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19. Pursuit.
Dawn broke gently over sleeping bodies and let them rest. Up in the firmament, the sun was already rising through a cloudless sky. Outside the bothy, its warmth was ardent on the ancient stones, the good weather continuing and unbroken, like a summer spell. Wiggy lay still, aware but not yet conscious : sleep still rippling calmly upon the shores of his body; light trickling in through the shadows and teasing his eyes, as he stretched back amid the sweet smell of his heather bed. He had slept so well, the deep sleep of perfect rest, and his body felt so quiet, relaxed and whole. Tardema, they called it in Hebrew - when sleep enfolds the quietened spirit in something like the eternal rest; as if he'd returned in his dreams to that place of peace and solitude once again. What had he stumbled across on his walk? An ancient strangeness, perhaps. A land of rest that reached back from time to the very creation of the world? And in his dreams he found it once more... that place of quiet... what dreams! what peace! Reaching over the still bodies, he stepped out through the bothy door : into light! It was everywhere. The whole world seemed full of its joyful proclamation. All around him, the heat released scents of scrub and berry like a lovely perfume. At the burn, he splashed water on his face, over his body : and it smacked him fresh and hard with its livid cool. He wandered down to Loch Morar and heard a corncrake sounding in the stillness across the bay. When he returned the others had stirred. Gordon had found the last flakes of some oats on the shelf. Harry had fetched some water from the stream. Dog had bumped his head on the door.
'Fuck! There's a bloody feich in here!' Hughie exclaimed, laughing at the rank disorder all around.
'Sugar!' Roberta was saying. 'I can't eat this unless I have some sugar!'
'Ye'll huf tae dae withoot it' Archie laughed. 'We tupped oot all the sugar in they blaeberries!'
'Oo-oh!' whined the girl. 'Wiggy! Do something! Otherwise I think I'm going to starve!'
'Stop complaining,' said Wiggy, ransacking the shelf where previous walkers had left remains, through the long winter and beleaguered spring. 'Ah! I thought I'd seen some. Here!' He tossed a tiny plastic bag to her, knotted at the top, and inside - a teaspoon or two of damp unwanted sugar.
'You brilliant man!' she cried. He beamed.
They ate the simple drammach in austere appreciation and it tasted good - simple and good - a few left-over raisins thrown in too, and nothing wasted. Then they all began the packing up. Philip Gordon went to the burn, and started to wash the last night's pots. He scrubbed the grease away with sprigs of heather in the morning sunshine, until Jock the Dog came stumbling over, cheerful, sleepy. The teacher looked up to see him pissing contentedly in the sparkling water, just upstream, his eyes half-closed. 'It's a helluva day!' he barked, with his friendly, carefree grin.
'Aye' said Gordon, and smiled resignedly.
As he returned to the ramshackle cottage, Hughie and Archie were hurling stacks of heather out of the door. Inside, Roberta and Alasdair were packing their rucksacks. Harry's was already done, propped up in a corner. Wiggy added his few belongings to Roberta's as usual, then went outside. He found Harry at the side of the bothy, picking up pieces of litter alone.
'What are you doing, Harry?' he asked.
'Making it nice for the next people' he answered gruffly. 'Nothing wrong with that, is there?'
Wiggy felt a tingle thrill down his spine. 'No' he replied. 'That's fine, Harry.' Then he went round the back and re-appeared with a spade to bury the rubbish and feich. The day was matchless. They all gathered in the superb sunlight, with their packs done up, ready to depart.
'That's about it, I think' said Gordon, securing the latch with a makeshift wedge.
'Heading for Charlie's cave, then?' asked Hughie.
'The cave above Loch Beoraid' Alasdair exclaimed boyishly, his eyes wide open. 'By dusk we'll maybe have found the treasure!'
'You can dream!' his sister said.
'Hoo-hoo!' laughed Archie 'Jist keep chasin' Cherlie!' and he tousled the boy's dishevelled hair. With their faces smeared, still unwashed from the day before, they looked like tinkers' children in the sun.
'What about you? Where are you heading?' Wiggy enquired.
'We'll probably head for Knoydart' replied Archie.
'If ye ever make it!' Hugh Sinclair laughed.
'By Christ, there's a pub at Inverie! Of course we'll make it.'
'But meanwhile...' said Hughie, taking a bottle from one of the packs and tossing it over the heather to Archie.
'Slainte!' The huge forester beamed with delight, taking a draught in the golden sunlight and roaring joyously to the high corries. 'Slainte Mhath, mo' bhalach!' They passed it round.
'Well' shrugged Hughie, glancing about. 'I guess it's time we all fucked off.'
They shouldered their packs and Wiggy, aside, spoke to Sinclair, man to man.
'A million pounds on my head, you say? It's a lot of money.'
The Scotsman looked straight into him with his glacier eyes, and spat on the ground. 'The question is not what I will do, but what you choose to do yourself. As for us, I doubt if we'll ever meet again. But I'd like to know... your concern for the people - is it simply paternalistic or, I wonder, will you have the faith one day to join with them in their insurgency?'
