Seasons on Harris (35 page)

We peered into the walled remnants of the white houses and the far more primitive, round-cornered black houses. There was no one else around. The others from the boat seemed to have vanished mysteriously into the echoing emptiness of the place. And yet, in a strange way, despite all the ruins and wrecked structures, the old village still possessed an aura of occupancy, an edgy immediacy of presences.

Maybe it was the memory of old sepia photographs we'd seen in the little one-room museum of the village men, thick bearded, pipe smoking, and tough, grouped together around the low walls built in front of the houses to break the fury of southern winds blasting in from the bay. There they stood, gathered in their daily “parliament,” to discuss affairs of the village and decide upon their shared activities. According to some visitors, these parliaments could be lengthy, loquacious affairs, lasting in some cases so long into the afternoon that work was often postponed until the following day in pragmatic island
mañana
fashion (once labeled “licentious lethargy” by an outsider ignorant of the subtleties of the St. Kildan democracy).

Or maybe it was the photographs of the women in “traditional” dress, described by one nineteenth-century visitor as follows:

Whatever the link to the island's past, it had permeated our mood, and as we sat together on one of those low, wind-blocking stone walls, looking down along the long, slow arc of the street and its thirty or so skeletal homes, the place seemed to possess a quiet spirit of animation. In that still, late-morning silence, something was there. Some faint echo of life, of activity, of community, of that quiet, intense certitude that invariably infuses small, isolated settlements. Flotillas of benevolent ghosts, wafting by in the warm sunshine.

Then it came to me, as I looked again at the structure of the village, its radiating fields, and its aura of self-contained totality. This was a true physical expression of harmony. It reflected order, social equality, resilient simplicity, a sustained and regular rhythm of life, mutual cooperation and respect, a satisfaction of basic needs—and a certainty of spirit. And not an imposed certainty (with the possible exception of the Roderick era) but a jointly agreed certainty shared and participated in by each and every member of this small, homogeneous society.

Possibly too utopian an interpretation? I wondered. Maybe you should just sit quietly or lie on this low turf-topped wall and enjoy the sun, my more mellow self suggested.

So that's what we did until a little later, when, much as we were seduced and intrigued by the tight, presence-rich intensity of the skeletal village itself, we suddenly felt a need to wander higher up this hill-girt world. We wanted to see its structure and layered origins from a higher—a more all-encompassing—perspective.

I was intrigued by the green valley to our right—the Gap—which, we'd been told by Angus, led to a spectacular six-hundred-foot-high cliff-climax between the great soaring ramparts of Conachair and Oiseval. “You're truly in the kingdom of the fulmars up there,” he'd told us. “Sometimes y'can see whales hunting the Atlantic gray seals right off the rocks.”

But just as we were about to embark on our mini adventure, we heard someone calling to us from a jeep on the track leading way up the mountainside of Gleann Mor to the radar station and the Cambir, the northernmost tip of the island, overlooking the smaller islet of Soay.

“You two want a ride?” the voice shouted.

“Where are you going?” I shouted back.

“To the top…some great views from up there…”

A quick decision. Walk or ride.

“Walk,” said Anne.

“Ride,” I said. “And then a walk back down.”

“Okay,” said Anne.

So we joined one of the young Soay sheep researchers in an ancient clapped-out Land Rover that somehow managed to grunt and growl its way along the rough track up the smooth grass slopes of Gleann Mor to the wind-buffeted summit. He was a shy fellow but offered one rather intriguing piece of recent research that suggested the more dominant Soay rams here often mate up to thirteen times in a single day!

We thanked him for sharing that impressive tidbit with us, tried to ignore the oppressive cluster of war-related structures and aerials and radar dishes up there, and wandered off together to see how our little isolated wonderworld looked from this dramatic vantage point.

We huddled, out of the wind, in a grassy dell. Tiny wild orchids frilled in errant breezes. Way, way below lay the three great arcs—the beach, the village, and the head dyke boundary wall. Then we looked at the land more closely, especially the greener, moist land along the tiny tumbling falls and sinuous curves of the stream known as
Abhainn a Ghlinne
. And it slowly became obvious that the subtly shadowed humps and bumps on the long slope down to the bay were not geological features but rather the ancient—very ancient—remnants of houses, sheil
ings, and fanks. And once again that sense of latent but intriguingly invisible occupancy and ephemeral presences whispered around us in a way that was both comforting and reaffirming.

Something about the tenacity and enduring spirit of man—able to survive and create communities in the wildest and most remote places surrounded by the scoop and soar of limitless spaces—filled me with a kind of pride in my own species. It's not a feeling I've had too often, especially in today's world, where our abilities to nurture harmony, cooperation, and certainty of purpose seem at best fragmented and illusionary, and at worst absent to the point of mutual self-destruction.

