‘They’re homesick for us,’ Neil’s dad said when he was told there were more and more fulmars being discovered nesting on the mainland. ‘They’re pining since we left.’
Neil saw them first when he arrived in St Andrews to study for the ministry – birds reeling near its cliffs or nesting in the crumbling walls of the Abbey. Tears glimmered in his eyes when he recalled how these birds had been the source of so much that his people had valued on the island. Light, meat and plumage. The glow of their lamps. The chink of coins in their pockets.
It wasn’t long after that he was arrested. A headline in the local paper told of how a Divinity student had been caught scaling one of the Abbey towers.
He told them he had been trying to gain a sense of what living there must have been like for the old monks and holy men who had once prayed and worshipped in the building.
He knew that explanation would have been – to their ears at least – a lot less weird than the truth.