Читать книгу Ring of Bright Water - Gavin Maxwell - Страница 14

Six

WHILE I WAS quite clear that I did not want to own another dog, and that Jonnie’s death had in some sense ended an overlong chapter of nostalgia in my life, it was, I think, autumn and winter’s days at Camusfeàrna that with their long hours of darkness made me crave for some animal life about the house.

Autumn begins for me with the first day on which the stags roar. Because the wind is nearly always in the west, and because the fences keep the bulk of the stags to the higher ground above Camusfeàrna, behind the low mass of the littoral hills, I hear them first on the steep slopes of Skye across the Sound, a wild, haunting primordial sound that belongs so utterly to the north that I find it difficult to realize that stags must roar, too, in European woodlands where forests are composed of trees instead of windswept mountain slopes. It is the first of the cold weather that leads in the rut, and the milder the season the later the stag breaks out, but it is usually during the last ten days of September. Often the first of the approaching fall comes with a night frost and clear, sharp, blue days, with the bracken turning red, the rowan berries already scarlet, and the ground hardening underfoot; so garish are the berries and the turning leaves in sunshine that in Glengarry a post-office-red pillar-box standing alone by the roadside merges, for a few weeks, anonymously into its background.

When the full moon comes at this season I have sat on the hillside at night and listened to the stags answering one another from hill to hill all round the horizon, a horizon of steel-grey peaks among moving silver clouds and the sea gleaming white at their feet, and high under the stars the drifting chorus of the wild geese flying southward out of the night and north.

On such a night, before I ever came to Camusfeàrna, I slept beside a lochan on the Island of Soay, and it was the wild swans that called overhead and came spiralling down, ghostly in the moonlight, to alight with a long rush of planing feet on the lochan’s surface. All through the night I heard their restless murmur as they floated light as spume upon the peat-dark waves, and their soft voices became blended with my dreams, so that the cool convex of their breasts became my pillow. At dawn their calling awoke me as they gathered to take flight, and as they flew southward I watched the white pulse of their wings until I could see them no longer. To me they were a symbol, for I was saying good-bye to Soay, that had been my island.

Winters at Camusfeàrna vary as they do elsewhere, but at their worst they are very bad indeed. When one gets up in darkness to the lashing of rain on the window-panes and the roar of the waterfall rising even above the howl of wind and tide; when the green field is scattered with wide pools that are in part floodwater but in part the overspill of waves whose spray batters the house itself; when day by day the brief hours of light are filled with dark scudding clouds and blown spindrift from the crashing shore, one begins to know the meaning of an isolation that in summer seemed no more than an empty word.

The burn fills and runs ramping high through the trunks and limbs of the alders, carrying racing masses of debris that lodge among their branches, and through the roaring of its passage comes the hollow undertone of rolling, bumping boulders swept along its bed by the weight of white water pouring from the rock ravine. It was in such a spate as this that the bridge was washed away in 1953, and then for five years the only alternative when the burn was full, to braving that crazy crossing clinging to a stretched rope was the long route to Druimfiaclach by the near side of its course, more than two miles of steep ground and sodden peat bog. Since the gales tear in from the south-west, funnelling themselves between the Hebridean islands into demoniac fury, the wind is usually at one’s back on the upward journey, but it is in one’s face coming down, and there have been nights returning from Druimfiaclach, torchless and in utter darkness, when I have taken to my hands and knees to avoid being swept away like a leaf.

There is, of course, another side to the picture, the bright log fire whose flames are reflected on the pine-panelled walls, the warmth and nursery security of that kitchen sitting-room with the steady reassuring hiss of its Tilley lamps as a foreground sound to the tumult of sea and sky without; and, in the old days, Jonnie asleep conventionally on the hearth rug. But Jonnie was gone, and all too often the other pigments, as it were, for this picture were lacking too. The supply of paraffin would run out during the short dark days; candles became unobtainable within a hundred road miles; there was not space to store enough dry wood to keep the house heated. Until this year, when I installed a Calor gas stove, I cooked entirely by Primus, requiring both methylated spirits and paraffin, and when the house was without either and it would require an hour to coax a kettle to the boil over a fire of wet wood, there have been days when a kind of apathy would settle down upon me, days when I would rather creep back to bed than face the physical difficulties of life awake. When stores do arrive they have still to be lugged down the hill from Druimfiaclach, a long stumbling journey with an unbalancing load upon one’s back and sleet slashing at one’s face and eyes; and above all I remember in the past the chill, inhospitable familiarity of wet clothes, wet clothes hanging in rows above a barely-smouldering fire and with as much hope of drying as the sea itself.

