Beautiful Just! (12 page)

The calf continued to suck, sheltered by her body from the cold wind and the thickening snow and when he was replete he collapsed on the ground. With worried croonings she nudged him up on to his tottery feet and towards the shelter of a rock where, with her hoof, she scraped the snow from a patch of coarse grass. Understanding her action the calf lay down and, tucking his head into his flank, he slept while his mother horned away the snow from sedge and heather clumps and blew upon it with her warm breath before she began to graze. When the after-birth came she ate it instinctively, licking the grass where it had been to obliterate any trace of smell that might attract a roaming fox and as evening showed greyly through the still falling snow she lay down beside her calf, positioning her head so that it was a roof protecting him from the blizzard.

At the first hint of dawn she roused him with the diligence of her attentions and encouraged him once again to relieve the heaviness of her udder. He was sturdier now and found the teats without difficulty and when at last he was satisfied instead of lying down he kicked up his back legs and almost fell in the attempt to express his delight. The cow moved forward three or four steps and lowed to him to follow. The calf lurched after her and rubbed himself against her flank. She moved forward again still calling to him persuasively and as he gambolled after her, his shaky legs gaining strength with every step, he answered her with thin pules of complaint.

The blizzard had ceased with the dawn; the wind had dropped to a wavering breeze and the emerging sun flushed the whitened moors. The cow began slowly climbing back towards the path where she had parted from her companions the previous day, stopping frequently to give a reassuring and proprietory lick at her calf. When she reached the path she stood and gave a loud enquiring bellow that the bare hills echoed and the snow blanketed moors absorbed. She listened intently and as if in response bellowed again, assertively. Raising her muzzle she sniffed into the breeze and as the scent of the herd reached her she gave a further bellow that was unmistakeably triumphant. Resolutely she made towards the glen, the fresh snow compacting beneath her hooves, her calf trotting confidently by her side.

In a very short time now she and her calf would be joining the herd.

As I threw out the water after having washed up my tea things I saw Old Alistair coming to the cottage. ‘He Breeah!' I called in answer to his greeting and going inside I took a bottle of nettle beer and a glass from the larder and stood by the door waiting for him. Except for Janet's house where he was to be found most evenings waiting his turn to read the paper and also holding forth at the subsequent ceilidh Alistair rarely bothered to visit any of his neighbours but in summer he sometimes made an excuse to call on me to drink a glass or two of my nettle beer. He was a vociferous traditionalist constantly proclaiming the industriousness of the women of his mother's generation while affecting to despise the present-day women of Bruach because they no longer devoted themselves to such time-honoured occupations as spinning and weaving and dyeing wool; grinding their own oatmeal between the quern stones and preparing medicines and ointments from the wild plants and herbs which were to be found on the moors. They were ‘spoiled with the vans' he was frequently heard to declare.

Alistair's own mother, he was fond of telling me, had regularly made not nettle beer but nettle tea for her family and he claimed that this annual ‘nettle scourin' as he called it kept both adults and children healthy for the rest of the year. When I suggested he should make his own nettle tea he looked at me askance. It was not a man's place to do such things, he informed me though being a bachelor he regularly cooked and cleaned for himself.

Whenever Alistair came he was always careful to bring as recompense for the beer some small gift which he thought might interest me: a fossil ammonite; a hollowed out tonka bean; an unusual pipe fish which he had caught and which, because of its hard, scaly skin, had in drying out retained its living shape were some of the things he bestowed on me and which were added to my collection. He was always careful too to come on a nice day so that he could insist on drinking his beer outside for despite his tendency to rant he was a shy man and since his traditionalism led him to deplore the efforts I had made to modernize my cottage he preferred to stay outside rather than feel himself constrained to express his contempt for them too strongly. He had already informed me he did not like the new windows which had been installed, maintaining that they were ‘misliked by the walls' and when he saw my new cooking stove for the first time he denounced it grouchily as looking as out of place in a croft kitchen as a giraffe would look in a cow byre, a comment which when I retailed it to Morag brought the response: ‘Ach, that man is so far back he cannot even taste a cake that has been baked in an oven.'

