Highland river, p.14
Highland River, page 14
An overhanging branch snicked off Angus’s cap. Kenn picked it up for him. As they emerged from the low archway of trees, bare springy turf ran back to the brae-foot on their right hand. Two rabbits lifted their heads, looked at them, and then very leisurely hopped up the brae under the trees. The leisurely action seemed in the nature of a derisive challenge and Angus nodded. ‘You wait!’ Their expressions quickened with good humour.
As they lifted their faces to the strath, however, their whole attention was held by a view of the landowner’s shooting lodge, about a mile distant, set on a wooded crest and directly commanding the river. It would be inhabited at the moment only by a housekeeper, yet the boys could never rid themselves of the impression of its windows as eyes.
They went on calmly and, just before gaining the shelter of trees again, were vouchsafed a vision of glory. In front and high up on the right, there uprose from the sombre birches a golden-green fire. They had seen willow-catkins before many a time, but by some trick of the strong, sweeping sunlight, the exotic blaze was such that they debated what tree it could be. But not very ardently, for the burning bush was no more than something added to their own excitement. The secret spirit of the wood surprising but encouraging them with a voiceless shout! The catkins of the hazels, their flame blown from them, drooped like pencils of brown ash. A few withered nut-clusters were still on the boughs, reminding them not of a past autumn but of an autumn to come, for youth’s memories have always this happy trick of living in the future. Across the river lay the blackberry flat and beyond it on the hillside the most famous of all spots for blaeberries. A dozen rabbits hopped towards their burrows.
‘Nobody has been here for some time,’ said Angus. ‘That’s plain.’
‘Yes,’ said Kenn. ‘Look!’ A white scut disappeared under the trees on their right.
They nodded knowingly. Kenn took a small trot to himself, for their pace had been quickening. They went on in silence. The path gradually rose and dipped sharply, the steep wooded slope coming in against their right shoulders, before it fell back again as they emerged once more upon grasslands varied with tree clumps and bronze bracken.
They were now in dangerous territory. The lodge was in full view on the opposing wooded crest where it curved inwards towards the river. On their right, hidden by an upsloping walled plantation of trees, was the gamekeeper’s house and dog kennels.
‘What about having a look at the Lodge Pool?’ suggested Angus.
‘What do you think?’ agreed Kenn.
From the Lodge Pool, the ground rose in two terraces to the walled plantation. The brae-face between the terraces was wooded, and into it Angus slipped, followed by Kenn.
The pool, lying directly under the steep slope on the opposite side, was screened from view of lodge or keeper’s house. Angus and Kenn stepped out from the trees and over the narrow stretch of level turf. It was a long, deep pool, favoured by salmon, but at the moment so dark that its bottom was quite invisible. ‘Out there,’ whispered Angus, pointing towards a ledge of rock, ‘is where they lie. I wouldn’t mind betting you there’s more than one in it just now.’
Kenn could see that Angus had come out of a sheer need to have a look at the pool, and not with the intention of doing anything. There was a memoried glistening in his eyes, his mouth was open slightly in that curious expression of hearkening to inward thought and the outward world at the same time. He beckoned Kenn with his hand and they went back to the trees.
‘Did you ever hear the story of Lachie-the-Fish, Beel’s brother, who’s now in Australia, and the seven salmon?’
‘Yes,’ said Kenn.
‘This is where it happened. There were seven salmon in the pool there and he got them all out on the off side. When he had carried them over to this side, he couldn’t resist the temptation of looking at them. You know. He wanted to see them, just to see them all in a row.’
‘I know,’ said Kenn.
‘Well, that’s the grassy bank where he laid them out, side by side. Seven of them. Side by side. Bonnie. Well, he was looking at them and looking at them, when he heard a stick crack just there and who should come out of the trees but Gordon the keeper.’
‘Lachie must have got an awful fright!’
