Just a wee bit closer!" John shouted, guiding me from above as I inched along a cracked, narrow ledge overhanging the jagged cliffs of Culswick. One hand clutched the precious rope of pig bristle and horsehair, the other reached into the nest. "There you go-that's it!"
It was the previous summer and we were fowling-gathering birds' eggs from nests along the sea cliffs for our dinner. Even the waves, crashing loud as thunder some fifty feet below, were drowned out by the cowlike moans of the swarming puffins, the raspy squawks of gannets, and the honks of razorbills. There were thousands of them nesting in cracks and burrows in the turf and rocks, none happy with our presence.
I didn't dare look down-me belly already so empty there was nothing going to keep me from those eggs.
It was as me fingers touched the cluster of brown speckled shells that the mother came at me, striking first me neck, then me arm, with her razor-sharp striped bill.
I cursed, swatting her back, as the precious eggs slipped from me fingers and smashed at me feet. And then, when I tried to regain me balance, I slid on the slippery yolk.
It was as I desperately tried to right meself that me foot somehow became wedged deep in a narrow fissure at the end of the ledge.
I grabbed the rope with one hand, the side of the cliff with the other, then looked up at John. "I'm caught!" I twisted one way, then the next, trying to pull meself free.
And then the angry mother struck again, this time at me face. And when I ducked I lost me footing.
"Chris!" John screamed from his perch ten feet above, but the rope had slipped from me hand. Before I knew it I was headfirst over the cliff, me pinned foot the only thing keeping me from plunging into the icy surf.
"Grab hold!" John shouted, swinging his rope toward me, an army of hotheaded puffins circling us.
Blood pounded to me forehead and cheeks, the weight of me body tugging at me wrenched foot as I tried desperately, again and again, to grab the rope.
I don't know how he did it, but in what seemed like an instant John scrambled down the slick, guano-coated wall and secured a loop around me chest. Then he wrestled me foot from the crack and pulled me to the ledge.
"Lucky there's not much meat on your bones," John said with a laugh, "or I wouldna' had the strength to haul you up."
Puffins by the hundreds swarmed before us, me trembling head buried in his warm shoulder. Like so many times before, he had saved me. Me guardian angel, William Jr. had called him. The one who managed to grab me, when I was but three or four, when I leaned too far over the gunwale of Gutcher's boat. The one who had somehow found me, lost in the fog on me way to school, when the others had given up.
And yet, there I was, running from me home in a fierce March gale, no lantern to guide me. All because of John. "I'll get that pouch and an explanation before he has a prayer of spending those coins," I muttered, pounding me soaked rivlins hard into the spongy earth, sea spray drenching me down to me shivering skin.
There was no road, of course, only a narrow path through layers of Shetland moss so soft no proper roads had ever been constructed. Even on the clearest of days I was known to lose me way, somehow baffled by similar, stark contours of the vast island landscape. In the dark I was hopeless. Before I knew it I had nearly stumbled smack into-of all places-the Peterson cottage.
Ann lived there, Mr. Peterson's beautiful black-haired daughter who was a year younger than me. Despite Catherine's constant teasing that Ann fancied me, I had never even mustered the courage to speak when she was near. No doubt her Daa had already told her what was soon to be the talk of the parish-that I had snuffed out his ewe.
I raced quickly in the opposite direction, the wind at me back, once sinking clear to me shin in the rain-drenched heather. Then I tripped over rocks and shrubs at the edge of the burn through the scattald. It was dark-oh so dark-and I remember breathing a sigh of relief when I caught the smell of peat, signaling another croft ahead. But what I couldn't see before me until it was too late was a wall of stone no higher than me knee. I tumbled over it headfirst into a puddle of muck, and it wasn't until I wiped the mud from me eyes that I made out the dim light from the window of the croft house of Knut Blackbeard not ten feet before me. And then I remembered Daa's words-should John not return by morning, he'd send Knut to find me.
Knut was a great muckle of a man with a bulbous red nose, pocked skin, and a ferocious beard as dark as night that was often flecked with straw, nettles, or remnants of food from past meals. Daa called him "the Viking," as it was Knut's claim to be the last of an old Norse family that arrived on the island a thousand years back with King Harald Fairhair of Norway. Knut was taller than any man on the island, with a frame so frighteningly solid they say it took twice as much wool to make his breeks and gansey as it did any other Shetlander's.