I untied the string from round the neck of the bottle and eased out the cork; the beer foamed over the glass as I handed it to Alistair who eyed it approvingly and as he took the glass in his right hand he thrust in front of me the spread palm of his left hand on which reposed three tiny creagags which he had caught while fishing off the rocks. Large creagags were greatly enjoyed by the Bruachites but I found them glutinous and bony; the small ones were usually thrown back into the sea as being useless for anything but when I saw the fish Alistair offered I exclaimed with delight.

‘No wonder Tizzie is excited,' I told him.

Tizzie had joined me one day in early summer when, having been too plagued by the midges to continue working on the croft and having been too loath to spend such a warm day indoors, I had in desperation taken my boat and rowed out until I was far enough away from the shore to escape the attentions of the midges. It was sultry on the land and so calm on the sea that when I rested on my oars the drips from the blades were the only discernible ruffle on the surface of the water and after rowing aimlessly for some time I shipped the oars and allowing the boat to drift with the tide I rejoiced in the coolness and the ever absorbing pastime of peering down into the green depths. Shifting my position after a time to the other side of the boat I glanced up to see a black-back gull swooping repeatedly at something on the sea well astern of the boat but it was a minute or two before I could make out the tiny, panic-stricken baby guillemot which was paddling frantically as it tried to escape the gull's attack. Every time the gull swooped for the kill the chick dived but the time it could remain submerged was limited and as it bobbed to the surface the enemy came again, the cruel beak ready to snatch and shake the life out of its victim before tearing out its entrails. The black-back's manoeuvres were unhurried. The chick would soon tire and the gull had only to continue swooping until the guillemot was too exhausted to dive and then he would merely have to lift his prey from the water.

I grabbed my oars and rowed to the rescue and surprisingly when the chick saw the boat approaching instead of diving or paddling away in fright it came purposefully towards it, cheeping imploringly. As I shipped an oar and put my hand into the water like a scoop the guillemot swam into it with complete trust to crouch like a small black ball of fluff on my palm. Immediately it ceased its cheeping and I held the chick to my breast as the shadow of the black-back's wings swept close over us. Back the black-back came again so close his beak was within inches of the gunwale. I put the chick safely under a thwart where it stayed quiet and still while the black-back, cheated of its prey, squawked its fury and flew away. The chick closed its eyes.

While I rowed about the sea hoping to find a distracted parent or indeed any other guillemots near which I could safely leave the chick it slept beneath the thwart and I was astounded and moved by its apparent trust in me. For more than an hour I rowed without seeing so much as a feather of another guillemot and since I had to return home and carry on with the work I had left I scanned the sky for the presence of black-backs. Satisfied there were none in the vicinity I lifted the chick and put it gently back into the sea whereat it squeaked protestingly and refused to swim away from the boat. I started to row but the chick followed, its little webbed feet paddling desperately after the boat and its squeaking becoming so full of entreaty that I was compelled to stop and let it catch up again. It was such a defenceless little thing that I wanted more than anything to take it home with me but, I told myself firmly, it was too ridiculous to think of hand-rearing a baby guillemot. The sea was its true home and despite the hazards it would stand more chance of surviving there than it would stand with me. I rowed on, but the guillemot refused to be left behind and after one or two more attempts to elude it I yielded and lifted it into the boat. Back again under the protection of the thwart the chick dozed contentedly.

On the shore I put it at the edge of the tide hoping it would swim away from the land but as I moved it followed me closely pecking at my shoes so I carried it back to the cottage and fed it with slivers of fish cut from a fillet I had been intending to cook for my own supper. It ate them greedily before recommencing its monotony of squeaks which were like those of a stuffed toy. I made a bed for it in a cardboard box lined with an old pyjama jacket and it accepted the nest unhesitatingly, fluffing out its feathers as it settled down among the folds of cloth.