But before the other man could answer, they all looked up as a groan of metallic foreboding up the glen grew to an angry throb and then to uproar. In seconds the helicopter was almost upon them, landing some hundred yards beyond the bothy. 'Redcoats!' Roberta yelled, a piercing scream.
They looked at one another, without words. Wiggy caught the poachers' eyes, that seemed to gleam and harden instantly. One glance and he knew they would not betray him. 'Fuck off!' called Hughie, pointing towards the hill.
'We'll hold them off' growled Archie.
'But you don't have to...' Wiggy protested. 'You owe us nothing.'
Hughie's steely eyes flashed back. 'Mo Bhalach, this is life, this is life... and the free Highlands are our domain. Ours and yours - not people like this...'
'Aye!' glowered Archie. 'We arra people.' Taking a swig from his bottle, he bellowed. 'Remember this! We arra people!'
'Freedom!' said Hughie, gripping Wiggy's arm. 'That's what it's all about! Freedom, mo bhalach!'
Gordon was beckoning, urging them all to move and depart. In the near distance, soldiers in black were leaping to the ground from the wailing craft.
'Well' snarled Archie, placing his rough hand softly on Harry's cheek. 'Farewell, wee fella...'
'Ye find that treasure, mind' said Jock to Alasdair.
The men clasped physically, without more words, all haste, all clamour. 'Remember the Fithich Dubh!' said Archie darkly, turning to the girl. Then looking up the glen he smiled. 'Well,' he shouted, 'it's time ferra rammy!' A glint in his eyes... The Dog had picked up the petrol, and started soaking the heather around the house : almost beside himself, frenzied, tugging at the leash, laughing, whimpering.
'Now, for Fuck's sake, Go!' yelled Sinclair, pushing them physically on their way. They started to run.
'Jockie, take the chopper! Archie, the decoy!' He shouted again. 'Now run like the deer...'
They headed west, crashing through the peat, reeling under packs, racing through bracken. Into heather, through heather, round boulder, desperately trying to merge - like Charlie, hiding behind the next boulder, hunted in the heather - one instinct now, escape from capture.
Roberta looked frantically back as she ran, trying to catch sight of the kindly poachers, but a veil of smoke lay between them now, from the scrub that had recently been their beds. Beyond it, their friends : but what had become of them she could not tell. She ran on, helping Alasdair, whose antler tied to the top of his pack had caught in a tangle of undergrowth.
As they turned round the hill, breathless and panting, they could hear the sound of shooting behind them. 'Shit!' said Harry, cutting his hand on an edge of rock. He sucked the blood.
Alasdair, tearful, turned to his teacher. 'They'll all be killed!' Gordon just blinked. The centre must hold, he knew too well. Whatever the cost, the centre must hold. 'Quickly!' he said. 'We must keep going - and keep your heads down!'
They pressed up ancient Gleann Taodhail, past woods where the boys had found Roberta. Wiggy was sullen and ashen-faced. He spoke not a word.
Then a muffled boom cracked and echoed on the opposite hillside and, shortly after, a pall of darker smoke rose above the spur of the hill. The helicopter had clearly gone up.
They stopped in their tracks. 'Bloomin' Nora!' Alasdair exclaimed, pointing towards the conflagration.
'The crossbows' said Harry. 'It must have been the crossbows. The flaming bolts...'
'Do you think they're alright?' Roberta whispered.
Gordon put his arm around her shoulder, and peered through his glasses at the rising plume. 'Oh, they'll get away - they know these hills - they have the instinct to disappear... and the wilderness will swallow them up...' The teacher looked across at his friend. 'Wiggy, are you alright?' The man nodded grimly. 'Do you want to carry on?' No answer. Just staring round at the silent hills.
'The sooner we're out of this valley the better,' said Gordon. 'Come on. Up there.' He pointed.
Under wooded cover, they followed a burn which cut through a dizzy ravine down the side of the valley. It would lead them out of the glen to a mountain lochan high in the hills.
They were safer now.
The wilderness was hiding them. They clambered up the stream, water and rocks tumbling around them as they scrambled and pulled on birch and ash, that bore their weight and provided shelter. There was a smell of moss and last year's leaves. And sweat, sticking to their backs and breaking loose all down their straining bodies. The midges were becoming querulous, as they ascended, troubling Wiggy in particular as he brought up the back. They seemed to wage a personal vendetta against him.
'Why can't they just leave me alone' he complained. Then after some grumbling, he laughed at himself, and gave Harry a shove as the boy lost his footing on a boulder above.
Alasdair, at the front, was the first to break out into the sunlight and open hillside above. 'Wow!' he shouted, looking across at a herd of deer roaming free on the mountain beyond. And when the glinting waters of Lochan a' Bhrodainn came into sight, cupped in a hollow, Roberta yelled 'Yeee!' and they gathered and stopped for a short rest. Gordon and the boys turned for a piss, Roberta and Wiggy each examining the mountains and seeking their stillness and peace. It was breathless and quiet.
More relaxed, they pressed on to a second remote lochan, sheltered high in the lonely hills. Wiggy took the front now, with the map.
