The Blackhouse

ELEVEN

The news that Artair and I were to join that year’s team going out to An Sgeir ruined my last summer on the island. It came out of the blue, literally, and sent me into a deep, black depression.

There were only six weeks left before I was due to leave for university in Glasgow, and I wanted to spend them as I had the last two. Marsaili and I had passed nearly every day together since our encounter on Eilean Beag. I had begun to lose count of the number of times we had made love. Sometimes with the ferocity and passion of people who fear they might never have the chance again — it had been like that the time we made love in the barn, high up among the bales, where Marsaili had stolen that first kiss all those years before. Other times with a slow, languid indulgence, as if we believed that these idyllic days of summer, sun and sex would never end.

It did not seem possible, then, that they would. Marsaili, too, had been accepted for Glasgow University, and four more years together stretched ahead of us. We had gone to Glasgow the previous week to search for digs. I told my aunt that I was going with Donald, not that she would have cared much who I went with. Marsaili’s folks thought she was going with a group of schoolfriends. We shared a B & B for two nights, lying in together all morning, wrapped around each other until the landlady threw us out. We imagined how each and every day would be like this once we started university, sharing the same bed, making love every night. Such happiness seemed almost impossible. Of course, I know now that it was.

We trailed around the West End for hours, following up ads in the paper, working through a list we had been given by the university, checking out tip-offs from other students encountered in the bars of Byres Road the previous night. We struck lucky. A room of our own in a large Edwardian flat in Highburgh Road, sharing with six others. First floor, red sandstone tenement, stained glass, wood panelling. I had never seen anything like it. It was all so extraordinarily exotic. Late-opening pubs; Chinese, Italian, Indian restaurants; delicatessens open till midnight; mini-markets open twenty-four hours; shops, pubs, restaurants open on a Sunday. It hardly seemed credible. I could imagine how deliciously illicit it would feel to buy a Sunday newspaper on a Sunday and read it over a pint in a pub. Back then, back on the island, you never saw a Sunday newspaper before Monday.

When we returned to Lewis the idyll continued, although now there was an edge of impatience to it. While both of us would have been happy for the summer to last for ever, we could hardly wait for the time to come when we would leave for Glasgow. Life’s great adventure lay ahead of us and we were almost wishing away our youth in our haste to embark upon it.

The night before I received the news about An Sgeir, Marsaili and I went down to the beach at Port of Ness. We picked our way in the dark through the rocks at the south end of it, to a slab of black gneiss worn smooth by aeons, hidden away from the rest of the world by layers of rock that appeared to have been cut into giant slices, stood on end, then tipped over to lie in skewed stacks. Cliffs rose up above us to a night sky of infinite possibilities. The tide was out, but we could hear the sea breathing gently on the shore. A warm breeze rattled the sundried heather that grew in ragged, earthy clumps on shelves and ledges in the cliff. We laid out the sleeping bag we had brought with us and stripped naked to lie on it in the starlight and make love in long, slow strokes, in time with the beat of the ocean, in harmony with the night. It was the last time there was real love between us, and its sweet intensity was nearly overpowering, leaving us both limp and breathless. Afterwards we slipped naked over the rocks to the hard flat sand left by the receding tide, and ran across it to where the water spilled moonlight upon the shore, and we high-danced through the breaking waves, hand in hand, shrieking as the cold water burned our skin.

When we got back to the sleeping bag, we rubbed each other down and got dressed, chittering in the cold. I took Marsaili’s head in my hands, her tangle of golden hair still dripping, and gave her a long, slow kiss. When we broke apart I looked deep into her eyes and frowned, noticing for the first time that there was something missing.

‘Whatever happened to your glasses?’

She smiled. ‘I got contacts.’

It is hard to remember now just why I reacted so violently against the notion of joining the trip to An Sgeir to harvest the guga, although I can think of many reasons why I would not have wanted to go.

I was not a particularly physical boy, and I knew that life on An Sgeir would be unremittingly hard, physically gruelling, full of danger and discomfort.

I did not relish the prospect of slaughtering two thousand birds. Like most of my peers, I enjoyed the taste of the guga, but had no desire to see how it reached my plate.

It would mean being separated from Marsaili for two whole weeks, or even longer. Sometimes the weather kept the hunters trapped on the rock for several more days than they intended.

But there was more to it than that. It seemed somehow like falling back into that black hole from which I had only just emerged. I can’t really explain why. It’s just how it was.

I had gone down to Artair’s to see how his mother was doing. I had seen very little of him in the last few weeks. And I found him sitting on an old tractor tyre out by the peat stack staring across the Minch towards the mainland. I hadn’t noticed before, but the mountains of Sutherland stood sharp and clear against the pastel blue of the sky, and I knew then that the weather was about to break. From the look on Artair’s face I feared the worst for his mother. I sat on the tyre beside him.

‘How’s your mum?’

He turned and gave me a long, vacant look, as if he were staring clean through me.

‘Artair …?’

‘What?’ It was as though he had just woken up.

‘How’s your mum?’

He shrugged dismissively. ‘Oh, she’s okay. Better than she was.’

‘That’s good.’ I waited, and when he said no more, added, ‘So what’s wrong?’

He took his puffer from his pocket, clutching it in that distinctive way he had, half-covering his face, pressing down on the silver cartridge and sucking on the nozzle. But he had no time to tell me before I heard a door closing behind us and his dad’s voice calling from the step. ‘Fin, has Artair told you the good news yet?’

I turned as Mr Macinnes approached. ‘What news?’

‘There are two vacancies on the trip to An Sgeir this year. I’ve persuaded Gigs MacAulay that you two should come with us.’

If he had slapped my face with all the power he possessed, I doubt if I could have been more stunned. I didn’t know what to say.

Mr Macinnes’s smile faded. ‘Well, you don’t look too pleased about it.’ He glanced at his son and sighed. ‘Just like Artair.’ And he shook his head in vigorous irritation. ‘I don’t understand you boys. Have you any idea what an honour it is to be allowed to go out to the rock? It’s a time of great comradeship and togetherness. You’ll go out there as boys and come back as men.’

‘I don’t want to go,’ I said.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Fin!’ Artair’s dad was utterly dismissive. ‘The village elders have agreed, the team has accepted you. Of course you’re going. What kind of fool would I look if you cried off now? I went out on a limb to get you boys accepted. So, you’ll go. And that’s that.’ He turned and stormed off towards the house.

