The Camerons Read online

  “This I would say is one of the triumphs of the Celtic race, a great tribute to your people,” Mr. Comyn said to Gillon.

  “I am not a Celt, I am Scotch Gaelic,” Gillon said. He was very sullen about it.

  “Do you see what has happened,” Mr. Comyn said to Maggie, “the degeneration? They don’t even know who they are any longer.”

  He turned to Gillon with icy contempt, as if he were talking to some kind of mentally injured person. “You do not have to be a Scots Gael to be Celtic, but in order to be Scots Gael you must be Celtic.”

  Gillon reddened, and when Mr. Comyn turned away she whispered something in his ear it was also just as well Mr. Comyn didn’t hear. It was, “Gowk.”

  After that they trotted down through a dim, deep glen past a rushing cascade and came to a stop near the sea in a stand of towering Scotch pines, last descendants of the ancient Caledonian Forest, where Mr. Comyn stopped to water his horse. Gillon lay down among the fallen needles on the forest floor and slept. He slept for only five or six minutes and when he woke he seemed completely refreshed. He would make a remarkable miner if he could do that in the pit, Maggie thought, and then Gillon got up and brushed the needles from his kilt.

  “This is where I would like to live,” he said.

  “What would you do here?”

  “Live.”

  He felt her eyes on him before he looked down into them.

  “Just live? Is that enough for a man to do?”

  “If he’s happy.” He couldn’t understand why her eyes seemed so angry. “I could be happy here.”

  “Why do you think no one else is here?”

  “I’m not anyone else. I know this much. I could be happy here.”

  She got up and left him and pretended to examine the thick red spongy bark of the pine.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, very low and very coolly. “I know I wouldn’t want to spend my life in a little stone house sneaking things from the sea.”

  Mr. Comyn was bringing the gig back up the slope and she started down toward him.

  “In my wee kiltie,” she said, and didn’t turn back to see the way he took it.

  They were invited to lunch at Mr. Comyn’s place, where the caddie was given his soup and bread in a pot outside the house on the lawn, and when they were done they went down by the shore and followed an old road that ran parallel to it until they came to a bog, which in time, a little further inland, became a swamp. Somewhere in the cool darkness of the swamp they found the stone. It was black and smooth with age and use. Gillon had never seen one like it.

  “On this stone were burned more witches than were burned in all the rest of Great Britain together,” Mr. Comyn said. Maggie ran her hand along the cool smooth stone.

  “Don’t touch it,” the guide said to her, “bad luck. It is the worst luck in Scotland. They would stretch them out and stake them here and here and here—do you see the little holes in the stone where the iron stakes were locked? They would be, of course, naked. Excuse me, Miss Drum, but history is history, and all their parts shaved because the hair of the witch, especially from certain parts, excuse me again, was said to contain very strong and valuable properties.” His eyes were glittering and she didn’t like the way he licked his lips, like Rodney Bel Geddes when he passed her. “And when they were staked they put a fire on their bellies, just a wee one, a few little twiggies, and if they screamed, for each scream—proof that the devil inside them was being burned out of his hiding place—they added another stick, bigger each time, until the screaming was steady and they were consumed in flames.”

  Gillon had wandered away. The stories of witches did not interest him. He was, he felt, a believer in the rational explanation of life, but he turned around when he heard Mr. Comyn shouting, “Oh, Miss, please don’t do that! No one has ever done that before,” and was as stunned as Mr. Comyn to see Maggie lying on the Witches’ Rock, spread-eagled on its cool blackness, her arms and legs stretched wide in order to touch the holes in the stone. It made Gillon feel strangely indecent and, for some reason, afraid, watching her lie on the black stone.

  “Get off,” he shouted at her, “get off the stone,” and she sat up and looked at him in a very queer way and did. Even Mr. Comyn didn’t think it odd that the caddie had yelled at his mistress.

  “Never,” Mr. Comyn was saying. “Never before. No one ever did that to me before.”

