God's Highlander (14 page)

‘You've missed!' Even as Donnie shouted the words the stag nearest to them stumbled to its knees and then fell on its side.

Donnie Ross let out a yell that might have been heard all the way to Bannockburn, adding still more speed to the hoofs of the surviving animals.

‘That was a
great
shot. You wait till I tell Pa that our preacher downed a stag at a hundred and fifty paces with Great-Grandad's gun.'

‘I can't help feeling there might have been an element of luck involved….'

Donnie Ross's expression showed that he, for one, dismissed the possibility of it being a lucky shot. Wyatt had to admit to himself that he, too, felt none of the humility he ought to have shown after downing one of the most beautiful of God's creatures.

S
HRILL CRIES OF delight greeted Wyatt and Donnie Ross when the two men entered the shielings. The women had been expecting Wyatt since Seonaid Fraser had arrived and told them the minister of Eskaig was on his way to visit them.

‘You've done fine to bring in a deer for us, Donnie,' said Tibbie Ross, avoiding looking directly at Wyatt. ‘Although I hope the factor doesn't get to hear you've been shooting the laird's deer. He'd not be too happy with the Ross family.'

‘It was the preacher who shot it, not me.'

Donnie Ross was in the middle of a group of admiring women, and Wyatt thought he might have been excused had he sought to take some of the glory, albeit unearned, for a while longer. ‘Preacher Jamieson has Lord Kilmalie's permission to hunt whenever he wants.'

‘Well! Our minister has a great many unexpected talents. How long are you staying with us, Minister Jamieson?'

There was such a wealth of implied familiarity in Seonaid Fraser's voice that many of the older women looked to Wyatt to observe his reaction.

‘I'll be staying long enough to help eat the stag – and to hold a service for you all. I trust you'll surprise me, Seonaid, by being able to say all the prayers along with me.'

His reply brought a chorus of hoots from the women, aimed at Seonaid Fraser, and Wyatt knew he had successfully stepped over the trap she had placed before him.

Wyatt could not see Mairi among the women. In fact there were very few faces he recognised.

‘If it's our Mairi you're looking for, you'll find her down at the stream with the butter-makers.' The information was volunteered by Tibbie Ross and accompanied by a knowing smile.

‘I'll no doubt see her before I leave. I went to the croft to see why none of the Ross family has been to my kirk lately. As I was so close I decided to come on to the shielings. I'm glad I did; there are many here I've never seen before. Certainly not in Eskaig for a Sunday service.'

One of the listening women, her face weathered from many years of outdoor working, said sharply: ‘Highland folk are closer to God up here in the lands He made than they ever were in Preacher Gunn's kirk in Eskaig.'

There were many murmurs of agreement – proof once again that, although Wyatt's predecessor might have had a strong following around Loch Eil, he had none up here among the crofters and cottars of the mountains.

‘It was no more Preacher Gunn's kirk than it is mine. It belongs to the Lord. You're as welcome there as anyone else. It's my intention to learn something about each of you while I'm here, then I'll look forward to meeting your menfolk in Eskaig one Sunday soon. But don't let me stop you from working. You'll need to have all your chores done if we're to enjoy a good meeting tonight.'

The Highlanders were a polite people, and Wyatt had toiled all the way from Eskaig to meet them. They would attend the service and hear what he had to say to them. However, not everyone would be able to attend the proposed prayer meeting, and it was noticeable that the herd-boys suddenly took an unprecedented interest in their charges, vying with each other to perform what were usually unpopular evening chores.

Wyatt wandered about the shielings talking to the women. Some came to Eskaig once or twice a year in order to buy those household items they could neither make nor improvise. Others had never left the mountains during their lifetime. If it was not possible to make an exchange for something they wanted, they went without. Most of these were cottars, or sub-tenants. They rented their primitive cots in exchange for labour and a percentage of their crops from tenants who were themselves almost as poor. It was an archaic and inefficient method of husbandry that was still prevalent in both Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland. The method needed to be brought up to date. There had to be change, but it would take time to alter customs that went back hundreds of years – and time was not on the side of the Highlanders.

