Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois (9 page)

Drive into Portree, park, and are walking down the main shopping street in the rain when Susan suddenly lets out a whoop and points—and there is Amy Thompson, coming the other way! We all whoop and hug in the middle of the sidewalk, earning odd looks from the passersby. Not only have we all ended up in Portree at the same time, completely by chance, but it turns out that she is also staying at the Viewfield House! We burble the usual cliches about what a small world it is, then separate briefly, Amy and Susan going off on separate shopping expeditions, while I go to the Tourist Information Office to find out about guided tours of the region; I spot a poster for one called “Skyetrek Safari” that looks interesting, and write the number down.

We give Amy a ride back to the Viewfield House, after a side-trip to a woolen mart that turns out to be already closed for the evening. It’s raining much more heavily now, and I wonder if there’s any possibility the weather will clear enough tomorrow for a guided tour to be possible. Give a call to Skyetrek Safaris anyway, and make a tentative reservation for tomorrow’s tour, which will only go if enough people reserve. Have drinks in the sitting room before the fire—even in August it’s chilly enough here on Skye at night that you don’t mind it—and then go in to dinner, sitting at a table with Amy and Angus, a young working-class Scot from Glasgow in boots and blue jeans who has pretty clearly been trying to chat Amy up in the sitting room. (I have a lamb chop, Susan has chicken. Tomato soup and mackerel pate first.) Coffee afterward back in the sitting room, after which Amy goes up to bed, and Angus, obviously disappointed—I get the feeling he would have liked to have gotten to know Amy
much
better—leaves the inn and goes into Portree for a pub-crawl, staying out until after 2 a.m., drowning his sorrows; we see him the next morning, massively hungover, having a solitary breakfast in the dining room, long after everyone else has finished.

When the group in the sitting room has dwindled to just us and another American couple (also from Pennsylvania, as it turns out; from right outside Philadelphia, in fact), the host, who is referred to invariably by all as Mr. MacDonald (you can almost
hear
the forelock-tug that accompanies this phrase), and who looks something like a muscular Ron Howard, tells us a long story about a friend of his grandfather who was mauled by a tiger he was hunting in India (for the Politically Correct reason that it was terrorizing the native villagers, of course), when the mahout panicked during the tiger’s attack and slammed the howdah into an overhanging tree-branch, knocking both it and the Great White Hunter off the elephant to the ground. The mahout ran away and climbed a tree, while the host’s grandfather’s friend, whose leg had been shattered by the elephant stepping on it after he’d fallen to the ground, tried to fend the tiger off with the butt end of his rifle. The tiger had apparently bitten completely through the wooden stock of the rifle, and was shaking it back and forth in his jaws, while the hunter clung desperately to the other end, when the rifle went off, scaring the tiger away and fortunately
not
managing to shoot the hunter in the process. The mahout was too scared to tell anybody about this incident apparently, because he was afraid that he’d be punished because it was his fault, so he ran off and left the hunter behind, where he remained sprawled helplessly in the jungle, badly mauled and with his leg crushed to dust, for more than 24 hours before he was found by a rescue party. He had to have his leg amputated, of course, and Our Host tells us how later, when he himself was a small child, the grandfather’s friend would encourage him to kick his tin leg so that he could hear it clang, which they both found amusing. Apparently the grandfather’s friend also kept the rifle with the bitten-through stock, and would produce it as proof of this experience. (I have no idea whether this story is true or not, of course—it does strike me that perhaps he’s having a bit of fun putting on the Gullible Colonials . . . and yet, the story is no intrinsically more bizarre than other well-documented things that
did
happen to other Victorian Adventurers of the day, so who knows? Maybe it is true.) Our Host adds that by rights the grandfather’s friend should have died of septicemia, which claimed almost everyone who suffered such wounds in those days in that climate, but, in the 24 hours before he was found, maggots had gotten at his wounds, and the natural antibiotics released by the maggots as they fed had ultimately saved his life.

On this cheery note, we go up to bed. I whistle the Beatles’ “Bungalow Bill” as I climb the stairs, but, if Our Host notices, he is not moved to comment.

Tuesday, August 22nd—
Slegachan, Loch Brittle, Loch Harport, Dunvegan, Trotternish Peninsula

Wake up about 7:30, after having spent one of the most uneasy nights of the trip. We both sleep fitfully, awakening often to scratch the itchy bug bites we had gotten the night before—which have now formed into lumpy red welts—and, although the room is somewhat hot, we don’t dare to open the window, for fear of letting more midges in to bite us, and the stuffiness doesn’t make it any easier to sleep.