Of course, it's not that simple. Examples of excellence and mutual generosity of spirit abound in our world. But here on this tiny island, as we strolled together back down the long slope of Gleann Mor, admiring the vast and massive power of the soaring cliffs, the peaked drama of the dun, the rock-bound bays thwacked by lines of surf hundreds of feet below us, and the nestled intensity of the ancient village circled around its beach—it all did seem so simple. And, without overromanticizing what must have been an extremely arduous existence here, as indeed it was throughout much of Scotland, I sensed something of the unique essence of place that had lured and nurtured people here century after century. And I envied them their certitude and their mutual harmony.

 

A
ROUND THREE O'CLOCK IN THE
afternoon, we heard Angus ring his boat bell, signaling our time for reloading and the start of our second adventure of the day.

It was the silence I remember most about this next part of our journey. Although not in terms of the birds. They were a constant, full-throated cacophony of whirling, spiraling gannets dive-bombing the ocean or, in the case of the puffins, skimming the waves in hyperflighted flocks with their small, stubby, penguinlike wings barely keeping them airborne.

Rather, it was the silence of us all on the boat. Initially, leaving Village Bay after another frisky little dinghy ride through the wave-chop and a somewhat precarious clamber back up into
Interceptor 42
, there had been
excited chatter and sharing of experiences and discoveries among the passengers. It was fascinating to listen to these exchanges, which suggested that while we'd all been exploring the same small place, each one of us had returned with a different take—a personal perspective—on the island's significance and meaning.

But as we edged northward out of the bay and rounded the soaring 970-foot-high cliffs of Oiseval and the point of Rubha an Uisge, that strange, almost eerie silence fell upon our boat and all its passengers. Without exception. We just stood together on the deck by the rail and gazed at the unfolding drama of guano-coated cliffs rising precipitously from a choppy ocean, and the cloudlike circlings of tens of thousands of gannets, guillemots, fulmars, petrels, kittiwakes, and gulls. We wondered at first if our intrusive presence had stirred up all these frantic patterns of flight, with shadows like circling vultures scampering over the boat. But as we sailed slowly on along the base of the cliffs, the patterns and the amazing volume of sound continued unabated and we realized we were mere observers to their timeless rituals.

Anne was standing at my side by the rail. At first, because of the strange silence of awe and admiration that seemed to have descended upon our little group, I was reluctant to talk. Eventually I pulled her closer and whispered, “We're in another world here…this is no longer our planet…it's another place altogether…we're guests of the birds.”

She smiled and whispered, “I don't feel unwelcome…but what do you think all the noise is about?”

“I don't know, but watching how they fly and circle and float on the air currents, barely moving their wings…I'd like to think it was all for pure, wonderful delight…maybe they fly and cry out like that simply because they can.”

Angus guided the boat closer and closer to the towering cliffs until soon we were all looking up at the highest precipice of all—the gigantic rampart of fourteen-hundred-foot-high Conachair, the tallest sea cliff in the British Isles. This essay in pure raw, bold beauty is one of the primary bastions of the island fulmars. Countless thousands were nesting on its immensity. Every inch of ledge and rock-buckle was occupied by screeching white bodies, often lined up like uniformed militia on
parade. Guano mounds, dribbles, splatters, and splodges gave the soaring rock face the exuberant aura of an action painting thrown against the rock face by some Pollock-inspired, drug-laced expressionist exhibitionist. And it was down into these tumultuous cliff-worlds of screech and flight that the intrepid
Hiortaich
cragsmen once lowered themselves, snatching up the young fulmars and gugas (young gannets)—unable to fly from the ledges—collecting eggs, and noosing the larger birds with simple rope lassos attached to fishing rod–like poles.

A visitor here in 1908 was overawed by their skill and courage:

We learned later to our surprise that such activities still continue today on the island of Lewis. Against increasingly strident objections from naturalists and “Greens,” a small group of tradition-honoring climbers set out annually in a small boat in late August for the rugged, deserted islet of Sulasgeir, thirty-five miles north of the Butt of Lewis, on a “
guga
hunt.” While such activities are still very much a valued part of local life in Iceland and the Faeroe Islands, this particular two-week event on dangerous four-hundred-foot-high cliffs is the last remaining vestige of true fowling in Britain today. The fowlers claim that their catch is strictly limited to two thousand birds (less than twenty percent of the colony) and is justified as a “sustainability harvest” to prevent devastating “overnesting.” However, when the bird lovers heard that the hunt was to be celebrated that autumn by a formal “international conference and
dinner” with boiled
guga
as the prime delicacy on the menu, their outcry against “this barbaric ancient ritual” reached crescendo pitch. Nevertheless, the event, organized by the Islands Book Trust in Ness (a fascinating repository of books and research materials on the Western Isles near Point of Ness), went off as planned.

Boreray and The Stacs

One participant likened the
guga
flavor to “a very pleasant roast pork”; another described it as “rather overgamey venison with fishy undertones.” Others adamantly declined to comment.

The precarious activities of fowlers on St. Kilda constituted a major part of their lives, their livelihood, and their proof of manhood. To fail as a fowler “at the crags” relegated you to a kind of social purgatory here. You were not a true
Hiortach
, and in an island community so small and interwoven with generations of inbreeding, that must have been as close to a living death as any man could experience.