'When you get to Lochan Tain Mhic Dhugaill, veer left because we need to cut across the hill that side,' Gordon had said. But as the others reached the brow of the next rise, they could see that he'd veered to the right instead.
'What's Wiggy doing?' Gordon exclaimed. 'I'll go and see' Roberta called. 'You carry on.'
As Gordon and the boys skirted the opposite side of the lake, Roberta loped up and found him, sitting on the shore on a bend between two burns : just sitting and taking in the day. 'What are you doing?' she teased. 'I've come to rescue you.'
'What a setting!' he said. And they looked out over the shimmering waters.
Roberta said quietly, 'You feel as if a sword could rise up out of the water at any moment...'
'I lost my peace of mind' he started to say.
'You don't need to explain' she interjected, looking away from him at the small figures of the boys on the other side. Above them, the blue and cloudless skies; around, the brilliant green of the hills; and in the stillness, here, a sense of presence. Water, an enchanted element to the Celts : and light, playing and sparkling on its iridescent surface. There was a sense of gatheredness, a here-ness, a sense of place. They noticed it together. Soft motion of the water and, no doubt, fish inhabiting its darker depths, silver, darting.
'Wiggy...' she started, looking him in the eyes. Then she said 'Do you want a biscuit?' He smiled and gladly accepted, as he had lost his share of the biscuits at cards the previous night. It was a digestive. He took a bite, and inspected the rest of it with real appreciation and delight. Then he reached in their shared pack. 'Here! Would you like some bread?' he asked. 'Alright,' she smiled but soon complained. 'It's hard!' she moaned, with fondness.
The sun beat down on the crown of his head, so she made a knotted handkerchief for his sunburnt baldness.
'I crown you King Wiggy!' she said fondly, standing in front of him and putting it on. The others were waving across the lake.
'C'mon Wiggy!' she said, stooping on her coltish legs. But he didn't move. Across the strand, a curlew sounded by the mountain lochan, almost unbearably doleful and sad. She saw the sun glint on the water's surface, with translucent beauty; and threw a stone in, watching the ripples gently reaching out and out and out. Then, more belligerent, she hurled a large rock next to Wiggy, and it crashed through the surface, breaking his reverie, soaking his kilt. He leapt and caught her, grabbed her slender wrists, and spun Roberta round and round and round. Falling back in the heathery grass, the sky above them kept on spinning : the whole world turning on its axis round them, and they - at rest and close to the centre of things.
'Come on Wiggy!' she commanded, throwing grass on his upturned face. Then she ran off, and the man grabbed the pack and gave chase after her.
But he had left the map behind at the spot where they'd been sitting.
Skirting the hill for a while, they descended to Kinlochbeoraid, at the end of its reclusive waters.
They were far gone now : deep, deep and buried - the wilderness enclosing and encroaching along the valley bottom. Their presence seemed so tiny in the remote defile of the glen, beneath great hills : the undergrowth thick and verdant all around them. They came to a grassy clearing where a pattern of stones seemed to suggest the earlier presence of someone's tent : and close by, a sock, hanging dry on a branch.
'Who's been here?' asked Alasdair, pointing.
'The Nudies!' Harry was convinced. 'It must have been the Nudies' camping spot!'
'Ur! I'm not sitting here!' squealed Alasdair.
'Look, there's Mr Nudie' Harry croaked. 'I saw him run behind that tree...'
They stopped to eat some remaining fragments where the other family had pitched their tent. Already their fleeting presence was fading away, the sward returning to its normal colour where it had been pressed down and flat; the rocks that had held the tent in place disappearing beneath the overgrowing grass; and the sound of children almost a memory in the glen where they had played together.
'Odd isn't it?' said Wiggy. 'Our presence on this planet is so brief and we, like strangers in a strange land, are gone almost as soon as we've arrived.'
Looking around them, the two men viewed this wilderness, once peopled. There was a feeling, almost, of being overwatched by a friendly presence. Where were the people of Charlie's world? Ousted and scattered, in the violation of a way of life. Perhaps in the darkness, lurking in the shadows, a recollection of a happier time, before lost freedom.
'Eagle!!' shouted Harry suddenly.
He was right. Floating on thermals above the crags behind them, it soared effortlessly overhead towards them. Leaning back, they watched its calm majestic presence. There was something about an eagle in flight : it had an almost voluptuous muscularity, like the satisfying firmness they felt in their legs after days and days of walking.
The bird seemed curious about their unexpected presence for a while, then turned away, and merged, and disappeared.
Alasdair was keen to carry on, the hope of treasure calling to his heart. But then they discovered they hadn't got the map. 'I gave it to you,' said Gordon with a smile. 'Are you sure?' his friend enquired.
'Oh, nice one, Wiggy' the children groaned.
There was nothing for it but to read the folds of the country, face to face. 'We have to follow another burn up the side of the hill,' Gordon recalled. Then along a ridge for several miles. He was sure they could trace a course through the wilds.
