Seasons on Harris (28 page)

But of course they never do. Even cigar puffing, lanolin and lemon juice–drenched, pennyroyal-protected members of our species seem to suffer as much as everything else. Some claim that concentrated elixirs of Deet can do the trick, but my feeling is why kill yourself just to avoid a few nibbles. After all, others have suffered and survived, including this anonymous island visitor in 1850 who later wrote (thus confirming his survival):

Even the most distinguished of travelers here have had to suffer the same torture. For example, according to John O'Sullivan, a fugitive from Culloden along with Bonnie Prince Charlie:

Even Queen Victoria noted in her
Leaves from Our Life in the Highlands
that on an 1872 visit “we stopped to take our tea and coffee but were half devoured by midges.” Apparently, she even borrowed a cigarette from one of her courtiers to keep them at bay notwithstanding the fact that she avidly discouraged smoking. Ironically, the two greatest moaners and groaners about Highland conditions, Boswell and Johnson, never mentioned midges. Neither did many of the celebrated artists and writers who ventured into these wildernesses, including the renowned William Wordsworth, who apparently wrote his mellifluous, rosy-hued lines here in perfect peace.

But when I read of today's scourge in the guest book of our little cottage—
“You swat and flail, clawing at your scalp, cursing. But a cloud of them hangs about your head, your nostrils, your hairline, your brows—it is hell on earth!”
—I decided that Roddy's advice is perhaps the best. Light up the most noxious cigar you can find (or a pipe of strong Navy Cut tobacco—I'm told that's pretty effective too) and valiantly sally forth into the summer skirmishes. Or, better still, close all doors and windows, open up a bottle of fine malt, and watch these clouds of egg-anxious females have their wayward way outside. With someone else—preferably one of those stoic, dismissive
Hearaich
characters who claims that we “outsiders” just don't have what it takes to resist these summer onslaughts. And may he be wearing a very loose kilt when they swoop in for the kill.

W
ELL, AS WITH MOST ENJOYABLE
things in life, the sheep's year begins with a real good tuppin'!” said Ian MacSween, one of the island's leading sheep farmers, with a broad grin.

“Tupping?” I asked.

“You know—mating.”

“Ah—right.”

“That's usually next month—in November. After the October dipping in the fank…”

“The fank being all those pens outside your croft?”

“Tha's right.”

“And that's what I'm coming to see next week—the dipping?”

“Well, you'll be doing more than seeing. You'll be part of the gathering…won't you?”

“Bringing the sheep down from the hills?”

“Tha's right. Tha's where all the fun is. Bring your wife too, if you like.”

“Well—I'll certainly ask her.”

“Aye—you do that!” He laughed and his massive frame, sprawled Nero-like across the large armchair by the fire, rocked violently. He knew as well as I did that such gatherings held no great appeal to the
females of most families. From what Ian had told me so far, it was a tough biannual exercise trying to entice hundreds of sheep—in Ian's case around six hundred—down from the high boggy hills of North Harris to the rich grassy
inbye
land beside the cottage and the dipping fank.

I liked this gentle giant as soon as I met him. The first greeting, however, came from a great brown slavering dog of obscure origin that rushed me as soon as I opened my car door.

“Down, Lassie, down!” boomed a voice in the doorway of a modest-sized croft cottage set on a steep slope overlooking the broad, twilight-glimmering expanse of Loch Seaforth, just over the mountains of North Harris at Scaladale. Lassie paid no attention whatsoever and seemed determined to plant a sticky wet kiss, first on my face and then, as I resisted, on my crotch.

“Lassie! Down!” the voice called again to no effect.

Ian MacSween—Sheep Farmer

So this large figure, silhouetted against the house lights, rolled toward
me, arms outstretched, seized the recalcitrant dog by the scruff of its neck, and shouted into its face: “Inside! Now!”

Finally the dog obeyed and my hand was grasped by a man whose billowing white hair, huge walrus mustache, and twinkling eyes, full of humor, immediately conjured up images of Albert Einstein. A somewhat larger and more rotund version of the original, it's true, but a definite clonish resemblance. And I told him so.

“Now that's most ironic y'think that.” Ian laughed as he led me inside to a cozy sitting room with a glowing peat fire (and Lassie, still awaiting her kiss), “because as well as being a sheep crofter, I run the maths department at the Nicolson in Stornoway.”

