13

ONE DAY LATE IN THE SUMMER – it was 13 August in 2000, the 19th in 1999 – the puffins leave. In the morning, the place is as full as it has ever been and the sky at the colony quivers and flickers with the hundreds of thousands of bodies in flight. The rocks on the boulder screes around Garbh Eilean are incandescent with the yellow of the lichen and the air is thick with the tang of guano. You then turn your back to some other task. The boat needs fixing, the rushes around the well should be cut away. Look again, in the afternoon, and the birds have gone. The place is empty. The rocks glow as they ever did, but nothing lives among them. Acre after acre of the colonies is empty; silence clings to them. The sudden stillness is haunting, sianta is the Gaelic word, and these are now the Shiant Isles. The guano fug still wafts around you. The rocks are still spattered with it, the kittiwake droppings white where they have fallen straight down the cliff from each rock-ledge nest, the guillemots’ brown on the ledges where the birds have stamped and shuffled across it for the summer months. But the party is over. What the Shiants could offer – a place for an egg, near a sea full of fish, away from predatory enemies – is no longer needed. For the rest of the year, dispersal across the ocean is the better option.

Not everything has yet gone. The skuas are still here and they are teaching their young to fly, the giant juveniles clumsying after their parents, shadowing and modelling their behaviour on the skill and expertise on display in front of them. The baby shags, now just waterborne, cheep like budgerigars in clusters next to the natural arch. There is a mass of snipe in the marsh, fluting at night over their territories, and a short-eared owl, the only daytime owl, cruises low over the rushes for the voles that are its only prey.

At this turning point of the year, at least in a good summer, the islands have turned Cretan with drought and the grass is so dry that as you walk through it the stems rustle against you. Where the sheep cannot reach, the long bluish threads of the ungrazed grass hang like wigs. Over the stone foundations of the medieval farmstead at the bay, the turf has turned brown, mapping the structures beneath it.

This is also the moment for the arrival of the most mysterious of all Shiant creatures. In thirty-five years, I have seen it only once. From Stocanish, at the north-west point of Garbh Eilean, I had been watching with my children the north-going stream of the tide as it swept past the Galtas. It was running hard and fast through the big gap between Galta Mor and the other stacks, tailing like a mill race of roily water. Galta Beag was throwing a big curve away to the east, as though the flow were meeting a coffer-dam there. Downstream of all the rocks, the currents were blotched with balloons of upwelling water. Each was as heavy as a pond of olive oil and they were dotted across the stream like the spots on the flanks of trout. This pattern of rough and smooth was spread across an area a mile wide and at least one and a half miles long, the glitter of the turbulence coating a thousand acres of the sea.

Gannets pay attention to the tide. As it floods, they fish here by the Galtas; as it ebbs they move to the riffles off Seann Chaisteal and Sgeir Mianish. If you want some fish, it’s a good idea to follow them. We launched the boat and dropped our weighted lines just where the running water breaks and shivers over the hidden rock ridges. You haul the fish in, no skill here, the metalled bodies lying on the boards beside your feet, the big coppery pollack, the saithe steely blue, the occasional small, fat mackerel, and sometimes a little red gurnard slipping out of the mouth of the bigger fish, caught just as the prey was in its gullet.

It was, in that way, an ordinary late-summer day, a taking of the fish which the Shiants have always provided. I baited some creels with the heads of some of them, a fleet of six, no more, and set them – or ‘shot’ them, as the word goes, but that is too dynamic a term for the gentle lowering of these cage-traps into the waters of the Minch – and left them there for the night, when the lobsters would emerge from their rocks to feed.

I had my sons, my sister Rebecca and my first wife Olivia with me in the boat that day. We were right in the middle of the three islands, the Shiants’ navel, and the tide must have been at dead water. The evening was calm and the Minch was wearing its sleek summer skin, with that oily, rich viscosity which is merely the thickness of plankton in the water, the favoured pasture of the sharks.