The second ascent was hotter than ever, the sun bearing down on them all without respite. Halfway up, Roberta stopped in her tracks. Her glasses were getting humid and steamy, and her back was hot and damp with sweat. It irritated her that the boys, and Wiggy, had stripped to the waist. It made her cross. 'I've had enough of this,' she muttered and pulled the T-shirt off her back, her young pubescent breasts now free, exposed to the summer air, in touch. 'I'm joining the Nudie Club' was all she said.
Wiggy looked on with surprise, not because of her delicate exposure, but - and the boys gasped as well - because they could see now the earth and the peat smeared by the girl all down her body. She looked dark and savage, more part of the land than the rest of the group. They'd smeared their faces the previous day - but she seemed different : somehow indifferent to any control.
'If the Headmaster could see us now!' joked Alasdair.
'You'd probably get the sack, Mr Gordon!'
'As likely as not,' smiled Gordon wryly.
They laughed at the thought of their leader inspecting his troops... 'now, Mr Gordon, have they combed their hair?... Let's take a look... Aargh!'
Wiggy laughed. And so they continued, a party drawing closer : closer to each other and the earth. Alasdair trail-blazing through the scorching heat, driven by a search for treasure and a growing desire to understand the people - the vanished people - who had gone before.
They were reaching for the hill-top, and two hinds had crossed their path not far ahead, when they heard a human voice behind them calling out. Gordon, bringing up the rear, told them to carry on, and soon they were clearly being pursued. They quickened their pace, but the gap diminished, as the man below closed in upon the teacher. Not recognised at first, something about his hair, the way he cocked his head, his easy stride, awoke in Gordon an understanding and he stopped. It was Andrew Douglas.
The American was looking tanned, sweat trickling from his brow and down the back of a clean white shirt, soaking his pack. His wiry ginger hair glistened in the bright sunlight and he looked, if anything, more weathered than before. They stopped and talked, Douglas narrowing his eyes with amused satisfaction when told about Wiggy.
'I'll be danged!' he said. 'I thought as much! And all the kids? Are they keeping well?'
'See for yourself!' Gordon replied and they walked on up towards them.
Wiggy, who had watched their intercourse closely, had learnt who the stranger was from the children, Harry having first realised who it must be. So he walked down to greet the American and they shook hands.
'Bonnie Prince Charlie, I presume' he said with a grin. Though it was hard to tell from Wiggy's appearance who he might be : the knotted handkerchief on his head, the stained and muddy kilt, a smear of earth on his cheek, and the bare chest shining with sunlit sweat.
'It's alright. You can call me Wiggy, if you like... all the others do.'
Andrew smiled and thought for a moment. 'Mr Wiggy, perhaps' he said.
When he reached the children, he noted their wild appearance with a laugh. 'And I thought I knew about skulking,' he joked.
They gathered round, eager to tell him all about their journey; their adventures, the treasure, the redcoats on their trail.
He smiled. 'I've seen a few of those.' He explained. 'Spent the night at Pean, and headed over the pass to Loch Morar early today. As I approached, I saw a bit of hurly-burly, and when I reached the foot of the glen - ha! - they had a welcoming party for me.'
'Nothing like getting away from it all,' Gordon mused.
'Sure. Well I reached the burnt-out shell of a chopper, and next thing I knew, I'd got three or four gun-barrels pointed my way. So I didn't argue. They interviewed me in a cottage...' 'Oban Bothy...'
'So I worked out. They left me in there while they had a chat. When I read the exercise book on the shelf, I figured I was on the trail. Then they told me to leave, er, in the vernacular. I complied. Though they seemed to think that you, Mr Wiggy, had been taken north by about twelve terrorists.'
He raised his eyebrows, and surveyed the land. 'It's a fine day,' he said philosophically.
'Then they got away?' said Wiggy quietly. He grinned, then gasped and laughed out loud. 'They bloody got away!' he said to Gordon. 'They bloody made it, didn't they?' The two men held each other with relief.
And so, to the hill-tops! Prince Charlie's cave was now five miles away, along the rolling hills that stretched out west. As they hit the tops, the radiant views spread out before them, and all around them - light!
Andrew Douglas strolled with his easy, regular strides, looking this way and that, relaxed and friendly. Behind him, the moorland and tummock grass glistened and glinted, nodded and winked, in the dazzling rays of the August sun. Along the ridge, rolling hills; dry peat bogs; soft, feathery black earth; the droppings of deer... and westward, the sea.
Light! Sparkling on distant water, and islands twinkling out to sea, more islands beyond : the ravishing beauty and splendour was almost enough to make a child cry for pleasure and joy. Light! Light! And an Island of Glass, beckoning through the aetherial brightness. An Island of Glass, Roberta recalled, shining and waiting in the blue-sea'd beyond.
Andrew lent Wiggy his map, and they made out the mountains around them : Beinn Odhar Mhor, Sgurr na Paite, Coirc Bheinn, Sgurr Mor, Beinn Bhuidhe. The heather was springing under their feet, and Wiggy felt young again, deep in his heart. The incident at Oban had rendered him quiet, but now he felt relaxed once more, and talked to Douglas as the others pressed on.
'What made you come after them?' Wiggy enquired.