‘He never moved. He stood like the one that was turned into a pillar; stiff, boy, as stone. And Gordon came down, slowly down with his back to the river and his eyes on the trees here where his spaniel was hunting out the rabbits. If he had turned his head even half over his shoulder he would have seen Lachie and the seven salmon. But he kept walking sideways with his face towards us and his back to Lachie, slowly, step by step, following the dog; slowly down past us here, and over round the bend there, and out of sight. The dog never put up a rabbit. And Lachie never moved.’
This true story was one of sheer marvel for Kenn. Its nightmarish quality of suspense even now held him spellbound.
‘And the joke of it was,’ said Angus, ‘that Gordon wanted to catch Lachie more than any other living man!’
‘Lachie must have been great,’ said Kenn.
‘He was,’ said Angus. ‘Come on.’
They soon reached the bridge that spanned a longer and deeper pool, but Angus resisted the temptation to look into it, for now they must go more warily and casually than ever.
Ahead the sides of the strath slowly converged on a deep, rocky gorge. Had it been summer weather, they could have gone up through the gorge, springing from boulder to boulder in the bed of the stream, but there was too much water in the river for that now. So presently they climbed up through birch trees and came out on the moor with the giddy bank of the gorge a little below them. Legend had it that once upon a time a man pursued by his enemies had leapt from precipice to precipice clean over the gorge and landed safely.
He must have been a greater jumper than any ever seen at the local Games. There was enough in Angus’s murmured joke to defeat the faint sickening sensation Kenn experienced as he glanced down over the bald head of the rock.
Altogether the feeling of insecurity was now at its strongest, for though Kenn had more than once come in sight of the gorge he had never before climbed on top of it and seen the world that lay around and beyond. Behind, the keeper’s house on one side of the strath and the lodge on the other were startlingly visible; and beyond them croft houses on wide sweeps of land disappeared like toy cottages towards the sea. There was no sign of life at all about the lodge. And actually neither men nor boys moved about the keeper’s house.
‘It looks as if they’ve gone to the hill right enough,’ said Angus, as they snuggled into the long heather. They turned from the known world behind and faced the moors. But there was no smoke of heather burning as far as the eye could see.
And the eye could see such distances that here and there a glimpse of moor crest looked like a delicate pencil-shading against the remote sky. The hills were low and long and sinuous; spinal elevation of the backs of moors rather than hills. And all in the one shade of dark brown.
The immense distances drew Kenn’s spirit out of him. He had come into the far country of legendary names. As Angus murmured them, pointing from under his nose with the heather stalk he nibbled, his excitement went out from Kenn like heat vibrations from a moor, and left him exposed to the feel of hidden watching eyes; and yet, for that very reason, his brother’s companionship deeply warmed him. It was like snuggling into his own bed, but immensely more exciting because of the companionship and of the peril (vastly exaggerated in his mind) in which they lay. And from this nest of insecurity and affection, he gazed away towards the moors and crests that for so long had been names with the remoteness about them of names in Judea but far more intimate and thrilling because they were used by grown men he knew. This far country was the country that he had hoped one day to see. And the day had come.
Through this world of slow-rising moors, the river ran. Its strath, however, was now growing shallow, the slope of trees on the right less steep and less high, and the wide grey-green flat land had the bare loneliness of a place haunted by peewit and curlew.
‘Do you see the ruins yonder at the upper end of the flat?’ asked Angus. ‘Well, it’s just beyond, where the brae comes round to the river, that Achglas Pool is.’
‘Is it?’
‘Yes. That’s our only hope. Not really that there’s any chance at all. But we’ll have a look.’
‘What’s the ruins of?’
‘Och, some old croft houses. They used to plough up the grassland down there. Do you know how I know?’
‘No.’
‘Well, do you see the shallow hollows in the ground at a little distance from each other, as if someone had been cutting broad straight swathes? That always shows the land was once cultivated.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘Yes. Now if you look straight over Achglas and away beyond it, do you see a short white wall?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s the burying ground.’