Artair just looked at me, and there were no words needed to know that we shared the same feelings. Neither of us wanted to hang around, in case Mr Macinnes came out again, so we headed off up the road out of the village towards my aunt’s house, and the tiny harbour below it. It was a favourite spot, usually quiet, punts pulled up along one side of the steep slipway, the small jetty at the foot of it overlooking the clear green waters below the fold of cliffs that protected the harbour. We sat together on the edge of the jetty by the winching angle and watched the movement of the water distort the crabs in their creels, kept there underwater by the crabbers until the price picked up. I don’t know how long we sat in silence, just as we had after my tutoring sessions, listening to the rise and fall of the water sucking at the rocks that rose out of it, black and glistening, and the plaintive cries of the gulls on the clifftops. But, finally, I said, ‘I’m not going.’

Artair turned to me, a look of pain in his eyes. ‘You can’t leave me to go on my own, Fin.’

I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry, Artair, that’s up to you. But I’m not going, and no one can make me.’

If I had expected an ally in Marsaili, then I was to be sorely disappointed.

‘Why don’t you want to go?’

‘I just don’t.’

‘Well, that’s not exactly a reason, is it?

I hated the way Marsaili always applied logic to situations that were purely emotional. The fact that I didn’t want to go should have been reason enough. ‘I don’t need a reason.’

We were in the barn, high up among the bales. There were blankets and a stash of beer, and we were expecting to make love again that night, haymites or not.

‘There are boys your age all over Ness who would kill for the chance to go out to the rock,’ she said. ‘The one thing everyone has for those guys is respect.’

‘Yeh, sure. Killing a lot of defenceless birds is a great way of earning respect.’

‘Are you scared?’

I hotly denied it. ‘No, I’m not scared!’ Although that was not, perhaps, entirely true.

‘It’s what people will think.’

‘I don’t care what people think. I’m not going and that’s an end of it.’

There was an odd mix of sympathy and frustration in her eyes — sympathy, I think, at the clear strength of my feeling, frustration at my refusal to say why. She shook her head gently. ‘Artair’s dad …’

‘… is not my father.’ I cut her off. ‘He can’t make me go. I’ll find Gigs and tell him myself.’ I stood up, and she quickly grabbed my hand.

‘Fin, don’t. Please, sit down. Let’s talk about it.’

‘There’s nothing to talk about.’ The trip was only a matter of days away. I had thought to get moral support from Marsaili, to bolster me in a decision which would have repercussions. I knew what people would say. I knew that the other kids would whisper behind their hands that I was a coward, that I was betraying a proud tradition. If you had been accepted for An Sgeir, you had to have a damned good reason for backing out. But I didn’t care. I was leaving the island, escaping the claustrophobia of village life, the petulance and pettiness, the harbouring of grudges. I didn’t need a reason. But obviously Marsaili thought I did. I headed towards the gap in the bales, then stopped suddenly, struck by a thought. I turned. ‘Do you think I’m scared?’

She hesitated a little too long before replying. ‘I don’t know. I only know that you’re behaving very strangely.’

Which tipped me over the edge. ‘Well, fuck you, then.’ And I jumped down to the lower bales and hurried out of the barn into the gathering twilight.

Gigs’s croft was one of several on the lower slopes below Crobost, a narrow strip of land running down to the cliffs. He kept sheep and hens, and a couple of cows, and planted root vegetables and barley. He did a bit of fishing, too, though more for personal consumption than any kind of commerce, and would not have made ends meet had it not been for his wife’s part-time job as a waitress at a hotel in Stornoway.

Darkness had fallen by the time I got back from Mealanais, and I sat up on the hill above the MacAulay crofthouse looking down on the single light shining out from the kitchen window. It fell in a long slab across the yard, and I saw a cat moving through it, stalking something in the dark. Someone with a sledgehammer was trapped inside my chest and trying to break out. I felt physically sick.

There was still light in the sky away to the west, long, pale strips of it between lines of purple-grey cloud. No red in it whatsoever, which was not a good sign. I turned and watched the light as it faded and felt cold for the first time in weeks. The wind had turned. The warm, almost balmy south-westerly had swung around and carried on its edge now a chill straight down from the Arctic. The pace of the wind was picking up, and I could hear it whistling through the dry grasses. Change was on the way. When I looked down towards the crofthouse again, I could see the shadow of a figure in the kitchen window. It was Gigs. He was washing dishes at the sink. There was no car in the drive, which meant his wife was not yet back from town. I closed my eyes and clenched my fists and made my decision.

It took me only a few minutes to get down the hill to the croft, but as I reached the road a pair of car headlights swung up suddenly over the rise and raked across the moor in my direction. I ducked down by the fence, crouching amongst the reeds, and watched as the car turned into the drive and parked outside the crofthouse. Gigs’s wife got out. She was young, maybe twenty-five. A pretty girl, still in her white blouse and black skirt. She looked tired, a drag in her gait, as she pushed open the kitchen door. Through the window I saw Gigs taking her in his arms and giving her a long hug and then a kiss. My disappointment was acute. This was not something I could discuss with Gigs when his wife was around. I stood up from the long grass, leaped over the fence and pushed my hands deep into my pockets, heading off then towards the bothan on the Habost road.

There were very few bothans still operating after the big crackdown by the police. I never really saw what the problem was. They might have been unlicensed, but they were never run for profit. They were just places where men gathered together for a drink. But even though they were illegal, I was still underage, and would not be allowed in. There was an odd morality that still operated. Which did not mean, however, that I could not get my hands on a drink. I found a small gathering of my contemporaries in the stone shed behind the bothan, sitting around on the skeletons of old agricultural machinery, tipping cans of beer into their faces. For cash and cigarettes, some of the older boys would slip out from time to time with drink for the kids in the shed, turning it into a kind of baby bothan. Somebody had acquired half a dozen six-packs, and the air was thick with the smell of dope, and manure from the neighbouring byre. A tilley lamp hung from the rafters, so low that you would bang your head on it if you did not take care.

Seonaidh was there, and Iain, and some other boys I knew from school. I was seriously depressed by now, and intent only on getting drunk. I began pouring beer down my throat like there was no tomorrow. Of course, they had heard that Artair and I were going out to the rock. Word, in Ness, spreads like fire on a dry peat moor, fanned by the winds of speculation and rumour.

‘You lucky bastard,’ Seonaidh said. ‘My dad was trying to get me on the trip this year.’

‘I’ll swap you.’

Seonaidh pulled a face. ‘Aye, right.’ Naturally, he thought I was joking. I could have made a necklace from the eye teeth everyone there that night would have given to take my place on the team. The irony was, they could have had it for nothing. Any one of them. Of course, I couldn’t tell them that. They would never have taken me seriously or, if they had, they’d have thought I was insane. As it was, my lack of enthusiasm seemed to signal to them that I was merely playing it cool. Their jealousy was hard to take. And so I just drank. And drank.