Douglas looked out. 'Oh, it's good to throw out the tinsel from time to time...'
'I know what you mean. Out here, the leisure society's comforts are stripped away. Somehow, mind, spirit, imagination all seem sharpened by hunger and physical exercise into a clarity of vision...' They could see for miles in all directions... 'You start to see things clearly, and in place.'
'Maybe that's why the hermits sought their cells. Maybe the inspiration for Iona sprang from views like this.' Douglas mused. The pair walked on a hundred yards before Wiggy continued. 'I think there's a lot to be said for the ascetic instinct : to retreat for a while from all the cosmetic comforts. Otherwise we can lose touch with deeper being.'
He stopped to examine some tiny plants. 'Our civilisation,' said Wiggy, 'is so fragile : needs wild places like this. They provide us with a permanent spiritual backdrop to the ever-changing ephemera of our lives.'
'We live in the instant society' Douglas sighed. 'Only interested in what happens next.'
They looked around at the mountains, that seemed so everlasting and unchanging; and out to sea - transcendant, shining, another, a deeper reality.
'What we've lost,' complained Wiggy, 'is a sense of the eternal... we hardly even have a sense of history. We become cut off from roots and inorganic. Instead, as you say, society interacts with the superficial, the gimmick, the media event, and then moves on... seems cut adrift...'
'Yet if we do lose sight,' continued Douglas, further on, 'then where do we go? Where are we heading?'
'Untrammelled industrialisation in the name of improvement... environmental abuse... the destruction of the planet, I suppose.' Wiggy looked out, appalled by it all. 'I mean - what does one do... just preside over it all?'
They stopped and gazed out at the empty glens, where once communities had lived and loved. And his mind travelled to other waste places, places laid waste by economic policy. 'In my being,' he said, 'what I long for is a return, a restoration : I long for a release of grace and the mending of wrongs... but it begins with the healing of the injured heart.'
The American frowned. 'It's a darned strange thing, but I've felt a sense of grace all through my life, like some kind goodness, some good fortune by me...'
They were thoughtful and still, aware of the beauty and order around them. Wiggy continued. 'So often I feel... if only, if only... I look at this country and long for grace and restoration of its waste places.'
'In the grail legend,' Douglas declared, 'first the fisher king must be restored...'
'I know.' He seemed agitated and carried on. 'After a time, historical movements gain momentum and become irreversible. If we are to survive, we need a flame to keep alive the spiritual values, in the face of that government by material expediency, which marks the price of all, but the true deep value of nothing.'
So it had been : at Strathnaver, Kildonan, Knoydart; at Sollas, Glenelg and poor Glencalvie. Throughout this land, the desecration of community by the instruments of economic policy : the reduction of true feeling and culture to economic expediency... until no-one was left.
They came over the hill and rested a mile later upon a knoll. Below them, the two men could see the children at Lochan Stob a Glas-chairn.
The temptation to escape such unremitting heat had grown too great. Harry had said, 'I'm blowing up! Can't we stop and have a swim?'
'It's up to you,' the teacher replied. Spontaneously they all undressed and ran in naked to the cool green waters. The sudden coldness made them gasp. Gordon sat apart, and carefully removed his boots.
'We're all Nudies now!' Alasdair squealed, ducking and shouting in the brilliant sun.
'This is just - wonderful!' Roberta called, spraying up water with her outstretched arms. 'Heee!' she yelled, as sparkle and light and fractured radiance split the air and scattered in showers everywhere. 'Why don't you come in?' she cried to the teacher.
'He's chicken!' said Harry.
And Gordon lay back in all the brightness, and listened to the water and the children's screams in a deep content.
On the rise above, Wiggy was pulling his telescope out. They had caught a glint of light across the valley : a man using field-glasses, scouring; and a column of men at Tain Mhic Doughaill. He could make out the silvery gleam of the loch. Through his glass, he saw they were soldiers, inspecting a map : Gordon's map, in fact - the one he had left behind. He frowned. 'It's always the same,' he said to Douglas. 'Always the centre has to hold, at any cost... there are moments when it may seem challenged, like the start of Bonnie Prince Charlie's campaign, when life's outsiders met at Glenfinnan... but it's no use. In the end, the centre always holds.' 'They're on our trail,' he carried on.
'I'm not so sure' drawled Douglas slowly. 'I reckon we should be safe up here. The children are out of sight from them, the sun's behind us at an angle, see? Besides, they're following thoughts, we're following feelings.' He chuckled calmly. 'The point is, there's no logic to where we are, or what we're doing. And if there's one thing the linear mind can't cope with, it's the unreasonable course of action...
'
'Do you really think so?' Wiggy asked.
They stirred and moved on, meeting the children, drying on the strand. The redcoats' manoeuvres were reported to Gordon. He shrugged his shoulders.
'We've treasure to find' was all he would say.