  They made the rest of the trip in silence, Mr. Comyn breaking in by cluck-clucking several times and shaking his head. He left them where he had found them and they started back up the beach. The wind was up, scud was flipping from the tops of the waves, and the water had turned to a hard blue from the soft milky green of the morning.

  “Why did you do that?” Gillon asked.

  “I don’t know. I only know that if I had lived then, they would have burned me there.”

  Gillon didn’t know what to say. Part of him suspected that she might be right.

  “But I wouldn’t have made a sound when they put the twigs on,” Maggie said. “I wouldn’t have given them the satisfaction. They wouldn’t have gotten a whisper out of me.”

  He never forgot that.

  6

  They waited for a family of seaweed gleaners to pass up the beach in their raggedy duds before carrying the hooks and net and lines across the beach to the boat.

  “Yeer noo goon oot ter new?” the man asked.

  “Aye, we’re going,” Gillon said, and the man shook his head. Maggie liked the determined way Gillon said it.

  The gleaners watched them until they were far out at sea. The wind was whipping them hard.

  “What’s the matter with them; haven’t they ever seen a boat go out before?”

  Gillon smiled at her.

  “They were hoping to get a beautiful tweed suit or at least an old kilt when the tide came washing in.”

  It left her with a cold feeling.

  “Would you like to start tying the hooks on the lines now,” Gillon said.

  “Yes, yes, please.” It would give her work to do while the water hissed under the floorboard.

  It would be a hard trip, Gillon explained to her, but not a dangerous one if a man knew what he was about.

  “Just go by the rules,” Gillon told her. “Never test the sea. You must be humble before her.”

  It was what her father said about the mines. One more good sign, Maggie thought.

  Their goal was to get a mile or so out beyond the spilling mouth of the Buckhorn River by twilight—the gloamin tide when the sun would be low in the water and they would be swallowed in its golden blindingness, hidden in that troubling light and by the high chop of the sea—and still be left with light enough to fish by.

  It was a belief of Gillon’s that somewhere out at the far mouth of the salmon rivers, somewhere between the full salt of the sea and the full fresh of the rivers, was a compromise point in the sea, a holding station for salmon, where the fish readied themselves for the fresh water after their long run from the open seas. Since the river water, fed from melting snowfields, was colder than the sea water, and colder water sinks, vast unseen kettles of salmon lay down in the black, almost brineless water outside the rivers, far deeper than men usually hunted them.

  When they left the cover of Holydeen, the swell suddenly hit them broadside and the boat began to roll. Gillon saw Maggie look up suddenly.

  “Frightened?”

  “Are you?”

  “No.”

  “Then why should I be?”

  As suddenly as the swell had hit them, he felt he loved her for that.

  “Excuse me,” she said and, using part of the sail as a shield, she vomited her lunch, careful as always about the wind, and washed her mouth with brine. “That ends that,” Maggie said, and he loved her for that. He decided to dare it right then.

  “Now would you put these on the hooks?”

  It was asking a lot of her. While he rowed, with his foot he pushed down to her a little metal
tobacco box filled with crawling prawns. Some were dead and some smelled and some squirmed and thrashed for their lives. She studied the little shrimp and, without asking him a question, began hooking them on the barbs. He watched her spearing the prawns one after another, her no-nonsense head with that heavy rich brown hair bent to the job, never looking up from it when the boat heeled far over to one side. He loved her for that.

  “I couldn’t have come this far without you,” he called to her, the wind was that strong.

  “There’s a long way to go,” she said back to him.

  Let him ponder on that one for a while, she thought.

  He had read his winds and tides well. When he dropped his sea anchor in the water outside the estuary mouth and looked from the front of the boat back toward Maggie, he could see nothing but the fragment of a silhouette. He was blinded, and they were masked in the sun’s slanting glow. And when the sun finally slipped under, they would then be veiled in dusk. So far, so good, he thought, better than he could have hoped. If the sun had been hidden by clouds, there was no way they could risk what he was planning to do. Gillon was very excited.