I didn’t hear Angel coming in. He was older than us, and he’d been drinking in the bothan most of the night. He’d brought out some beers in return for a joint. ‘Well, well, if it isn’t orphan boy,’ he said when he saw me. His face was round and yellow in the light of the tilley lamp and floated through the dark of the shed like some luminous balloon. ‘You’d better get as much drink down you as you can, son, ’cos you’ll get none out on An Sgeir. Gigs is unre-fucking-lenting about that. No alcohol on the rock. Smuggle out so much as a dram and he’ll throw you off the fucking cliff.’ Someone handed him a rolled-up joint and he lit it, pulling the smoke deep into his lungs and holding it there. When, finally, he blew it out he said, ‘You know I’m the cook this year?’ I didn’t. I knew he’d been out before, and that his father, Murdo Dubh, had been the cook for years. But I also knew that his father had been killed in an accident on a trawler during a stormy February that year. I suppose, if I’d thought about it, it would have been logical for Angel to follow in his father’s footsteps. It’s what men in Ness had done for generations. ‘Don’t worry,’ Angel said, ‘I’ll make sure you get your fair share of earywigs in your bread.’

After he’d gone, another joint was lit and handed around. By now, I was feeling sick, and after a couple of drags, the suffocating claustrophobia of the shed began spinning my world around and around. ‘I’ve got to go.’ I pushed out of the door into the cold night air and immediately threw up in the yard. I leaned against the wall, pressing my face against the cool stone, wondering how on earth I was going to get myself home.

The world seemed to pass me by in a blur. I have no idea how I even managed to get as far as the Crobost road. The lights of a large vehicle caught me full-beam, and I froze like a rabbit, wobbling on the verge until it passed with a whump of air that knocked me over into the ditch. It might not have rained in weeks, but the residual water held by the peat still drained in a thick, brown sludge into the bottom of the ditch. It covered me like slurry, clinging to my clothes, running down my face. I gasped and cursed and pulled myself out to roll over on to the spiny verge. I lay there for what seemed like hours, although it was probably only minutes. But it was long enough for that cold edge on the fresh north wind to chill me through. I struggled on to my hands and knees, teeth chattering now, and looked up as another vehicle came down the road towards me, illuminating my misery in the glare of its lights. As it approached, I turned my head away and shut my eyes. The car stopped, and I heard a door opening, and then a voice. ‘In the name of God, son, what are you doing there?’ Big hands lifted me almost bodily to my feet, and I found myself looking up into Gigs MacAulay’s frowning countenance. He took his forearm across my face to wipe the mud off on the sleeve of his overalls. ‘Fin Macleod,’ he said, recognizing me finally. He sniffed the alcohol on my breath. ‘For Heaven’s sake, son, you can’t go home in this state!’

It took me some time to warm up again, huddled on a chair by the peat fire, a blanket over my shoulders, a mug of hot tea cupped in my hands. There was still a tremor ran through me each time I took a sip from it. The mud had dried now and was caked and cracking like shite on my skin and my clothes. God knows what I must have looked like. Gigs had made me leave my trainers at the door, but there was still a trail of dried mud between it and the fire. Gigs sat in his chair on the other side of the hearth and watched me carefully. He smoked an old, blackened pipe, and blue smoke curled from it into the light of the oil lamp on the table. It smelled sweet as a nut, a pitch higher than the toasty scent of the peat. His wife had taken a damp towel to my face and hands before brewing the tea and then, on some unspoken signal, retired to bed.

‘Well, Fin,’ Gigs said at last, ‘I hope this is you getting it out of your system before you go out to the rock.’

‘I’m not going,’ I said in a voice so small it was little more than a whisper. I was still drunk, I suppose, but the shock of falling in the ditch had sobered me up a little, and the tea was helping, too.

Gigs did not react. He puffed gently on the stem of his pipe and watched me speculatively. ‘Why not?’

I have no recollection now of what I said to him that night, how it was that I expressed those feelings of deep, dark dread that the very thought of going out to the rock had aroused in me. I suppose, like everyone else, he must have assumed that it was fear, pure and simple. But while others might have displayed contempt for my cowardice, Gigs appeared to understand in a way that seemed to lift that enormous weight which had been bearing down on me from the moment Artair’s dad had given me the news. He leaned towards me across the fire, holding me steady in the gaze of those Celtic blue eyes of his, his pipe smoking gently in his hand. ‘We are not twelve individuals out there, Fin. We are twelve together. We are a team. Each one of us is reliant on the other and supports the other. It’s hard, aye. It’s fucking hard, boy. And it’s dangerous. I don’t pretend otherwise. And the Lord will test us to the very edge of our endurance. But you’ll be richer for it, and you’ll be truer to yourself. Because you’ll know yourself in a way that you never have before, and maybe never will again. And you’ll feel that connection that we all feel with every one of those men who’ve been out there before us, reaching back through the centuries, joining hands with our ancestors, sleeping in the places they have slept, building cairns by the cairns they have left.’ He took a long pause, sucking on his pipe, allowing the smoke to eddy around his lips and nostrils, rising into the stillness in blue wreaths around his head. ‘Whatever your blackest fear, Fin. Whatever your greatest weakness. These are things you must face up to. Things you must confront, or you’ll spend the rest of your life regretting it.’

And so with a heart full of dread I went on the trip to An Sgeir that year, although I wish, today, with every fibre of my being that I had not.

In the days before we left, I kept myself to myself. The wind had swung further round, to the north-east, and a storm that seemed to mark the end of summer hammered the island for two days. Force-ten winds blew the rain in horizontally off the Minch, and the land drank it thirstily. I had not made up with Marsaili after our last exchange in the barn, and I avoided going to Mealanais. I stayed indoors, reading in my room, listening to the rain battering against the windows and the wind lifting tiles on the roof. On the Tuesday night Artair came to the door to say that we were leaving for the rock the next day.

I couldn’t believe it. ‘But the weather’s coming from the northeast. They always say you can’t land on the rock if there’s any kind of easterly.’

Artair said, ‘There’s a new front coming in. A north-westerly. Gigs thinks we’ve got a twenty-four-hour window for getting on to the rock. So we go tomorrow night. We’ve to load the trawler at the Port tomorrow afternoon.’ He didn’t seem any happier about it than I was. He sat on the edge of my bed in silence for a long time. Then he said, ‘So you’re going?’

I couldn’t even bring myself to speak. I acknowledged with a tiny nod of my head.

‘Thanks,’ he said. As if somehow I was doing it for him.

It took several hours the next day to load the Purple Isle berthed at the breakwater quay at Port of Ness. All the supplies required to maintain twelve men on a rock in the middle of the ocean for a fortnight. There was no natural spring on An Sgeir, so all of our water was taken in old beer casks. We had boxes and boxes of food, two tons of pickling salt in sacks, tools, waterproofs, mattresses to sleep on, a fifteen-foot aerial lashed together to pick up a signal for the radio. And, of course, the peat for the fires that would warm us and feed us. The hard graft involved in passing everything from the quay to the trawler and stowing it in the hold took my mind off our imminent departure. Although the storm had abated, there was still a heavy swell, and the trawler rose and fell against the harbour wall, making the transfer of supplies a difficult and sometimes perilous task. We got soaked, too, as the sea broke again and again over the wall, sending spray cascading down upon us as we worked. The previous day waves had been smashing into the breakwater and exploding fifty feet into the air, sending their spume arcing over the harbour to obliterate it from view at each pulse of the ocean.

