Campbell Donald and His Seven Cows

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80425-262-8
Verlag: Luath Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

Perhaps Donald Michael MacDonald invented the round mile, all 2,240 yards of it. Donald and his seven cows, walking the same steps each day through the past and the future, the fairy knoll and the poison pool, the eternal truths and the unknowable possibilities. Rarely does Donald venture beyond the round mile, for he has no need to: all of history can be found on his land. Yet the wind farms, the spaceport, and the American billionaire with his Big House all threaten the peace Donald has cultivated and guarded as fiercely as he protects his animals. He loses a part of himself - and most of his herd - before an unexpected old friend helps Donald and his seven cows to reclaim their path, even as their island is transformed by a new age.

ANGUS PETER CAMPBELL is an award-winning novelist, poet, journalist, broadcaster and actor. He was born and brought up on the islands of South Uist and Seil. He attended Oban High School where his English teacher was Iain Crichton Smith, then graduated with Honours in History and Politics from the University of Edinburgh. His novel, Memory and Straw, won the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year 2017, Electricity was shortlisted as the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year 2023, and his second crime novel, Constabal Murdo 2, won the Gaelic Literature Awards Fiction Book of the Year 2022.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Campbell, Angus Peter

Leseproben

2

MAISIE AND THE herd and I stop at the big rock after 224 yards. That’s the first stop. There’s good grazing there on all sides, but especially on the west and south sides. I rest against the rock, looking out towards the sea. The rock has a hollow where I can rest my back while fully stretching out my legs, and above the hollow is a narrow cleft where you can see things. Even rocks have insides. I think something is hidden inside everything.

You have to stand to look into it, and at first you don’t see anything because it’s all dark, but your eyes become accustomed to the darkness, or maybe the darkness becomes accustomed to you, I’m not sure which. After a while you can see in deeper and deeper, and the light gets brighter and brighter, and the shadows move and dance. It always surprises me that though the rock outside is grey, it’s filled with all the colours of heaven inside: blue and green and mauve and red and orange and yellow and white and purple and lemon and others that I have no name for. Every time I look I see a different vision. I think they’re pictures from stories I heard and read when I was a child, when stories were all that existed.

The other day it was a thousand ships with their red and white sails unfurled, all riding the waves as they sailed west, with dolphins and porpoises and sharks dancing and rising and plunging all around them, and yesterday it was a world of ice where Maisie and Rover and the herd and I were skating across the mountains, doing turns and twirls and leaps, and today it was a big thatched castle with turrets and flags of every colour flying and then the Chief came out wearing a flowing red robe, standing on his speckled horse with everyone waving and cheering, and then the warriors all climbed onto their smaller horses and leapt the high walls and, led by the Chief, galloped across this huge green field and on to the shore where the sand runs for miles and miles. The Chief was put on a galley with twelve oarsmen while the warriors and their wives and children ran and played and jousted on the sand all day long. The oarsmen sang a song I couldn’t make out, rowing westwards. I could tell of thousands of things I’ve seen in that cleft, and they’d all be true.

My grandfather had horses, though they were nothing like these. Just four small Eriskay ponies used to pull his cart, and a big Clydesdale horse which did all the ploughing for him. Proper horses. Unshod.

‘They’re not children to dress up in shining shoes for school or church,’ he said.

I spent a lot of time with Grandfather at the smithy. He went there to get the plough shares and coulters sharpened, or to get a new spade-head or new wheels for his cart. What a beautiful cart it was. He made it himself and allowed me to paint it, blue and red and yellow and orange stripes like I’d seen in the picture books. Old MacInnes the blacksmith was a deaf mute, but made up for it with his hands, melting iron like butter and turning out spades and knives and hammers and sickles that spoke and sang as they emerged out of the fire. I’m always surprised when a fire lights. First the smoke, then the white and red flames, as if God is saying, ‘See, Donald. Everything’s possible.’ possible.’ Moments before, there was nothing, and then suddenly – or sometimes after a struggle – there’s smoke and flames and warmth. As long as something’s possible it’s bound to happen sometime.

Grandfather died when I was five. I don’t remember the four small ponies, I do remember the Clydesdale. I suppose because he was so big. But when I really think about it, it’s not the height or the bigness I remember but the smell. You don’t smell it now because nobody has a horse like that anymore. It was a sort of strong sleepy smell, which I sometimes get a hint of when I rest at the tenth stop of the round mile and have a nap after lunch in the early afternoon. There’s some wild garlic there, and it may be that, but it’s also more – someone breathing a woman’s perfume ever so faintly. The perfume my mother had when I was a baby.

