Ring of Bright Water. Gavin Maxwell
as they did when other human figures appeared on the road. One night she heard them restless and calling, the clear bugle voices muffled and buffeted by the wind, and when she opened the door in the morning she saw that there was something very much amiss. The two parent birds were at the near edge of the loch, fussing, if anything so graceful and dignified as a wild swan can be said to fuss, round a cygnet that seemed in some way to be captive at the margin of the reeds. Morag began to walk towards the loch, calling to them all the while as she was wont. The cygnet flapped and struggled and beat the water piteously with his wings, but he was held fast below the peaty surface, and all the while the parents, instead of retreating before Morag, remained calling at his side. Morag waded out, but the loch bottom is soft and black, and she was sinking thigh deep before she realized that she could not reach the cygnet. Then suddenly he turned and struggled towards her, stopped the thrashing of his wings, and was still. Groping in the water beneath him, Morag’s hand came upon a wire, on which she pulled until she was able to feel a rusty steel trap clamped to the cygnet’s leg, a trap set for a fox, and fastened to a long wire so that he might drown himself and die the more quickly. Morag lifted the cygnet from the water; he lay passive in her arms while she eased the jaws open, and as she did this the two parents swam right in and remained one on either side of her, as tame, as she put it, as domestic ducks; neither did they swim away when she put the cygnet undamaged on to the water and began to retrace her steps.
The swans stayed for a week or more after that, and now they would not wait for her to call to them before greeting her; every time she opened her door their silver-sweet, bell-like voices chimed to her from the lochan across the road. If Yeats had possessed the same strange powers as Morag, his nine and fifty swans would perhaps not have suddenly mounted, and his poem would not have been written.
It was not through childlessness that Morag had turned to animals as do so many spinsters, for she had three sons. The eldest, Lachlan, was thirteen when I came to Camusfeàrna, and he had twin brothers of eleven, Ewan and Donald. The twins were eager, voluble, and helpful, by intention if not in every case in result, and after the first weeks, when the family had become friends, it was they who would carry my mail down from Druimfiaclach in the evenings after school, and at weekends do odd jobs for me about the house. They painted the outside walls of the house with Snowcem for me – or as much of the walls as their diminutive statures and a broken ladder could compass. They carried the heavy white powder down from Druimfiaclach in paper bags, and one day I suggested that they would find it easier to use my rucksack. They were delighted with the suggestion, and returned the following day with the whole rucksack full to the lip with loose Snowcem powder, and not only the main well of the rucksack but every zip-fastening pocket that the makers had designed for such personal possessions as toothbrushes and tobacco. That was nine years ago, and the two are grown-up and out in the world, but in wet weather that rucksack still exudes a detectable whitish paste at the seams.
Gradually the MacKinnon household became my lifeline, my only link with the remote world of shops and post offices, of telegrams and anger, that I would so much have wished to dispense with altogether. It is not easy at any time to victual a house that has no road to it, and it becomes the more difficult when the nearest village with more than one shop is between thirty and forty miles distant by road. The mails themselves arrive at Druimfiaclach, once a day, by a complicated mixture of sea and road transport from the railhead at the shopping village. From it they are carried by motor-launch to a tiny village five miles from Druimfiaclach, where originally a vast old Humber and now a Land Rover takes over and distributes them among the scattered dwellings of the neighbourhood. I am, therefore, reasonably certain of receiving one post a day if I plod up the hill to Druimfiaclach to fetch it (though occasionally it is too rough for the launch to put out, and it is not unknown, this being the West Highlands, for the whole mailbag to be sent to Skye through oversight or petulance), but I can only leave a reply to that post at Druimfiaclach the following night, for collection by the Land Rover on the morning after that; so that if I receive a letter on, for example, a Tuesday evening, it will be Friday before the sender gets my reply. Newspapers reach me on the evening of the day after they are published, if I go to Druimfiaclach to fetch them. Because of the height of the surrounding mountain massifs no radio will emit more than a furtive whisper; by pressing one’s ear to the set one may catch tantalizingly fragmentary snatches of news, too often of wars and rumours of wars, or of equally intrusive and unwelcome strains of rock ‘n’ roll, mouse-squeak reminders of far-off human frenzy, whose faintness underlines the isolation of Camusfeàrna more effectively than could utter silence.
In practice, the exchange of letters often takes a full week, and the frustrations inherent in this situation have led the more impatient of my friends to the copious use of telegrams. The only way in which a telegram can be delivered, other than by the Land Rover carrying the mail to Druimfiaclach in the evenings, is by five steep and weary miles’ bicycling from the Post Office to Druimfiaclach, followed by a mile and a half of hill-track on foot. In all, ten miles bicycling and three miles walking. The village postmaster is a man of extreme rectitude and sense of duty; the first telegram I ever received at Camusfeàrna was when on a sweltering summer’s day, the hills shimmering in the heat haze and the fly-tormented cattle knee-deep in the motionless sea, he stood exhausted before my door bearing a message which read ‘Many happy returns of the day’. The mountains had travailed and brought forth a mouse; after that I persuaded him, with great difficulty, to exercise his own judgment as to whether or not a telegram was urgent, and to consign those that were not to the Land Rover for delivery to Druimfiaclach in the evening.
Telegrams between the West Highlands and England are often liable to a little confusion in transit, to the production of what the services call ‘corrupt groups’. During my first stay at Camusfeàrna I realized that though the house had, as it were, dropped into my lap from heaven, I had no subsidiary rights; a diet composed largely of shellfish might, I thought, be suitably varied by rabbits, and I telegraphed to the owner of the estate to ask his permission. The telegram he received from me read: ‘May I please shoot at Robert and if so where?’
The reply to this sadistic request being in the affirmative, I shot at Robert morning and evening, with a silenced .22 from the kitchen window, and he went far to solve the supply problem both for myself and for my dog Jonnie. Alas, Robert and all his brothers have now gone from Camusfeàrna, and except by living entirely from the sea it is difficult to approach self-subsistence.
For a year or two there was goats’ milk, for Morag had, characteristically, given asylum to four goats left homeless by their owner’s demise; one of these, a dainty, frolicsome white sprite called Mairi Bhan, she presented to Camusfeàrna. It was but a token gesture, for the little nanny was unaware of any change in ownership, preferring the company of her co-concubines and her rancid, lecherous overlord. The herd, however, took to spending much of their time at Camusfeàrna, where they would pick their way delicately along the top of the croft wall to plunder and maim the old apple and plum trees by the bridge, necessitating strange high barriers that seem cryptic now, for the goats are long gone. Their cynical, predatory yellow eyes, bright with an ancient, egotistical wisdom, were ever alert for an open door, and more than once I came back to the house from an afternoon’s fishing to find the kitchen in chaos, my last loaves disappearing between agile rubbery lips, and Mairi Bhan posturing impudently on the table.
In the end their predilection for Camusfeàrna was their undoing, for where a past occupier of the house had once grown a kitchen garden sprung rhubarb leaves in profusion; of these, one spring, they ate copiously, and all but the billy died. Never sweet to the nostrils or continent of habit, he became, deprived of his harem, so gross both in odour and in behaviour, that only the undeniable splendour of his appearance prevented my joining the ranks of his numerous enemies. He survived, a lonely satyr, a sad solitary symbol of thwarted virility, until the burden of his chastity became too great for him, and he wandered and perished.
The goats were not the only invaders of the house, for in those days there was no fence surrounding it, and a door left ajar was taken as tacit invitation to the most improbable and unwelcome visitors. Once, on my return to the house after