winter-time,” I said.

“Did you ever go to Buckingham Palace?” she wanted to know.

I nodded.

“Is it very big and fine-looking?” she asked.

“Yes, it’s big,” I said.

“Did you see the Queen?”

The questions were fired at me quickly, one after the other.

“No, just the palace,” I said, as casually as I could, conscious of her wide eyes on my face.

“It must be wonderful to see the palace,” she exclaimed.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “It looked sort of lonely to me. I wouldn’t like to live in it, anyway.”

“Would you rather stay in Skye?”

“Yes,” I said, forgetting her father’s long, gloomy face in the brightness of the morning. “Wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know,” she answered slowly. “I have never been away from Skye.”

“Would you like to go to London?”

She giggled.

“The
cailleach
says everyone in the cities is bad. She says they will all go to hell-fire.”

“What’s a
cailleach?
” I asked, puzzled.

“A
cailleach
is an old woman,” she explained. “We call my granny the
cailleach
.”

“Has she been to London?” I asked.

The girl shook her head, her dark plaits swinging from side to
side.

“Well, then, how does she know?” I demanded.

“Oh, but himself says people in the cities are bad,” she declared. She saw that I did not understand her, and added quickly, “My father, I mean.”

At the mention of his name, she glanced back nervously to the house, as if afraid she would see him standing in the doorway.

A silence came between us. I was thinking of Murdo Beaton and his thinly disguised hostility to me, and I wondered why his own daughter was afraid of him. Perhaps it was because I was there. Perhaps she was afraid to be seen talking to me. That would explain her startled glance back to the house.

“You father doesn’t like me, does he?” I said suddenly.

She looked down at the ground, tracing a nervous pattern in the grass with one bare foot.

I repeated the question, and she glanced back again to the house, and murmured, “I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do,” I burst out. “What did he say to you last night, when I was in the kitchen?”

“He told me to go for the cows,” she answered quietly, and then, looking me straight in the eye, “But when I came back he told me not to speak to you.”

“But why?” I asked, bewildered.

“I don’t think he wants you here,” she said, and then, the words tumbling out in a sudden rush, “My cousin in Broadford was going to stay with me at Easter, but he wouldn’t let her come.”

“But why?” I repeated helplessly.

“Maybe he hopes you will go away again, if you have nobody to speak to,” she said.

If the croft did not belong to me, I thought, he would not have allowed me to come in the first place. And now it seemed he was determined to make my stay as unpleasant as possible. I wondered why.

“Well, anyway, you can’t care, because you are talking to me now,” I said, brightening.

Her thin brown hand touched my arm for a moment.

“You won’t tell him, will you?” she pleaded earnestly.

“‘Course not,” I said, “but what will you say if he sees you?”

“We are safe enough,” she said calmly. “He usually sleeps in until about eleven o’clock.”

“Whatever for?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “People here don’t get up very early.”

I noticed that smoke was rising from the chimneys of all the other houses in Achmore, and I sensed something evasive in her manner, but I was too glad of her company to pay much attention to a fleeting expression.

“Have you any calves?” I asked eagerly.

“Come on, I’ll show you them,” she said, and I could see she was glad to get away from the house.

I followed her down the croft to the byre. The byre was very little different from the cottage except that there were no windows in the walls, and the thatch was not so well kept. The walls were of the same mortarless, undressed stone as the cottage, and I wondered how men could have lifted such huge blocks of stone into place.

It was dim inside the byre, the only light coming from a small pane of wooden framed glass fitted in the roof, and it was some time before I made out the four stalls with the tethering swivels set in the walls. Two black calves were tethered in one stall, and when they saw us they twisted and tugged at their ropes, and gazed at us with large, pleading eyes. I scratched their heads and they thrust their moist noses against my arm. Two rough tongues, like coarse sandpaper, rasped over my skin, and I withdrew my hand quickly.

“Don’t they ever go out in the sun?” I asked.

“My father will tether them on the croft when he gets up,” she answered.

I saw the two long tethering ropes hooked over a rafter. They had a steel swivel in the middle, a noose at one end, and an iron stake at the other.

“We could take them out for him,” I suggested.