We left on the midnight tide, diesel engines thudding as we slipped out into the bay from the relative shelter of the harbour, facing into the huge swell, waves breaking over the bow to pour in foaming rivers across the deck. It seemed no time at all until the lights of Ness were swallowed by the night as we yawed and pitched into open seas beyond the Butt of Lewis. The last thing to vanish was the comforting flash of the lighthouse on the clifftop at the Butt, and when that was gone there was only the ocean. Untold stormy miles of it. If we missed the rock the next stop would be the Arctic. I gazed out into the blackness in what I can only describe as abject terror. Whatever my greatest fear, I figured I was facing it right now. Gigs tugged on my oilskins and told me to go below. There was a berth reserved for Artair and me and we should get some sleep. The first day and the last on the rock, he said, were always the hardest.

I don’t know how I slept, squeezed into that narrow berth right up on the port side of the bow, shivering and wet and miserable. But I did. We had crashed through eight hours of mountainous seas to cover fifty miles across some of the most notorious waters in the world, and I had slept through it all. I think it was the change in the pitch of the engines that wakened me. Artair was already scrambling up the ladder to the galley. I wiped the sleep from my eyes and climbed out to drag on my boots and my oilskins, and then follow him up on deck. It was broad daylight, the sky above us torn and shredded by the wind, periodically obscured by the squally showers of fine rain that blew in our faces.

‘Jesus,’ I said, ‘what’s that stink?’ It was a high-pitched acrid stench, a porridge of shite and ammonia.

‘That’s the guano, orphan boy.’ Angel grinned at me. He actually seemed to be enjoying this. ‘Ten thousand years of accumulated bird shite. Get used to it. You’re going to be living with it for the next two weeks.’

That was how we knew we were close to the rock. The stink of bird shit. We couldn’t see it yet, but we knew it was there. The Purple Isle had slowed to only a few knots. The swell of the ocean had dropped dramatically, and we were going with it now rather than fighting it.

‘There she is!’ someone shouted, and I peered through the mist and rain to catch my first sight of this legendary place. And there she was. Three hundred feet of sheer black cliff streaked with white, rising straight out of the ocean in front of us. Almost in that same moment, as the mist cleared, splinters of sunlight fell through fissures in the cloud, and the glistening rock was thrown into an instant projection of sharply contrasting light and shade. I saw what looked like snow blowing in a steady stream from the peak before I realized that the snowflakes were birds. Fabulous white birds with blue-black wingtips and yellow heads, a wingspan of nearly two metres. Gannets. Thousands of them, filling the sky, turning in the light, riding turbulent currents of air. This was one of the world’s most important surviving gannet colonies, and these extraordinary birds returned in ever-increasing numbers year after year to lay their eggs and raise their chicks in this forbidding place. And that in spite of the annual harvest by the men of Crobost, and the two thousand chicks we were about to take from their nests this year again.

An Sgeir lay along a line that ran approximately south-east to north-west. The towering spine of the rock dropped from its highest point in the south to a bleached curve of two-hundred-foot cliffs at the north end, like a shoulder set against the prevailing weather of lashing gales and monstrous seas that rose out of the south-west to smash upon its stubborn gneiss. Three promontories on its west side jutted into the ocean, water breaking white and foaming furiously in rings all around them as they dipped down into undersea ravines.

The nearest rib of rock was called Lighthouse Promontory, because of the automatic lighthouse built at its conjunction with the rest of the island — the highest point of which loomed over us as we approached. Beyond it, the second and longest of the promontories formed an inlet that cut deep into the heart of the island, open to the east, but providing shelter from the west and the north. It was the only place on An Sgeir where it was possible to land our supplies. Here, time and the relentless assault of the elements had carved out caves in the rock so deep that finally they had cut clean through to the sheer cliffs at the far side. It was possible, Gigs said, to paddle through them in a punt, or a rubber dinghy, great natural cathedrals rising forty and fifty feet into blackness, before emerging on the other side of the island. But only ever when the sea was flat calm, which was almost never.

An Sgeir was barely half a mile long, its vertebral column little more than a hundred yards across. There was no soil here, no grassy banks or level land, no beaches. Just shit-covered rock rising straight out of the sea. I could hardly have imagined anything more inhospitable.

The skipper steered the Purple Isle gently into the inlet they called Gleann an Uisge Dubh, Black Water Creek, and dropped anchor in the bay, a great rattling of rusted chain as it left its locker. With the cutting of the engines, I became aware for the first time of the noise of the birds, a deafening cacophony of screeching, calling, chattering creatures that filled the air along with the stink of guano. Everywhere you looked, on every ledge and stack and crack in the rock, birds sat in nests or huddled in groups. Gannets and guillemots and kittiwakes and fulmar petrels. The bay around us was alive with young shags, their long, snakelike necks dipping in and out of the water in search of fish. It was extraordinary to think that a place so hostile and exposed could play host to so much life. Gigs slapped my back. ‘Come on, son, we’ve got work to do.’

A punt was lowered on to the gentle swell, and we began the process of transferring our supplies from boat to rock. I went out with the first load, Gigs gunning the outboard and motoring us in to the landing place, cutting the motor at the last moment and turning broadside to allow the swell to lift us gently up against the rock. It was my job to jump out with the rope on to a ledge no more than two feet wide and secure it to a large metal ring set into the stone. I nearly went on my arse as my feet slithered under me on a slimy skin of sulphur lichens. But I kept my balance and slipped the rope through the ring. The punt was secured and we began unloading. We balanced boxes and kegs and sacks precariously on ledges and outcrops until it looked as if everything we had brought with us had been dropped from a great height on to the lower reaches of the cliffs. With each return of the boat, more of the team arrived and leapt ashore. Just beyond our landing point, the rock folded away into one of its cathedral caves. It was dark and creepy, with the eerie sound of water sucking on rock echoing from somewhere deep within its blackness like the rasping breath of some living creature. It was easy to imagine how legends of sea monsters and dragons had grown out of such places.

