The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (20 page)

He stood up from the kitchen table. ‘Come into the workshop,’ he said, creaking open a door at the back of the kitchen. I followed him, and found that I’d entered the lair of a murderer or resurrectionist. Dozens of corpses – birds, mostly – lay about in various states of decomposition, dismemberment and restraint.

On a chest freezer sat a human skull, the cheekbones of which had been partially built up with plaster and resin, but the nose of which was unreconstructed: just a blade of cartilage cutting out from the face. On a shelf was a wooden owl, with a glistening rope or cord of metal protruding from its open mouth. From a rafter, dangling from its meat hook, was the Hanging Figure.

Two of the walls were lined with workbenches. Barrels stood about as tables and desks. Every surface was cluttered with objects. Conical flasks, bell jars, retorts, syringes – the glassware of an apothecary or mad inventor. Cork-stoppered phials, film canisters. I found a jar containing an inch or so of a red unguent, which appeared to glow from within. I picked it up and rotated it so that I could read the sticker:
SEAL OIL
. The oil slunk around the jar’s base, leaving a ruby tideline on the glass.

There were pots filled with feathers, mostly tail and wing, and separated roughly by species. On the benches were the tools of the job: clamps, pliers, calipers, gauntlets. A springy curl of minke baleen, a foot long, black and polished. The cochlea of a grey whale.

At waist level on a bench in the workshop was a basket filled with horns, teeth, bones and beaks from unidentifiable creatures. Unicorns? Hippogriffs? Dragons? I lifted the basket, and underneath it was a shallow crate containing perhaps fifty hollow sand dollars, little pods of white with their cryptic dot-markings. Nestled among them was an armadillo’s shell, orangey in colour and delicately articulated, covered in pale wire-like hairs. I picked it out and held it. It sat like a bubble on my palm.

‘Drop the armadillo back where you found it, close your eyes and put out your hands,’ Steve said. I extended my hands towards him, palms upwards, arms touching at the wrists, as though I were submitting to being manacled or bound.

‘Ready?’

I nodded. I felt a cool stone object being placed across my palms. My hands sank down under its weight.

‘This is made of the stuff that the world is made of.’

It was a feather, a foot-and-a-half-long stone feather, made of a polished black rock with green flecks. Through the stone ran a curdy white spine that resembled ivory.

‘The spine is whalebone, from a rib that I cut from a carcass I found washed up on the shore just there.’ Steve pointed out of the window, over the fuchsia hedge, down towards the bay.

‘The
vanes
and the rest of it are made of dolerite,’ he said. ‘I quarried it over to the west of the island, in what I’m told by an archaeologist was a Viking-era quarry, though what the hell the Vikings used to cut this stuff I can’t imagine. I used a diamond-toothed cutter that I ran off a generator, and the dolerite all but knackered it.’

The feather was cool on my hands, and impossibly heavy. Its density seemed supernatural. It longed to fall, dragging my arms down. This was its brilliant contradiction as an object – it was a feather that yearned for the earth, a flight-object supercharged with gravity.

Steve took the feather back. I felt as if I’d been unchained.

I moved over to an oil barrel, on which was a see-through freezer bag, knotted shut. There was condensation on the inside of the plastic, but through the droplets I could make out black sharp objects. I picked it up, and the smell of rot roared in my nose. Stretching the plastic tight with my thumbs, I caught sight of stubby beaks and skulls with feathers and flesh still adhering, mulching in a humus of blood and loose meat.

‘Guillemots,’ said Steve, grinning. ‘Still some way to go there. Back in a minute – I want to get something to show you.’

In a red plastic crate lay ten sparrowhawk corpses. An eleventh corpse had been mummified in masking tape. I picked one of the birds up. It was like picking up a seed husk or Airfix model, so light that it seemed to lift my hand. Nothing here weighed what it should. Everything had been hollowed by age or drill, or filled in with lead or stone. The hawk had a barred chest, honey-gold on grey, webbed laterally with wavery lines that resembled cardiogram patterns. The bird’s old eyes were closed, and its head was turned to one side as if in embarrassment or to ward off a blow.

The spell of the room was beginning to work on me. I felt jittery. Fairy-tale stories rose up in my mind.