Yawning, we go downstairs for breakfast. Amy is just finishing up as we come into the breakfast room, and leaves almost immediately for her tour of the woolen markets on the nearby island of Harris. We sit with the American couple from Wallingford, who are going to spend the day hunting up a doctor to take a look at the husband’s sore throat. I hope that we will have a somewhat more enjoyable day than that, but since it’s raining outside, a fine steady rain that shows no sign of stopping, I’m not sanguine that we actually will.

After breakfast, Susan drives into Portree to buy something at the chemists, while I wait by the door of the inn to see if our tour is actually going to show up. By the time Susan returns, a few minutes later, I’m beginning to be gloomily sure that it is not going to show up, that they’ve cancelled it, either because of lack of bookings or because of the weather. A
few
minutes later, though, just as the steady rain begins to sputter and slacken, the Land Rover for the “Skyetrek Safari”
does
show up—a few minutes late, but there. We climb aboard, me in the front seat, next to the driver (there are advantages to being too big to fit in the back!), with Susan squeezed into the back with the two other passengers, two young Dutch girls, and we are off on our tour of Skye.

As we drive south back toward Sligachan, with the rain beginning to lift, I chat with the driver, whose name is Cameron, a tree-surgeon who works part-time for the Forestry Service, and who started this tour business two months ago as another sideline, in order to make ends meet; originally born on Colonsay, another small Scottish island (he tells us how, as a young man, he used to drive his family’s tractor to the local
ceilidhs—
folk dances—in order to try to meet girls, but the girls weren’t impressed by the tractor, so he had no luck; the tractor would come in handy the next day, though, when he and his brother would, for a fee, use it to pull out of the roadside ditches the cars that homeward-bound revelers had drunkenly driven into the ditches the night before), he’s lived on Skye for three years, and has three children (eventually
someone
was impressed by the tractor, I guess), the youngest of whom was born only two weeks ago. The two young Dutch girls are Marguerite, the hardy big-breasted blond one who keeps running ahead of everyone with childlike enthusiasm, whooping and pointing at things, and who still lives in Holland, and Martina, the older, quieter, darker and more intense one, who lives in London, where she works for the railroad in connection with the operation of the Channel Tunnel, and with whom Marguerite is visiting; I come to the conclusion by the end of the afternoon that they are lovers, although they’re fairly discrete about it—something about the way they touch each other’s hands, though—brushingly, as if by accident—and speak in soft voices while leaning close to each other, especially when we are at some romantic place, like a deserted coral beach that stretches away into a haze of sea and sky, seems to give them away . . . although I suppose that this could be only my own romanticism coming to the fore.

By the time we reach Sligachan, the rain has mostly lifted, giving us a good view of the Red Cuillin and the Black Cuillin, two mountain ranges which are both named after the predominant color of their rock—reddish rock to our left (Red Cuillin), shiny black rock to the right (Black Cuillin); we also learn that Cuillin is pronounced something like Kool-in, far from the way we were pronouncing it . . . but then, we’re probably mispronouncing the name of just about everything on Skye, just as we did on a previous trip in that other Celtic homeland, Wales. We turn away from the main road, which leads south toward the ferry slip, and take a network of small back roads across the width of the island to Loch Brittle, where we park and walk up a muddy hillside alongside a rushing runoff stream to see a small waterfall; the water is snarling along quite vigorously, obviously fed by the recent heavy rains, and, although not terribly high, the waterfall is picture-postcard pretty.

By the time we get back down to the Land Rover, the rain-clouds have lifted and the sky is a brilliant fresh-washed blue; it will remain sunny and clear for the rest of the day. Cameron opens a forest gate, and we drive up into a forest plantation, up a hill through ranks of closely planted trees, and down the other side to Loch Harport, which, from the hillside, is full of boats that could easily be Lake Monsters; I point out how a few Monster sightings could probably triple his tourist trade, and, after thinking this over and squinting at the boats a little, Cameron decides that they do look a bit like Lake Monsters after all, now that he thinks of it. After all, what worked for Loch Ness—remember the Monster Center, full of tourists who were all buying things?—ought to work for Loch Harport too.