After four hours the last of the supplies was brought ashore, and the rain began again, misty wet sheets of it, soaking everything, making every algae-covered surface of every rock treacherous underfoot. The last thing we took on to the island was a small rubber dinghy, which four of the team dragged up the slope to secure about fifty feet above the bay. It was to be used for emergencies, although I could not think what kind of emergency would make me want to put to sea in it. To my astonishment, I saw that Angel had crouched down in a shallow cleft in the cliff, and using his body as shelter had built a small fire of peats. He had a kettle close to boiling on it. The Purple Isle blew her foghorn out in the bay, and I turned to watch her pull anchor and head towards the open sea. It was a dreadful feeling watching her slip away like that, the skipper’s mate waving from the stern as she went. She was our only link with home, our only way back. And she was gone, and we were left here on our own on this barren lump of rock fifty miles from the nearest landfall. For better or worse, I was here, and all that remained now was to get on with it.

Miraculously, Angel was now passing around mugs of hot tea. Tins of sandwiches were opened, and we crouched there on the rock, the smell of peat smoke in our nostrils, the sea snapping at our feet, and drank to warm ourselves, and ate to restore our energy. For now, all these boxes and barrels and sacks had to be manhandled two hundred and fifty feet to the top of the island.

What I had not expected was the ingenuity of the guga hunters. On some previous expedition, they had brought out wooden planking and constructed a chute, two feet wide and nearly two hundred feet long. It was built in ten-foot sections, which they wrapped in tarpaulin and stored on the rock for each successive year. Piece by piece the sections were retrieved and slotted together, braced against the rock by stout legs and stays. It looked like one of the old wooden flumes you would see in black and white photographs from the goldrush days of the Klondike. A dolly on castors came thundering down from the top at the end of a length of rope, and the process of hauling up kegs and sacks and rolled-up mattresses began. Smaller boxes were passed hand to hand in a chain of men all the way up to the top of the rise. Artair and I passed boxes between us in silence, and then up the chain to Mr Macinnes, who kept up a constant commentary, explaining how the chute would be kept in place for the two weeks we were on the rock, and used at the end of it to slide the gugas — plucked, singed, gutted and cured — one by one to the boat below. All two thousand of them. I could not begin to imagine how we could kill and process so many birds in just fourteen days.

It was mid-afternoon by the time we had transferred all our supplies to the top of the rock, and Artair and I climbed our way wearily up to join the others. There we saw for the first time, crouched among the rocks and the boulders, the remains of an old blackhouse, built more than two centuries before, and maintained each year by the guga hunters to provide their shelter. It comprised just four walls, and the sun- and salt-bleached struts of a non-existent roof. I could not believe that this was to be our home for the next two weeks.

Mr Macinnes must have seen our faces. He grinned. ‘Don’t worry, boys. In an hour we’ll have her transformed. She’ll be a lot cosier than she looks now.’ In fact the transformation took less than an hour. To reach the blackhouse we had to stumble across the chaos of rocks on the top of the island, slipping and sliding in the spinach of lichen, guano and mud that covered them, trying to avoid the nesting fulmar petrels tucked into nearly every crevice. The whole crown of the rock seemed alive with birds, nests woven from frayed scraps of coloured string, the debris of broken and discarded fishing nets scavenged from the sea. Green, orange, blue. Entirely incongruous in this most primeval of places. As we blundered among them it was impossible to escape the vomit of the fledgling petrel chicks, an involuntary response to our sudden and unexpected presence. Their vile green bile spattered over our boots and oilskins as we passed, the stink of it almost as bad as the shite that coated every treacherous surface.

Within the walls of the blackhouse, great sheets of corrugated iron wrapped in tarpaulin were recovered and unwrapped, and we set about nailing them in place between the angled beams of the roof. Then we threw the tarpaulins over them, and fishing net weighed down by boulders that were left to hang all around the walls. Now our blackhouse was weather-tight and waterproof. Inside was dark and damp, the smell of guano almost overwhelming. The floor was strewn with discarded nesting materials, and our first task was to clear it out, and remove the nests built into every nook and cranny of wall space, carefully re-siting them somewhere out among the rocks. Half a dozen peat fires were lit in open-hearthed barrels to dry out rain-soaked walls, and we transferred all our supplies into a room at the far end of the blackhouse where, in a traditional home, the animals would have been kept.

Thick, choking smoke quickly filled the place, a fumigation, driving out the smell of shit, and forcing streams of earwigs out from every crack and crevice in the walls. Our eyes were streaming. Artair dashed outside, airways reacting to the smoke. He was gasping for breath. I followed him out to find him sucking desperately on his puffer, panic subsiding as his tubes reopened and oxygen flooded his lungs.

Gigs said, ‘Go and make yourself familiar with the rock, boys. There’s nothing more you can do here just now. We’ll give you a shout when grub’s up.’

And so, with the wind whipping around our legs, and the rain running in sheets off our oilskins, we made our way slowly and carefully across the rock, heading north to the third promontory, a huge arc of smooth rock almost severed from the mother island by a deep gully. We had seen the stacks of cairns there, silhouetted against the grey sky, piles of stones laid meticulously one on the other to create columns three feet high and more, like gravestones. Out there on the promontory, next to the cairns, we found the remains of a small beehive-like dwelling, its roof long since caved in. We found flat rocks to sit on and with some difficulty lit ourselves cigarettes. Still, it seemed, there was nothing for us to say to each other. So we sat in silence and looked back across the length of An Sgeir. We had a marvellous view of the rock from here, rising up to its peak at the lighthouse, a short, squat, concrete structure with a maintenance hatch, and a strangely structured glass roof to protect the light. Seabirds gathered around it in their thousands. Next to it was the only flat and level place on the island. A square of concrete laid into the rock to provide a landing pad for the helicopters that brought out maintenance crews twice a year. We could see the ocean all around us, grey-green and leaden, breaking against the rock in wreaths of creamy foam, rising and falling into a distance obscured by rain. Despite the presence of ten other men on the island, and my best friend sitting beside me, I cannot ever remember feeling so alone. Depression fell over me like a shroud.

In the distance, we saw a figure approaching across the rock. As he got nearer we realized it was Artair’s dad. He called and waved and began climbing up towards us. Above the sound of wind and rain battering my hood I heard Artair say, ‘Why the fuck can’t he just leave us alone!’ I turned to see if the remark had been directed to me. But he was staring straight ahead at his approaching father. I was startled. I had never heard Artair speak like that about his dad before.

‘You shouldn’t smoke, Artair,’ were Mr Macinnes’s first words when he reached us. ‘Not with your condition.’ Artair said nothing, but continued smoking all the same. Mr Macinnes sat down beside us. ‘You know the story behind the ruined dwelling?’ He pointed to the collapsed beehive. We shook our heads. ‘It’s the remains of a twelfth-century monastic cell inhabited, some say, by St Ronan’s sister, Bruinhilda. There’s another just like it on a rock called Sula Sgeir ten miles or so west of here, close to North Rona. Legend has it that her remains were found in one of them, whether or not it was here or on Sula Sgeir I don’t know. But her bones were bleached as white as driftwood by the elements, and there was a cormorant nesting in her ribcage.’ He shook his head. ‘Hard to believe that anyone could live out here on their own.’

