This wasn’t it A glance at the thin, wispy-bearded, pebble-bespectacled lad who came hurrying forward to greet me when I stepped on to the ground was all the proof I required that this was indeed not it. Another glance at the seven or eight bearded, scarved and duffel-coated characters behind him who had not, as I’d thought, been working but were struggling to prevent their tents from being blown away by the wind, was almost superfluous proof. That lot couldn’t have hi-jacked a rowing boat. The M.F.V., I could see now, was down by the stern and listing heavily to starboard.
“Hallo, hallo, hallo,” said the character with the wispy beard. “Good afternoon, good afternoon. By Jove, are we glad to see you!”
I looked at him, shook the outstretched hand, glanced at the listing boat and said mildly: “You may be shipwrecked, but those are hardly what I’d call desperate straits. You’re not on a deserted island. You’re on the mainland. Help is at hand!”
“Oh, we know where we are all right.” He waved a deprecating hand. “We put in here three days ago but I’m afraid our boat was holed in a storm during .the night Most unfortunate, most inconvenient.”
“Holed as she lay there? Just as she’s moored now?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“Bad luck. Oxford or Cambridge?”
“Oxford, of course.” He seemed a bit huffed at my ignorance. “Combined geological and marine biological party.”
“No shortage of rocks and sea-water hereabouts,” I agreed. “How bad is the damage?”
“A holed plank. Sprung. Too much for us, I’m afraid.”
“All right for food?”
“Of course.”
“No transmitter?”
“Receiver only.”
“The helicopter pilot will radio for a shipwright and engineer to be sent out as soon as the weather moderates. Good-bye,”
His jaw fell about a couple of inches. “You’re off? Just like that?”
“Air-Sea Rescue. Vessel reported sinking last night.”
“Ah, that. We heard.”
“Thought you might be it. Glad for your sakes you’re not We’ve a lot of ground to cover yet.”
We continued eastwards towards the head of Loch Houron. Half-way there I said; “Far enough. Let’s have a look at those four islands out in the loch. We’31 start with the most easterly one first of all – what’s it called, yes, Eilean Oran -then make our way back towards the mouth of Loch Houron again.”
“You said you wanted to go all the way to the top.”
“I’ve changed my mind.”
“You’re the man who pays the piper,” he said equably. He was a singularly incurious character, was young Lieutenant Williams. “Northward ho for Eilean Oran.”
We were over Eilean Oran in three minutes. Compared to Eilean Oran, Alcatraz was a green and lovely holiday resort. Half a square mile of solid rock and never a blade of grass in sight. But there was a house. A house with smoke coming from its chimney. And beside it a boatshed, but no boat. The smoke meant an inhabitant, at least one inhabitant, and however he earned his living he certainly didn’t do it from tilling the good earth. So he would have a boat, a boat for fishing for his livelihood, a boat for transportation to the mainland, for one certain thing among the manifold uncertainties of this world was that no passenger vessel had called at Eilean Oran since Robert Fulton had invented the steamboat. Williams set me down not twenty yards from the shed.
I rounded the comer of the boat-house and stopped abruptly. I always stop abruptly when I’m struck in the stomach by a battering-ram. After a few minutes I managed to whoop enough air into my lungs to let me straighten up again.
He was tall, gaunt, grey, in his middle sixties. He hadn’t shaved for a week or changed his collarless shirt in a month. It wasn’t a battering-ram he’d used after all, it was a gun, none of your fancy pistols, just a good old-fashioned double-barrelied twelve-bore shotgun, the kind of gun that at close range — six inches in this case – can give points even to the Peacemaker Colt when it comes to blowing your head off. He had it aimed at my right eye. It was lite staring down the Mersey tunnel. When he spoke I could see he’d missed out on all those books that laud the unfailing courtesy of the Highlander.
“And who the hell are you?” he snarled.
“My name’s Johnson. Put that gun away. I——”
“And what the hell do you want here?”
“How about trying the ‘ Ceud Mile Failte’ approach?” I said. “You see it everywhere in those parts. A hundred thousand welcomes——”
“I won’t ask again, mister.”
