A Rope--In Case (11 page)

When I made up my mind to go to a ceilidh I always hoped that certain people would be there, my favourite being Fiona. Fiona was a dear kind old soul; lumpish in shape, tattily clad and always reeking of staleness. Though I recoiled from close proximity to her I enjoyed her company, cherishing her presence in much the same way I cherished the presence of the compost heap at the bottom of the garden—regretful of its appearance and odour but grateful for the bountiful goodness that was constantly working away inside. Given the chance Fiona would have taken upon herself the troubles and toils of the whole village. She was available if anyone needed a temporary nurse for an old relative or a sick cow; she was ready to lend a hand at the making of haggis and black pudding whenever a sheep was killed; she would lay out a corpse or pluck a hen and if someone ran short of bread she was so good-hearted she would give them her last half loaf. I have even seen her take the sweet from her mouth to give to a child. Although she had never been off the island Fiona was by no means lacking in shrewdness and guile. She was however at times confounded by modern acquisitions which most of the Bruachites had by now come to accept. She would not go near a telephone for instance and water running from a tap, when she had a chance of seeing such a thing, was still a source of great delight. A camera was an inexplicable machine and a photograph something to be exclaimed over as much for its existence as for its subject matter. She had been at my house one evening when I was giving a show of colour slides, most of which I had taken myself in and around the village. Fiona had sat very quietly indeed until I put a slide into the projector which showed the cottage where Angus, the fisherman, lived with his mother. It was an excellent photograph, so clear that it showed the dribble of tar over one window and the unlit lamp on the sill inside. Around the wide open door was grouped an expectant cluster of hens, obviously anticipating a feed, and the quality of the photograph was such that one found oneself awaiting the appearance of Angus's mother at the door with a bowl of mash. Amid appreciative murmurs of identification and approval Fiona suddenly jumped up.

‘I must away an' shut that door!' she explained in answer to our enquiries. ‘There's Angus away to the sea this very mornin' an' his mother away in Glasgow an' there's the door wide open. Yon hens will take every bit of food in the house if I don't close it.'

The presence of Fiona at a ceilidh invariably evoked tales of the supernatural, for she was unashamedly greedy for old legends and stories of mystery. There needed only to be the tiniest whisper of a slightly out of the ordinary happening and instantly Fiona would attach to it magical associations and would launch into one of her numerous tales of strange predictions and stranger events. When her story ended someone else would be exhorted to contribute a tale and so it would continue for the rest of the evening. There is no doubt in my mind that tales of the supernatural were accepted by the Bruachites as being factual. And indeed I found it difficult to be sceptical when I was listening to such unequivocal narration in an ambience of lamplight and peatsmoke; listening to old men who could preface their stories with ‘I mind when I was a wee lad my grandfather tellin' me' …; listening to people who could tell of first-hand encounters with ghosts or wee folk which might be recollections of thirty years ago or might be an experience of the previous week. One had to be a cynic to discount stories told with such conviction. It was not so easy to be cynical when after a night of such cosy mystery you had to walk home across lonely moors where the wind hummed eerily in the corries; malign shadows dogged your path, and there were sudden and inexplicable cold breaths over your shoulders. Even in daylight there were parts of the moor which were too oppressive for anyone to wish to be there alone. In the dark one hardly dared to look in their direction.

One clear fine night in October I was sitting in my own kitchen with my ear pushed almost inside an ebbing radio set trying to pick up the essential clues in a tensely exciting murder mystery. Just when the final denouement was about to be made however the radio gave a final whimper and died completely. I swore at it; I twiddled knobs, and shook it without being rewarded with so much as a scratch of atmospherics. Disgusted, I turned away from it and at that moment there came a growl of wind in the chimney and the kitchen was filled with smoke. Every chimney in Bruach suffered at some time or another from wind blowing down it but fortunately it was not always the same wind direction that affected all the chimneys. I knew that Janet's chimney never misbehaved itself at the same time as mine so I resolved to go and join the inevitable ceilidh around her fire. I slung a coat over my shoulders and held it together with my left hand, my right hand being bandaged and in a sling since I had fallen on it two weeks previously. I opened the door into Janet's kitchen and she looked up in surprise. Her face broke into a welcoming smile as she urged someone to make room for me near the fire. This much of a stranger I knew I should always be in Bruach.

