The Short Stories of John Buchan (Complete Collection). Buchan John
place was so filled with blue fine smoke that my eyes were dazed, and it was not till I sat in a chair by a glowing fire of peats that I could discern the outlines of the roof. The rafters were black and finely polished as old oak, and the floor was flagged with the grey stones of the moor. A stretch of sacking did duty for a rug, and there the tangle of dogs stretched itself to sleep. The furnishing was of the rudest, for it was brought on horseback over barren hills, and such a portage needs the stoutest of timber. But who can tell of the infinite complexity of the odour which filled the air, the pungency of peat, varied with a whiff of the snell night without and the comfortable fragrance of food?
Meat he set before me, scones and oaten-cakes, and tea brewed as strong as spirits. He had not seen loaf-bread, he told me, since the spring, when a shepherd from the Back o’ the Caldron came over about some sheep, and had a loaf-end for his dinner. Then, when I was something recovered, I sat again in the fireside chair, and over pipes of the strongest black we held high converse.
“Wife!” he said, when I asked him if he dwelt alone; “na, na, nae woman-body for me. I bide mysel’, and bake my bakings, and shoo my breeks when they need it. A wife wad be a puir convanience in this pairt o’ the warld. I come in at nicht, and I dae as I like, and I gang oot in the mornings, and there’s naebody to care for. I can milk the coo mysel’, and feed the hens, and there’s little else that a man need dae.”
I asked him if he came often to the lowlands.
“Is’t like,” said he, “when there’s twenty mile o’ thick heather and shairp rock atween you and a level road? I naether gang there, nor do the folk there fash me here. I havena been at the kirk for ten ‘ear, no since my faither dee’d; and though the minister o’ Gledsmuir, honest man, tries to win here every spring, it’s no’ often he gets the length. Twice in the ‘ear I gang far awa’ wi’ sheep, when I spain the lambs in the month o’ August, and draw the crocks in the back-end. I’m expectin’ every day to get word to tak’ off the yowes.”
“And how do you get word?” I asked.
“Weel, the post comes up the road to the foot o’ the Gled. Syne some o’ the fairmers up the water tak’ up a letter and leave it at the foot o’ the Cauldshaw Burn. A fisher, like yersel’, maybe, brings it up the glen and draps it at the herd’s cottage o’ the Front Muneraw, whaur it lies till the herd, Simon Mruddock, tak’s it wi’ him on his roonds. Noo, twice every week he passes the tap o’ the Aller, and I’ve gotten a cairn there, whaur he hides it in an auld tin box among the stanes. Twice a week I gang up that way mysel’, and find onything that’s lyin’. Oh, I’m no’ ill off for letters; I get them in about a week, if there’s no’ a snawstorm.”
The man leant forward to put a fresh coal to his pipe, and I marked his eyes, begrimed with peat smoke, but keen as a hawk’s, and the ragged, ill-patched homespun of his dress. I thought of the good folk in the lowlands and the cities who hugged their fancies of simple Arcadian shepherds, who, in decent cottage, surrounded by a smiling family, read God’s Word of a Saturday night. In the rugged man before me I found some hint of the truth.
“And how do you spend your days?” I asked. “Did you never think of trying a more kindly country-side?”
He looked at me long and quizzically.
“Yince,” he said, “I served a maister, a bit flesher-body doun at Gled-foot. He was aye biddin’ me dae odd jobs about the toun, and I couldna thole it, for I’m a herd, and my wark’s wi’ sheep. Noo I serve the Yerl o’ Callowa, and there’s no’ a body dare say a word to me; but I manage things according to my ain guid juidgement, wi’oot ony ‘by your leave.’ And whiles I’ve the best o’ company, for yince or twice the Yerl has bided here a’ nicht, when he was forewandered shooting amang thae muirs.”
But I was scarce listening, so busy was I in trying to picture an existence which meant incessant wanderings all day among the wilds, and firelit evenings, with no company but dogs. I asked him if he ever read.
“I ha’e a Bible,” he said doubtfully, “and I whiles tak’ a spell at it to see if I remember my schulin’. But I’m no keen on books o’ ony kind.”
“Then what in the name of goodness do you do?” said I.
Then his tongue was unloosed, and he told me the burden of his days; how he loved all weather, fighting a storm for the fight’s sake, and glorying in the conquest; how he would trap blue hares and shoot wild-fowl—for had he not the Earl’s leave?—and now and then kill a deer strayed among the snow. He was full of old tales of the place, learned from a thousand odd sources, of queer things that happened in these eternal deserts, and queer sights which he and others than himself had seen at dawning and sunset. Some day I will put them all down in a book, but then I will inscribe it to children and label it fantasy, for no one would believe them if told with the circumstance of truth. But, above all, he gloried in the tale of the changes of sky and earth, and the multitudinous lore of the hills. I heard of storms when the thunder echoed in the Caldron like the bleating of great sheep, and the man sat still at home in terror. He told with solemn eyes of the coming of snow, of masterful floods in the Aller, when the dead sheep came down and butted, as he said, with their foreheads against his house-wall. His voice grew high, and his figure, seen in the red glare of the peats, was like some creature of a tale.
But in time the fire sank, the dogs slumbered, our pipes went out, and he showed me my bed. It was in the garret, which you entered by a trap from the shed below. The one window had been shattered by some storm and boarded up with planks, through whose crevices I could see the driving mist and the bog lying dead under cover of night. I slept on rough blankets of homespun, and ere I lay down, in looking round the place, I came upon a book stuck fast between the rafters and the wall. It was the Bible used to brush up the shepherd’s learning, and for the sake of his chances hereafter I dragged it forth and blew the dust from it.
In the morning the mist had gone, and a blue sky shone out, over which sudden gusts swept like boats on a loch. The damp earth still reeked of rain; and as I stood at the door and watched the Aller, now one line of billows, strive impetuous through the bog-land, and the hills gleam in the dawning like wet jewels, I no more wondered at the shepherd’s choice. He came down from a morning’s round, his voice bellowing across the uplands, and hailed me from afar. “The hills are no vera dry,” he said, “but they micht be passed; and if I was sure I wadna bide, he wad set me on my way.” So in a little I followed his great strides through the moss and up the hill-shoulder, till in two hours I was breathing hard on the Dreichil summit, and looking down on awful craigs, which dropped sheerly to a tarn. Here he stopped, and, looking far over the chaos of ridges, gave me my directions.
“Ye see yon muckle soo-backit hill—yon’s the Yirnie Cleuch, and if ye keep alang the taps ye’ll come to it in an ‘oor’s time. Gang doun the far shouther o’t, and ye’ll see a burn which flows into a loch; gang on to the loch-foot, and ye ‘ll see a great deep hole in the hillside, what they ca’ the Nick o’ the Hurlstanes; gang through it, and ye ‘ll strike the Criven Burn, which flows into the Callowa; gang doun that water till it joins the Gled, and syne ye’re no’ abune ten mile from whaur ye’re bidin’. So guid-day to ye.”
And with these lucid words he left me and took his swinging path across the hill.
AT THE ARTICLE OF DEATH
“…Nullum
Sacra caput Proserpina fugit.”
A noiseless evening fell chill and dank on the moorlands. The Dreichil was mist to the very rim of its precipitous face, and the long, dun sides of the Little Muneraw faded into grey vapour. Underfoot were plashy moss and dripping heather, and all the air was choked with autumnal heaviness. The herd of the Lanely Bield stumbled wearily homeward in this, the late afternoon, with the roof-tree of his cottage to guide him over the waste.
For weeks, months, he had been ill, fighting the battle of