“Air-Sea Rescue. There’s a missing boat—–”
“I haven’t seen any boat. You can just get to hell off my island.” He lowered his gun till it pointed at my stomach, maybe because he thought it would be more effective there or make for a less messy job when it came to burying me. “Now!”
I nodded to the gun. “You could get prison for this,”
“Maybe I could and maybe I couldn’t. All I know is that I don’t like strangers on my island and that Donald Mac-Eachern protects his own.”
“And a very good job you make of it, too, Donald,” I said approvingly. The gun moved and I said quickly: “I’m off. And don’t bother saying ‘ haste ye back’ for I won’t be,”
As we rose from the island Williams said: “I just caught a glimpse. That was a gun he had there?”
“It wasn’t the outstretched hand of friendship they’re always talking about in those parts,” I said bitterly.
“Who is he? What is he?”
“He’s an undercover agent for the Scottish Tourist Board in secret training to be their goodwill ambassador abroad. He’s not any of those I’m looking for, that I know. He’s not a nut case, either – he’s as sane as you are. He’s a worried man and a desperate one.”
“You didn’t look in the shed. You wanted to find out about a boat. Maybe there was someone pointing a gun at him.”
“That was one of the thoughts that accounted for my rapid departure. I could have taken the gun from him,”
“You could have got your head blown off,”
“Guns are my business. The safety catch was in the ‘On’ position,”
“Sorry.” Williams’s face showed how out of his depth he was, he wasn’t as good at concealing his expression as I was, “What now?”
“Island number two to the west here,” I glanced at the chart, “Craigmore.”
“You’ll be wasting your time going there.” He sounded very positive. “I’ve been there. Flew out a badly injured man to a Glasgow hospital.”
“Injured how?”
“He’d cut himself to the thigh-bone with a flensing knife, Infection had set in.”
“A flensing knife? For whales? I’d never heard——”
“For sharks. Basking sharks. They’re as common as mackerel hereabouts. Catch them for their livers – you can get a ton of liver oil from a good-sized one,” He pointed to the chart, to a tiny mark on the north coast. “Craigmore village. Been abandoned, they say, from before the First World War. We’re coming up to it now. Some of those old boys built their homes in the damnedest places.”
Some of those old boys had indeed built their homes in the damnedest places. If I’d been compelled to build a home either there or at the North Pole I’d have been hard put to it to make a choice. A huddle of four small grey houses built out near the tip of a foreland, several wicked reefs that made a natural breakwater, an even more wicked-looking entrance through the reefs and two fishing boats swinging and rolling wildly at anchor inside the reefs. One of the houses, the one nearest the shore, had had its entire seaward wall cut away. On the twenty or thirty feet of sloping ground that separated the house from the sea 1 could see three unmistakable sharks. A handful of men appeared at the open end of the house and waved at us.
“That’s one way of making a living. Can you put me down?”
“What do you think, Mr, Calvert?”
“I don’t think you can.” Not unless he set his helicopter down on top of one of the little houses, that was. “You winched this sick man up?”
“Yes. And I’d rather not winch you down, if you don’t mind. Not in this weather and not without a crewman to help me. Unless you’re desperate.”
“Not all that desperate. Would you vouch for them?”
“I’d vouch for them. They’re a good bunch. I’ve met the boss, Tim Hutchinson, an Aussie about the size of a house, several times. Most of the fishermen on the west coast would vouch for them.”
“Fair enough. The next island is Ballara.”
We circled Ballara once. Once was enough. Not even a barnacle would have made his home in Ballara.
We were over the channel between Ballara and Dubh Sgeir now and the Beul nan Uamh was a sight to daunt even the stoutest-hearted fish. It certainly daunted me, five minutes in that lot whether in a boat or scuba suit and that would have been that. The ebb-tide and the wind were in head-on collision and the result was the most spectacular witches’ cauldron I’d ever seen. There were no waves as such, just a bubbling swirling seething maelstrom of whirlpools, overfalls and races, running no way and every way, gleaming boiling white in the overfalls and races, dark and smooth and evil in the hearts of the whirlpools. Not a place to take Aunty Gladys out in a row-boat for a gentle paddle in the quiet even fall.