‘An' how's your poor, dear wrist, Miss Peckwitt?' It was Fiona's anxious voice and I turned happily to acknowledge her and her enquiry. Anything that was ailing was always poor and dear to Fiona. You might hear her say one time, ‘The poor, dear man has gone to his rest,' and another time she might be bemoaning, ‘The poor, dear bus has a hole in its wheel.'

I told her that my wrist didn't seem to be getting much better. It was still very painful.

‘I'm sayin' I wouldn't be surprised if you've broken it,' Erchy chipped in through the general commiseration.

‘I suspected that myself,' I admitted, ‘but the doctor has X-rayed it and he's quite confident there's nothing broken.'

‘Ach, him! I doubt but he'd have X-rayed it through the bottom of a whisky bottle,' commented Morag and looked round the gathering for their appreciation.

‘'Tis wonderful indeed these X-rays,' asserted Fiona. ‘They tell me they can look right through your bones with them.'

‘Aye,' someone affirmed. ‘They're clever, right enough, these days with their inventions.'

‘Not so clever as in the old days,' objected Fiona. ‘There was folks then that could look through the years without any machines to help them an' they'd tell us what was goin' to happen. I'm thinkin' it must be a lot easier to look through bones.'

‘That reminds me,' I began, ‘has anyone here ever had a pet raven or had any experience of a raven behaving in a very peculiar way?'

Their eyes were fixed on me. ‘No, why do you ask?' they demanded and I told them of how that very afternoon I had gone for a long walk over the moors and that when I had reached a certain valley I had suddenly become aware of a raven which kept alighting a few yards in front of me and then rising to circle just above my head. Each time it had alighted it had croaked at me in such a familiar way that I thought it must have at some time been a tame one. I tried to return its croaking. When I had decided I had gone far enough I turned towards home but then the raven had seemed to become agitated and had flown several times in front of my face as if trying to get me to turn back. Being something of an amateur ornithologist I was intrigued by the behaviour of the bird and did turn back. Once again the raven resumed its antics, alighting a few paces in front of me and croaking. It was so persistent that I got the impression it wanted me to follow it and this I did for perhaps another quarter of an hour. However tiredness overcame curiosity; the bird seemed to be leading me on interminably and when I thought of all the work that was awaiting me at home I finally gave up the chase and turned in my tracks. Several times the raven flew across my path as if trying to divert me but ignoring it I kept steadily on. After a little while it alighted on a projection of rock, croaked at me three or four times with the air of a disgruntled hawker and watched me disappear over the brow of the hill.

It struck me as strange that though down in the quiet valley I had found the behaviour of the bird interesting and rather endearing the moment I gained the brow of the hill which looked down on to the familiar houses and crofts I started to think of the incident as being a little uneanny and began to wonder what they would make of it at the ceilidhs when I told my story. I thought that the most likely explanation would be that someone had once caught and tamed the bird and that it had since escaped or been allowed its freedom. But no-one knew of anyone who had at any time had a pet raven, neither in Bruach nor anywhere else on the island.

‘You should have followed it,' Johnny suggested. ‘It might have led you to some treasure. Some of these beasts are supposed to know where there's treasure an' if they take a fancy to you they'll lead you to it.'

‘Indeed she was wise not to follow it any further than she did, I'm thinkin',' Anna Vic shuddered and gathered herself into her chair.

‘What do you think was the reason for it then?' Erchy asked.

I shook my head. ‘I can't think of anything unless it had a wounded mate or something like that. If it had been in the spring I'd have thought it might be trying to distract my attention from its nest or a young one but that's not likely at this time of year.'