We stop briefly at a grocery store, and then drive up the road toward Dunvegan, turning off the road entirely—which, of course, is the advantage of being in a Land Rover—and driving up a steep and rugged slope to the crest, where we have scones and coffee from a flask in the ruins of a ruined Celtic hill-fort—a
broch,
according to Cameron—on top of the hill. The
broch
is an irregular stone ring broken open on one end; inside, it’s about eight or nine feet across, the center covered with grass, sheepberries, knobs of rock, and bits of heather, the surrounding walls just a bit too high for me to see over without climbing up on them; when we do climb up on them, we get a magnificent view over the rolling, mostly-treeless hills of Skye—several ancient volcanic cones, flat as tables on top, are visible from here, with a gleaming arm of the sea, and the sharp silhouettes of mountain peaks on other islands, beyond. According to Cameron, the
broch
has never been excavated, so as we walk around inside it, it’s possible that just under our feet, a few dozen feet down under the grass and the sheepberries, are unknown and undisturbed Celtic treasures, golden torcs, silver necklaces, swords, jeweled harps, who knows what? Most likely it’s bones and skulls and broken pieces of pottery, but even that has its allure—perhaps there’s some piece of evidence here, buried beneath our scuffling feet, that will, in some future age, help to unravel some archaeological mystery that has been puzzling scholars for centuries. Perhaps the key that will unlock knowledge of a lost race or a vanished civilization is here, buried in the flinty soil, down under the roots of the heather and the butt-ends of worms. Cameron’s mind is obviously musing on lost civilizations too, because, as we munch scones, he tells us of another ancient remnant not far from here, a
souterrain,
which (according to Cameron, anyway) is a complex of prehistoric tunnels and rooms under the ground, with very low ceilings and an entrance so low that you have to crawl though it; once inside, the rooms are too low for a man of normal height to stand up in, and it’s Cameron’s speculation that these structures were left behind by a race of men of diminutive size, non-supernatural but much smaller than ordinary men, who were the origin of the legends of fairies and elves that persist everywhere in the Celtic world. I’ve heard this speculation before; I heard it for the first time, I believe, from G.C. Edmondson, who, a couple of decades ago, theorized that the Good Folk were actually Bushmen, whose range had once extended over Europe until they were hunted and hounded by normal-sized folk back into their African heartland. I’m not sure that I entirely buy this, but it is an attractive theory—and one thing I
am
fairly sure of is that there was much more going on up here in these Northern lands than most archaeologists, whose focus of interest has traditionally been centered on the Mediterranean, have even yet begun to imagine. Who knows what was going on up here in Scotland at the time that the Egyptians were building the Pyramids, let alone back when the people of Sumer were baking the first mud bricks for Ur? Whatever it was, I’ll bet it would turn out to be surprising, if you could somehow open up a window through time and look.

After lunch, we press on, past Dunvegan Castle, past fields full of shaggy Highland cattle (who look like they ought to be grazing at the foot of a glacier, along with other Ice Age animals such as Mastodons and Wooly Rhinos), and park at a gate at the end of a winding road. We walk along a shore path, over a hill, and down to the sea, past a beach full of resting cows (they lounge on the sand above the waterline and watch us incuriously as we pass, discovering as we go that having cows on a beach
does
make for interesting obstacles for walking there), over a rise, past the ruins of a “black house” (named for the color of the rock used in its construction) that once belonged to Cameron’s wife’s family, and then down to a long coral beach that stretches away almost endlessly until, at the edge of vision, it curves around a headland and is lost to sight. Rugged, mountainous offshore islands loom up out of the glinting, restless, cold-looking water, like Stegosauruses sunk to their snouts in the sea; one of them is Harris, where, at this very moment, Amy is touring the woolen markets. Cameron and I sprawl on the beach, whose pale sands are made of impacted plant coral (and whose pale sands are
also
strewn with huge, spiral-shaped cow pats), laid down—the coral, not, as far as I know, the cow pats—in a time of intense volcanic activity when the temperature was warm enough here for lush tropical vegetation to grow. While we sprawl, Susan and the Dutch girls take off their shoes and wade in the ocean; Susan wades around fairly sedately, but, after a while, the Dutch girls begin to laugh and splash each other, playing like schoolgirls. I don’t go wading, but, before we leave, I go down to the water’s edge and dabble my hand in the North Sea, just to be able to say I did. The water is cold, but I was brought up on the shores of the chilly North Atlantic, and I don’t think it would be too cold for me to go swimming in it—although, in all the huge sweep of beach we can see, only one other person is. (Another cultural difference between Britain and the States: in this kind of hot weather, at home, the lakes and rivers and the seaside would be packed with swimmers, and with people fishing, and sailing, and paddling canoes and kayaks, and (alas) jetskiing (if Loch Ness was in upstate New York, it would be so thickly covered with waterborne tourists that you would hardly be able to see the water, let alone the Monster), but we see very few people doing any of these things on the bodies of water we pass,
especially
swimming; except for a few hotel swimming pools, on the whole trip, in all of Britain, in the hottest summer in decades—it’s the hottest summer in recorded history in Scotland—we see only two or three people actually swimming in the water, although we see lots of people standing on the shore, or sitting on the rocky beaches looking—wistfully, perhaps? Wishing the water were warmer? Or that they knew how to swim?—out to sea.