‘Who built the cairns?’ I asked. From our position I could see now that there were dozens and dozens of them, stretched across the curve of the promontory like a cemetery.

‘The guga hunters,’ Mr Macinnes said. ‘Every one of us has our cairn. Each year we add another stone, and when we have been for the last time, they are the reminder to all those who follow that we have been before.’

A shout from the direction of the blackhouse drew our attention, and we saw someone waving us back.

‘They must be ready for us to eat,’ Mr Macinnes said.

By the time we got to the blackhouse, there was smoke billowing out of the hole in the roof left for its escape. The interior was surprisingly warm now, and less smoky than it had been. Angel had his cooking fire burning in an open keg in the middle of the floor, a pot hanging over it from a chain in the roof, a mesh grill set over the flames for making toast, a large frying pan bubbling with oil set on top of it. Gone was the stink of guano and bird vomit, to be replaced by the smell of kippers cooking in the pan. There were potatoes boiling in the pot, and Angel had made a stack of smoky toast for us to mop up the juices. There were two big pots of tea to wash it all down.

Three-foot-wide stone ledges all around the walls had been covered with tarpaulins and laid with the big mattresses we had dragged up the rocks earlier in the day. Our beds. By the flickering yellow light of candles set at intervals around the room, I could see beetles and earwigs crawling all over them. I shuddered at the thought of spending one night here, let alone fourteen. Or more.

Before we ate, we washed our hands in water preserved from last year’s trip, a brown, cloudy soup in a cut-down keg, and then gathered around the fire, squatting on the floor, as Gigs opened his bible and read to us from it in Gaelic. I barely listened to the monotonous drone of his voice. For some reason I was filled with a sense of dread, of anticipation, premonition perhaps. Somewhere, programmed into the time — space continuum, it may be that deep down I knew what was going to happen. I began shaking, and when Gigs had finished reading, ate my fish with trembling fingers.

I don’t remember there being much talk around the fire that first night. We were a solemn group, battered and bruised by the weather, calling on reserves of fortitude and stamina to face the days ahead. We could hear the wind howling around our ancient stone shelter, and the rain hammering on the roof. I don’t even remember going to bed, but I can recall very clearly lying on a damp mattress on that unyielding stone shelf, fully dressed and wrapped in blankets, wishing that I was young enough to weep with impunity. But big boys don’t cry. So I held my peace and drifted away on the tide of a shallow, troubled sleep.

I felt better the next day. It’s amazing what a few hours’ sleep can do to restore a broken spirit. Sunshine slanted through the tarpaulin draped across the doorway, blue peat smoke hanging in the light. I tumbled out of bed, blinking matter from my eyes, and squeezed into the circle of men gathered around the fire. The warmth of the glowing peats was almost soporific. Someone spooned me out a bowl of porridge and I dunked thick chunks of smoky toast into the hot goo of it and filled my mouth. I poured scalding tea into my mug and thought I had never tasted anything so good. I guess the first night is the worst, like maybe your first night in a prison. After that, you know the worst, and you just get on with it.

A hush fell on the group as Gigs opened his bible, a well-worn tome scarred and tashed from constant use. His voice rose and fell in soft Gaelic incantations as he read from it and we listened in the solemn first light of the day. ‘Right, then,’ he said as he closed it. And it was his signal, or so I thought, that the first killing spree of the trip was to begin. ‘Fin, Donnie, Pluto, you’re with me.’ I felt a great sense of relief that I would be with Gigs that first day. Artair was with another team. I tried to catch his eye across the fire and give him a smile of encouragement, but he wasn’t looking my way.

I had expected that we would make straight for the cliffs to begin the harvest, but in fact we spent most of the morning constructing a bizarre network of struts and cables across the top of the rock, from the killing grounds to the processing areas up by the cairns and down again to the top end of the chute. These aerial wireways, in hundred-metre lengths, were mounted on crude wooden tripods and cranked up to the correct tension with a jockey-winch. Operated by pulleys, this ingenious network would allow sacks of dead birds, suspended from hooks, to be whizzed across the island from one place to the next with minimum effort. Everything was dependent on the angle and tension of the cables, so that gravity would do most of the work, and Gigs was meticulous in getting each of these factors just right. Each bird weighed around nine pounds, and each sack carried ten birds. To have attempted to manhandle such cumbersome loads across this treacherous and uneven rocky moonscape would have been madness. And yet, before Gigs came up with his idea for pulleys and cables, that is just what the guga hunters must have done for all the centuries they had been coming here.

At midday, we were out near Lighthouse Promontory when I saw Angel making his way over the rock towards us, performing an extraordinary balancing act. In one hand he carried a large black kettle of hot tea, in the other, dangling from a plastic box of cake and sandwiches, were our mugs, tied by their handles to the ends of twelve lengths of string. Each day at noon, and at five, we would look for his lumbering form picking its way across the island with hot tea and sandwiches to keep us going. Much as I disliked Angel Macritchie, I had no complaints about his food. He was punctilious in everything he did, as all the veterans said his father was before him. He had something to live up to, and he made certain that he did. And I suppose that is why, although nobody liked him, he succeeded, at least, in earning their respect.

We sat around the lighthouse then, eating sandwiches and cake and washing it all down with mouthfuls of hot tea. Cigarettes were rolled and smoked, a comfortable silence among the group as sunlight flitted in and out of low, broken cloud, taking the cold edge off the wind that still blew out of the north-west. In a few minutes the slaughter would begin, and the taking of all those lives was, I think, the subject of quiet reflection. It is hard to start the killing, easier once it has begun.

We commenced among the colonies on the east-facing cliffs of the Lighthouse Promontory, two teams of four starting at either end and working towards each other in a pincer movement. A third team of three worked its way across the top. As soon as we climbed down on to the cliffs, the parent birds rose in their thousands from the nests, shrieking and wheeling overhead as the killing of their chicks got under way. It was like working in the midst of a snowstorm, the flashing white of gannet feather filling your eyes, your ears full of their anger and anguish and the beating of their wings against the wind. And you had to be careful, as you climbed level with the nests, that the chicks did not take your eye out, a reflex jab of the beak if you startled them.