Soon Alasdair was spurring them on, sensing his way down the rolling hillocks, instinctively following the lie of the land. When he got to the wooded steeps he thrilled, feeling the presence of Charlie once more. He had hidden there all those years ago. They scrambled and searched for the lonely cave. It was hard to locate, but at length Alasdair shouted out. 'Here it is! I've found it! I've found it!' He almost expected to find Charlie there, sitting in wait with a handful of friends. But there was nothing there : just rock and dust and musty leaves. Search as they could, it was just no use. An emptiness - the end of dreams?
Alasdair searched and searched again but he knew already in his heart. Finally he slumped on a boulder in empty dejection and let quiet tears steal softly down his cheeks. 'I was so sure' was all he murmured. 'I was so sure.' Gordon left him.
But some time after, he came and stood close by, surveying the ancient grandeur of the hills along Loch Beoraid. 'I know,' the boy began. 'The treasure wasn't the only thing.'
'Put it this way,' said Gordon. 'The coins would just have ended up in a dusty drawer in some museum.' Alasdair nodded. He looked at the boy and held his hands. 'But we've been living in Charlie's world. We are living with Charlie, sharing his dreams.'
'I know' he repeated, as his sister loped up. 'There's something strange here. I've felt it on this journey, but I can't explain.'
She draped her arms around him, kindly, and he felt loved. 'If we believe in dreams,' she whispered, 'then chasing them is like a dream itself : a dream that breaks into our life and catches us all unaware.'
She stroked his hair. 'But' he hesitated... 'What happens now?' He looked around at Wiggy, who was helping Harry to lay a fire.
'There's nothing for it!' Roberta waved, springing to her feet, theatrically. 'We must fly to Skye! The Pinnacle beckons!' She dropped to the ground. 'Or else we die!'
'The Inaccessible Pinnacle!' they all agreed. 'And we keep chasing Charlie,' said Alasdair. 'Isn't that what Archie said?'
Though when the camp-fire was lit, Gordon confided 'I fear they'll keep a close eye on the ports...'
Wiggy pulled out his broken pocket-watch. 'I think I know a person who might help. You see this time-piece? I was given it some twenty years ago, in token of appreciation, as they say...'
'It doesn't work,' choked Harry. 'It's all broke!'
'But its value's not in keeping time. It's the friendship that lies behind the gift. Read the back...' Harry took the watch.
'From Murdo Macleod to a Distant Friend : Nae Man can Tether Time or Tide, Slainte'
'Murdo Macleod!' laughed Wiggy. 'We found him the worse for wear in his ancient boat, drifting somewhere up the Sound of Sleat. His engine had cut out, and a storm was closing in...'
'Where was he headed?'
'I can't remember. He had a consignment for a friend, he said. So anyway, we gave the boat a tow to Arisaig. That's where he lives.'
'And you're thinking,' said Douglas, 'he might repay the favour and take us over the sea to Skye? A drunken skipper in a beat-up tub!'
'If it's still afloat,' added Gordon.
'If he's still afloat...' They laughed.
'I'm hungry' Alasdair said, changing the subject.
'Well we've got two trout and a crust of bread,' Roberta sighed.
But Douglas grinned and reached for his pack.
'Now see' he said 'I've got a few days' food for one, which is the same as saying I've got one meal for six...' and they cheered as Douglas pulled out the supplies. 'And...' the bottle slid between two shirts... 'a little something to help me sleep!'
'Hmmm...' said Gordon, with quiet approval. 'Glenfiddich!'
The smoke spiralled through the grey-barked birch. Harry fetched water and, as it boiled, the children collected heather for the cave, and made a camp of leafy boughs. Wiggy strolled down the hill alone, to relieve himself, and gather wood. He smelt the soft sweet-scented smoke, and felt - in touch : the tree-bark rough to hold, his hands pleasantly stained, unclean. Relief indeed. On his return, it was very still.
The children huddled and murmured quietly at the cave's entrance. The hillside all around them glowed with a reticent light that seemed to come - not from the dying sun in the west - but from somewhere deep within the rocks themselves. They seemed invested with an intimate warmth. In the still presence of the quiet dusk, the children seemed safe in their private childhood : with its less inhibited dream of reality, and its greater release and freedom and joy. In the failing light, they sat and ate together : telling Andrew more of their adventures, listening to Gordon as he recalled Charlie in the Hebrides...
'If we do go over the sea to Skye, we're following Charlie yet again.'
'It's the most romantic part of the story,' Wiggy supposed. 'I mean, it's the only bit people really remember. Flora Macdonald and the Prince in disguise. He wasn't on Skye for very long, but it's steeped in romance and high adventure.'
'Yes, we'll be taking a short-cut really.' Alasdair again. 'Because first he spent months in the Outer Isles.'
Gordon continued. 'He first met Donald Macleod just over these hills. He was nearly seventy but he managed to procure an eight-oared boat, and they fled from the mainland, where the authorities were closing in.'
'The journey almost killed them!' said the boy.
'They hid on many islands, sometimes sheltering in sodden bothies. It was a time of austere hardship, but there were also moments of idyllic pleasure. He found a retreat for three weeks at a place called Corodale on the island of South Uist. There, in a hidden valley, life was reduced to a few simplicities.'
Andrew chipped in. 'From what I read, he and his friends were drinking half the time.'