“How d'you find time to do both?” I asked, surprised because Roddy MacAskill had told me Ian was one of the last few major sheep farmers on the island. “An' that takes an awful lot of time and hard work!”

“Well, things have really changed, y'know, for this generation. There are so few people involved now compared to what it used to be in my late father, Hughie's, time, and my grandfather's. Can't really see it going on too much longer. We're all getting older. The young ones won't stay and the landlords don't like us grazing sheep on their deer-hunting estates. So—there's only a handful of bigger crofts left now. There used to be gatherings galore when we brought the flocks to the fanks all down the valley here. Our sheep aren't ‘hefted,' y'see—that's when they instinctively stay on the part of the hills they were born in. Ours roam all over the place on the ‘common grazing,' so it's quite a job finding 'em all and gettin' 'em down here. But we all used to work together—helping each other. Only now there are so few of us. You really need at least ten people and the same number of dogs for a good gathering. These sheep can be spread out over miles up there—and it's hard going. Even the small crofts are dwindling—just a few trying to stay on, but they won't last for long.”

“I keep hearing that same story about so many things that used to make the islands special…unique.”

Ian nodded. “Aye. And I've only got two dogs now. I love 'em both, but they're not as good as the ones I used to have. With those, I could go up there gathering a few strays all by m'self—didn't need anyone else to
help out—but now, with these two, I'd likely come back empty-handed. Good trained dogs nowadays cost upwards of a thousand pounds—far too much for most of us around here…”

“So why continue?”

“Because that's what we've always done. And I love working with sheep. Have done ever since I was a child. It's a family thing. You get to know them almost as individuals—the strong ones, the weak ones, the stubborn ones. You can tell, almost as soon as a lamb pops out, what kind of sheep it'll be. It's an instinct that builds up over the generations. My great-grandfather came here to Scaladale in 1885. He came from Scalpay, that wee island just off Tarbert. Used to be a real big fishing island. Almost every family around here came from Scalpay. They were given crofts—it wasn't what you'd call a real ‘clearance'—more ‘an incentive-motivated inevitability'! They built black houses down by the shore—y'can still see the ruins. My dad—Hughie—was one of thirteen children. This house we're in now they built in 1912 and another one close by. But there were just too many people—up to fifteen in a house sometimes. My mother was English—from Birmingham. She married my father after the war in 1946 and moved here. She often said if she'd known where and how she was going to live, she'd never have come. I mean, there was no electricity, no inside water—not much of anything really. True culture shock it was for her. But she stuck it out…adapted quite well in the end, bless her.”

“How did you manage to build up such a large sheep farm?”

“Well—it used to be even bigger. We ran sheep over all the hills around here and we even once held the grazing rights to the Shiants.”

“Adam Nicolson's islands?” Anne and I had become ardent admirers of Adam's recent book,
Sea Room
—an exquisitely crafted, multilayered portrait of the tiny Shiant Isles, way out in The Minch, east of Harris.

“Aye—well, they belonged to his father, Nigel, then. Y'know, the son of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. Part of the infamous Bloomsbury group—Virginia Woolf and all that. He wrote that great book on Lord Leverhulme,
Lord of the Isles
. Anyway, he passed them on to Adam when he was twenty-one. I coulda kept the grazing…my father said I should…but I didn't…”

“Why?”

Ian's huge face crumpled a little. He looked embarrassed and replied hesitantly, as if reluctant to explain. “Well…it was like this…I'm not, ah, much of a man f'boats…for the water…I only went to the Shiants once as a youngster. I never wanted to go again. My father looked after that grazing. When he retired, I let it go.”

It seemed oddly touching—this large, powerful man, devoted to his dogs and sheep, willing to climb and search the most arduous of terrain, bog-laden and littered with pernicious, leg-breaking hollows—looking for strays or lost lambs. And yet, bound to the land by a deep-seated fear of the water.

“Must be all those tales of the Blue Men in The Minch!” I said, hoping to lighten our conversation.

Ian laughed. “Aye—must be something like that…”

“Are you superstitious?”

“I didn't think I was, but I must admit my great-grandmother seemed to have…the powers…”

“Y'mean like ‘second sight'?” I was becoming increasingly fascinated by this subject.