Gigs led our group along ledges and cracks and shelves of rock, examining each nest for its contents. He carried a catching pole, more than six feet long with a sprung metal jaw at one end. He reached out with it to pluck the chicks from their nests, quickly passing them back to the second in the group. Donnie was a veteran of more than ten years, a quiet man probably well into his fifties, always with a cloth cap pulled down over his brow, silver whiskers bristling on a face ravaged by time and weather. He carried a stout stick, and when a bird was swung round to him on the end of the pole he seized it and killed it with a single, well-practised blow. I was next in the chain. Gigs had decided to blood me in the truest sense of the word. I carried a machete, and it was my job to decapitate the birds and hand them back to Pluto, who arranged them in piles for us to collect on the return. At first I was sickened by my task, and slow at it. I was squeamish about the blood that ran over my hands and spattered my overalls. I felt warm splashes of it on my face. But they started coming so fast that I had to let go of my reserve, to free my mind of all thought and fall into a rhythm, both mechanical and mindless. Thousands of gannets and fulmars screamed and wheeled in endless eddies about our heads, and two hundred feet below the sea boiled and thrashed against the green collar of algae on the lowest rocks. Gradually my blue overalls turned black with blood.

At first I had thought that Gigs was selecting the chicks at random. Some he took, others he left in the nest. It was Donnie who explained to me that the fledgling gannet went through three stages of development. The downy young chicks of the first stage produce very little meat, and so Gigs would leave them to grow to adulthood. The slim, black, young birds at the third stage of development were harder to catch. It was the second-stage chicks that were the real prize, easily identified by the three remaining clumps of down on the head, back and legs. Fine and meaty and easy to catch. Gigs had years of practice in identifying them at a glance.

We moved across the cliff with astonishing speed, in a wave of killing, leaving piles of dead gugas in our wake. Until finally we met up with the second group. It had taken just over ten minutes, and Gigs signalled that the carnage was over for the day. And so we retraced our steps, carrying back as many gugas as we could, piling them up, and then forming a chain to pass them one by one to the top. There, the heap of dead birds harvested by the three groups mounted, and Gigs took out a pencil and a small notebook and carefully counted their number and noted it in his book. I looked back across the cliffs at where we had been, blood streaking red against the black, and realized that I had not even had time to be afraid. Only now did I become aware of how one slip, one careless move, would have led to almost instant death.

Gigs turned to me, and as if giving up some great secret handed down to him across generations, said simply, ‘Well, Fin, that’s what we do.’

‘Why?’ I said to him. ‘Why do you do it?’

‘It’s the tradition,’ Donnie volunteered. ‘None of us wants be the one to break it.’

But Gigs shook his head. ‘No. It’s not the tradition. That might be a part of it, aye. But I’ll tell you why I do it, boy. Because nobody else does it, anywhere in the world. Just us.’

Which, I supposed, made ‘us’ special in some way. Unique. I looked at the pile of dead birds on the rock and wondered if there was not, perhaps, some better way to be special.

We bagged the birds in hessian sacks, and I watched the strange spectacle of sack after sack swooping across the rock, dipping to a halt at the lowest point, and then being hauled on ropes up to the area by the cairns where eventually they would be plucked. There they were tipped out on to tarpaulins and left to dry in the wind.

I slept that night the sleep of the dead, and woke to find that the weather had changed again. Rain beat steadily against the rock on the leading edge of a blustering south-westerly, and it was mid-morning before an edgy Gigs decided that we could not afford to sit around any longer waiting for a break in the rain. So with silent resignation we got into our oilskins and headed out again on to the cliffs, with poles and sticks and machetes, feeling the icing of guano slippery beneath our boots as we worked our way through the colonies tucked away in the lower reaches of the Lighthouse Promontory.

The pile of birds grew, covered now to save them from a soaking. The process of plucking them did not begin until the rain was by. Which was not until the Sunday, but since the guga hunters would not work on the Sabbath, all we could do was remove the tarpaulins and let the sun and the wind labour at drying the birds while we took our leisure.

It was strange. During that whole two weeks on the rock, I was never once on the same team as Artair. Hardly ever saw him, in fact. It was almost as if they were keeping us apart, although I cannot imagine why. Even on the two Sundays I barely saw him. Or his dad. When I think back I can’t really remember Mr Macinnes at all. But I suppose that wasn’t really surprising. We were never on a team together, and the factory process of plucking, singeing, gutting and curing meant that groups of us worked on different parts of the process in different places at different times. The only time we were all together was when we ate, squeezed around the peats in the gloom of the blackhouse, too tired some nights even to talk. We were just faces in the firelight. It was not unheard-of for Gigs to insist that we went back out after our evening meal to catch up on that day’s plucking. There were occasions when we were out there by the cairns until midnight, pulling out fistfuls of feathers by the light of a tilley. We had little inclination to talk, and not much to say if we did.

Still, it was odd that Artair and I did not get together on that first Sunday, even if just to share our misery in silence. I climbed down to a spot near where we had landed our supplies. It was more sheltered from the wind here, and seawater trapped in pools among the rocks warmed gently in the August sunshine. Several of the men who had been before sat around the pools with their boots and socks lined up along a ledge of rock, trousers rolled up to the knees, bare feet dangling in the tepid water. There was some idle banter and smoking of cigarettes, but the men seemed to clam up when I arrived, and so I didn’t stay long. I climbed instead towards the top of the promontory where I found a slab of flat stone, angled towards the south, on which I could lie out in the sunshine and close my eyes, escaping, at least in my mind, to the summer idyll I had been forced to abandon so prematurely.

It was wonderful just to do nothing, simply to lie there and relax aching muscles and let the sun warm your bones. Later I went back to the blackhouse to drag out my mattress and try to get the dampness out of it, but it was so deep inside that it would have taken days of constant sun to dry it out completely.

All too soon our day of rest was over, and we were crawling back on to our shelves after an evening meal of bacon and eggs and fried bread, and Gigs’s nightly reading from the Gaelic Bible. I caught Artair watching me from his mattress on the other side of the blackhouse. I smiled and called goodnight, but he just turned his face to the wall without a word.

We began the plucking on the Monday. The birds had dried off nicely in the Sabbath sunshine and we sat up amongst the cairns with the wind blowing around our ankles to do the job. It was a messy business. Gigs showed me how it was done. First he placed a bird between his knees and plucked the neck, leaving only a narrow collar of feathers. Then he turned to the breast, pulling out handfuls of feathers all the way down to the tail. He ripped off the new primaries from the upper wing and pinched off the leading edge quills. Then the bird was turned over and the back and the legs were plucked until only the finest white down remained. Gigs could pluck a guga in under three minutes. It took me more than twice that long.

It was relentlessly hard and competitive. We stopped every hour to count and call out the tally of how many birds we had plucked. Gigs had always plucked the most, Artair and myself the fewest. And then we would start again.

By the end of that first morning, my hands had all but seized up, every muscle and joint aching to the point where I could hardly hold a single feather between thumb and forefinger. And the feathers got everywhere. In your eyes and up your nose, in your ears and mouth. They clung to your hair and stuck to your clothes. At the height of the plucking, with the wind whistling around us, it was as if we were trapped in a blizzard of feathers and down. Artair’s asthma reacted badly to it, and after two hours he could scarcely breathe. Gigs excused him from further plucking, and he was sent to light the fires for the singeing.

