Seasons on Harris (27 page)

Gray Seal

No matter, I consoled myself. I'd made it. Only I hadn't quite got the lay of the land up there and didn't realize that the slope I'd climbed was actually the leading edge of a sandy arête, and as soon as I stepped on the ridge, the sand gave way and I went tumbling down the backside of the dune, with no marram grass to slow my rapidly accelerating rate of descent.

I ended up in a hundred-foot-deep bowl of talcum-textured sand, almost as far down as I'd been when I started the climb from the other side. And it was a bowl with no discernible exit. All around me rose those soaring walls of wind-smooth sand offering no footholds and no chance of immediate escape.

“Crazy!” I mumbled—or maybe something a little bit more epithet-laced. “There must be a way out—try traversing, zigzagging back up to the top…”

But this was very pernicious material. It looked beautiful and golden in the afternoon light and it felt so benign—even warm. However, in terms of ascending footholds, it was utterly useless. Like trying to climb up through powder snow. Every few tentative steps up eventually led to a slide back down to the level at which I started. An interesting predicament.

And it was then I spotted the skeleton. At first it was just the hint of a rib cage a few feet to my right at the very bottom of the sand bowl. I edged over and nudged the sand away with my feet. More ribs and part of a backbone. Whatever it was, it had obviously been there a long time. The bones were ghost-white, picked clean of all skin, flesh, and tendons. I had a dramatic vision—courtesy of my inner demons, doubtless—of some poor lonely hiker who had made the same mistake as me and ended up his days trying to claw his way out of this malevolent bowl before finally dying of exhaustion, thirst, and a horrible slow starvation.

It, of course, turned out to be a sheep. When I kicked off enough sand, out came the skull with prominent curved horns and a menacing toothy grin. For a moment I was relieved. But then I realized that if a nimble-footed sheep couldn't escape from this place, what chance did I have?

That maudlin sense of hopelessness was eventually replaced by determination. No way was I going to let a few dunes—admittedly the largest dunes I'd ever seen outside the Sahara—do me in. I had things to accomplish and places to go. Most important, I had dinner to cook back at the cottage and I knew how disappointed Anne would be if I failed to turn up for cocktails at the allotted time on our lawn overlooking the sound.

So eventually I figured it out. As I watched how the wind would spiral into the bowl, whipping sand off the lee slopes and depositing it in great swirls on the opposite side, I realized that the lee must consist of harder, more compact sand. So that's where I started to climb and, despite occasional slip-backs, I finally traversed my way up to the grass-tufted ridge and edged very cautiously onto something resembling a flattish plateau.

I always feel humbled and intimidated by the almost-tangible energy and mystery of wild places. But, believing that true discoveries and rev
elations only come through letting go of such emotions, I celebrated the sense that I was obviously safe now. All I had to do was find my way out through this dune labyrinth to the safety of the cemetery, which I knew from my map existed at the northern tip, and the narrow track that would eventually lead me back to Seilibost.

My pessimist-self, however, was not quite so complacent: “When things start to go well—watch out!” it muttered. My optimist-self responded on autopilot: “Any further problems are merely opportunities in disguise!” And there were indeed problems. Two of them. First, my plateau of safety was actually lower than the main dunes, so I couldn't see out for orientation. And second, the sun, which had been my comforting companion throughout the hike, had suddenly vanished in an ominous pall of clouds that were now rapidly descending as a thick and chilly mist, sullen, silent, and ominously still. A sudden sheen of silence.

Oh, great! I thought. I could be wandering around this wilderness for ages trying to find my way out. And of course that's what happened. For the next hour I flailed through this omnipresent fog, maybe walking in circles along the highest ridges, hoping for something to confirm my somewhat confused sense of direction. A friend of mine once advised me that “the key to a good walk is knowing when to sit.” Obviously I forgot his advice that day.

Eventually I realized that I was actually going consistently downhill, either back to the beach or, hopefully, toward the cemetery. But this strange little corner of my island still had a few tricks up its topographical sleeve: nasty overhangs of soft sand that wanted to send me tumbling back into one of those treacherous bowls; little scooped-out “sand holes,” many partially hidden in the marram tufts and carved out by vicious little mini-tornadoes or “sand devils”; and ankle-snapping rabbit burrows that pockmarked the surface of the sand like Gruyère cheese holes.

Finally I heard a car or a truck or something with linkages to a more familiar world. It came from quite a distance but at least it was straight ahead. And then—a path! Only a rough indentation in the sand, but at least something to suggest that other of my species had wandered, and presumably survived, here.

The velvety, sheep-cropped grass of the cemetery suddenly appeared out of the mist as I made a long descent down the last of the dunes. I sighed with relief and wandered past the scores of headstones for MacLeods, MacLeans, MacKayes, MacDonalds, Morrisons, and MacAskills. All lovely familiar names in this safe, quiet haven. Which it indeed once was, and still is. A haven, particularly for those who died on the eastern bay side of Harris, where the ground is so rock-bound that no space could be found for communal burial sites. So, along an ancient peaty track (now part of the Harris Walkway, which links over twenty miles of traditional hill tracks from the Lewis border to the Seilibost Sands), the coffins had to be carried the ten or so miles from Grosebay to the soft
machair
earth of Luskentyre for sanctified interment. It doesn't sound particularly far, but as later hikes across the “lunarland” of central Harris showed us, it can be an extremely arduous experience.