Kenn kept gazing at the ancient place of the dead. In all the vast world in front of him only one human habitation was visible. It was a shepherd’s cottage.
‘It’s lonely there,’ said Kenn.
Angus looked at him. ‘You wouldn’t like to live there?’
‘No.’
‘Would you be frightened of the graveyard at night? Think of the old fellows with the beards coming out of it!’
‘Would you be frightened?’ asked Kenn.
‘I don’t know,’ said Angus, with a slow smile. ‘I have passed it at midnight. You will pass it too.’
Kenn began smiling also, but awkwardly, his eyes all troubled light. He would pass it, too, himself, at midnight.
‘Who are they?’
‘Who?’
‘Buried there.’
‘The folk who lived here long ago. They lived in the ruins there, and in other ruins you’ll see. They poached the river many a time, I bet!’
Kenn’s awkward smile deepened, for he could not see them poaching the river. They were too old and bearded for that. They were men of the heather, out of the solitary moors, out of the past. When Angus looked around him, Kenn looked quickly too. ‘Did you hear anything?’ he asked.
‘No. Did you?’
‘No. I thought you had.’
‘No, there’s not a soul about. If they’ve gone to the hill, their smoke should be showing soon. The low-ground smoke, I mean.’
‘Where’s the high ground?’
‘Away miles beyond the burying ground. Do you see that long, low hill against the sky, like an animal lying flat with a great waggle on its tail?’
Angus told him of the distances his own squad of burners had gone last year. Told him stories of the fires and of the gillies who controlled each squad, how one gillie had nearly gone mad when the fire was getting the better of the lads, and had himself lashed into it like a demon. ‘You’re big for your age. You’ll be able for the low ground yourself next year.’
‘Do you think so?’ asked Kenn shyly.
‘Yes. Why not? And then two-and-six for one day. A whole half-crown. It’s good pay.’
‘It’s a lot of money,’ said Kenn. While he was lost in contemplation of this wealth, Angus caught his arm.
‘What?’ whispered Kenn, flattening.
‘The peewit.’
They saw the bird wheeling and diving and heard its sibilant cry. Pee-z-wit! It was tremendously excited.
‘Must be a weasel or something,’ murmured Angus at last. ‘Couldn’t be anyone in the trees—unless he’s been there a long time.’
They watched the bird and the trees. Its anxiety grew less fierce; its cry more drawn out. Angus caught Kenn’s arm again. ‘Look!’
Over the ridge to the right of the burying ground a drift of rising smoke shadowed the sky. The first fire by the heather-burners!
Kenn looked into Angus’s face. It was smiling with that humoured uplift at the mouth-corner that was somehow so personal and friendly. Angus’s bright eyes met Kenn’s and he nodded. ‘Come on.’
When they reached the shelter of the trees, Angus set off quickly along the ridge of the wooded slope. Kenn could see he was not going down to the river level until he had investigated the peewit disturbance.
But when they arrived at the approximate place, they could find no trace of any living thing. Even the peewit had vanished. As Kenn looked about him at the trees, and rocky outcrops below, and thickets of young hazel, he realised how easy it could be for anyone to hide, for a flattened body to shove a grey face round a greyer boulder.
Angus shook his head, then beckoned with it. He was satisfied there was no danger.
They went down the wooded slope in a long slant and ultimately came out on the river land by the cottage ruins. They laughed silently at one or two bolting rabbits. A good sign! The laugh vanished as a curlew got up and woke the whole place with its long cry. Two peewits got up. The double cry of the curlew fell away with the falling land into the fluting, tremulous whistle.
‘Enough to make you mad!’ muttered Angus. But when they pulled up in the neck of trees beyond the flat, he said derisively, ‘Doesn’t matter. Not a soul about.’ Then he stood listening, until the cries of the birds had passed into silence. He went on a little way and stood again. ‘That’s Achglas,’ he said, nodding to the pool below them. ‘We’ll sit here for a little.’