We were in a big wooden dinghy and there were five or six of us in there, floating about between the half-enclosing arms of the islands. Looking up, away to the south, where the sky was daubed by the swell into patches across the water, I saw a fin. ‘Is that a shark?’ I said. The boys thought I was joking. But we looked harder and saw the fin moving through those slack colour-islands of sea and sky. It was a fin and I turned the boat towards it, perhaps two or three hundred yards away. Within seconds Rebecca said quietly, ‘There’s another, there are two of them.’ The fins were trailing each other, one pursuing the other through the soup, perhaps fifteen feet apart. A few seconds more as we edged towards them, the outboard gurgling down into its lowest register, and then we realised, simultaneously I think, the whole boat coming to the same idea: not two sharks but two fins, the dorsal and the tail of the same animal, fifteen feet apart.

Lovers on St Kilda sang to each other:

He: You are my turtle-dove, my song-thrush, You are my sweet-sounding harp in the sweet morning.

She: You are my hero, my basking shark.

I’ve tried the lines out on a variety of people and they laugh, but for me that is as good as a North Atlantic haiku, at least in its sudden, final turn from everything that is sweet and coherent to the huge masculine simplicity of that other creature, cearrabhan in Gaelic, the unmeasured, the unsugared, unsinging presence of the giant wild.

It was like that the evening we met our shark. The beautiful surface ease of the sea, its time-lapsed slopping from one state to another and the way it looked like a bed in which you could loll and roll for hours: all that concealed another place. Those two fins were the blades of one world cutting up into the air of another. I stopped the engine, the boat drifted and the grazing shark was moving across our bows. I wasn’t frightened as it turned, a little below the surface now, and circled us, its head as wide as a table, its body the length of two dinghies, its dredger-bucket mouth agape for the food-rich water streaming through it, the skin a mottled grey and a manner as casually proprietorial as a landlord behind his bar, as a Macleod in his Minch. It circled us, one full circumnavigation of the boat, and then moved away, still underwater, its outline breaking up as the coloured sea closed over.

That was twelve years ago and I have never seen one since. Numbers have certainly dropped catastrophically since the 1940s, and no one knows why. Dan Macleod at Lemreway blames ‘the Norwegians’. Others the rampaging depredations of shark hunters such as Tex Geddes and Gavin Maxwell in the Forties and early Fifties. And there is some evidence to suggest that the shark population goes through boom-bust cycles with a period of about half a century.

I hope and pray it does because I know that the way to see these animals is not in that rare single sighting, which is rather a twitcher’s view, the precious conservationist with his awe in his pocket, but in the grandeur of the shoals among which Maxwell and Geddes played such havoc. Maxwell had, I think, an admirably complex attitude. He felt no, or little, compunction about shooting these enormous animals. In Harpoon at a Venture, he maintained that to kill a basking shark is no more or less cruel than to kill a herring. But his sense of wonder remained intact. Only from him do I know a description of the basking shark en masse: ‘Down there in the clear water,’ he wrote of one summer day in 1946 off the southern coast of Skye,

they were packed as tight as sardines, layer upon layer of them, huge grey shapes like a herd of submerged elephants, the furthest down dim and indistinct in the sea’s dusk. A memory came back to me from childhood – Mowgli and the elephants’ dance, and the drawing of the great heaving mass of backs in the jungle clearing.

That’s what I want: a vastness of vast presences, ranks of them stepping down into the green dark of the sea.

A couple of weeks later, in early September, the shepherds arrive ‘to take the lambs home’. That is a euphemism: the real destination is Stornoway market, and then the butcher or, if they are not quite fat, some lush southern pastures where they can be finished. In 1999, Shiant lambs from Eilean an Tighe and Garbh Eilean (those from Eilean Mhuire were, as John Murdo Matheson the shepherd says, ‘ready fit for the hook’) went to a buyer from Lancaster, who sold them on to a farm near Dover, where they spent the winter, fattening a little more, and from where they finally went to the butcher the following spring. There is nothing new in this: upland and island stock have been fattened and finished on richer farms further south, nearer the urban markets, for centuries. The whole of Scotland was laced with the drove-roads along which they travelled.

Ever since the departure of the old Shiant population in the 1770s, the islands have been a stock-raising place. At first, it was a mixture of the old black cattle and sheep. But improvers soon cast their eye over the potentialities of the place. ‘The Schant Isles are certainly the greatest curiosities I ever contemplated,’ Rev. James Headrick, a geologist who had been invited to Lewis in 1800 by Lord Seaforth, remarked: ‘Were they known, men fond of viewing all that is grand and uncommon in the productions of nature would come from the remotest corners of the world to see them.’

