The Gathering Night (49 page)

This story is nearly finished now. My grandmother – Nekané – says the story began with my birth, and that I should be the one to bring it to an end. You've all listened very patiently. This is the last night of Gathering Camp. Tomorrow my family are going back to River Mouth Camp. River Mouth Camp is my Birth Place. Four of my grandfather's bones lie under the hearthstones there. I don't remember my grandfather, but everyone in my family tells me I loved him. And he loved me.

The Go-Betweens asked us to tell this story because last winter Edur met some Heron People hunting on the slopes of Grandmother Mountain in the Moon of Rushes. One of the Heron hunters had just been initiated – a Year ago now. His name was Basajaun. His father was Ekaitz, Kemen's cousin of the Lynx People, who took a woman of the Heron People. This young hunter, whom Edur met, has the same name as my cousin who's sitting over there, giggling and poking his brother and making trouble, as usual. Probably this other Basajaun of the Heron People is a bit more sensible. Anyway, now the other Basajaun has Heron written on his back.

That's what Edur told us all when we got to Gathering Camp, and that's why the Go-Betweens asked us to tell you this story.

We've finished it now. In the story I have the last word. Maybe that's not fair, because I'm not the most important person in it. But the story began with me, and my grandmother says it has to end with me. Something Haizea said when it was her turn makes me think the story isn't over yet. Haizea says there can't be an exact end to any story. Every story really started at the Beginning – wherever you begin telling it from – and it can't be properly finished until we come to the End.

My grandmother says there are many more lives to be lived before the End.

A
UTHOR'S
A
FTERWORD

The Mesolithic era in Scotland tends to be passed over in deafening silence. Six thousand years of human occupation – from the last Ice Age until the agricultural revolution of around
4000
BC – are usually represented in histories and prehistories by a maximum of a page or two on Scotland's hunter-gatherers, with comments on how little we know about them. I was drawn to the early inhabitants of my country partly because, unlike ourselves, they left so little trace of their long presence. They lived long before agricultural peoples built stone circles like Callanish or villages like Skara Brae. My initial ignorance was great, but I soon discovered popular misconceptions were even greater. I've often been asked ‘Could these people speak?' ‘Did they have fire?' or ‘Did they have any art?' I wanted to show that in evolutionary terms seven or eight thousand years is almost nothing. In other parts of the world people were already farming. These people were genetically the same as us; only the world they inhabited was different. Sometimes it seems so far away and long ago it's like looking down the wrong end of a telescope.

My search for these early peoples led me along various paths. I began looking at familiar Hebridean and West Coast land-scapes in a different way. I considered what I'd seen and read of Inuit, Native American and Sami traditions. I read about peoples in places I've never been to, like Mongolia, Australia and South Africa. These parallels helped me to see my own country through the eyes of people who were hefted to their land in a way that I can never experience myself. Mesolithic people wouldn't have needed a separate word for ‘nature': everyone – people, animals, birds, fish, mountains, rivers, seas – would have co-existed in the same holistic world.

Nor were Mesolithic lives necessarily as ‘nasty, brutish and short' as Hobbesian theory would have us believe. The stereotype of grunting cavemen wielding clubs lingers on, although recent hunter-gatherers have lived rich lives in marginal areas where no one could possibly practise agriculture. Resources must have seemed infinite before agriculture took over all the prime land. Mesolithic Scotland seems to have provided a living as plentiful as that enjoyed by, for example, the Native Americans of the north-west coast before their way of life was disrupted for ever. Mesolithic people in Scotland shared their land with red and roe deer, pig, wild cattle, wolf, bear, beaver, otter, fox and perhaps squirrels. Rivers were full of salmon and trout. All kinds of birds inhabited sea, cliffs, marshes and forests. Shores were rich in shellfish. The sea teemed with fish. Ray Mears and Gordon Hillman, in their TV programme on survival, have indicated the tasty variety of plants available for gathering, even through the long winters. I am not suggesting that Mesolithic Scotland was a Rousseau-esque paradise full of noble savages, but all the evidence suggests that human life was about far more than mere subsistence. People could make decisions about their lives, just as we do, based on social and spiritual considerations, and not just the material imperatives of where and how to find the next meal.