'He had a big supply,' said Gordon. 'He'd sent the old Macleod to find Lochiel, who was skulking somewhere at the head of Loch Arkaig. Eighteen days later the old sailor returned with enormous quantities of whisky and brandy.' Wiggy nodded.
'He certainly liked his drink, that man. They all seem to like a dram out there.'
'Have you been to the islands before, Wiggy?' He looked at Roberta.
'I've stayed on Berneray. Somehow, the Celtic way of life survives out there. The language, the feeling. When the Gaelic population was expelled from the rest of Scotland, an industry in seaweed distribution preserved the Celtic culture a little longer over there.'
'Seaweed?' said Harry. 'What use is seaweed?'
'The farmers used it as natural fertiliser : excellent stuff!'
'But in the end' Gordon concluded 'the result was much the same : the ruins of homes, the desolate hearth, no more children picking flowers along the lonely machair by the sea.'
What dereliction and horror had taken place? What usurpation had removed so many from their way of life?
The stars were peeping out, between the branches : gleaming delicately like a necklace scattered and slung among the leaves. All round them, stillness : just water, rock and a darkening sky.
'I wonder where Hughie and Archie are now...'
'And Dog!'
'I don't suppose he knows himself...'
The flames crackled and conversed quietly. And seated close, the flickering faces of shade around the fire seemed strangely different, almost transformed... while further back, a sense of others lurking there, lingering near... As the children sidled into the darkness, to continue making their leafy camp, and Andrew was washing the dirty pans, Wiggy and Gordon walked up the hill. It was serenely calm. Light bejewelled the distant skyline, and in the stillness the noble, eternal hills were just a presence, silhouetted along the horizon in the quiet of night.
The two men talked, between long silences, more aware of some subconscious mood, than of each other. 'Have you ever longed to be completely spontaneous, completely yourself?' Wiggy asked.
Gordon thought. 'Yes, but there always seems to be a lid on it all. Perhaps you have to lose yourself - like this' he pointed to the darkening wilderness - 'to open up and liberate what's really longing to come out...'
'I agree. We all have feelings inside us, which are so much stronger than we realise : and they have to come out, one way or another. If we're lucky, they come out as life... or else, they come out in other passions : contorted, in dark, less-ordered forms...'
They lay back in the twisted heather, and a bird screeched from the shadowy wood. Wiggy bit his lips, in thought. 'That's why people seek power, I think - as an outlet for unrealised love, unrealised feeling. If our feeling being is not fulfilled, it finds random expression in grotesque releases, bursting uncontrolled from within the unrestored psyche.'
'You probably wouldn't agree,' said Gordon, 'but the unrestored psyche... I think it has a lot to do with the way we suppress the female in ourselves. Men too often intensify gender differences...' he looked at his nails : one of them was starting to crack... 'and they do it to keep at bay the residual femininity in themselves.'
'Do you really believe that?'
'I do.'
The teacher searched to find the right words. 'Men seek to dominate their own femininity, to keep it down, and dramatize this in the domination of women, of nature... and this blasted desire to control leads on with logical irresistibility towards the authoritarian state; towards a mentally tenser and tenser society. Indeed, I think this male posture could threaten the continuity of life itself.'
'So you blame it all on men?'
'Yes. Well, no... but put it this way : I feel there's less dichotomy in women between the intellect and feeling...'
'Really? Feminism seems unbalanced to me... asserting one group's rights against another's.'
Wiggy was silent for a while. 'But can't men liberate themselves?'
'They're in bondage to fear. We all are. Fear of each other, but more than that : fear of women - of their subversive power to evoke compulsion and desire below the levels of rational control.'
'Do we have to fear them for that?'
'We fear their dangerous subversion, yes. They introduce a radical culture, because they subvert the establishment from the roots... intimacy, co-operation and collective involvement : they threaten the male control of the world, conversing with nature and their own nature, always threatening to set free feelings that could unbalance the status quo.'
'But in all this,' said Wiggy, unsettled, 'what are we really looking for? I mean, male or female - forget the difference - what are we seeking so hard to attain?'
'Look!' exclaimed Gordon. He extended his arm. 'This beautiful country, as bold, lovely, and wild now as it was then... Bonnie Prince Charlie stood here, 250 years ago, and it could have been yesterday. Isn't this what we are all chasing? A beautiful country of dreams and the heart? I think so...' he paused... 'but I find it so hard to believe...'
'You mean, to believe in God?' said Wiggy. 'Somehow, out here, it becomes a little easier...'
Gordon struggled with religion, its belligerent dogma and possessive claims. 'I would like to believe, but there seems to be so much unnatural guilt and forced idealism. The wearisome attrition of moral rectitude depresses me. I'm ill at ease with all the organisation and interference in people's lives. I can't believe you can put God in a box, and then tell people to conform to a single pattern of belief, when there is - so much diversity. I'm troubled by it all.' He retreated into scepticism. 'Maybe the only moral course is truth... the lie is the great evil.'
'Then what, as Pontius Pilate said, is Truth?'
There was a long silence. Stars were tingling at the further end of nether galaxies, outlying and remote.