Then came the track. A narrow, sinuous creature that I knew would take me safely back home. Maybe I'd even get a lift. Otherwise I knew I'd be in for a long walk.

It was not only a long walk. It was also cold, wet, and utterly spirit-crushing. Not a single vehicle passed me along those three miles back to the main road. And the cloud-fog, which I hoped would eventually lift as quickly as it had come, decided instead that it was time to release its pent-up burden of Atlantic rain, with drops big as pinto beans, and dump a good part of it right on top of me as I sloshed along, soaked and shivering in this ridiculously unseasonable autumnal storm.

I tried to restore my subdued spirits by remembering one of my favorite mantralike travel aphorisms—another beauty attributed to Sir Richard Burton: “Of the gladdests moments methinks in human life is the departing upon a distant journey into lands unknown.”

But the only really good thing about the remainder of that eminently forgettable day was the fact that when I finally gained the sanctuary of our little cottage, Anne cosseted me like a newborn baby, supplied me with mug after mug of strong hot tea, and, God bless her, had even prepared a delicious and truly Yorkshire dinner of steak and kidney pie with minted peas and roasted potatoes.

“I almost cooked some lamb,” she told me. I was glad she hadn't. The
memory of that poor creature—and doubtless many others—trapped and terminated in the sand bowl had spoiled that particular aspect of my appetite for quite a while.

But as the days passed and the weather became pleasant and predictable (a rather rare occurrence on this climatically fickle island), we continued to explore the sands together and our discoveries of new mini-earthscapes, strange aquatic creatures in the rock pools, and other multifaceted peculiarities of local flora and fauna, were endless and always enticing.

 

N
OW, MUCH AS
I
HATE TO
spoil this picture of our deliciously carefree ramblings, I feel I should mention one particular drawback at this and other seasons: the pernicious midge.

The Pernicious Midge

You'll never forget that first bite of the
meanbh chuileag
—the little fly—a ridiculously polite euphemism for one of the most detested plagues of the warm months here. And one reason you won't forget the bite of this virtually invisible attacker, with a wingspan of barely a millimeter, is because it rarely attacks on its own. Ratherlike Canada geese, midges are social creatures, enjoying the perpetual company and attack formations of cloud like collections of clones that breed in their billions among the bogs, lochans, and wet rasslands of the islands. Piranhas, of course, act within similar cohesion and, having once experienced nips from these devil-teethed barbarians of the Orinoco River in deepest Venezuela, I will
congratulate the tiny midge on coming in a close second on the pain scale.

“Ach, it's only the pregnant female that bites. The males are harmless,” I'd been told at the beginning of the midge season in late May by a strappingly bold ex-crofter in the Tarbert Stores, that lopsided wonderworld of do-it-yourself miscellanea next door to the Clisham Keel.

“Well,” I said a little grumpily, having just beaten off an attacking army with huge clouds of my cigar smoke (and a quick dash for the store too), “when there's a million buzzing around your head, I don't think it makes any damn difference if only half of them are biting!”

“Well, what y'might wanna do,” replied my stoic informant, “is use a little squirt of oil of citronella or pennyroyal, or a sprig of bog myrtle pinned to your clothes…or…”

“Aw, no, no,” chipped in one of the young men behind the counter, “my granny always says one part of lavender oil to twenty parts of elder-flower water.”

“Nah—that'll not do it. Just try lemon juice…”

And even a fourth joined in: “Listen—the best cure of all is a mix of lanolin, camphor, and cassia…I forget how many parts…”

The owner of the store was dismissive of such folk remedies: “Na' listen—all those things are useless—just tasty salad dressings for those hungry creatures—but we've got this new machine comin' in next week…The Midge Master. Y'put it outside where y'sit, turn on the special fuel, and the midges think it's you an' they get sucked in by the thousands. Works wonders!”

Roddy laughed when I told him of all these remedies. “Well, now, there's always someone comin' up wi' a new remedy, but the only real way to beat 'em is t'keep the breeze about ye, particularly in the evening, or puff like crazy on a big cigar, or…well, y'could do what I do and jus' stay inside and enjoy a nice glass o' malt.”

That and a noxious cigar sounded by far the best solution. But that first sudden ambush had left me fired up both physically (I had dozens of little red welts all over my face and arms) and mentally. The He brideans are a little canny about their summer plague (“Don' wanna put the poor
tourists off, now, d'we?”), so I decided to undertake a little research into the matter.

I began with George Hendry's
Midges in Scotland
, in which he explains in cool, nonemotive, scientific prose (obviously he'd never experienced a full-blown armada attack) that:

Which of course would explain their vampirish voraciousness when they finally do find a gullible victim. Like me.

However, being usually of a generous and benevolent nature, I would hate to see any species threatened through lack of basic nutrition, despite the fact that it seems the midge's only purpose, other than self-perpetuation, is to satisfy the gustatory requirements of reed warblers. So feed away, little fly, on whatever sheep, cows, horses, rats you find (although it does distress me to see sheep particularly driven to suicidal distraction by these avaricious hordes)—but leave us
Homo erectus
alone!