Foxfire, Wolfskin Read online

  He loved her, of course, right from the start. Loves her still, more than anything ever in his life. She was what held it all together; holds it all together now while the world wastes away around them. He’s never actually told her, though. Couldn’t ever get the words out. You need to have grown up softer, to speak them. Every time he opened his mouth they’d stuck in his throat. Men like him didn’t do it, and it couldn’t be helped now. He just hasn’t ever been able to get the words out. He thinks she knows, though. Hopes she knows. She knows so much else. The use of meadowsweet to ease a headache; yarrow to staunch a wound. In all the years she’s been with him, he’s never once needed to get the vet out. She’s always known what to do.

  He lowers himself full length to the ground and lies flat, the rifle butt cradled against his right shoulder. He lines up his body with the gun, all pointed in a straight line towards the target. Comfortable, natural; man and weapon perfectly in tune. Just as it always has been, just as he was taught by his grandfather, all those years ago. He lines up the hind’s neck in his sights, and …

  … Ach. The Devil take it. The hind lifts its head again; stands poised, ready for flight, as he curses to himself quietly. Take the shot while you can, he tells himself, and be damned. She’ll be waiting to hear the shot, and what does any of it matter, now? Take it while you can, this once, this last time, for you may never have another chance to walk up this hill. He closes his eyes, and for a moment it seems that he can sense it beside him: the quivering concentration of the old dog, every instinct telling it to jump up and give chase. But the old dog knew fine well when to stay, and when it was time to go. The old dog would hold itself there if it must, against its nature.

  Satisfied that all is well, the hind lowers its head and sets to grazing once again.

  He raises the rifle …

  Pulls the trigger.

  She hears it then: a single shot. A heavy crash that propagates; clatters down the glen like the sound of shattering glass. She clenches her fists reflexively, feels the warm worn metal of her wedding ring bite into the bony finger of her left hand. Settles herself down in the rocking chair by the fire and waits.

  Waits, as she’s so often waited before. And while she waits, she thinks. Thinks of the long years she’s spent with this man, longer than she’s ever spent with a human husband through all the long centuries of her calling. Thinks, and drifts back – back to the choice she made when he’d surprised her, dew-bathing on the flat stone down by the loch that fine Bealtaine morning, almost six decades ago now. It was an auspicious morning for such a meeting; too auspicious to write it off as chance. Well, she’d thought, as she lifted her white-frocked body up from the rock, maybe it was time again – time for her to heave herself out of the heavy waters and set her feet to the land again. Hadn’t it always been so? And she’d smiled at him there, so tall and shy, so gangly and tongue-tied and stumble-footed – but she could see the trueness inside him from the start. The integrity of the land itself, as if he’d been birthed right out from its massive, stone heart.

  She’d chosen well with this one; chose well the man on whom to bestow her gifts. She’d set him the usual tests, and he’d passed them – every one. He’d never struck her in anger; he’d never once spoken to anyone of where and how he found her. And he’d never raised a gun to one of her beautiful, delicate white hinds.

  She doesn’t unclench her fists until the creak of the gate tells her he’s home. A distinctive creak; a sound that the gate makes only for him. A short creak, and firm. Others are more hesitant with the gate, open it slowly – misled, perhaps, by the years of rust that are visible on it and lend it an air of fragility.

  She stands quickly, moves to the sink, picks up a tea towel. Waits until the door is open, and she hears his first step on the wooden kitchen floor before she turns, and smiles.

  His face is dark – a darker shade of its customary ruddy-cheeked gauntness. She tilts her head; he shakes his. ‘I missed,’ he says. And turns around, and quietly closes the door behind him as he leaves the house again.

  He walks back up the brae and into the field where he buried the old dog yesterday. The old dog stayed true to the end, even if it meant going against its nature. And now he can say that he has finally matched him. He’d made him a grave under the shade of an ancient plum tree; the old dog had loved that tree. He smiles to think of it: the old dog under the tree with the hens, grazing on fallen fruit. And for a moment it seems that he can see him there, head bowed with the weight of age, fur matted and tangled now, so much less shiny than when he was a puppy. The old dog wags his tail to see him and then he is gone and there is nothing but the fine drizzle and bedraggled black hens, and he lowers himself slowly down on the grave and he weeps.

  He’s been gone all afternoon; it’s getting dark now. She wonders whether to start the tea, but doesn’t want it to spoil. She hesitates. Should she go to find him? Should she interrupt him, or should she just let him be? She understands how to let him be; it’s what she’s always done best. But it is her own need that comes to her now; she needs to know if he will survive this. No: she needs to know how he will survive this. He will survive this; that’s what he does best. And isn’t that why she chose him, after all? This man who she’d imagined might know how to be worthy of her; this man who might know, in the end, how to hold true. Not just to her, but to the land. Always, and only, to the land, and the creatures who walk on it and are of it. And in all the years of their life together, he has never failed her or the land. He has never, deep in the heart of him, failed to care. She does not need to measure such things in words; she measures the truth of him in other ways. But she needs to see him, now; she needs to see how he is. She needs to know.

