Bruach Blend (10 page)

As soon as it saw the fish in Ian's hand the chick became restless and its cheeping grew more urgent. Ian took out a pocket knife and hacking the smallest trout into three pieces offered the first of the pieces to the chick. It swallowed it instantly and immediately cheeped for more.

‘Goodness! He must be hungry!' I exclaimed. ‘And he doesn't need any coaxing to eat, does he?'

‘Not him!' agreed Ian. ‘An' you'll see after the first few days he'll be the same with near anythin' you offer him. Whelks an' limpets; bread or potach, even rats an' mice if you chop them up for him first.'

‘Ian!' I wailed protestingly.

He flashed me an impish smile. ‘He will so,' he declared, ‘an' he'll grow well on them, surely.' It was evident he had already convinced himself that I was going to undertake the rearing of the gull chick but I was still hesitant. I had once reared a baby guillemot
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which had become so used to human company that it refused to return to the sea and, as a consequence, had had only a short life. I had been told that gulls develop no such human fixation but I was still reluctant to take the risk.

‘I'll bring you limpets an' fish myself when I get the chance,' Ian bribed. I could see he was becoming anxious. Rapidly I assessed the problems I might be faced with; the mess; the necessity of frequent feeding; a place to keep him; but I shrugged them away. After all if I could act as ‘foster ewe' to a lamb I ought to be able to become ‘foster gull' to a chick.

‘Very well,' I said resignedly. ‘But I'll need some food for him tomorrow. The way he's eating these trout they aren't going to last him for long.'

‘Tomorrow's the Sabbath,' Ian reminded me solemnly.

‘Oh, so it is,' I replied with matching solemnity. The Bruach Sabbath was so stiflingly restrictive that even a boy of Ian's age could not be permitted on that day to engage in an occupation as frivolous as picking limpets off rocks. I knew if I needed fish for the chick I would have to seek for it myself.

We fed the chick trout until he seemed replete.

‘They'll eat more than their own weight in food at one meal just,' Ian told me. ‘Once we weighed an adult gull an' then we fed him all he would eat. When we weighed him again he was near three times as heavy as he was before.'

‘And I'm expected to provide for an appetite like that?' I taxed him.

‘I'm only sayin' they will,' he replied. ‘I'm no sayin' they have the need of it.'

I put the chick down on the sun-warm grass and left him dozing contentedly while I went indoors to find a suitable box in which to keep him. Ian followed me.

‘The Dear but I'm as hot as a kettle,' he said, politely helping himself to a drink of water from the pail.

‘I'd noticed that,' I said. ‘You didn't get as hot as that sitting by the burn fishing.'

‘No indeed, but didn't I go gull nestin'?' he reminded me.

‘You prefer gull nesting to fishing?'

‘No, but when Uishden an' some of the lads came by an' said they'd found out the laird an' a party of his friends was meanin' to go to the Cairn gull nestin' this evenin' we all rushed off to make sure we would get there before him.'

I looked at him quizzically. ‘Why do some people begrudge the laird getting some free food for himself?' I asked.

‘Ach, it's no' that at all,' Ian hastened to deny. ‘It's the way he an' his friends go about it we don't like. See, when we go we take with us a pail of sea water an' we test them as we take them out of the nest to see do they float or sink. If they float we know there's chicks in them so we put them back into the nest an' the gull knows no difference. The way the laird an' his friends does it is to take home every egg he can get hold of an' then throw away any he finds with chicks in them.' Ian paused and then added: ‘Ach, he's English so I don't suppose he knows any better.'

I handed him a slice of cake, most of which he crammed into his mouth at the first bite.

‘You rival a seagull at gulping your food,' I accused him as I punched a hoarded cardboard box back into something resembling its original shape.

‘I would indeed,' he acknowledged, not without a tinge of pride. ‘But once my food is down it stays down, you can be sure of that. You cannot be so sure with a gull. Supposin' they're full of food as can be an' yet if there comes a chance of somethin' they're likin' better they'll bring up everythin' that's in their stomachs just to make room for it.'

