Bruach Blend (4 page)

I planned, as I plodded on, that before I went to bed I should fill the hens' trough with food and so deter them from becoming too vociferously indignant as they undoubtedly would if their morning feed was late; and if, as I guessed would happen, too many opportunist gulls and crows, spying the full trough and no human being in attendance, grew confident enough to visit the hen run and steal a good proportion of the food then I would compensate the hens by giving them a larger feed in the evening. The slight departure from routine might cause them to retaliate by laying fewer eggs for a day or two but since it was the height of the egg-laying season they would still provide for my requirements. Perhaps I should be later than usual for Bonny's morning milking but she would suffer no discomfort as a consequence. It was some time since she had calved and, being mostly Highland, she produced a relatively small quantity of milk and therefore was not incommoded by a large distended udder such as that of a dairy cow. I could enjoy my extra hour or two in bed in the morning knowing my charges were provided for. Only Charlie Big Eyes would miss his morning feed and at this stage of his convalescence I reckoned Charlie Big Eyes could very well fend for himself.

I had found Charlie Big Eyes one wild wet morning some three weeks previously hunched dejectedly beside the hen run, his feathers shaggied by wind and rain. When I had thrown a small handful of corn in his direction he had watched with what I thought to be unusually large eyes for a pigeon and when after a moment or two of hesitation he had moved forward to peck at the grain I was able to see that he had rings on both legs. It was not the first time a homing pigeon had honoured me with its presence. Before Charlie Big Eyes there had been Charlie One, then Charlie Two, followed by Charlie Three. Charlie One had arrived in much the same circumstances as Charlie Big Eyes. He too had been squatting dejected and bedraggled by the hen house and since Charlie One was the first ‘lost' horning pigeon I had ever encountered I had felt both pleased and flattered that he had chosen my croft on which to seek sanctuary. I threw down some grain and he half-circled it, his gait expressive of both eagerness and caution, but though I spoke coaxingly it was not until I withdrew completely out of sight that he began pecking at the corn with a rhythm that was almost mechanical in its repetitiveness. Initially it was with the intention of restoring him to health and strength so he would be able to find his way back to his rightful home that I regularly fed him grain and mash but as he grew more trusting and his golden eyes came to regard me without suspicion I realized I had grown fond of Charlie One and continued to feed him in the hope that he had forgotten his old home and had now adopted me as his new owner.

Between feeds Charlie One chose to perch on the ridge of the cottage roof and on calm mornings I woke to his anticipatory cooing for food. When the weather buffeted him from the roof he took refuge in the doorway of the byre where he restlessly awaited his morning feed. I knew that he could not survive the really wild weather in such meagre shelter and if he was to remain I had to devise some safe and sheltered place for him to roost at night. The beams of the thatched byre offered a plethora of roosting places to many small birds who poked their way in through the tiny spaces between the walls and the roof, but a pigeon is not a small bird and for Charlie One there was no access to the byre unless the door was left open – and in Bruach a door left open was an invitation to the wind to come in and lift off the roof. Likewise the barn was similarly snug, its drystone walls affording apertures where only wind and rain and mice could penetrate. And again because of the strength of the wind one could not simply rig up a temporary shelter, since even the smallest Bruach structure had to be solid indeed if it was to stand at all. One way out of the difficulty was for Charlie One to share the hen house, but as some of the hens resented his presence and attacked him fiercely on sight it was an impossible solution. The remaining structure on my croft was my own ‘wee hoosie', but fond as I was of Charlie One I rebelled at the notion of sharing my privy with a pigeon.

I mentioned the problem of Charlie One's accommodation to Erchy.

‘Ach, you'll not need to trouble yourself,' he told me. ‘I doubt he'll not be with you much longer.'

I felt a twinge of indignation. ‘He's been here for nearly three weeks now,' I pointed out. ‘Surely if a bird stays that long he must have adopted it as a new home.' I was careful because of the Bruachites' contempt for sentimentality not to disclose to Erchy that I had already given the pigeon a pet name.

‘Indeed you might think that,' Erchy allowed.