It was more than an hour before Wyatt reached the stream where Mairi and a few other girls were making heavily salted butter for the whole of the shielings. He had glanced in her direction more than once as he moved around, but she always seemed to be busy.

There were a number of different types of butter-churn in use by the women. Mairi was working a plunger type, the buttermilk being agitated by means of a plunger attached to a long stick which she worked two-handed. The churns had been brought in hand-pulled carts, or packed on the backs of ponies from remote Highland cots. Keeping the heavy wooden plunger moving inside its tall iron-banded churn was warm work, and Mairi was both hot and bad-tempered.

‘Nice of you to drop by,
Minister
Jamieson,' she retorted in answer to his greeting. ‘I'm surprised you have the time to come visiting us, what with your kirk, the school … and the factor's daughter.'

Mairi brushed back a tress of black hair with her hand and attacked the butter-churn with renewed vigour.

‘What's Evangeline Garrett got to do with anything?' Mairi's verbal attack had taken Wyatt by surprise. He was not to know Mairi had mentioned his name so often at the shielings that he had become known, even to those who had never met him, as ‘Mairi's minister'.

His unexpected visit to the shielings had provoked much comment, and the sly glances cast in Mairi's direction did not pass unnoticed by her. When Wyatt had chosen to speak to most of the other women first, not approaching her until he had been in the glen for more than an hour, the sly innuendoes assumed a new and more spiteful nature. Wyatt was paying the penalty for his tardiness.

‘I thought you might have had to ask her permission before coming up here on a visit.' Mairi's anger was subsiding as swiftly as it had erupted, leaving her feeling rather foolish, but she was determined Wyatt should not know. ‘She seems to decide most other things in your life – like who can go to your school….'

So that was it. Wyatt was vaguely relieved. ‘Evangeline is the teacher. It's for she and Alasdair Burns to decide who they're going to teach. Otherwise they could say with justification that I am running
their
lives for them. Besides, as I recall, it was
you
who made the decision to leave.'

‘That was only so she wouldn't have the satisfaction of throwing me out.' The plunger thumped on the base of the churn as Mairi attacked
her task once more. ‘You'd better hurry up and start your prayer meeting. It will be dark before you get back to Eskaig as it is.'

‘I'm not returning to Eskaig tonight – and you'd better go easy, or you'll knock the bottom out of that churn.'

As the plunger thumped against the base of the butter-churn, Wyatt walked off to help two women carry a wooden tub that must have contained at least eight gallons of milk.

Life at the shielings was well organised. Women and young boys had been coming here for longer than anyone could remember, and they all knew what was required of them. Without the summer grazing, those who lived among the high mountains could not survive. During the all too brief summer months nature was bountiful here. Beef cattle were fattened for the late-autumn sales held in Fort William and Inverness. They might even be driven to lowland areas if their numbers and the prevailing price made such a journey worthwhile. Dairy cattle, too, enjoyed the lush grass, and their milk was shared between calves and butter-maidens. Hopefully the cattle would leave the shielings with enough fat on their bones to survive the long hard Highland winter, sharing a cot with their owners. Not
all
would survive. In a bad winter four out of five might perish and there would be hardly enough meat on their bones to flavour a good stew.

This was the background to the days spent at the shielings, but the grim reality of survival in the mountains was not allowed to spoil the comparatively carefree life the women enjoyed here. Through the dark cold days of winter, beleaguered by penury and privation and with even basic survival hanging in the balance, the shielings provided happy memories of the past and hope for the future.

Until about an hour before dusk, Wyatt moved about the shielings talking to cheese-makers, herd-boys, milkmaids and cooks. Except for Donnie Ross, all the boys were beneath the age of fourteen. By contrast, the women were of all ages, ranging from the youngest girls to old women who sat hunched in disapproval, glowering on the scene about them as they knitted or worked tapestry. These doyennes of the shielings missed nothing that their own kinswomen were doing and frequently called out a warning if the behaviour of the younger women did not meet with their approval.

There was singing, too. Songs of the herd-boys farther along the glen; the singing of the cheese-makers and the women tending the
cooking-fires…. But most beautiful of all was the singing of the dairymaids as they went about the evening milking. There must have been thirty or forty girls milking cows, and each song began with one clear voice singing a low, lilting, haunting tune that had been sung in this glen by many generations of milkmaids. The words would be taken up by others, and it was a sound that no listener would ever forget.