But Headrick was employed more for an economic than a picturesque survey:

These islands are better adapted for sheep and a few goats than for cows, which cannot be kept from falling over the rocks, – an accident that happened while I was there. I should think the fine woolled Cheviot breed would thrive well on them. I mentioned this to the tacksman: but he said that sheep were to apt to get fat there; and then they became lazy, and fell over the rocks, like cows. But this objection is easily obviated by stocking more fully, which would prevent them from getting more fat than necessary. Cows cannot get at half the grass. I am also apt to think that these Isles might form a commodious fishing station. The seas around swarm with fishes of various sorts, and there is a commodious landing place for boats between Garve and Y-Kill.

The fishing station was not a good idea – no anchorage and no market – but since Headrick’s report, the Shiants have been a sheep place. Sheep get fatter there quicker than on the mainland of Lewis (Hughie MacSween said that in some years he had fat lambs from Eilean Mhuire by June, whereas in Scaladale or on Seaforth Island, where he also had his stock, they would never be fat before the end of August) and they also have more lambs. Because the Shiant sheep tend to have – and are able to rear – more twins than elsewhere, the average lamb survival rate is about one lamb per ewe, or a ratio of a hundred per cent, whereas on Lewis, even in a good year, they are pleased to get seventy per cent. It is said by Tommy Macrae and other Lewismen that Shiant lamb has yellow fat, which only a few weeks’ grazing on Lewis can turn white, and it is the ‘sea birds manuring the grass’ that is to blame. And at Dingwall Market outside Inverness, the wild and springy stock from these islands had a reputation before the war as the ‘Shiant Isle Jumpers’.

It is the relative riches of the Shiants which has kept the shepherding tradition alive here, despite the costs and difficulty. The islands are a step up, not down, for Lewis or Harris sheep men, which is what makes coming out with them here such unalloyed pleasure.

The grazing tenancy has been handed down in this century in an unbroken chain. Calum MacSween, the Tarbert baker, was Lord Leverhulme’s tenant, then Compton Mackenzie’s and my father’s. He left it to his son Johnnie, and it then went to his cousin Donald ‘DB’ Macleod of Scalpay, a butcher, poet and romanticist. When he died, it went to Hughie MacSween, Calum’s nephew, and from him to another cousin, Donald MacSween, the Scalpay fisherman. When Donald had some trouble with his heart, he was forced to give up the Shiants, but there was a man waiting in the wings. John Murdo Matheson of Gravir in Lewis, who is now twenty-nine, had left school at sixteen (‘I didn’t have the academic brain to go on’) and had started work part-time at Stornoway Mart and part-time on a farm north of the town. He wanted more than that and the man who owned both mart and farm encouraged him to have a go at taking on the Shiants. He knew Hughie MacSween from his visits to the market and when, in 1989, John Murdo heard that Hughie was thinking of giving up the Shiants through illness, he ‘clicked into gear’.

John Murdo’s father had a nickname for him: ‘Friends of the Earth’, because of his unrequitable hunger for land. The family already had two crofts, one at Gravir above the lochside and another a few miles away at Calbost, and now he wanted to add the Shiants to the collection. He has a way with animals and a natural authority. Mackenzie, Nicolson and Matheson blood all flow in his veins. I once remarked on this to him. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘I think we’ve got it all covered.’ But he was only seventeen and that was too young. Besides, he couldn’t raise the money to buy the stock from Hughie. The islands went to Donald MacSween and only in 1996 did he transfer them to John Murdo. By then, he was working both at the mart and as a slaughterman at Heather Isle Meats in Stornoway. Few of these arrangements have anything to do with the nominal proprietor; he is the lucky recipient of the grace, courtesy, charm, energy, loyalty and generosity that pours out from one Hebridean tenant after another. No rent is paid nowadays, but we share the costs of maintaining the house.