Sometimes there is snow, though it rarely lies deep at Camusfeàrna itself, as the house can be no more than six feet above sea-level. But I remember one winter when it did, and it lay thick round the house and came swirling in gustily from the sea on the morning that I had to depart for the south. I left the house before dawn to catch the mail Land Rover at Druimfiaclach, the darkness only just relieved by the white wastes that ran right down to the waves. I remember that morning particularly because it was the worst, the most nightmarish climb that I have ever made to Druimfiaclach. The weather had been so bitter that the burn was low, frozen far up its course on the snow peak, and I had thought that with the aid of the rope I should be able to ford it in long seamen’s thigh-boots. I saw my mistake when I reached it, but with a hundredweight or so of luggage on my back I preferred to try rather than to take the long route round through the bogs. Both my boots filled in the first couple of yards, but the house was locked and time was short, and I struggled across, soaked at last to the waist, hanging on to the rope with my legs swept downstream by the piling weight of snow water. At the far side of the burn I sat down and emptied my boots of a full two gallons apiece. I tried to wring out my trousers, but when, my teeth chattering like castanets, I got the boots back on again, the feet filled slowly with an icy trickle of water that still coursed down my legs. When I began the steep climb from the burn the burden on my shoulders seemed to have doubled its weight. I slipped and stumbled and panted up dim glaucous slopes that had lost all landmarks, and at the top of the first steep I was caught in a swirling, flurrying blizzard of wind and snowflakes, that spun me round in unsteady pirouettes and left me dizzy and directionless.

For all the hundreds of times that I had travelled this path in daylight and in darkness, I could recognize no curve nor contour in the merging grey pillows about me, and the snow was coming down so thick that it blanketed even the sound of the eighty-foot falls in the gorge. I had always been frightened of a stranger slipping down that precipice in the dark; now I was so hopelessly lost that I began to be afraid of it myself, and to avoid the ravine I began to climb upward over the steepest ground I could find. I reeled into snowdrifts and fell flat on my face, my feet slipped on boulders hidden by the snow and the weight on my shoulders threw me over backwards, and all the time the blizzard beat at me, slapping the wet snow into my eyes and ears, down my neck, and into every crevice of my clothing. Once I stumbled on a stag, snow-blanketed in the shelter of a rock; he was up and away and gone into snowflakes that were driving horizontally across the hill-side, and for some minutes I took his place under the rock, the stag smell pungent in my nostrils, wondering how I had ever thought Camusfeàrna a paradise. It took me an hour and a half to reach Druimfiaclach that morning, and when I got there it was more by accident than judgment. This was the prelude to an hour’s travel by launch and four hours in the train to Inverness before starting the true journey south.

Yet it is the best and the worst that one remembers, seldom the mediocrities that lie between and demand no attention. At the end of struggles such as those there has always been the warmth and hospitality of the long-suffering MacKinnon household, Morag’s scones and gingerbread, and cups of tea that have tasted like nectar; and there have been fair winter days at Camusfeàrna, when the sea lay calm as summer and the sun shone on the snow-covered hills of Skye, and I would not change my home for any in the world.

But after Jonnie’s death it seemed, as I have said, a little lifeless, and I began in a desultory way to review in my mind various animals, other than dogs, that might keep me company. Having been encouraged in my childhood to keep pets ranging from hedgehogs to herons, I had a considerable list available for screening, but after a while I realized reluctantly that none of these creatures with which I was familiar would meet my present requirements. I put the idea aside, and for a year I thought no more of it.

Early in the New Year of 1956 I travelled with Wilfred Thesiger to spend two months or so among the little known Marsh Arabs, or Ma’dan, of southern Iraq. By then it had crossed my mind, though with no great emphasis, that I should like to keep an otter instead of a dog, and that Camusfeàrna, ringed by water a stone’s throw from its door, would be an eminently suitable spot for this experiment. I had mentioned this casually to Wilfred soon after the outset of our journey, and he, as casually, had replied that I had better get one in the Tigris marshes before I came home, for there they were as common as mosquitoes, and were often tamed by the Arabs.

We spent the better part of those two months squatting cross-legged in the bottom of a tarada or war canoe, travelling in a leisurely, timeless way between the scattered reed-built villages of the great delta marsh both west of the Tigris and between the river and the Persian frontier; and towards the end of our journey I did acquire an otter cub.

It is difficult to find new words in which to tell of happenings that one has already described; if one has done one’s best the first time one can only do worse on the second attempt, when the freshness of the image has faded; and that must be my excuse and apology for quoting here part of what I wrote of that otter cub, Chahala, soon afterwards; that and the fact that she is an integral and indispensable part of my narrative.

We were sitting after dark in a mudhif, or sheikh’s guest house, on a mud island in the marshes, and I was brooding over the delinquency of the chatelaine, a bossy old harridan of a woman who had angered me.