I looked at him with assumed dismay. ‘That's comforting, I must say. That means I shall have to watch both ends.'

Ian turned to me with an expression of sheer delight on his face, which might just as easily have been provoked by my statement as by the offer of a second slice of cake.

‘You will need to be puttin' some hay in the box,' he instructed, and accompanied me to the barn where I pulled a few handfuls of hay with which, under his supervision, I made the cardboard box into a cosy nest. ‘I'd best be away now,' he said, having apparently satisfied himself that I was capable of coping with the gull. ‘I'm after promisin' the cailleach I would go up to the Post Office for her this evening yet.'

‘You're already too late for the Post Office,' I warned him. ‘You'll have Nelly Elly girning at you for keeping her back from the milking.'

‘Ach, I'll give her a couple of gulls' eggs to quieten her,' he replied. ‘She's that fond of them I believe she would rise from her bed at midnight to give me a stamp if she saw them.' He indicated the rusty pail. ‘Would you like one for your own tea?'

I was on the point of accepting when I remembered I had some sooyan which Erchy had brought that morning, and since they would not keep more than a day I declined the offer of the gull's egg.

Ian picked up his fishing rod and pail and started off down the road.

‘Remember your promise to bring me fish,' I called after him.

‘I will so, maybe on Monday,' he called back, adding a pious afterthought which sounded strange from one so young, ‘If the Lord spares me.'

By this time the chick had recommenced its cheeping. ‘All right, Gulliver,' I said, and gave him another feed of trout, after which I lifted him into his hay-lined box where I left him content as I went about my chores. But Gulliver was not content for long. It seemed to me that the more he was fed the more he demanded and after my own evening meal I fed him again, by which time he had consumed all the trout Ian had left and judging from the smell of his box had muted most of it. I re-lined the box with fresh hay and when evening came, indicating its arrival only by a coolness and not by a diminishing of the light, I brought the box indoors, fearing that without the close canopy of a parent gull's feathers the chick would feel the cold. Before I went to bed and in the hope of keeping Gulliver satisfied until the morning, I cut strips from one of the sooyan set aside for my next meal and fed him until he could quite literally eat no more and he began to sway with sleep or satiety while the tail end of a fish was still plainly visible protruding from his gullet.

The days of a Hebridean May are ‘as long as today and tomorrow' and with darkness so brief it is hardly more than a gesture. My strategy failed. It was in the small hours of the morning that Gulliver woke me with his unremitting cheepings. I stayed in my bed, my thoughts alternating between drowsy regret that I had agreed to foster the chick and a sense of guilt because I did not rise immediately to attend to him. At the same time I could not help reflecting that such vociferous cheepings surely could not emanate from a bird that was in any danger of dying from starvation and it was therefore safe to ignore him for a while and go back to sleep. I tried to shut my ears but the cheepings bored on into my senses as tormentingly as a dentist's drill and the moment I thought I detected a fainter note I jumped out of bed and, full of remorse, rushed into the kitchen where I was met first by the revolting smell of fish guts and then by Gulliver himself who had managed to clamber out of his box. The evidence of his subsequent wanderings trailed itself over the kitchen floor. I fed him sooyan until he was quiet and back again in his box, then going over to the byre found a piece of old herring net which, when tied over the top of his box, effectively imprisoned him. That done I washed the floor and returned to bed to sleep and to dream disordered dreams which were penetrated by incessant, pestering cheeping. When I woke at my usual time the smell of gull mute permeated the whole house. I rushed to get both Gulliver and his box out into the open air and there he stayed for the rest of the day while the doors and windows of my cottage remained wide open to the deodorizing action of the breeze.

During the day I attended with ever-increasing frequency to the despotic demands of Gulliver, who ate prodigiously, only interspersing his feeds, or so it seemed to me, with minutes of contented repose and hours of agitated protestation that he was hungry. By evening he had disposed of most of the sooyan I had left. By bedtime when I had again carried his box into the kitchen for the night, I had cause to be sorry I had been so generous in the provision of food for after about half an hour in Gulliver's malodorous company I knew beyond doubt that continued cohabitation would be unendurable. I banished him thereafter to the cow byre – unused during the summer months since Bonny was out on the hill – and after cutting down one side of his box to enable him to go in and out at will I shed even more of my responsibility by leaving a plate of chopped fish from which, I reasoned, he could help himself and so survive the night while I slept soundly in my bed.