The pattern of the shepherding year is immutable. The tups are put on in November, about eight or nine of them for the three hundred-odd ewes, and are taken off in February, ‘knackered’ as John Murdo says. If the weather prevents them being collected and given cake and nurture at home in Calbost, as happened in the dreadful storms of early 2000, with winds in Stornoway recorded at a hundred and six miles an hour, the exhausted and expensive animals can die on the islands. Lambs are born in late April or early May, deliberately unsupervised. If anyone lands on the islands and disturbs the ewes at this time, the likely outcome is that the sheep will desert their lambs. At the end of May the lambs are marked – male a red spot, female blue – and the ram lambs castrated. The flock is shorn in July, an exhausting, hot few days, as the wool is clipped entirely by hand. In early September, the sheep are gathered again, the best ewes and ewe lambs kept back for stock on the islands and the cull ewes and marketable lambs taken to Stornoway. In November, finally, the tups are put out there again for the winter.

Each trip also has its pattern. You arrive usually on a Saturday and as Hughie MacSween says, ‘there may be a dram or two in the provisions. And the first night we arrive, whether it was a Friday or a Saturday – now DB didn’t approve of this – we’d have a dram. And that first night the whole lot would be perished. The whole lot.’

The perishing of the dram is a wonderful chute to oblivion, an increasingly sentimental slither into the night. John Murdo has brought his uncle Kennie Mackenzie, a joiner from Leurbost in Lochs, and ‘two boys from the mart’ with him. Kenneth Angus Maclver – Toby – is a shepherd and stockman. Nona, whose real and unused name is Donald Smith, is a shepherd and ex-butcher. The tilly lamp hisses over us. John Murdo has cooked us a leg of lamb from his own sheep at Calbost, which he slaughtered and butchered himself, and some of the potatoes I have grown in the lazybed at the far end of the bay.

Toby: There is nothing like a good potato. And that is a good potato.

John: You don’t want too much seaweed on it. Seaweed makes the potato wet.

Kennie: I hope you didn’t plant those on a Sunday, Adam.

Adam: No, I’m sure it was a weekday, Kennie.

Kennie: Because nothing planted on a Sunday ever grows.

Adam: No, and fish mustn’t be landed on a Sunday.

Kennie: It’s better that they rot on the shore.

Adam: Even if they’re caught on the Saturday and you are late coming in?

Kennie: You would benefit more by throwing the lot than eating even a morsel of one of them.
The coal fire glows so hot that we are all in shirt sleeves and sweat pours down John Murdo’s face.

Toby: You think it’s hot in here, Adam? You should see us at the clipping. Fifteen ewes and it’s in the sea to cool off. Especially on Mary Island, where the sun shines off the rocks by the fank there. Lambs jumping all over you. It’s hot work then. It’s fast work. You might think it’s hot now. I can tell you it’s hot then.
The rats scuffle behind the boarding around the room.

Nona: Ah, there we are. That’s a sound I like the sound of. It’s always nice to know you’ve got some neighbours handy.

John Murdo is king here. Only a slight gesture is needed from him, nothing more than moving to untie a knot or shift a coal on the fire, for the others to jump to, looking to him.

The dogs, which have been tied up outside, are brought in: John Murdo’s Sheba, a delicate little thing, Toby’s Queenie, hyperactive, with darting eyes and quivering ears, Kennie’s Roy, one eye brown, the other eye blue, and Nona’s Spot, a sweet-natured, big clown of a creature, named after a spot on his ear, and who refuses ever to go to his left. They curl up at their respective masters’ feet and their ears are stroked.

John: When Sheba gets home she’ll be on the tips of her toes for a few days. It’s hard-going for the dogs here. Her feet get so sore and her pads are soft. She needs a bit of looking after.

Nona: Not like this one. The first year we were here, wasn’t it, over by the salt pool above the cliffs next to the natural arch, that was Spot’s day wasn’t it?

Kennie: Wasn’t it?

Adam: What happened?

Nona: We were gathering them down there and I sent Spot off on a run over to his left to get behind the sheep, out, you know, in a curve like that. As soon as I’d given the whistle I knew I had made a mistake. It wasn’t even worth looking. Phut. He’s gone straight over. I told John it wasn’t worth looking over. He’s dead. So we went to the cliff edge and there he was, wet through, on a rock down at the edge of the sea barking up at us. It must be sixty, seventy feet down there.

Adam: What had happened?

Nona: It was his speed that saved him. He must have leaped out right out wide like that above and over the rocks and into the sea eighty or ninety feet below him and then somehow climbed to the rocks at the shore.