  She pulls on her old wellies, groaning as she bends and something in her back cracks with the strain. She is old herself now in this human form; she forgets that, sometimes, too. She takes her ancient mouldering Barbour and pulls the hood tight over her head. The gate creaks behind her – a slower creak, more hesitant than his – and she walks down the path to the big shed. He’ll be in there with the sheep; he always takes comfort from the sheep. They have always been at the heart of his life; he has always been a shepherd, at heart. Early spring mornings, vigilant in the chill of the lambing pens, and he’d loved every minute of it. The smell of piss and afterbirth, the smile in his eyes when she brought him a mug of tea. And a biscuit for the old dog.

  He isn’t in the shed.

  The hens, then. He’ll be in the byre with the hens.

  She walks back up to the house and on along the path that leads up the brae. Opens the rickety wooden door to the old stone byre, quiet now, so as not to disturb his favourite Orpington laying an afternoon egg. How proud he’s always been of his fine-feathered rare breeds. Entering them into the Black Isle Show, selling their offspring at the mart for a fine price. But he isn’t with the hens, either.

  And then it comes to her: of course. He’ll be with the old dog. Where else now would he be?

  And it is there that she finds him, lying full length along the grave, one arm wrapped across the tiny mound as if he wants nothing more in the world than to sink through the earth, curl up and sleep alongside his old dog. The rifle rests on the ground beside him – and for a moment she stops and clutches at her throat – but then she’d have heard the shot, wouldn’t she? She didn’t hear a shot.

  Sleeping, then?

  He isn’t sleeping. She bends over him, gently touches his forehead, lays her hand on his chest to feel for the heart that has beat so solidly beside her each night for fifty-eight years of marriage.

  There is no beat.

  She hesitates even now to disturb him, to make a fuss. She clenches her fists, goes back to the house, calls the doctor.

  Sits in the rocking chair.

  Waits.

  The next morning, she stands in the pristine kitchen and looks around her. At the cranky old bright red Rayburn; at the fireplace now cleaned of soot and crumbling peat. At
his mother’s polished deal dresser, the fine old china it holds faded now, and chipped. This is, she thinks, the last kitchen she will ever see. It’s the one she’s loved best, of all the houses she’s lived in, of all the times she came out of the loch and found it was time, after all, to set her feet to the land again. To set her concerns to the affairs of men. The seventh human house she’s inhabited, the seventh human husband she’s taken to her bed. She’s loved every one of them – how could it be otherwise? – they’re all so fragile, so easy to bruise and break. She’s brought them her abundance, given each of them the chance to uncover their finest selves. But there was something more about this man. This simple man who, in the end, held true. They will not see the like of him again, in the decadent, dying days ahead.

  So she will go into the loch now for the last time; she will not come again to grace the houses of men. Not of such men. The men who hold this teetering world in their blood-stained hands. She closes the dark green door behind her; she closes the creaky old gate. She walks along the gravelled path to the home field, and stares down into the dark, deep water that has sung to her daily for fifty-eight long years. Today, she will not resist its music. She calls her black sheep and her white goats to her; she calls her creamy, red-eared cows to her. She calls Angus the pure-white bull to her. The white hinds have gathered now on top of the hill; she turns, and sings them safely down. She walks the length of the field with all of her stock behind her; she passes through the old farm gate, and on down to the slippery, seaweed-strewn shores of the sea loch. Out onto the Black Shore, the threshold between this world and the other. Her world; the land beneath the waves.

  The sea loch is not the way it was: the salmon farm has seen to that. She has watched its living waters turn to toxic soup. She has felt the once-revered salmon, trapped now in crowded cages of steel, grow sick and fat. Heard their songs of pain and exile; shrunk in horror from armies of lice that feed on their crooked, grey flesh. No, she will not come again to grace the houses of such men. She will take back what is hers to take, and she will go.

  She stands at the edge of the loch with her feet in the lapping water, and she calls the few remaining wild fish to her. Pink salmon and flashing sea trout to her, langoustines and crabs to her. Lobster and wrasse to her, pollock and coal-fish to her. Mackerel and flounder to her, slinking silver eels to her. She knows a place where they can be safe; they will not be seen again in these times. Let them come with their nets and their stinking boats; let them fetch their fine rods, their slick designer jackets and expensive waders. They will find no sustenance here. She calls the sea eagles to her; calls the old grey ladies out of the heronry by the shallows to the east. Down they’ll all go – down and away; down deep where the gateway to the other place lies.

  Perhaps, when the world has turned a few more times, when their remaining relics have all crumbled away into dust – perhaps then she will bathe again on the flat rock by the sea loch at Bealtaine. But she does not think she will.

  The last of her men was the last man standing. And she will be the last of the fairy wives.

  THE

  BOGMAN’S WIFE

  THE DOG OTTER found me first, bottomed out in the shallows on the gravelled bed of the loch. It stood stock-still on the bank and stared. One bite and it would all have been over – but the bogman had followed its trail up the rising sun. One whiff of him and off the otter slunk. He crept up to see what it had been fishing for and stumbled, half blinded by a sudden shaft of morning light. Cloud smothered it and there I was, mercurial old me, threading a slow, silvery path through the boulders. I was tired by then. It’s hard work for a sea trout, swimming this far upstream.