I wasn't sure if it was his beady gray eyes that sent chills down me spine or the gait with which he thundered about, his beefy arms swinging powerfully at his sides. To me and every other lad on the island, Knut Blackbeard was as dangerous as red-hot iron newly plucked from the forge.
He lived alone, always had, tending to his own crops and only joining the other Culswick men to fish for the cod on the sloop they leased from Wallace Marwick. But it was on Knut whom the entire parish depended when Marwick's shipments came ashore in the dark of night.
"See to it," Daa would say when word came of a drop, and the giant of a man would stand watch as the barrels and casks were hefted silently up steep cliffs and into caves waiting for Marwick's men to see to their sale. So legendary was Knut in wielding a club that they said Her Majesty's Revenue Men ran at the mere sight of him.
We never knew for sure why he was so fiercely loyal to Daa, but there was talk that he had been a small, homely child teased and beaten by the others in the parish.
"Daa watched out for him," John guessed. "Now he's returning the favor."
And I remember being but seven or eight when two of the Queen's Revenue Men came by. A suspicious packet had been spotted circling Culswick shores the night before, they said as they started nosing about the croft.
"As God as me witness," Daa said when they found a cask of gin tucked behind some straw in our byre, "I've no notion how that got here!"
It was the first time I remember hearing a quavering in his voice.
The officers sailed the cask to the sheriff's office in Lerwick and said they'd be back.
"You know, Knut," I overheard Daa whisper, as the two discussed the matter later that day, "if word gets out that Mr. Marwick is behind that gin, you'll be putting your club away for good." Then he looked at his brute of a friend-bushy red eyebrows twitching-and raised his voice an octave or two. "And what will become of me wife and bairns if they lock me up?"
By the end of the day Knut had claimed the cask as his own and spent the next six months in Lerwick Prison.
I hadn't noticed the flock of sheep by Knut's stone wall, huddling against the storm. But when I realized where I was and sprang to me feet, they shot like lightning in all directions, baaing nervously in the night. And then a light suddenly flashed but a few yards away.
"Who's there?" a voice demanded. I knew it well.
I flattened me body back into the wet behind a shrub. The light moved closer, until two worn, mud-caked rivlins stood but inches from me face. When I finally dared peer up at Daa, he was searching wildly about.
I held me breath, willing the sheep not to give me away. They cried frantically to one another, skidding this way and that while Daa held his lantern high.
"I know what I heard," he bellowed into the wind. "Show yourself or I'm comin' to find you!"
He stood there for what seemed like an eternity, eyes searching through the storm until I was sure I could hold me breath not a second longer. Then, muttering to himself, he turned slowly down the path to Knut's cottage. The moment he rapped on the door, I was up and over that wall, and I didn't stop running until I found me way to Skeld.
IT WAS NEARLY DAWN WHEN I PASSED ANDREW Johnson's forge, where I had first lifted a hammer so many years before. And then, when I came to the water's edge, I made out the outline of Wallace Marwick's fishing station, and slipped into the wee stone lodge where I and the other lads of the parish slept each summer while we worked to cure the fish.
Harold Inkster, the foreman of the station, saw to it that we worked every light hour of those long summer days, splitting and gutting boatloads of ling and cod, first pulling the livers for oil and then carefully bathing the carcasses in fresh water to keep the flavor from being spoiled by the blood.
"None in the British Isles does it better," he would boast as we layered the catch with salt in tall wooden tubs, our chapped, puckered hands throbbing from the sharp cut of gills and stinging bite of salt. Four or five days later he gave the nod and we pulled them to be washed again before we carefully laid each piece on the stony beach to dry.
"The Spanish like 'em green," he'd say, and so orders to Bilbao were dried skin-side up. But the Germans liked them white, so shipments bound for Hamburg were dried skin-side to the beach, allowing the flesh to be bleached by the sun.
A mouse scurried across the damp straw scattered on a bunk by the door. All I had to do now was wait for light and then meet John at the stranded schooner. With any luck, Daa and Knut Blackbeard wouldn't find me first.
Let me find him, Lord, I prayed, wrapping me arms across me chest to keep me soaking wet body from shivering. I suspected God might not be much help after what I had done to that ewe. Then I curled up on the bunk, all the while me mind racing over what had happened that night and what I might have done differently.
I hadn't meant to sleep, but the lodge had no windows and I never saw the morning light. And it was like most restless nights, where you finally slip into a deep sleep only an hour or two before dawn. In fact, I might have slept past noon if it hadn't been for the nasty wafts of boiling whale blubber from the shack above town.