I felt an unreasonable hatred for that witless woman with her show of bustle and competence, and contempt that not even her avarice had mastered her stupidity. Thinking of these things, I was not trying to understand the conversation around me when the words ‘celb mai’ caught my ear. ‘What was that about otters?’ I asked Thesiger.

‘I think we’ve got you that otter cub you said you wanted. This fellow comes from that village half a mile away; he says he’s had one for about ten days. Very small and sucks milk from a bottle. Do you want it?’

The otter’s owner said he would fetch it and be back in half an hour or so. He got up and went out; through the entrance of the mudhif I could see his canoe glide away silently over the star-reflecting water.

Presently he returned carrying the cub, came across into the firelight and put it down on my knee as I sat cross-legged. It looked up and chittered at me gently. It was the size of a kitten or a squirrel, still a little unsteady on its legs, with a stiff-looking tapering tail the length of a pencil, and it exhaled a wholly delightful malty smell. It rolled over on its back, displaying a round furry stomach and the soles of four webbed feet.

‘Well,’ said Thesiger, ‘do you want her?’ I nodded. ‘How much are you prepared to pay for her?’

‘Certainly more than they would ask.’

‘I’m not going to pay some ridiculous price – it’s bad for prestige. We’ll take her if they’ll sell her for a reasonable price, if not, we’ll get one somewhere else.’

I said, ‘Let’s make certain of getting this one; we’re near the end of the time now, and we may not get another chance. And after all the prestige doesn’t matter so much, as this is your last visit to the marshes.’ I saw this fascinating little creature eluding me for the sake of a few shillings’ worth of prestige, and the negotiations seemed to me interminable.

In the end we bought the cub for five dinar, the price to include the rubber teat and the filthy but precious bottle from which she was accustomed to drink. Bottles are a rarity in the marshes.

Most infant animals are engaging, but this cub had more charm per cubic inch of her tiny body than all the young animals I had ever seen. Even now I cannot write about her without a pang.

I cut a collar for her from the strap of my field-glasses – a difficult thing, for her head was no wider than her neck – and tied six foot of string to this so as to retain some permanent contact with her if at any time she wandered away from me. Then I slipped her inside my shirt, and she snuggled down at once in a security of warmth and darkness that she had not known since she was reft from her mother. I carried her like that through her short life; when she was awake her head would peer wonderingly out from the top of the pullover, like a kangaroo from its mother’s pouch, and when she was asleep she slept as otters like to, on her back with her webbed feet in the air. When she was awake her voice was a bird-like chirp, but in her dreams she would give a wild little cry on three falling notes, poignant and desolate. I called her Chahala, after the river we had left the day before, and because those syllables were the nearest one could write to the sound of her sleeping cry.

I slept fitfully that night; all the pi-dogs of Dibin seemed to bark at my ears, and I dared not in any case let myself fall into too sound a sleep lest I should crush Chahala, who now snuggled in my armpit. Like all otters, she was ‘house-trained’ from the beginning, and I had made things easy for her by laying my sleeping bag against the wall of the mudhif, so that she could step straight out on the patch of bare earth between the reed columns. This she did at intervals during the night, backing into the very farthest corner to produce, with an expression of infinite concentration, a tiny yellow caterpillar of excrement. Having inspected this, with evident satisfaction of a job well done, she would clamber up my shoulder and chitter gently for her bottle. This she preferred to drink lying on her back and holding the bottle between her paws as do bear cubs, and when she had finished sucking she would fall sound asleep with the teat still in her mouth and a beatific expression on her baby face.

She accepted me as her parent from the moment that she first fell asleep in my pullover, and never once did she show fear of anything or anyone, but it was as a parent that I failed her, for I had neither the knowledge nor the instinct of her mother, and when she died it was because of my ignorance. Meanwhile this tragedy, so small but so complete, threw no shadow on her brief life, and as the days went by she learned to know her name and to play a little as a kitten does, and to come scuttling along at my heels if I could find dry land to walk on, for she hated to get her feet wet. When she had had enough of walking she would chirp and paw at my legs until I squatted down so that she could dive head first into the friendly darkness inside my pullover; sometimes she would at once fall asleep in that position, head downward with the tip of her pointed tail sticking out at the top. The Arabs called her my daughter, and used to ask me when I had last given her suck.

I soon found that she was restrictive of movement and activity. Carried habitually inside my pullover, she made an enceinte-looking bulge which collected a whole village round me as soon as I set foot outside the door; furthermore I could no longer carry my camera round my neck as I did normally, for it bumped against her body as I walked.