They sat on the edge of a narrow, stony pathway that slanted up through the trees. There was no hurry. Listening acutely, Kenn heard the soft thud of his own heart.
It was quiet and grey and alert here. Spink! said a chaffinch above them. Spink! Spink! He had never heard the note so detached and clear. In the sheltered strong sunlight, it was like a sound in another world, or, rather, the world just beyond the known one. The note was not clear, was sibilant a little, like the cry of the peewit, yet it was round and bright with happiness, and hopped from branch to branch like a coloured bubble.
He hardly listened to it, his eyes were so avid for the river, his ears for other sounds.
Though the hazels and birches were not large trees, they were old and twisted and tufted with lichen. They reached down and near; they stood back leaning secretly together. The wind higher up sifted softly through thin twigs. Outcrops of grey rock were patterned with smooth lichen. Rotten stumps and dead branches had yellow moss growing on them. Last year’s nuts were in the dead leaves under Kenn’s fingers, as he turned his head to look up into the brae-face.
The two sides of the strath narrowed at this point before falling back again. The near side of the pool was solid rock which the water hit as it entered before swirling out into a round basin with a stony beach on the off side. It was not a large pool, but it was deep and, as the boys saw, impenetrably dark.
‘Black as peat,’ said Angus, with his friendly smile, when presently they stood on the low rock scanning the water. Then he glanced quickly over each shoulder and stepped down to a narrow ledge. Though only some eighteen inches broad and not nearly his own length, he yet managed to curl up on it and peer down into the dark current. As he lay there, his nose in the water and his cap held in his right hand close to his head, with its snout lipping the water, Kenn wondered how on earth he expected to see anything, for the ledge in the pool’s throat lay at a slant to the incoming dark current which flowed past at some speed carrying continuous legions of round white foam petals.
But he wondered with the excitement that knew Angus was not going through this performance for the fun of it. This was an example of that secret knowledge of the river which he himself hoped yet to attain; the knowledge that finally got into the bone and remained there for ever. Without this knowledge, all talk of loving a river was so much sailing froth; pretty, and to be smiled at in that pleasant, derisive way Angus had at times.
Angus was now lying still as the rock itself. Kenn glanced about him, holding his breath to listen. Angus lifted his head and slowly turned up his face. The water trickled unheeded from the hair on his forehead and from his nose. He was smiling. ‘A beauty!’ he said, in quiet tones, and levered himself on to his feet. As he squeezed his hair and his nose, he looked about him. ‘A fine fish—about ten pounds. And clean.’ He vaulted up beside Kenn.
Presently he got Kenn down on the ledge. ‘Wait a bit.’ He glanced at the sky. ‘You won’t see a thing unless you get a beam of sun. When you lie down bring your eyes close to the water. Make a shadow with your bonnet and look down the shadow. Keep staring down. He’s about six inches out from the rock and his body moves from side to side a little with the current, a very slow waggle like a clout in a stream. … Now! I’ll hold your jacket.’
Kenn got down and Angus directed him into position. But though Kenn stared earnestly, he could see nothing but the dark-brown water, foam-patterned, flowing immediately under his eyes.
‘Keep the foam off if you can with the edge of your hand or the snout of your bonnet. Make a sort of calm water and keep on staring straight down. I’ll hold you.’
The brown of the water beneath him became all at once irradiated with sunlight and Kenn realised that he was staring into depth, a brown depth full of myriads of specks of matter. Far down the specks ran into a treacly thickness. Stare as he liked he could not see the bottom, could not see any shape, could distinguish nothing at all beyond a tiny pale fleck that disappeared even as he looked at it.
He hated having to admit defeat. ‘I cannot see him,’ he said at last, wiping his nose slowly.
‘Did you see nothing at all?’
‘No. There was a wee little white thing—’