John: It was a terrible swell that day. We got round there in the boat but if he hadn’t jumped for the boat, we’d never have got him. But he jumped for the boat.

Nona: And I had to keep him going not to let him stiffen up. He would have stiffened up if he’d laid down. And when we got home he was sore for days afterwards. He must have smacked into the sea, his belly. But it didn’t change him. He’s a good dog.

John: I had a dog die here. Meg. She’d been poorly at the beginning of the year, a liver complaint, and then we were out here in March and she wasn’t right. She wouldn’t come out of the house. And then that night she was lying there next to me at night on the other bed and in the morning she was as flat as a pancake.

Nona: A good dog she was, always on the go, a good soul, wasn’t she?
We all stare at the fire for a while as the dram continues its perishing around us.

Toby: What about the boy who got a Russian one out of those catalogues?

Nona: A dog?

Toby: No, it was a wife, Nona. There are a few tasty bits in there.

Nona: What was his like?

Toby: A hefty number.

Nona: I don’t think she’s arrived yet.

Toby: She’s a lawyer, isn’t she?

Nona: Well, she’ll have him if she is.

Kennie: But that’s no way to get married.

Toby: He only knew her a week or two.

John: He had one before. She didn’t last long.

Toby: Women are best left out of it. I’ve got more daughters than I can count and none of them can boil an egg. They should be let out once a year to cook the Christmas dinner.
The five of us disintegrate into whisky-sodden hysterics and John puts another coal or two on the fire.

John: How many people would give their eye teeth to be here now?

Kennie: Aye, away from the cares of the world.

Adam: Hughie told me once that his uncle Calum, sitting on the beach here waiting for the boat, always used to say, without anyone ever prompting him, ‘There is no place outside Heaven’s Gates where I would prefer to be sitting than the place I am sitting in now.’

Nona: On a day like this you would never want to leave, would you?

The next day, being Sunday, nothing is done here. We go for a walk, we sit in the sunshine, we read the newspapers that we brought with us yesterday. We listen to the radio. It is a holiday away from the world. But come Monday, after a sober tea and coffee evening the night before, the work begins. In the drenching rain, we gather the sheep island by island. First on Eilean Mhuire, easily gathering them in a smooth and continuous sweep around the island and down on to the shore. There with the washed-up kelp on the floor of the fank, and wool and dung mingled on the cobbles, the bodies of the wet sheep pressing against the hurdles and the seals wailing on the offshore skerries, it is easily and quickly done. All the sheep are dosed with the worming drench, the fifteen best ewe lambs are marked for collection on Wednesday and then released back up to the pasture again.

Toby, in his yellow jacket and orange trousers, keeps muttering at Queenie, ‘Come into heel, will you,’ and Nona stands there with Spot beside him. ‘That’s the lambs, or some of them. They’ll look better when they’re dry.’ I asked him why he had given up butchery. ‘I couldn’t stand it on a good day, stepping out the back door and looking at the sky.’

In the dripping, drenching rain, Garbh Eilean is a different proposition altogether. The shags have gone now. There’s just nest after nest of fulmars crowded with grown chicks. The cloud is down low on the islands like a lid. It clings like smoke around the cliffs. The colour of the screes has been dulled in this early autumn rain and the corpses of sea birds, a kittiwake, a puffin, have already dissolved away – or perhaps the rats have had them – leaving just the feathers on the rain-glazed grass.

Garbh Eilean is a big, stocky brute of an island to shepherd. It is high and steep. Different parts of the flock are hefted to different areas and resist being herded. In particular, those which spend their lives down on the sweet rich grass at the Bagh don’t like coming up on to the sour acid moor of the high ground. One of them in particular, an old ewe that John Murdo calls ‘the old ski champion’, goads the rest. For year after year she has niftily dodged the gathering, allowing herself to be led almost to the top and then, when they think they have done it, suddenly turning round and skiing past men and dogs back down to the bottom, taking her sisters and granddaughters and enormous extended family down with her. There are ewes down there, with three unshorn fleeces one on top of another, which look like abandoned sofas.