‘But what I'm sayin' is he'll stay until he's ready to fly away, just.'

I hoped to prove him wrong. Surely, I reasoned, a pigeon's homing instinct would reassert itself as soon as the bird felt fit enough to fly and as to Charlie One's fitness I had no doubts at all. In fact it had taken only a few days of rest and good feeding for Charlie One to recover from his weak, half-starved condition and for nearly two weeks now, sturdy and alert, he had been strutting self-confidently about the croft, his head bobbing perkily; his neck feathers polished to gleaming iridescence by the clean Hebridean rain and wind. Admittedly each day after his recovery he would go missing for a time after his morning feed, but I accepted that birds must fly, and since more often than not when I glanced up at the roof of the cottage Charlie One would be there preening his fluffed-out feathers I was reassured as to his faithfulness. But it continued to distress me that Charlie One had as yet no ‘home' where he could be safe from weather and from predators. Casting around for a suitable roosting place which would be within my powers of contrivance, I at last hit upon the idea of making a cavity high up in the peat stack at the end of the cottage. My peat stack was built in the traditional Hebridean way like a buttress against the more sheltered gable of the cottage and I reckoned that if I could remove a section of the stack and then rebuild it with spars of driftwood wedged among the dry peats to discourage them from collapsing, and at the same time provide a perch for Charlie One, I might very well solve the problem. Full of confidence, I set to work the next day, but to build a cavity into a stack composed of brittle odd-shaped peats is no easy task and before long my confidence crumbled as quickly as many of the peats. Even as I stepped back to survey my first attempt the peats collapsed, but with Kiplingesque courage I ‘stooped and built again' and yet again and again and the ‘worn-out tools' were my hands, which by the end of the day were rasped as if I had been cleaning them on sandpaper. But at last the task was accomplished. Charlie One had his own ‘Cosy Cote' complete with perch and droppings board and a ‘door' which I could wedge in place at night.

While I had been working I had from time to time thrown grain down, hoping that Charlie One would come and investigate and perhaps absorb the fact that here was a safe roosting place. He had eaten the grain but, as I discovered the next day, he seemed not to have noticed, or not to have accepted, ‘Cosy Cote' as a home. The cavity was empty of droppings. Two days later, though he had been present in the morning, Charlie One did not appear for his evening feed, but since he had been absent once or twice before at feeding times and yet had always turned up later I did not worry. However, when he did not appear that evening nor again the following morning I began to feel a mounting dismay; when the next day he was still absent I knew beyond doubt that he had gone. I wondered sadly if he had at last flown off to seek his former home or if he had fallen prey to a buzzard or a hawk or even one of the village cats.

‘I've lost my pigeon,' were my first words to Erchy when I next saw him. I was not aware at the time that there is a Gaelic word which is pronounced very much like ‘pigeon' but which translated means ‘big fat belly', so perhaps it is not surprising that Erchy, whose first language was Gaelic, should have looked momentarily nonplussed by my announcement. His eyes glinted over me as the right word slotted into his mind.

‘Ach, you mean your dove!' he exclaimed. ‘Aye, well, did I not warn you it would stay only until it was ready to go?'

I nodded affirmation. ‘All the same, I should like to know what's happened to him,' I said. ‘Whether he's making back for his own home or whether he's making a meal for a cat or a buzzard.'

‘Likely he'll be with the other doves at the cave over there.' Erchy gestured towards the high cliffs that edged the shore. ‘That's always where any stray doves end up that I've seen.'

‘They go to live with the rock doves?' I was surprised.

‘Indeed they do so. An' breed with them, too. There's been that much cross-breedin' with these racin' doves I don't believe there's many of the birds there that are the real wild ones any more.'

As soon as I could I took my binoculars and made my way to the cliffs where, lying in a well-screened cleft of rock near the cave, I was able to watch the comings and goings of the colony of rock doves. It was not long before I spotted Charlie One. His neck feathers glistened with more colours than the neck feathers of the wild birds and of course he was easily identifiable by the rings on his legs, but there was nothing in his behaviour to distinguish him from the rest of the flock with which he appeared to have achieved a happy co-existence. I watched for over an hour, my feelings a strange mixture of discovery and loss. I went home and blocked up the cavity in the peat stack.