Wyatt had heard the same songs many times before when he was a boy in the Isles. They brought back memories he had thought were long forgotten. Yet he had never heard them sung as they were this evening, and he knew he never would again.

‘It's such beautiful music. It always makes me want to cry when I hear it.'

There was no anger in Mairi now, but her voice startled Wyatt. He turned and saw her standing close behind him. She looked cooler, having washed in the cold Highland stream, and her dark hair had been brushed and tied back behind her neck.

‘It's very moving,' agreed Wyatt. He cast another glance at Mairi. She had changed her dress, too. She still wore working-clothes – no one would have any different here at the shielings – but they were clean and fresh. ‘You seem to have left your ill-humour back there with your butter-churn.'

Anger sprang to Mairi's face momentarily, but as Wyatt caught his breath in anticipation of another explosion she saw the humour in his eyes and smiled ruefully.

‘I'm sorry. I don't even know
why
I was so rude to you.'

‘You've been working very hard, and it's a hot day. We're all entitled to be bad-tempered sometimes without a need to explain it.'

‘Perhaps. All the same, it wasn't
all
my fault that I didn't get along with Miss High-and-mighty at your school.'

‘I never thought for one moment it was. That's why I've brought some books up here for you. Most are school books, but there's a bible, too. It was my mother's. I'd like you to have it.'

Feeling suddenly embarrassed, Wyatt said: ‘I think more people must have learned to read and write using a bible than from any other book that will ever be written. I'll find time before I go to help you get started on a few lessons.'

Mairi could only murmur her thanks, because at that moment one
of the older women came to tell Wyatt that now would be the best time to hold a prayer meeting, before the women had supper ready.

‘You'll be eating with us,' said Mairi as word was passed for the women and boys to gather for the service. ‘The best cut from an animal is always given to the hunter, and my mouth is watering at the thought of sharing it with you.'

 

Wyatt kept the prayer meeting brief and simple. A show of hands provided him with the information that only a few of his congregation had ever seen the inside of a church and not many of these had attended a service in recent years.

Even so, it was a prayer meeting that Wyatt would never forget. The shielings were located in a beautiful spot. The slopes were lush with rich green grass, and beyond them were rugged mountains shaded in every colour imaginable. Wyatt's prayers and the responses were made to an accompaniment of lowing cattle, bleating calves and the music of a fast-flowing shallow burn. Over it all hung the scent of peat fires and the aroma of cooking venison.

There was an undignified scramble among the herd-boys to be first in line when Wyatt gave a final blessing on the congregation, but their supper was assured. They were well looked after at the shielings, especially as after the meal some of them would be going off to guard the cattle throughout the night. There were many foxes in the area bold enough to attack a sleeping calf. Apart from the loss of a precious animal the noise was likely to cause a stampede, scattering the cattle for miles across the Highlands and causing many injuries among them.

As dusk settled upon the glen Wyatt sat at a peat cooking-fire, sharing a meal with Mairi, Tibbie and Donnie Ross. All about them were many other fires, most with their own family groups. Some were celebrating the occasion with song, others sat in silence; but tonight, at least, no one would go to bed hungry.

‘Does Seonaid Fraser have any special friends with whom to share a cooking-fire?'

Wyatt asked the question in all innocence and was unprepared for the reaction of the others. Donnie jumped as though someone had fired a shot alongside his ear, while Tibbie's snort was heard at the next fire, thirty paces away. Mairi fixed him with a look that was packed with questions.

It was Tibbie who eventually gave him an answer.

‘She'll share a fire with anyone who needs a pair of hands and isn't fussy who they belong to.'

‘That isn't true!' Donnie Ross sprang to Seonaid Fraser's defence immediately. ‘Lots of folk are happy to have Seonaid help around their cooking-fire. She's a good worker. Better than both of you, I don't doubt.'

‘The part of Seonaid Fraser that works hardest is something
you
should know nothing about, young Donnie. It's a good thing this will be your last year at the shielings. I told your father you were too old to come here. He should have listened to me.'