In a mile-wide line, the five of us, each with a crook, and the four dogs, set about clearing Garbh Eilean. ‘Get on, come on, get up, goo on, goo on, shsssh, sssh, whistle, heaaunk, heank,’ – a grunted pushing with the back of the voice – and then to the dogs, ‘That’ll do. That’ll do. THAT’LL DO!’

John Murdo strides easily around the island, jumping down into a cleft to collect a ewe and a lamb that have squeezed themselves in there, Sheba endlessly tearing here and there to his whistles. ‘Just get up over, come up over. Sheba!’

He had asked me to drive the sheep the length of the southwest shore, down towards Annat and then on to Stocanish, and not to let any of them past me. It was a struggle in the broken ground, steep slippery places, some gooed over with shag muck, and with the sleeting rain slicking the surfaces of the rocks, as I sweated in my waterproofs, much too aware of the need to keep up with the others spread out across the hill above me. It is not exactly the dynamism of these men that is so impressive, more the habit of exertion, the muscle and resilience learned in a lifetime of work. I felt like a stick of asparagus next to them.

I emerged on to the high ground, thinking and hoping that I had kept all the sheep in front of me. I could see John Murdo in his green waterproofs, half a mile away, gesticulating to me and shouting.

‘What?’

His words were torn and broken by the wind.

Again and again, he was waving his stick in the direction I had come. I couldn’t hear but I guessed what he meant. Some sheep had doubled past me. I should go back to gather them, and so I did, half a mile back and half a mile back again, driving a couple of ewes and their lambs firmly in front of me. It worked this time, and I finally joined up with John Murdo and the others. ‘There were some ewes and lambs behind you,’ he said quietly, smiling.

‘I know,’ I said.

Now the difficult part: driving this gathered flock of some hundred and thirty ewes and the same number of lambs, along with the four tups which had survived the spring, down the steep south side, the Sron Lionta, of Garbh Eilean. ‘Don’t get below a sheep on that hillside,’ John Murdo said, ‘or if it falls or tumbles down on to you, that’s you.’

Slowly we edge them towards the lip. They seep across the hillside. This is not a way they usually come and there is a hesitation in the movement, a stickiness which means that as they come to the edge of the steep slope, which is at a gradient of perhaps two in one (‘There’s no point in describing it,’ Kennie says. ‘Just call it the Eiger.’), they stop. The sheep tremble on the brink. It is something like those films of wildebeest crossing the river in the Serengeti, with the steam coming off the exhausted and bleating animals, many of them crammed on to little rock ledges, uncertain where to turn. A lamb suddenly slips and we watch it falling and rolling like a doll towards the sea, over and over, jerking and jumping over each new rock, all the way down to the little cove at the bottom, breaking its neck as it goes, dead before it is halfway there. It is left for the gulls and the rats because its flesh is bruised and no good for anything. ‘You can’t eat them,’ John Murdo says to me straightforwardly. ‘They are just wrecked. It would be all right if it fell into the sea. It would be all right if you could slit its throat and bleed it then, but with the bruising, the bloods’s clotting and it’s no good.’

Something in the quivering, bunched queue of sheep finally gives and they begin to trail carefully down the rocky path to the shore, the exhausted shepherds gently pushing them down in front of them. They trail across the isthmus and into the fank on the other side. Everything is in, including the champion skier. ‘There she is,’ Toby says, ‘the bastard from the Bagh, the bastard from hell, the bitch.’ The best twenty-five ewe lambs are marked to go back to Garbh Eilean and the rest are kept in, ‘to go home’.

The next day on Eilean an Tighe is easy by comparison. A steady sweep down to Mianish and back up again, with the big stocky body of a peregrine flying over the driven animals, draws the Eilean an Tighe flock into the fank by the house.

Only afterwards did I realise something which may or may not be significant. Every one of the islands had been gathered in a clockwise direction.

This might seem coincidental were it not for the fact that well into the historical period, recorded from Martin Martin in the 1690s to Margaret Fay Shaw in the 1930s in South Uist, the habit of doing things clockwise, which is also the direction the sun travels, from east to west, was in the past regarded as a form of blessing. Boats on leaving the shore, supplicants at holy wells, hosts greeting strangers, those resanctifying women after childbearing, anyone visiting an ancient and holy cairn: all these would involve a clockwise or sunwise turn, deiseil in Gaelic, as a form of charm. And here, even the way in which the sheep were turned from one holding pen to another within the fank was sunwise.