"Aye," I muttered, rubbing me nose as I pulled meself from the bunk. Me legs and shoulders felt stiff, and I was dizzy with hunger remembering the last piece of cod John had snatched the night before.
The sun was so high-too high-that when I opened the door I winced at the light. The sky was an intense blue, as it usually is after such storms, with only a dark cloud billowing in the distance from the shack on the hill. Several gray seals lounged on a large, jagged rock protruding from the water, with skuas and gannets floating on the now calm sea, petrels circling and squawking above.
I looked out at the magnificent three-masted schooner anchored among hundreds of other small sloops and half-deckers on the sparkling voe before me. Her main mast was snapped in half and her hull tipped to the starboard like an old, crippled lady. Water was seeping in below deck, slowly taking her down, a Union Jack fluttering in the breeze from her foremast. Waves lapped over the name "Fortitude," painted in large red letters on the white band around her hull.
I counted at least twenty bedraggled seamen, scarves curiously covering their faces, dragging large barrels across her tilted deck. Two others were busy lowering barrels into a sixareen, the Shetland name for a six-oared boat, tied off her transom. Three men were rowing another boat already loaded with barrels to a sandy spit offshore.
Not far from me stood a tiny, whiskered man with a long pointed nose looking out into the harbor. Not seeing John or any unloaded timber, I brushed the mud and nettles as best I could from me tattered gansey and breeks and started toward him.
He glanced at me, smiling, then turned back to the schooner.
"What's in the barrels?" I asked, hugging me arms tightly to me chest.
"You a Robertson?" the whiskered man asked, then sucked on his pipe. "Have the look, I'd say. Cheekbones of your Daa-the eyes." He looked at me closely, as I shifted nervously from foot to foot. "A bit more handsome than the others with those light blue eyes. And the ginger hair, o' course. Is that what they say about you, lad?"
We had no glass to look into. How I looked compared to me family had never crossed me mind. But I held me words, knowing we Shetlanders' deep curiosity about the business of others. One thing I knew for sure-by day's end this man and everyone else in the parish would know I had killed Mr. Peterson's ewe.
When I didn't respond, the man continued to look me up and down. "Seems you've had a bit of a rough night."
"Was quite a gale," I said, pulling me fingers through me hair.
He nodded, the wicks of his smile twitching. "That's what that other Robertson said earlier. Over from Culswick. Said his name was John."
I turned to him. "When?"
The old man chuckled, pulling the clay pipe from his lips and inspecting the bowl. "Oh, 'bout when the sun came up. But he's long gone now."
"How did he get the timber unloaded so fast?" I was furious with meself for sleeping as long as I had.
"Timber?" the old man asked, exploding with laughter. "So that's what he thought the Fortitude was carryin'!"
I grimaced as the breeze picked up an odor even stronger than the boiling whale blubber.
"I'm not sure who is givin' you Robertsons your information, but there's no timber in the wrecked hull of Her Majesty's fine vessel-just barrels and barrels of guano on their way from Gothenburg to Hull." He thrust the pipe back between his yellowed teeth and pointed to the loaded boat nearing shore. "If you think your eyes are waterin', just think of those poor lads! Looks to me like they've got more than enough muck in that ship to cover the crops of both England and Wales!"
The man made a click, click, click sound with his tongue and grinned. "The mighty English are goin' to have a hard time findin' a market for that here in Skeld."
So Angus Moncrieff had been wrong, I thought with a twinge of satisfaction. Then a sense of relief flooded me chest. Now all I needed was to catch up with John before he returned home and convince him to put back the pouch! At least there'd be something for the rent and to pay Mr. Peterson for the ewe.
"Good day to you, then," I said, turning back toward Culswick. "I expect me brother's hoping I'll catch him."
But I hadn't taken more than a few steps when the small man let out a long hoot.
"Ya won't find him goin' that direction." He winked at me in the morning sun. "Went that way."
He pointed north, to the path leading up and around the voe.
"And by the fire in that lad's eyes, I'd bet a kishie of peat he had a more exciting plan in mind than headin' back for the morning chores."
"That leads to Reawick and Garderhouse," I said, puzzled. "There's nothing up there but a few scattered crofts."
"Aye." The man nodded slowly. Then he pulled the pipe from his mouth and banged the spent bowl of tobacco against his thigh. "But it's the only way to Lerwick if you dunna have a boat."