“You try,” she retorted. “They would drag you off your feet. Even
a man can only take out one at a time. They are strong wee calvies.”

She patted their backs proudly, and I walked to the other end of the byre.

There was a pile of hay in the corner stall and two hens were nesting in it. They had scooped out hollows in the compressed hay so that only their backs were visible, and their small beady eyes watched me warily. I wondered how they had got in until I noticed a small opening in the thatch above the hay, and at that moment a hen squeezed through it and fluttered down to join the other two on the nest.

The calves were becoming increasingly restive, leaping madly about their stall. Mairi said they were hungry, and we had better go out and look for the cows, for the calves could not get their feed until they were milked.

“But how do you know where to find them?” I asked.

“Och, they will be out the back, on the common grazing,” she said.

“But where?” I demanded, thinking of the limitless waste of moor stretching for miles around. “What’s to stop them wandering to the other side of Skye?”

“Wait you,” she smiled. “The cows know when it is near milking time, and they won’t be far away.”

She led the way out of the byre, and up the hill by the side of the cottage. The cottage was built into a cutting so that its rear wall was almost a part of the hill, and before we had gone far, glancing back over my shoulder I discovered I was looking down on its neatly thatched roof.

The grass here was smooth and green and it ended in a turf dyke. There was a deep drain on the other side of the dyke, to prevent cattle from climbing back on to the arable land of the township. Beyond the dyke it was all rolling moorland as far as the line of circling hills.

I looked again at the strange conical peak over the saucer-shaped black hollow, but Mairi beckoned to me from the top of the dyke.

I scrambled up beside her, and she looked down at my sandals
and said, “You would have been better in your bare feet. Your sandals will get wet.”

We jumped across the drain, and made our way over the rough ground. There were no cows in sight, and I asked her where she was going.

She pointed to a grassy knoll.

“To Cnoc an t-Sithein,” she said.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The Hill of the Fairies,” she answered. “When the
cailleach
was a girl nobody would go near it in the dark.”

“What rot,” I said, but I had to admit to myself that I would not care to be alone on the moor in the darkness of the night. At that time, I did not know what desperate moves fear would drive me to.

We jumped across a small burn, and picked our way through a thick bank of heather. I wondered how she could walk on the prickly heather in her bare feet, but she did not seem to mind.

“How do you go to school?” I asked her.

“We have a scholars’ bus,” she said. “I meet it on the main road in the morning, but I’m allowed off school to help the
cailleach
. She’s been ill.”

“When are your holidays?” I asked, hoping she would not have to go back to school before they started.

“In a wee while,” she replied. “They start on Friday.”

“I expect you have lots of friends,” I ventured.

“Only at school,” she said slowly. “My father doesn’t like me to be talking with anyone here. He says they would be after wanting to know everything about the croft, and what himself was doing.”

I wondered again how my father could have been friendly with such a strange man, and I recalled the doubt in my mother’s mind about their friendship.

We climbed the green knoll, and the whole moorland lay before us. I could see a river winding its way east from the heart of the hills to the deep cleft of the gorge below Achmore Lodge, and I thought that some day I will trace its course up into the hills.

Mairi tugged at my sleeve.

“There you are,” she cried. “What did I tell you!”

Some cattle were grazing in a hollow, not thirty yards away from us. We raced across to them, and she went up to a great black beast and slapped it on the flank, and it moved off in the direction of the dyke, followed by a smaller black cow with a white patch on its head. The rest of the cattle went on grazing unconcernedly.

We urged the cows on with frequent slaps and shouts towards a wooden gate in the dyke. I dragged the gate open and the cows lumbered across the culvert, and headed for the cottage. Mairi helped me to close the gate for the hinges were broken, and we sat on the dyke, watching the cows go home.

I leaned back, propping myself up on one elbow, feeling the sun hot on my face. From where I lay, the dark cone-shaped peak seemed to be looking down at me.

“What is that hill called?” I asked her.

Mairi jumped down and turned round, her elbows on the dyke, and her small, brown face cupped in her hands.

“Which one?” she asked.

“The one like a cone with the hollow below it,” I said.