  “They’re here, I know that,” he told her, and she believed him. There was a way he went about it—looking over the sides of the boat, sniffing at the water, reaching down to feel its temperature, tasting it for salt—that made her think of fish, of salmon.

  He had told her about that, about his affinity for fish, especially the salmon; how each spring he would go miles up from Strathnairn to see the great ones trying to leap Doigh Falls and how he always knew, at first look, the ones who were going to make it, the ones with the spring and the heart, and the ones who would drop back and never complete the mission some force had driven them thousands of miles to complete. He could often tell the fish apart from one another, something no one else could do. At night he would think about an individual fish he had seen fighting all that day to best the falls, and early in the morning he would walk miles back to see if it had made it over or failed.

  “Now it’s my turn,” Gillon said. “Give me a line. This is the place.”

  The line was in the water no more than a few minutes when the fish struck. They felt the shock of it, a thump through the boards of the boat, and then the line began to strip out of the boat.

  “He’s running now,” Gillon shouted. “He has the hook. Hold on.”

  His face burned with excitement, his eyes were wild with it. When the fish had run as far as the line would allow, there was a second shock; the hook had held, the fish had stopped, and the bow of the boat was pulled down toward the water.

  “I have got my giant,” Gillon shouted.

  An angler along one of the streams, if he could have held such a fish on his line, might have spent an afternoon bringing such a fish to shore. With Gillon using the handlines, it was a matter of strength, his against the salmon’s, and of the hook holding fast. Pull, hold, secure the line that had been retrieved, and pull again. It was hard work; this was a fish determined not to die before reaching its natural home in the fresh-water river.

  It wasn’t the way Gillon wanted to do it but the way he was forced to do it.

  “I’m sorry,” he said aloud.

  “What are you sorry about?”

  “It isn’t sporting, it just isn’t fair.”

  “And what is?”

  When the salmon was brought to the side of the boat and felt the wood against its flanks, it leaped, the fine hard silver of its body showering them with sparks of lights and sea spray, and with that leap it was spent. It had uncoiled its life. It lay in the water alongside the boat, moving its fins to maintain its balance in the sea from some old memory, alive but actually dead.

  “I’m sorry,” Gillon said to the fish. “Forgive me.” He turned to Maggie.

  “I don’t think I can get it in the boat.”

  The fish was as long as Gillon, well over six feet and all dead weight on the hook of his gaff. With a sudden tremendous effort that came close to causing the boat to tip and spill them into the sea along with their salmon, Gillon got the head and upper part of the fish up over the sideboard and was holding it there, resting, when once again it thumped hard against the side of the boat, one more compression of muscle left, one last spring of life.

  “I can’t hold him,” Gillon cried out. “Oh, God, I’m going to lose my fish,” and was conscious of something swishing dangerously close to his ear—the tail of the salmon, he thought—and heard a thwack, a hard wet smack of wood and fish, and the struggle was over as suddenly as it had begun. He put both feet against the gunnels and slid his salmon the rest of the way into the boat and then he saw her putting the oar back into the oarlock.

  “Is that what you did?”

  She nodded.

  “You came close to hitting me.” He smiled at her.

  “It had to be done.”

  “I was nearly your salmon.”

  “It had to be done.”

  “Aye, it had to be done.”

  They looked down at the fish in the bottom of the boat. It was by far the biggest salmon Gillon had ever seen. It was a cock salmon, and old. Gillon knelt in the boat and ran his hand down the sleekit silver side of the fish.

  “I feel sorry for you, old cock,” Gillon said, “coming all this way and dying in the doorway.”

  He looked up at her.

  “But it had to be done,” and he smiled such a sudden sweet smile at her that she smiled back and thought, You sweet fool, you sweet romantic man.

  “Better us to get him than them,” she said.