‘This is one of the things I’m proudest of owning,’ said Steve suddenly, startling me. I hadn’t heard him come back in. He was carrying a red-and-blue cardboard box, a Woolworths Pick ’n’ Mix container wrapped in cellophane.

‘Last one!’ he said, proudly.

‘What’s inside?’ I asked, expecting him to say ‘the tongue of a salamander’ or ‘a dodo’s foot’.

Steve looked puzzled. ‘Sweets,’ he said. ‘This was the last box of Pick ’n’ Mix on the shelves on the last day of the Woolies’ closing-down sale in Tarbert. That’s a period piece now, that is.’

He put the box carefully on a shelf, in between an ivory tusk and a screw-top jar labelled ‘4000-Year-Old Storm Water’.

That evening, Joan, Steve and I sat round the table again while the late light faded out over the bay to a line of gleam. On the north wall of the kitchen was a glass box containing a white moth as big as a blackbird:
Atticus atlas
, from India. Its wings were linen-coloured and tightly stretched. In the corner a brindled kitten bullied an old white cat.

After supper, Steve pushed his chair back from the table, poured more drinks and began to talk. Most of his stories involved the killing and eating of wild creatures. Poverty, curiosity and a keenly carnivorous palate had led him to try most meats. He’d been a forager long before foraging was trendily rebranded as wild eating. When he was a student in art college he’d taken an air-rifle into the life-drawing class, sat by an open window that overlooked a stand of trees, and shot any squirrels that appeared. When he lived in the country, he used to carry a short-barrelled shotgun in his jacket in case he encountered moving foodstuffs.

‘Have you eaten heron?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes. Best time to eat them is on the full moon, because they’re fattest then. The flesh is very, very fishy. Fishier than guillemot. One of the fishiest birds I’ve eaten, in fact, except gannet.’

Had he eaten blackbirds? Of course, and in a pie. Curlew? Yes. More meat on them than you would imagine. Doves? Yes. Less meat on them than you would imagine. Eagle? No, not eagle, not yet. Swan? Steve’s face lit up. Memories were whirring across his inner eye like an old home movie, and he told me a story that I can’t repeat here – swan-murder still carrying a substantial penalty – involving a pigskin mannequin, an electric chair, two swans, a fireplace and an estate agent.

That night, waiting for sleep, my mind flocking with images of corpses and taxidermy, I remembered Rebecca West’s description in
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, an avid hunter who was said to have killed half a million creatures in his life. On the day of his death the Duke was in a reception hall in his palace in Sarajevo – even as Princip and the other assassins were taking up their positions along the line of the cavalcade – and the walls of that reception hall, wrote West, were:

stuffed all the way
up to the crimson and gold vaults and stalactites with the furred and feathered ghosts, set close, because there were so many of them: stags with the air between their antlers stuffed with woodcock, quail, pheasant, partridge, capercailzie, and the like; boars standing bristling flank to flank, the breadth under their broad bellies packed with layer upon layer of hares and rabbits.

Their animal eyes, clear and dark as water, would brightly watch the approach of their slayer to an end that exactly resembled their own.

I thought of how, once the
guga
-hunting party had departed from Sula Sgeir each year, the amputated wings of the dead gannets – 4,000 wings from 2,000 birds – were left lying on the summit, so that when the next big autumn storm came and the next big wind blew from the south or the west, thousands of these severed wings would lift from the surfaces of the island, such that it seemed, when seen from the sea, that the rock itself were trying to lift off in flight – an entire island rising into the air, like Swift’s Laputa.

On the Sunday, Steve took me on a pilgrimage to his most sacred landscape.

I was sitting in a Victorian dentist’s chair in Steve’s front room, reading. The chair was set on a pole on a massive base. It was upholstered in pink corduroy, with a narrow chintzy trim. There was a cast-iron grille for the patient’s feet to rest on, with the word
AUSTRAL
woven into it in iron, surrounded by a floral leaf design. The dark-stained pine of the chair arms was worn blonde by decades of anxious fingers. Levers and foot pedals offered a variety of operating positions. It was very sinister and very comfortable.

I heard Steve approach behind me. ‘I’ve got the instruments to go with the chair, you know,’ he said, reassuringly.

Then: ‘Shall we go for a Sabbath walk? Come on, let’s annoy Calvin. You can take a fishing rod, try one of the lochs in the interior. And I’ll show you the path I’ve made, and the place where the Hanging Figure’s eventually going to end up.’