I am not suggesting that John Murdo or any of the others is indulging in heathen practices. Nothing could be further from his mind. It is just the way it has always been done here. And it fits the place. If this is an inherited pattern, it is entirely unconscious.

The sun had come out and we were looking over the lambs gathered in the fank beside the house. The lambs were not quite as good as everyone had hoped.

Nona: It was the wet spring that did it.

Toby: That was what kept them back.

Nona: Aye, and the dry summer.

Toby: Aye, that would have kept them back too.

Nona: And it’s been cold these last few weeks.

Toby: That wouldn’t have helped.

Nona: No, they’re not as good as they might have been.

Toby: But there are some big ones in here.

Nona: Monsters some of them.

Toby: There’s some good lambs in there.

Nona: Look at that horned ewe with her twins.

Toby: There’s some very heavy lambs here.

Kennie: It’ll be heavy work getting them into the dory.

Toby: Come into heel, will you.

Nona: Once you get a good year, you expect a good year every year. It must have been ’98, was it? That was a corker. But you’re not going to get that quality every time.

Toby: No, not every time, that’s right.

As the shepherds looked the animals over, we had some visitors. The grey-hulled, thirty-eight-foot ocean-going twin-diesel estate boat from Eishken on Lewis, the Incorrigible, pulled into the bay and off-loaded its passengers, about eight handsome men and women, in their late teens or early twenties, in fleeces and sunglasses.

John glanced up from his work. ‘Oh, they’re from Eishken,’ he said. ‘They’ve been here before with their black labradors when we were trying to get the sheep down off the big island. They had their dogs on the beach and I had to shout at them to get out of the way because the sheep wouldn’t come down. You’d think they might have guessed.’

In the sunny afternoon, as we worked at lifting and drenching the sheep, the people from the boat came and sat on the grassy bank a hundred yards or so from us and watched. None of them moved towards us, nor did the shepherds greet them. Instead, we spoke quietly amongst ourselves.

John: Look at them. Look at them lying there like that. There’s no reality in their lives. You slog your guts out on a day’s work and then you see them there and you realise you don’t have the first idea how the other half lives.

Nona: Toby, you’re the one for the girls. You go and talk to them. You’re the one who nearly cut that head off that sheep at the clipping when that girl in a miniskirt came along with some eighty-year-old husband or other and you very nearly slit its throat open.
Toby leans against the side of the fank with his bum outstretched in the direction of the Eishken party.

John: Each of those sunglasses probably costs more than I get for a day’s wages.

Nona: At least they could come and say hello and have a look at what we are doing.

Toby: Yes, but they probably think we are going to rape and murder them.

Nona: We could hold them to ransom.

Toby: How much do you think? It’s diamond money, isn’t it, at Eishken?

Adam: No, I think it’s nightclubs, tenpin bowling and Burger Kings in the north of England.

Suddenly landed in this piece of class drama, I thought I should go over to them.

‘What are you up to at Eishken?’ I asked the ranks of silvered wraparounds.

‘Probably drinking too much,’ one of the boys said. A girl said she felt like climbing a hill and so I pointed out the way up the side of Garbh Eilean. She thanked me but didn’t move. Was it shyness that was hobbling their behaviour? God knows what we looked like, covered in sweat and sheep shit. I later heard from someone at Eishken that the party had been told that shepherds were working on the Shiants and they weren’t to interfere with them. And so they lay back and enjoyed the sun. This is the kind of accident by which moneyed gaucheness becomes intolerable arrogance to those who are exposed to it.

John, Toby, Nona, Kennie and I put the holding pen up on the beach while the Eishken boys and girls watched from just above us. Eventually, having visited ten yards or so of the islands, they sloped back down to their dinghy, which had been brought into the beach by one of the Eishken estate staff. ‘I’ll think I’ll climb a smaller bump tomorrow,’ the girl said as she walked past me.