The important thing about this rock is not really the cleft but the fissure on the west side where Mac Talla nan Creag lives. In English that means The Son of the Echo of the Hall of the Fissure of the Rocks. He has a long genealogy, like everyone else here had once upon a time. Though I call him Dòmhnall. Donald. The same name as myself. Unlike everyone in the cleft, you never see him, because he’s just a voice, and if you call out to him, he always answers, because he must get quite lonely living all by himself far inside that rock. So I always speak to him. When I speak wee (in a whisper), he replies wee, and when I speak loud, he speaks back loud. But you must speak slowly, for if you speak fast the words get lost in the rock and become mere sounds, which not even Mac Talla nan Creag can untangle.

‘Hallo!’ I shout, and there’s always a delay before he replies, and it’s always the sound of my own voice that comes back to me, as if he’s become so used to my voice that he’s become me. Maybe all we ever hear is our own voice anyway. I speak to him in Gaelic.

‘Ciamar a tha thu an-diugh?’ (‘How are you today?’) I shout, and instead of answering ‘Fine’ or something plain like that, he just asks me back the same question, ‘Ciamar a tha thu an-diugh?’ His voice echoes and rebounds as if he’s not one but two or three people.

‘Gle mhath’ (‘Very well’), I call back, and he says he’s the same, and then I always ask him, ‘Dè tha dol an-diugh ma-thà?’ (‘What’s doing today then?’), and he’s so civil and kind and respectful and asks me the same question back. I say ‘Och, direach a’ buachailleachd mar as àbhaist’ (‘Och, just herding as usual’), and he says he’s doing the same thing and I ask him how he’s getting on and he asks me and I say fine and he says fine too and we talk about the weather for a while, though some days, when the weather is fine and sunny and you can hear forever, we talk about greater things such as the plummeting price of cattle and the terrible ways the supermarkets are taking all the profits, leaving us poor herdsmen on the edge of poverty. We then say goodbye, ‘Bruidhnidh mi leat a-màireach ma-thà’ (‘I’ll speak to you tomorrow then’), and he promises the same and of course we do, day after blessed day, because he never lets me down, never has, unlike some of the folk around here who never speak to me or answer me or answer with rubbishy promises that they never fulfil. Everyone I know is so broken that they can’t speak any more.

They say Mac Talla nan Creag was the eldest son of the High King in the olden days, but he was spoilt and demanded everything for himself. He was selfish and huffy and refused to speak to anyone, because he thought they were not worthy of speaking to him. So the people rose up against him and took hold of him and put him inside the rock until he learned to listen properly and know how important people’s names and stories are. So he listens and calls back the exact story you tell him, and once he’s listened to everything everyone has to say he can come out and tell his own story. After I speak to him, I always put my ear to the rock to find out if he’s saying anything for himself, but it’s always silent. What a story he’ll have though, when he’s set free.

The thing is you can’t trust folk. Forever saying one thing and doing another. And forever looking away. Talking only of things they’ve heard on the radio or seen on television or read in the paper. Things I know already. Never about themselves, or what they think or feel. They think I’m strange. I know that. Sense it in the way they move. The Last of the Mohicans, wandering about here in this eternal circle every day while they go about their business in fancy cars, speeding along the road as if time is running out. Time! Every day is like the blink of an eye and like an eternity. Maisie after Maisie after Maisie across the years, and every morning there she is with her calm eyes waiting for me to open the byre door so she can go off to eat more grass. And she eats each blade of grass as if it were the first ever blade of grass, believing that the grass will never end. that the grass will never end. For when one mouthful finishes, another begins. It’s always the end of something, and the beginning of something else.

‘What do you think, Maisie?’ She turns towards me. She’s such an honest creature, unwilling to lie. She trusts me, like a child trusting a good father. I wonder if she suspects how fragile I am. I think she does. Otherwise she wouldn’t be so kind and gentle with me, looking at me with those big brown sad eyes.

I believe with her, and so the day becomes one long slow day for me too. As there is grass, there will be pebbles and stones and the stream and the loch and Lòn a’ Phùinnsein and the Fairy Hollow and Mary Ann and Catrìona and Eòghainn and Mr Haas, permanently absent from his big beautiful empty house. Maisie and the herd and I walk so slowly that sometimes we pass ourselves from twenty or thirty or three hundred years ago, walking and grazing these same fields with our ancestors. For moments, I can be someone else. Mac Talla nan...