There's little material evidence of the hunter-gatherers of Mesolithic Scotland. The shell middens of Oronsay, caves near Oban and on Ulva, locations on Islay, Jura, Mull, Coll, Rum and Risga are the main west-coast sites. Microliths – tiny stone blades and points – are indicative of a Mesolithic presence. Food remains and tools of bone, shell and antler, and a few postholes where tents were once pitched, are really all that is left. The only human remains are odd finger-bones from shell middens. There is nothing in Scotland like the fishing traps, villages or cemeteries of southern Scandinavia. In a Danish Mesolithic grave a newborn child was found resting on a swan's wing. At Starr Carr in Yorkshire archaeologists unearthed stag antlers attached to a mask. Their purpose remains a mystery; I've incorporated them into my fictional narrative. There are no such indications of spiritual or symbolic life in Scotland. That could either be because soil conditions are too acid, or because burial practices were different. My premise, as a storywriter, is that wherever there are people there will be emotions, rituals, metaphors, stories, art . . . in other words, a constant search for meanings.

Hunter-gatherer cultures all over the world share remarkably similar spiritual practices that express deep affinity with the land to which they belong. Shamanistic religions are closely allied to hunting economies. My Go-Betweens' spiritual practice is based on my readings in shamanistic spiritualities from many different parts of the world. To be Go-Between is to enact a role rather than to belong to a class. Go-Betweens have their own sort of power, but it operates through the natural world, within an egalitarian society. Forms of social control in hunter-gatherer societies sometimes strike me as being remarkably civilised and effective. However, if I'd been born eight thousand years ago, I would almost certainly have had fewer years in which to enjoy the cultural benefits on offer.

In all the long years of Mesolithic Scotland we know of only one definite historic event. This was the tsunami that struck the east coast following an underwater landslide off the coast of Norway in
c
.
6150
BC. I took this tsunami as the catalyst for my plot, and used first-hand accounts of the
2004
Boxing Day tsunami as the basis for Kemen's story.

I use Basque names for my characters because, although no one has any idea what languages were spoken in Mesolithic Scotland, Basque is thought to be the only extant language of pre-Indo-European – which is to say, pre-agricultural – origin on the western seaboard of Europe.

Most of my novels have maps. There's no map in this book, partly because sea levels have changed in complicated ways: land around the Scottish ice cap lifted up after the huge weight of ice melted, while sea levels everywhere were also rising. But, more importantly, there shouldn't be a map because my characters imagined their land in other ways.

Mesolithic people, like hunter-gatherers today, attained a level of environmental understanding and practical skills far beyond the reach of our own culture. In trying to imagine Mesolithic lives, I looked for, and sometimes attempted, hunter-gatherer skills that are still practised today. I'm grateful to Peter Faulkner from Shropshire, who helped me to make my own coracle from hazel, willow and hide. Enid Brown of Scotlandwell explained how to harvest wild honey, and Eric Begbie from Clackmannan worked out my wildfowling strategies. Mark Lazzeri of Assynt, Douglas Murray of Aboyne and John Love of Uist contributed to the deer hunts, and Callan Duck of St Andrews to the seal hunting. I am indebted to Maurizio Bastianoni in Umbria for sharing his expertise in boar hunting. Bill Ritchie of Assynt advised on fishing, and Tess Darwin, Mandy Haggith, Linda Henderson, Pete Kinnear and Agnes Walker all contributed their gathering skills and ecological knowledge. Jonathan Sawday skippered the initial voyage up the Sound of Mull and Loch Sunart, and he and Martin Montgomery supplied sailing directions throughout the book. These people not only helped me to write this novel, they also helped to alter permanently my own perceptions of land and sea, and how to live from them and with them.

I quickly discovered that, although Mesolithic Scotland is a closed book to most of us, there is a dedicated core of experts in the field. Both Caroline Wickham Jones of Orkney and Steven Mithen of Reading University welcomed a novelist on to their digs on Orkney and Coll respectively. The bit of hazelnut shell I found on the dig at Long Howe, and its implications for the early history of Orkney, have been one of the most exciting parts of this journey. I'm used to writing fiction, and in contrast that hazel shell was so
real
. Other archaeologists and geographers who have helped me on the way include Sue Dawson on the tsunami, Kevin Edwards on the Mesolithic environment and Karen Hardy on technologies. Clive Gamble of Reading University kindly read part of the manuscript.

A residency at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, Italy, provided crucial uninterrupted writing time early in the project. I finished the novel in the ideal surroundings provided by a fellowship at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center on Lake Como, Italy.

I am grateful to all these people who helped me to envision a Mesolithic world. Caroline Wickham Jones answered questions and read drafts with undiminishing enthusiasm, besides providing bed, board and library for weeks on end. And thanks, as ever, to Mike Brown for support in everything from coracle-making to copy-editing.

M
ARGARET
E
LPHINSTONE
is the author of nine previous novels, including
The
Sea Road
,
Voyageurs
,
Hy Brasil
and
Light
. She lives in Galloway, Scotland. Visit her online
www.margaretelphinstone.co.uk