“Aye. I guess you can call it that, although I'm not really a great believer in it m'self. Still, it makes you wonder. I remember there was this one time when my great-grandfather had found a long, curved strip of metal—the kind they line the keel of a boat with. So he decided to keep it. Up on the rafters of the cow byre in case it came in handy. Then one day my great-grandmother came rushing in from the milking in the byre, shouting that the keel strip was jumping about like something alive on the rafters and that she wanted it out—right now! So he took it out and threw it into our drainage ditch. On the edge of the
inbye
land. And then one day a friend came along and asked if he could have it for his own boat and my great-grandfather said he could. And so he took it and fixed it on his boat and…”

“Yes…,” I said, already suspecting the outcome.

“Well, not long after, he and some others were out in the boat. It was quite calm out there on the loch. No storms or anything. But someone on the shore saw the boat jumping about like it was being tossed by
storms and waves. Only there weren't any waves. And then the boat suddenly capsized and they were all drowned…”

Silence. The usual reaction to such second-sight tales.

“Well—I guess that's a good enough reason to get boat phobia!”

“Maybe, maybe,” chuckled Ian. “These stories can sneak inside your head…like this other time my great-grandmother rushed back from milking, saying she'd seen two strange men all dressed in black, walking down the track past our house. She couldn't recognize who they were, so we all ran out but there was nobody around. Then a week later, the man who lived in the only other house down the track got into a bar scuffle in Stornoway, hit his head on a concrete floor, and died. And late that night, two men all dressed in black walked down the same street to tell his wife of his death…and my great-grandmother had seen it all…a week before it happened.”

It was time to change the subject. Second-sight tales here, while intriguing, always make me a little uncomfortable. And the ones gifted with the ability seem the most uncomfortable of all and certainly the most reluctant to discuss the subject. “It's not a thing to be proud of,” one elderly woman in the Bays once told me. “It's like a curse…”

“So tell me more about the life of a sheep farmer. What happens when and why and where?”

“It's all pretty simple…at least, after a lifetime doing it, it seems that way.”

And that's when we started with the “real good tupping” in November and moved on into the winter.

“That's the worst time, really,” said Ian. “Our climate seems to be getting wetter and colder every winter. The young hoggs [the current year's lambs], the ewe hoggs, and the wedders [castrated hoggs] I usually send by cattle float across to the Black Isle for wintering. It's warmer there and the grass is good in the fields. The older sheep—the ewes and tupps [noncastrated rams] and gimmers [older females], I let out again in the hills and I feed them regularly. Mostly flaked barley. I leave it near the roadside. Drivers get annoyed by all the sheep on the roads but they go there anyway to lick up the gritting salt when it's snowing. Some farm
ers say feeding them is bad because it makes the sheep dependent and they lose their foraging ability. But, well—I'm a bit of a softie…and I love my sheep…”

“Do you eat lamb?”

“I never butcher a young lamb for myself personally. It's not a sentimental thing. Truly. It's from the meat point of view. My choice is a two-year-old wedder—much, much tastier. It's not really lamb—it's mutton. But many call it lamb because there's no real market for mutton. It conjures up images of wartime rations and tough boiled gamey meat.”

The house was suddenly hit by an abrupt thwack—almost like a landslide. I jumped. Lassie, who had been quiescent for the last half hour or so, leapt up barking. “Jeez! What the heck was that?!”

“Ah, nothin' much, David…just the wind. We're a wee bit exposed here.”

“But you're in the bottom of a beautiful glaciated bowl with hills all around…I thought it would be sheltered here.”

Ian had an attack of the giggles. Once again his large sprawled body rocked in his armchair. “Sheltered? Never! You should be here when the real gales come…in both directions, depending on the mood of the weather. Sometimes screaming like a horde of witches up the loch. Other times roaring down from Clisham and the high glens. Sheltered! The only thing we're sheltered from is the sun. Most of winter when the sun hardly gets over the horizon we're in shadow here—and a very cold shadow it can be too.”

“So much for global warming, then.”

“Warming for some maybe. Here it feels like the beginning of a new Ice Age at times!”

“Anyway,” I said, trying to ignore the ominous groaning of the rafters as the winds continued to batter the little house, “we've had the tupping and the long winter, so then comes…?”

“Oh, then comes the best time of all—the lambing—in April and May. Smaller farmers bring the sheep down to the croft, but there's not enough grass yet here, so we let them lamb up on the moor. We lose some that way, but in a good year it's really an amazing sight. Each ewe—
and we have around five hundred or so up there—can average around two lambs, so the hills are full of 'em!”