'When it all comes down to it,' Andrew Gordon said, feeling feminine, feeling unsure, 'in the midst of all this, in this great wilderness, or in the bleak wastes of our great cities, all I can find to take seriously is the personal : the precious touch of human care... these children here... you... your friendship. Beyond that I don't think that you can go...'
There was a movement in the shadows of the heath behind them. Harry, Roberta and Alasdair came and joined them, the friendly presence of Douglas lumbering up behind; and behind him, the presence of Glenaladale and Charlie too, who must have sat there a little while ago - their lingering presence, their vanished youth, like a brief sojourn, like theirs, in the dark present. They lay on their backs in the heather, smelt in the darkness the soft earth, and up in the sky, all around, over all : LIGHT! Huddled close, and nestled together under the vast immeasurable heavens, they leaned against each other and could see - the stars, so many, that they seemed to be showering down on the Highland night. A nebula recoiling, a receding turmoil of desolate worlds : while they in unnoticed smallness watching, the fleeting presence of humanity. Yes - overhead the sky was vast with stars. The distant galaxies wheeling slowly, imperceptibly; children and adults, alike, in awe : the thread of their life measured out for each one in the fractional movement of unreachable worlds. They, stilled and silenced, looking round at the mountains, and the tumultuous multitude of stars overhead.
'Don't you see,' said Wiggy quietly to the teacher. 'It's so vital we recognise our place, our size, upon this planet... by the time more light has come from these bright stars, we'll all be dead and gone, like Charlie himself... but the planet, it must live on, it must survive...'
He turned to the children and showed them the sky. 'There's Ursa Major... Orion the hunter : look at his feet... the Seven Sisters - see those little ones there.'
'Oh! I see them! I see them!' said Harry, leaning against Wiggy, feeling safe and secure. The man passed his telescope slowly around.
There was quiet on the hillside for quite a long while. 'What's that...?' trembled Alasdair, suddenly, in a quavering fearful child-like voice. Wiggy sat up and peered to the north, as he saw the tremulous threads for himself, golden and green, and wavering, strange : the Aurora, flaring in the distant sky.
The children, all of them, wide-eyed with wonder - Wiggy too... he felt pricking tears : they watched in joy.
Shimmering curtains of light emerged, retired, advanced out of nowhere at all. Flickering forays, through the darkness and night, seams of luminous azure and gold, shifting and weaving through fissures of black.
'What is it?' the boy repeated, amazed.
'The Northern Lights.' Andrew Douglas's strong, still voice. 'Just look at them dance! Do you see them leap!'
'You can't put that in a box,' said Gordon. 'It's wild and free.'
'It's beautiful.' Roberta's voice, released, conclusive.
The same sight, no doubt, seen by Charlie's friends - over the heaving tumult of the centuries - and just as strange, and indescribably wild : remote, unfathomable, then as now... to those dwellers who passed from the face of the earth.
The moment held them in its wondrous thrall. Later, after laughter and talk in the dark, the children retired to their heathery den, and soon there was stillness by the dwindling flame : silence hanging like breath on the cooler air. Gordon, who felt for Alasdair in his disappointment, went down and joined them and was soon asleep. But Douglas produced his whisky again, and Wiggy and he preferred to camp out, on the open hillside, in the summer night. They pulled from the bottle, and felt the warm glow of the golden water traverse their tongues, caress their throats.
In the deep of the night, Wiggy recalled his walk in the wild.
'I came to this place. And it's hard to explain, but I suddenly felt I had slipped somewhere else : such a peace, such a stillness settled upon me, like a feeling of beauty you might find, in a land the other side of sleep, perhaps, or the back of beyond.'
'The back of beyond? Who can say what lies there?'
'Tell me,' said Wiggy. 'Do you believe in dreams?'
'Just the good ones' he answered, and drew from the bottle.
'But really. In dreams? Do you think they have substance?'
Douglas breathed out. The taste of whisky was sweet on his lips.
'What did the Bard of Avon write? "We are such stuff as dreams are made of..." Well maybe we are. Perhaps we're the stuff of dreams ourselves. And what we dream, just recollection of a more real world, or the midnight stirring of the one who dreams of us.'
'Then dreams would be very real indeed!' Wiggy took the bottle.
'Maybe it's not the dreams themselves that count,' said Douglas, 'even if they were windows to another world : but our pursuit of dreams, pursuit of their strange beauty. Perhaps in the pursuit of them, we awake elusive knowledge in ourselves, and enter in. Maybe awareness breaks upon us as we pursue our dreams and seek them out.'
The whisky did its work, kept out the chill, and waves of kind benevolence, ripples of warmth, broke on their sleepy consciousness and lulled them both. All past and present so much one, all life caught by surprise and held, in the mighty wheel and motion of the stars.
'Sometimes,' sighed Douglas, 'our dreams are longings deep within, of what our lives regret or miss so much. Like the exiles cast abroad from this brave land. What did they say... ah, I remember...
"From the lone shieling of the misty island Mountains divide us, and the waste of seas - Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland, And we in dreams behold the Hebrides!" '
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