Christopher Macrae, the head keeper at Eishken and a good friend of John Murdo’s – his brother, the fisherman Ruaraidh Macrae often brings John out to the Shiants in his boat, the Astronaut – appeared and they waved and said hello to each other warmly. But that warmth did not extend to the passengers. Macrae’s assistant in waders was holding the dinghy in the shallows. One by one the girls and boys climbed in and sat down, so that with their weight the dinghy grounded on the cobbles. The employee had to push like a Number Eight in a scrum to get them off. John Murdo watched in silence. ‘Even if they had been properly stuck,’ he said to me quietly, ‘they would have sat there and let him struggle.’

We went back to the house. The Bitch from the Bagh was causing a rumpus in the holding pen and in the excitement of sorting it out, Spot nipped Nona in the bottom.

We got up at five the next morning. It was still night and you could just see the breakers in the sea outside, creaming in from the south-west. The fishing boat from Ness was expected at seven and we scraped around getting ready in the darkness. Most of us ate a breakfast by candlelight of black pudding, sausages, bacon, bread and butter but John Murdo was too nervous. The wind had got up in the night and he was worried we weren’t going to get off. He was taking two hundred-odd lambs to market, four thousand pounds-worth if the prices came good. That was the reason for no breakfast.

In the first light, we drove the sheep down on to the beach. The wind was wet and frozen. The boat from Ness arrived and its aluminium Russian dory, with hurdles on both sides, came into the beach. Its shallow draught bow just nosed against the shingle. We made a human chain from fank to boat and handed the heavy lambs down one by one. A man stood in the bow of the dory and we lifted the animals in to him. He held them tight against the hurdles with his knees. It was hot work and even in the cold of the wind we were down to our shirts in it, with the braces of the waterproof trousers up over them and sweat rolling down our faces. The lambs struggled and kicked but we held them at the hips and under the chin, exhausting and relentless work, tons of lamb transferred from shore to dory. They were taken out ten at a time the couple of hundred yards to the fishing boat standing off in the rising wind. There they were lifted up again, over the gunwales and on to the deck. Some of them kicked to get away. ‘Ah, you bitch,’ Toby would say as they flung out at him and the stones of the beach clattered around us. The tiredness grips your whole body but particularly in the ends of the fingers, which ache with exhaustion. Each of the tups needed four of us to carry it, one at each corner. ‘The angry bitch, he’ll have your knees if you don’t watch it,’ Nona said.

‘Look at the size of that lamb,’ Toby said. ‘You could go to sea on that lamb.’

‘That’s one for the freezer,’ Kennie said.

‘Get your hands out of your pockets,’ John said to me at one moment, as we were waiting for the dory to return for another load. This is not a luxury life.

At last, they were all on. The big fifty-eight-foot fishing boat was down at the bow with the weight of animals on its deck and in its hold. The shepherds lay collapsed on the piled nets in the stern, smoking roll-ups. Someone produced some cans of lager. ‘Nectar,’ Nona said.

‘I don’t know we’ve had this many passengers on her before,’ the skipper of the boat said in his wheelhouse. Next to the ruddiness of the shepherds the complexions of the fishermen looked grim and industrialised. ‘I wouldn’t dream of having anything to do with sheep myself,’ the fisherman said to me, smoking on his chair behind the wheel, his feet up on the desk beside it. ‘It’s all manual labour, isn’t it?’

The deck was getting slithery with the muck of two hundred lambs. The ones from Eilean Mhuire were to blame. We had picked them up directly from the island where they had been grazing all night. The others had been kept in the fank and were dry. As the big fishing boat, drawing six feet at the stern, headed out into the still Minch, the skipper looked at his cargo with some distaste. He had seen waves out here, he told me – we were now in the Stream of the Blue Men, looking this morning as neat as Hyde Park – as high as the mast out of the wheelhouse. ‘We had to crouch down to see the crests out of the windows,’ he said, ‘and it was coming in, great lumps of water coming down below.’

John Murdo was painstakingly picking his way through the lambs, checking that none of them had slipped and fallen, suffocating under the others. He had lost three or four a year or so ago like that, and found them dead under the others’ bodies. They were chucked overboard. I scrutinised the other shepherds and myself. We looked as if we had returned from another world: all the wool caught in the velcro of our jackets; our hands brown and greasy from the wool and the shit; our faces creased and tired; our bodies smelling of sheep, sheep, sheep, sheep; and, hanging over it all, a certain air of triumph.