Gulliver grew incredibly quickly and as each day came I could see a change in him. Fortunately he was soon able to take almost any food that was available. Fortunately because, as I had suspected, Ian Beag, finding more interesting ways of filling his time, soon defected on his promise to supply me with fish and it was I who had to go down to the shore to pick winkles and prize limpets from the rocks. I who had to smash them and pick out the flesh. There were times, as when a storm was accompanied by a high tide, when I could not even do this and I found myself hard put to it to provide suitable food for the chick, though I am glad to say I was never desperate enough to resort to catching and chopping up rats and mice and adding those to his menu as Ian had suggested.

Gulliver's fluffiness was quickly mantled with mottled brown feathers, his voice developed from its importunate cheeping into a less constant but equally importunate thin scream and he took to following me about the croft in the unflagging anticipation of being fed. When, later in the summer, the sea was ‘boiling' with mackerel shoals and one could haul in ten fish in as many minutes he would take a whole mackerel in his beak, and it was indeed a comical sight to see him standing with the fish sticking out inches either side of his gaping beak while, without dropping it, he slowly worked the fish back into his gullet until it had completely disappeared, after which he would remain so still it was as if he had stunned himself with his own greed.

When he was fully fledged though still not old enough to have attained the handsome grey and white plumage of a mature gull, I expected that Gulliver would soon be leaving me, but though he often flapped his wings while jumping up and down he was slow in gaining further prowess at flying.

‘He's too heavy, that's what's wrong with him,' Erchy told me. ‘You've fed him so well he'll not be able to fly.' I suspected he was teasing. ‘No, it's as true as I'm here,' he asserted. ‘You can see for yourself he's twice as big as any of the other gulls of the same age.' I acknowledged proudly that Gulliver was indeed a fine specimen of a bird. ‘Aye, well,' Erchy went on, ‘you'll notice even the wild gulls themselves don't take near as much food for a whiley before they start to fly so as to make themselves lighter.' I had noticed nothing of the sort but Erchy was so observant of the ways of wild creatures that I took his advice and experimented by cutting down the number of feeds. It transpired that it was good advice, for not only did Gulliver accept the limitation without complaint but after a few days on a restricted diet he succeeded, with much joyous screaming, in flying up to the roof of the cottage.

Once he could fly Gulliver became playful and his play doubtless being wholly instinctive was interesting to observe. Picking up a small twig he would fly up to about twenty feet, drop the twig and immediately swoop down and seize it again, accompanying this performance with squeaks of delight and repeating it until something else attracted his attention. Sometimes it was a small peeble with which he played in a similar way. At one time I noticed my clothes pegs were disappearing from the box beside the clothes-line post and reappearing, if they reappeared at all, at varying distances from the house. On one occasion when, because both my hands were occupied pegging out the washing I was holding a clothes peg in my mouth, Gulliver landed on my head and swiftly snatched the peg away. When I weeded potatoes he liked to fly down and with a sudden and disconcerting squawk land on my bent back, steadying himself by taking my ear in his beak, or as I was feeding the hens he would land on my head, scrabbling with his webbed feet for a foothold. But there came a time when Gulliver's playfulness developed into something suspiciously like mischievousness.

Dorothy, a friend of my schooldays, and her husband, a retired and rather crustily old-school-type colonel, came to spend a holiday with me. On the day after their arrival, the morning being gilded with September sunlight, they strolled across the croft to watch while I spread small ‘prapachs' of hay to dry ready to be built into larger cocks later in the evening. Gulliver had now reached the age when he was able to find much of his own food and after taking his breakfast from me and following it with a ruminative hour or so on the chimney pot he rarely appeared until it was time for his evening feed. However, almost from the moment the colonel and Dorothy appeared on the croft I became aware of his hovering presence.