Fiona said profoundly: ‘I'm thinkin' it was no ordinary raven.'

As soon as she had spoken the atmosphere of the ceilidh was laced with tension; everyone waited expectantly, knowing, as I knew, what would ensue. How often had I heard a rich Highland voice prefacing a narrative with the carefully enunciated words: ‘It was no ortinary …' The phrase was intended to convey that the ‘no ortinary' animal was really a witch who had temporarily assumed that disguise for some specific purpose.

‘Never follow that bird again should you see it,' Fiona enjoined me.

‘But Johnny thinks it might have led me to some treasure,' I retorted, counteracting the solemnity that had settled on the gathering with an attempt at flippancy.

‘Johnny knows fine it is not to treasure it would be after takin' you, but to some place …' She looked up at me and sensing my scepticism she faltered: ‘… to some place you might not wish to see,' she ended self-consciously.

‘An' what might have happened to you then the dear only knows,' Anna Vic was quick to reinforce Fiona's warning.

‘There's folks that's not been the same since they followed some gey queer animal or other.'

‘Aye, aye,' there were varied murmurs of confirmation. I already knew the story of the men who had played with the Fairies and their subsequent fate. I knew too of the lucky escape of Erchy's uncle after he had once been foolish enough to follow an otter that ‘wass no ortinary otter.' There were many such stories and nearly everyone in Bruach appeared to know of a relative of theirs who had been involved in some mysterious adventure.

‘What might have happened to you we can only guess,' Fiona resumed now with a surge of confidence. ‘Did you no hear, Miss Peckwitt, of the man that met the cat while he was ridin' back to his croft one night?'

‘No,' I lied. I had more than once heard the story but not hitherto from Fiona and experience had taught me that the tales varied according to the narrator.

‘Then you should know of it.' Fiona's grey eyes stared into the fire and the palms of her work-ravaged hands moved incessantly backwards and forwards over her skirt as she told the story of the local girl who had been jilted by her lover when it was proved to him that the girl's mother was an indisputable witch and that the daughter would surely become a witch herself. A few weeks after the jilting the lover was riding home one night just before dark when as he was approaching a narrow rocky pass he noticed a large black cat running in front of his horse. He tried to rein the horse away from it but the animal refused to obey and carried on into the pass. Here the cat suddenly turned and leapt at the horse, frightening it so that the man had almost been thrown. He had lashed at the cat with his whip but it had easily evaded him. The following night approaching the same spot the same thing happened but this time the cat succeeded in clawing the neck of the horse. The man was quite sure that on this occasion his whip had found its target but the cat made no sound of distress and he concluded that once again he had misjudged his stroke. He became so much troubled by these incidents that he had taken his story to the local seer, a seventh son of a seventh son, who was himself possessed of strange powers. The seer had at once identified the cat as being ‘no ortinary cat' but in fact the jilted sweetheart who, being the daughter of a witch, had been able to assume this disguise in order to wreak revenge on her ex-lover. ‘First she has lured your horse and frightened it; next she has clawed your horse, the third time it will be yourself she will be seeking to injure.' The seer then advised the man to carry a gun with him when he was riding home at night and to be sure to load the gun with a silver bullet—it was only silver that was effective against witches. He further cautioned him not to shoot to kill but only to wound and that immediately he had fired the gun he must gallop his horse straight for the house of the doctor and tell him everything that had happened. The man promised to do all this and before he again ventured to ride home in the dark he made a silver bullet from a sixpence and loaded it into his gun. Arrived at the place where the cat had attacked on the two previous occasions he held his gun in readiness. Sure enough there was the cat and this time when it leaped it was indeed into the man's flesh that its claws dug deep. He fired the gun and saw that he had succeeded in wounding the cat high in the right hindleg. He spurred his horse and raced for the doctor's house. The doctor, who was of course a son of the croft, listened attentively to the story and decided that they should get the local policeman to accompany them to the house of the witch. The policeman had knocked on the door and demanded entry several times before it was unbarred and opened by the old woman.