  You think I didn’t want to be caught? Don’t you believe it. I wanted it all right: I was ripe for the mating. Wait too long, and my silver would turn to brown. Summer would pass, the rods would arrive, and I’d be the trout-treat on someone’s table, for sure. So I flaunted my fine young tail – a flick here, a twitch there – and slowly, slowly he waded into the water. One touch of my tail, one tickle of my flank, a small scratch, and then a rub. He was born to the guddle, that one, and how I preened, how still I stayed, till he guddled me all the way out of the water and into his arms.

  He wasn’t a man to put them back, not him. I saw the wanting in his eyes; I saw the need, the deadweight of it pressing him down into the peat. He was a big man; hair thick and black as a sod of fresh-cut turf, eyes brown as the shadow of a cloud easing its way across a sunny winter bog. He was a hungry man, and I was the meal he’d been waiting for all his life. He carried me home, rough tweed jacket scrubbing at my skin, and I shed my scales one by one.

  He carried me into a house he’d built himself, from blocks of grey granite hewn from the wrinkled old mountains to the east. And there I stood, landed now, saltwater to fresh, water to earth I came. Skin white as the roiling sheets on the tidal wave of his bed; hair silver as moonlight striking a quartz stone in a lonely moorland stream.

  ‘Marry me,’ I said; and he did.

  They said it would never last, that I was a fish out of water, and him – well, he was a hard one, wedded to rock and peat. He wasn’t much of a man for talking, but then I hadn’t much of a tongue myself. We rubbed along well enough. I couldn’t tell you exactly what he did with his days out in the hills, but he kept us in fuel and food, and that was good enough for me.

  When my own work in the house was done I would take myself out to the moor. It was the simple wetness of it that hooked me, the manifold forms that water could take. The sinking bog suited me best, for no bog could sink me. I’d dive right down through the bright green grass, shudder with joy at the icy black water cradled in its bottomless bowl of peat. I’d dance across the quaking bog, light as a bubble in the places where no one else could safely tread. I never went to the loch, though. Somehow, it made me sad.

  I began to leave him on the day I understood that it wasn’t so much me he’d wanted, as a glimpse of an underwater world which was lighter and shinier than his own. On a sunny Sunday in the middle of June, he coaxed me along to his church. Heaviness and sin, damnation and misery – that was what they worshipped in that cold stone house. Prissy old preachers with biblical beards, crow-like in black woollen suits. Build your houses with their backs to the shore, they exhorted, for the sea is filled with irreligious things. Turn your faces away from the Earth, they demanded, for the Earth’s beauty is a sinful thing. And don’t lift your eyes to the sky, they said; you’re not worthy to look on the face of God. When their spittle-filled sermon denounced the sins of the flesh, he extracted his hand from mine.

  I laughed at him then; I laughed at them all. I saw the chains with which they’d willingly shackled their hearts; I perceived the prisons they’d voluntarily made of their souls. I laughed in the face of their god, and I walked out of that god’s house for good. For good, for god, for my god speaks with the voice of a wave; he lives in a house which has no doors. It is hate that they preach from their bitter pulpits, but the god of the loch sings love.

  I left him for the first time on the day he went to the loch in the morning and later brought home a trout. Threw her down on the kitchen table, browning body dull and thin. Slit her open right in front of me, and the thick clot of orange eggs spilled out of her belly and onto the cold flagged floor. He flung down his knife and spat in the fire as he strode away. Chips, he said. We’ll have it with chips. For tea.

  Me, I had other fish to fry. I gathered up the eggs and carried them down to the loch. I took them home and laid them in the arms of the shiny god of the waters. The tears I shed were brackish, and a sea-longing entered my heart. I slept on a bed of soft sedge, and when I found my way home in the morning I found he’d let the fire go out.

  I left him for good when he fell for a woman carved from the same stone. A great lumbering hulk of a woman, the kind their preachers preferred. I saw him gawp at her big breasts, I saw him assess the width of her hips. She was made for it, he could see it right away.
Fashioned for fruitfulness, given by God – she’d hatch him the sons I never could. She hooked him as he turned back down to his lie, and I watched as she reeled him in. She’d worked as a herring girl back on the mainland, cheating fish of their skins. Had a little house of her own on the proceeds; let him in now most nights when he came licking at her window. A professional gutter, that one; I shuddered when I looked in her eyes. His guddle and her gutting – he must have thought they were made for each other. I scented her gansey which reeked of blood and smoke, and remembered what it is to be prey.

  *

  I left the peat-stained sheets and the smouldering embers of his turf fire; I left the cracked bedrock of his heart. I left him clues to trace my path; riddles he’d never be able to answer.

  Follow the snipe’s flight, follow the otter spraint;

  follow me down to the water.

  Follow the wind’s bite, follow the fish-taint;

  follow the sea-king’s daughter.

  Follow me down to the water-lily bed,

  to the place where bogbean binds me.

  You may follow for a while in my footsteps, there –

  but you will not find me.