Since I was not certain the bird was a guillemot I got out my bird book which seemed to confirm that it might be and later I asked some of my neighbours if they could identify it. They told me the Gaelic name for it but since I could not find the name in my Gaelic dictionary I was not much enlightened.

‘Ach, I believe they have some other name for it as well in some parts,' Morag told me, shaking her head. ‘But I cannot bring it to mind though indeed it is teasin' at me like the drip on the end of my nose.'

‘Would it be a tystie?' I asked. My bird book said that black guillemots were called tysties in the Orkney Islands.

‘Indeed that is the very word,' confirmed Morag. And so I called the chick ‘Tystie' which quickly became ‘Tizzie' because it was easier to call ‘Tizzie' than ‘Tystie'. In no time at all Tizzie learned to answer to her name. She learned also to associate seaboots with the proffering of fish and even when she was in her box and covered up to quell her interminable squeaking it needed only the sound of boots clumping outside to start the pyjama jacket agitating and a moment or two later Tizzie would launch herself over the side of the box and on to the floor where she would rush to peck at the boots in the certainty they were bringing fresh fish for her.

She began to dominate my life. I found myself hauling up pails of sea water to fill an old zinc bath which she could use as a swimming pool; I begged fish; I spent hours fishing from the rocks which was by no means one of my favourite occupations and when the weather was too rough for any other sort of fishing I searched the rock pools and the shore for small crabs and catfish all of which she swallowed with hungry indifference and when replete she slept quietly and snugly in her box.

When she had been with me six weeks Tizzie was taking up to a whole mackerel or its equivalent in twelve hours and though in summer fish was not too difficult to procure I did not know how I would cope during the winter when it was virtually unobtainable and when the period of daylight was too short to cram in all the work of the croft without having the added burden of seeking for crabs and catfish even if the weather allowed access to the shore. But I knew I would have to find some way of providing for her even if it meant sending to the mainland for a few months' supply of tinned sardines.

As Tizzie matured her colouring changed to snowy white in front and dark grey to almost black on her back and her posture as she approached a human – which she did completely without fear – was so upright that tourists seeing her would exclaim ‘Oh, look! A baby penguin!' Whenever I could spare the time I took her down to the sea and waited while she bobbed about in the water and despite my attachment to her I hoped for her own sake the day would come when she would feel the call of the wild and return to her own kind. But Tizzie appeared to have no instinct whatsoever to return to her natural environment and the fact worried me.

I was even more worried when I received an invitation to my nephew's wedding which was to take place in England. It was an invitation which I knew I must accept and I wondered what was to happen to Tizzie whilst I was away. I certainly could not take a guillemot to a wedding nor could I expect my neighbours to give up time to look after her particularly as the haymaking season was in full swing. Erchy and Hector gallantly offered to share the task of feeding her and Morag promised to keep an eye on her until I returned but despite their assurances I doubted if they would be able to look after her as well as I had done. I knew they would do their best but just at that time I was anxious about an increasing lethargy I had noticed in Tizzie; a certain droopiness about the wings and I was full of foreboding.

When I returned from the wedding I knew from Erchy's face that Tizzie was dead. ‘We fed her all right,' he explained. ‘But she didn't seem as if she wanted her food after a day or two an' when we put her into the sea she was like as if she couldn't swim at all.'

‘I had a feeling she was sickening when I went away,' I acknowledged. ‘I was wondering if she hadn't enough oil in her feathers through being so much on land.'

‘More likely you overfed her just,' suggested Erchy.

‘Maybe,' I said.

‘Aye well it could be this is the best way for it to happen,' he said. ‘An' it was a better death than the beast would have known if that black-back had got her.'

‘I suppose it was,' I admitted. But it was small comfort.

‘Four o' clock in the mornin', mind,' said Erchy.