One evening Thesiger and I discussed the prospect of weaning Chahala. We both felt she should be old enough to eat solid food, and I felt that her rather skinny little body would benefit by something stronger than buffalo milk. However, I underestimated the power of instinct, for I thought that she would not connect flesh or blood with edibility and would need to be introduced to the idea very gradually. The best way to do this, I decided, was to introduce a few drops of blood into her milk to get her used to the taste. This proved to be extraordinarily naive, for while I was holding the bodies of two decapitated sparrows and trying to drip a little blood from them into her feeding bottle she suddenly caught the scent of the red meat and made a savage grab for the carcasses. I think that if I had not stopped her she would have crunched up bone and all with those tiny needle-like teeth, and we took this as evidence that she had already been introduced by her mother to adult food. I took the carcasses from her, much to her evident fury; and when I gave her the flesh from the breasts cut up small she wolfed it down savagely and went questing round for more.

‘Finish with milk,’ said Amara, our chief canoe-boy, with a gesture of finality, ‘finish, finish; she is grown up now.’ And it seemed so, but, alas, she was not.

A week later we shot a buff-backed heron for her, and she wolfed the shredded flesh avidly. It was the last food that she ate.

It was very cold that night. Over my head was a gap in the reed matting of the roof through which the stars showed bright and unobscured, but a thin wind that seemed as chill as the tinkle of icicles rustled the dry reeds at the foot of the wall, and I slept fitfully. Chahala was restless and would not stay still in my sleeping-bag; I did not know that she was dying, and I was impatient with her. In the morning I took her to a spit of dry land beyond the edge of the village to let her walk, and only then I realized that she was very ill. She would not move, but lay looking up at me pathetically, and when I picked her up again she instantly sought the warm darkness inside my pullover.

We made an hour’s journey through flower-choked waterways in low green marsh, and stopped at another big island village. It was plain to me when we landed that Chahala was dying. She was weak but restless, and inside the house she sought the dark corners between the reed columns and the matting walls. She lay belly downward, breathing fast and in obvious distress. Perhaps something in our huge medicine chest could have saved her, but we thought only of castor oil, for everything she had eaten the night before was still inside her. The oil had little effect, and though she sucked almost automatically from her bottle there was little life in her. I sat hopelessly beside her for a couple of hours when Thesiger came in from doctoring. ‘Better get out for a bit,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep an eye on her. It’s hell for you sitting in here all the time, and you can’t do her any good. This is your last marsh village, and you may never see another.’

I went out, and remembered things that I had wanted to photograph and always postponed. Then I found that the shutter of my camera was broken, and I went back into the house.

We left an hour later. When I felt the warmth of Chahala next to my shirt again I felt a moment’s spurious comfort that she would live; but she would not stay there. She climbed out with a strength that surprised me, and stretched herself restlessly on the floor of the canoe, and I spread a handkerchief over my knees to make an awning of shade for her small fevered body. Once she called faintly, the little wild lonely cry that would come from her as she slept, and a few seconds after that I saw a shiver run through her body. I put my hand on her and felt the strange rigidity that comes in the instant following death; then she became limp under my touch.

‘She’s dead,’ I said. I said it in Arabic, so that the boys would stop paddling.

Thesiger said, ‘Are you sure?’ and the boys stared unbelievingly. ‘Quite dead?’ they asked it again and again. I handed her to Thesiger; the body dropped from his hands like a miniature fur stole. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘she’s dead.’ He threw the body into the water, and it landed in the brilliant carpet of white and golden flowers and floated on its back with the webbed paws at its sides, as she had been used to sleep when she was alive.

‘Come on,’ said Thesiger. ‘Ru-hu-Ru-hu!’ but the boys sat motionless, staring at the small corpse and at me, and Thesiger grew angry with them before they would move. Amara kept on looking back from the bows until at last we rounded the corner of a green reed-bed and she was out of sight.

The sun shone on the white flowers, the blue kingfishers glinted low over them and the eagles wheeled overhead on the blue sky, but all of these seemed less living for me since Chahala was dead. I told myself that she was only one of thousands like her in these marshes, that are speared with the five-pointed trident, or shot, or taken as cubs to die slowly in more callous captivity, but she was dead and I was desolate. The fault lay with whoever, perhaps more than a million years ago, had first taken up the wild dog cub that clung to the body of its dead dam, and I wondered whether he too had in that half-animal brain been driven by the motives that in me were conscious.

I fretted miserably over the death of Chahala, for she had convinced me utterly that it was an otter that I wanted as an animal companion at Camusfeàrna, and I felt that I had had my chance and wasted it. It was not until long afterwards that the probable cause of her death struck me. The Marsh Arabs drug fish with digitalis concealed in shrimp bait, and whereas the human system, or that of an adult buff-backed heron, might find the minute dose innocuous, the same quantity might be fatal to as young a creature as Chahala.

I had no more time in the marshes; Wilfred and I were to spend a few days in Basra before going on to pass the early summer among the pastoral tribes. But Chahala’s death, which seemed to me like an end, was in fact a beginning.