We left by the workshop door, and followed a stream that led uphill and inland, by the side of which ran a faint track that Steve had created and maintained himself. It was afternoon. The sky was black trimmed with grey: rain on the way. A lapwing turned and tumbled overhead, making for the coast, letting out wireless bleeps and twiddles.

‘Lapwings have got those lovely spoon-shaped wings,’ I said. ‘They’re one of my favourite birds.’

‘Not much flesh on them,’ said Steve.

After half a mile, we cut up from the bottom of the stream to a high rock ridge. Steve’s path continued, loosely written into the heather. From the ridge a view of the Harris interior opened up: thousands of hectares of lochans, streams, glacier-scraped crags, moor and bog. The standing water was collecting and returning the light, so that it resembled ice. It was a terrain that readily abstracted to pure form. The road and the houses of Geocrab were already closed out, only minutes after leaving them. The wind was now hectic, roaring. It was hard to hear or speak. Looking back I could see a big swell breaking on the easterly points of land, sending up smoke-plumes of spray, so that it looked as if the coastline were on fire.

We reached a smooth platform of gneiss, blazed with a lightning strike of quartz. Steve leant close to my ear and shouted over the wind. ‘Look! Follow my finger.’ He pointed out and across, his finger panning over the landscape. ‘There. There. There. There, and … there.’

My eyes were rheumy from the gale, but I could see that he was marking off a series of massive boulders, distinctive even in that wilderness of rock. Each was balanced on a high point of land, each was whiter in tone than the surrounding surface rock, and together they seemed to be arranged in a rough circle, perhaps 300 or 400 yards in diameter. At the noon-point of the circle was the whitest boulder, and at the circle’s heart was the biggest boulder.

It was a ring of megaliths. But these boulders hadn’t been brought here and raised by human effort. They were erratics, carried to these positions by the glaciers that had carved Harris during the Pleistocene. As the glaciers melted, the boulders would have been lowered gently into their present positions: a line of dropped stones, marking the route. We walked the circle, following the thin track that threaded from boulder to boulder.

Steve had worked each of the stones in some way. Several years previously he had set fire to one of them, caking its surface with jelly-turps and then lighting it at dusk: boulder as fire-cairn, beacon. In homage to Joseph Beuys, he had coated the noon-point rock in fat: ‘One hundred kilograms of best German lard!’ The lard had drawn seagulls to the boulder, and they had flocked about it for days, picking and pecking at the lard. ‘It looked as if they were trying to lift the rock into the air!’

At last we reached the great central rock, about which this chance structure of megaliths had organized itself. It was eight feet or so tall at its highest point, roughly rhomboid in outline, and poised on one of its vertices. Steve bent down and picked up a shard of quartz from its base. ‘Sami shamans call quartz “frozen light”,’ he said. ‘Here, take this.’ I took it, glad of the talisman. Its crystal planes were large, and it was shaped like a shark’s tooth or a mountain’s peak.

I hauled myself up the side of the boulder and onto its sloping summit. It was a raptor perch, well used. Buzzard or eagle or both. There were big black and white turds, and dozens of excreted bird and animal bones. It had a miniature forest of lichens, foliose and squamulose. I scrambled down and we took shelter in the lee of the boulder, under its steepest overhang.

‘Nine tons, I estimate!’ he shouted, touching the boulder’s flank. ‘I’m going to slice its top off,’ he said. ‘Then I’m going to remove a cylinder from its centre, like coring an apple. Then I’m going to put the Hanging Figure inside that space. And then I’m going to put the top back on. None of this will be easy. But the incision line will be so fine it will be nearly invisible, and it will soon heal over with lichen and weathering, and then almost no one will ever know where the Figure is, except for me, you and a few others.’

He paused. ‘This will be its last kist. And this, for me, will be coming full circle. It will be the most important thing that I’ve ever done.’

I felt the stone’s tilted weight above us, charging the air. We were sitting in space that should have been filled, and briefly I imagined the wind unbalancing the boulder and the stone crushing us, sealing us in. Steve’s affection for the boulder and its world was cold and hard and tender, a longing simultaneously for distance and for enclosure: a paradox understandable to anyone who has ever been in a certain kind of love.