Charlie Two stayed with me for only about ten days before he departed but whether he flew home or whether he also joined the rock doves I never knew. Charlie Three had been with me barely a week before a surprisingly apologetic child brought me a tangle of feathers – all that was left of Charlie Three after their cat had finished with him. Charlie Big Eyes had been with me nearly a month, but by now I had grown philosophical about the ways of pigeons. He was welcome to shelter and food if he wished to avail himself of them, but since I accepted that even supposing his homing instinct did not reassert itself strongly enough to lure him away he would in time respond to the call of the wild. Meanwhile I had no intention of again dismantling my peat stack to provide him with a ‘Cosy Cote'.

I continued my search for Bonny while my thoughts ranged over the variety of animals and birds and even insects which I had enjoyed nursing back to health. There was Harry the hedgehog, whom I had found one sharply cold morning of early spring enmeshed in an abandoned piece of fishing net. I thought at first he was dead, but when I put him into a box of hay inside the warm oven he revived slowly but shakily, and after a few hours was well enough to snuffle his way about the kitchen and to lap warm milk from a saucer. I then provided a box for him in a secluded spot beside the haystack to which he returned each day after his nightly foraging. Harry became so tame he no longer raised his prickles when I picked him up and I was sure he would become a permanent resident. I congratulated myself on having acquired a useful pet, but as soon as the weather grew warmer Harry deserted and though the milk I continued to put out each night was always gone by morning I never knew if it was Harry who had drunk it.

Another temporary patient was a sickly baby lamb to which I temporarily acted as ‘foster-ewe'. I had been roaming the hills when I found the lamb, which appeared to have been deserted by its mother, and I wondered if perhaps the ewe, having given birth to more than one lamb, and subsequently having been forced to protect her progeny from a marauding hill fox, had forsaken the weaker. Perhaps my coming upon the scene had caused the fox to abandon his prize temporarily, in which case he would no doubt be in hiding near by waiting to return and claim of his victim the moment I was out of sight. Determined to intervene, I carried the lamb to the shepherd's cottage, but there was no one there when I arrived. No one even within hailing distance and I guessed the shepherd must himself be out on the hill while his wife was probably engaged at the ‘Big House'. It seemed best that I should take the lamb home and this I did, putting it into the inevitable hay-lined box beside the stove where I tried to feed it warm milk from a spoon. My efforts were totally unsuccessful. The lamb was too feeble to be interested and the milk ran out of its mouth almost as quickly as I spooned it in. It was too long a walk to go back to the shepherd's house, so I hastened to Morag's cottage where I found Erchy and Hector taking a quiet strupak with her in the kitchen. I asked if any of them knew where I might borrow a baby's feeding bottle.

They looked at me askance. ‘Indeed, mo ghaoil, but where would you be findin' such a thing hereabouts? Surely a woman that's fit enough to have a bairn is fit enough to feed it herself. That's what we say here.' She spoke with pride. Morag had once boasted to me that Bruach women did not find childbirth painful so it seemed to follow that they were invariably able to feed their babies themselves. I had to admit that I had never seen a Bruach baby being fed from a bottle but I wondered if someone sometime had brought a feeding bottle to Bruach.

‘I mind tsere was a tourist here once wiss a baby an' she was after feedin' it from a bottle,' Hector recalled. ‘Tse Dear knows why she had to do tsat all tse same when she had breasts on her tsat big you could swear it was two peat creels she had under her blouse, whatever it was she kept inside tsem.'

‘Didn't you find out?' interjected Erchy. ‘Man, you must be gettin' old.'

Hector slid him a look of disapproval. ‘Ach, she was from Glasgow and tsere's women tsere tsats no more use to a bairn tsan a starved cow tsat goes dry after calvin' just. No, nor to a man either.'

‘I suppose the shepherd would have teats?' I suggested.

Erchy drew the palm of his hand across his mouth. ‘Damty sure his wife has, anyway,' he said, and looked boldly at Hector for confirmation.