  Gillon turned his back to her so that she wouldn’t have to witness the gory business of working the hook out of the fish’s mouth.

  “What makes you so angry with them?” he asked. His own anger was like a line squall, blowing up and blowing out as fast as it rose, but her anger was a cold and steady one, a season of anger.

  “I don’t like the way they look at me.”

  “And how is that?”

  “They don’t see me when they look.”

  “Aye, I understand.”

  “But one day I’ll make them see me.”

  “Och, who cares? Who cares at all?”

  “I care. All.”

  The hook was out and he began to reorganize his line as he talked.

  “One day they closed the mussel beds at the Kyle of Tongue and we were living on mussels then. No one would say why. So one night when we were hungry enough and it was dark enough, sleet and snow, my mother went out to the beds at low tide and filled her creel with mussels. On the way home, a water factor, one of the bailiff’s boys, crept up behind and cut the straps on her creel. The loss of weight was so sudden she fell backwards in the water.”

  He looked up at her. The line was ready. There was no anger in his face, which she found disappointing.

  “By the time she got home, she was frozen. She died the next week.”

  “And what did you do about it?”

  He lowered his head. “Nothing.”

  “Then you know what to do about it? Let’s kill another of their salmon now.” Gillon smiled at her again.

  “Saumont.”

  “Saumont,” Maggie said.

  * * *

  Gillon’s theory proved to be right. The mouth of the river was deserted of fish except for the few who would run the river the next day, but farther out, where the brine and fresh water mingled with each other, dark shadows slid around their boat and then dropped away into the darkness below. In the next quarter of an hour or half an hour—there was no telling the time in the excitement—they killed three more salmon, hens and cocks, all of them big, the smallest bigger than Maggie.

  It had been exciting, a rage of killing, and then it was over. All his life he had dreamed of killing one great salmon for himself and now he had done it four times over, and he suddenly felt terribly empty inside, quiet and a little puzzled at himself, and sad.

  “We can go now,” he said to Maggie. “Are you ready to go
?”

  “Yes. I’m set.”

  “Because this is the hard time, see. Are you prepared for it?”

  “Yes.”

  He put the sail up and got his oars.

  “Can you swim?”

  “No.”

  “Nor can I.”

  They were very quiet then. He didn’t tell her that he was testing the sea, but she knew. The boat was riding terribly low in the water. The good thing, which Gillon had counted on, was that the wind had died. The sun by then was sitting on the water. The dangerous time would be when the sun had set and evening not yet come, and they could be seen from shore. Gillon picked up the oars and began to row. It was heavy going.

  The problem was light. Gillon wanted darkness now; the sun had set but darkness wouldn’t come fast enough. He could still see the shoreline. Each pull of the oars was one more pull toward safety, but true safety lay in calm seas and darkness.

  “How do you feel?” Maggie said. She was puzzled by the look on his face.

  “I don’t know. I never know how I feel,” Gillon said. “Sad, I think. I don’t know why.”

  “I know how I feel. Very happy. I know why you feel sad.”

  “Why?”

  He was glad to be rowing, to have the feel of the oars in his hands, to be doing something.

  “You had your dream of catching the great fish, and now you’ve done it and nothing lives up to the dream, does it?”

  Gillon said he didn’t know, he had so few dreams.

  “No, nothing does,” Maggie said, “and as soon as you learn that the better off you’ll be.”

  “Don’t move,” Gillon ordered. “Bend down and sit still.”

  A circle of cold whiteness bloomed on the water ahead of their boat and began to slide and dip across the tops of the waves toward them.

  “He has us,” Gillon said, and put down his head, and then the brightness seemed to explode in the boat, a stunning white coldness of light; they were ringed in it, and then it passed on.

  “He has us,” Gillon said.

  “They have nothing,” Maggie said. She could hear shouting far off on the shore.

  He began to row but there was no leap to it.

  “Row,” Maggie said.

  “He knows,” Gillon said. He was in despair. “Drysdale knows, he knew all along.”