The fires were lit in low, metre-square chimney stacks built of loose stone in an area almost directly above where we had first come ashore. It had been discovered decades, perhaps centuries, earlier that this was an ideal spot for providing the strength and direction of draught the fires needed to burn at their fiercest. And so the stacks were always assembled at the same spot. As we sent the plucked birds in sacks of ten screaming nearly two hundred yards down the wire to what Gigs called the factory, I saw Artair carrying glowing peats in makeshift tongs from the blackhouse to get the fires started. By the time the birds had been successfully transferred, and we had climbed down to join him, Artair had a fire blazing in each chimney. He and Pluto were delegated to do the singeing. I watched as Pluto showed Artair how. He took a bird and snapped its wing joints across his chest. Then, with a wing in each hand, and the guga hanging limply between them, he lowered it into the flames to singe away the remaining down. I watched as the flames licked up around the dead bird, turning it for a moment into a fiery angel, before Pluto withdrew it sharply from the fire. The down had dissolved to a fine, black ash, its webbed feet burned to a curled crisp. It was important not to scorch the skin and ruin the flavour, but it was equally important to leave it free of quills, because these would ruin the texture. Artair and Pluto began working their way through all the birds we had plucked that day, creating in turn dozens of their own fiery angels on that gusty Monday afternoon.

From the fire they went to Old Seoras, a wiry skeleton of a man with a head like a skull. Protective goggles increased the illusion. He scrubbed the ash off the birds before handing them on to Donnie and Malcolm, who exercised a kind of quality control, burning off anything missed by the flames with blowtorches.

They went then to John Angus, who hacked off the wings with a hand-axe and passed the birds for splitting to Gigs and Seumas, where they sat facing each other astride a thick oak beam raised up on two low cairns. The splitting beam had served its bloody purpose over decades, seasoned and weathered by all its years on the rock. On it, with knives as sharp as razors, the gugas were split from end to end and the tail removed. Three careful cuts were made above the ribs, and with one deft movement, fingers thrust between flesh and bone plucked out the ribcage and entrails. It was my job to take those entrails from the growing pile and drape them over the edge of the chimneys where Pluto and Artair were forging their angels. The fat immediately ran down into the flames, spitting and popping and fuelling their ferocity.

The final stage followed the splitting. Gigs and Seumas made four neat slashes in the flesh of the birds with their knives, creating pockets into which fistfuls of salt were thrust to begin the curing.

On ground as flat as they could make it, right next to the top of the chute, the two men spread out tarpaulins and laid the salted birds in a large circle, feet turned towards the centre, the outside flap of skin folded up to prevent leakage of the pickling fluids created by the salt. A second circle overlapped the first, and a third overlapped the second, moving closer to the centre until the entire first layer had been formed. A huge wheel of dead birds. Then another layer began on top of that, and another, and another, until it stood nearly five feet high. By the end of the two weeks, there were two huge wheels like that, each comprised of a thousand birds. All around us their wings lay scattered across the rocks, to blow away in the autumn gales on a final flight to freedom.

And that’s how it was on the rock for two stultifying weeks. Working our way across all the cliffs, through all the colonies. Ever-repeating cycles of killing, plucking, singeing, splitting. Until those wheels were completed. It was a numbing experience which after a while became wholly mechanical. You got up in the morning and you worked your way through the day until you crawled back on to your mattress at night. Some of the men even seemed to enjoy it. A kind of silent camaraderie, punctuated by the cracking of the odd joke and the relief of laughter. Something inside me just shut down, and I retreated into myself. I was not a part of the camaraderie. I don’t think I laughed once in fourteen days. I just gritted my teeth and counted them off one by one.

By the second Sunday the job was almost done. The weather had been reasonably favourable, and we had made good progress. It was dry, although not as sunny as the previous week. I made my way up to the lighthouse and stood on the concrete apron of the helipad and looked back across the island. The whole of An Sgeir was laid out beneath me, the prickly curvature of its spine, its promontories like three broken ribs, all that remained after an eternity of erosion. I could see, just off the north-west tip, stacks of black rock rising out of a deep green sea that frothed angrily against them, clouds of seabirds around their peaks, riding the thermals in endless, effortless circles. I turned and made my way to the edge of the cliff. It fell away sheer, in a three-hundred-foot drop. But it was cut through by cracks and splits and deep chimneys, and was transected in several places by ledges, white-caked by guano which had been worn smooth by the wind and the rain. There were thousands upon thousands of nests on the cliff. The richest pickings on the island. And the most inaccessible. Tomorrow we would climb down to the ledges below and reap our final harvest. A sickening little knot of fear tightened itself in my stomach and I looked away. Just one more day to get through, and then on Tuesday we would begin the process of decamping in time for the arrival of the Purple Isle, weather permitting, on Wednesday. I could hardly wait.

That night we had the finest meal of our stay. We ate the first of that year’s gugas. By now our supplies were running low. The bread was stale and sometimes mouldy, and always crawling with earwigs. The meat was all eaten, and we seemed to be living on porridge and eggs. The only constant at every meal was the diet of scripture and psalms served up from Gigs’s bible. So the guga was manna from Heaven, a reward perhaps for all our piety.

Angel spent the afternoon preparing. He took three gugas from the first wheel and washed and scraped them clean. Then he divided each into four and plunged them into a large pot of water boiling over the fire. While they boiled he peeled the last of our tatties and set them in water over a second fire. By the time they were near the boil, he was ready to change the water in which the gugas were cooking. He carefully removed the pieces of bird, tipped the greasy, salt-clouded brown water away over the rocks, and refilled it with fresh to bring back to the boil. Then the birds were returned to the pot for a final half-hour.

The sense of anticipation in the blackhouse that evening as we sat down around the fire, clutching our plates, was very nearly palpable. The tin box of irons that was usually passed around for us to select our cutlery was kept stowed in its place. You only ever ate the guga with your fingers. Angel served a piece of bird on to each of our plates and we helped ourselves to liberal portions of potato. And the feast began, there in the blue smoky light of the fire, skin and meat and tattie filling hungry mouths, savoured in silence. The flesh was firm, but tender, the colour and texture of duck, but with a taste that lay somewhere between steak and kipper.

A quarter bird was more than enough, along with the tatties, to leave us sated and sleepy, and listening in an almost trancelike state to Gigs reading from the Bible. And then bed, and the welcome mist of sleep. I doubt if there was a man in the blackhouse that night who gave a single thought to the dangers he would face on the final cliffs tomorrow. If he had he would almost certainly not have slept.

Yet again the wind had changed. Coming down from the northwest now, with a spit of rain on its cutting edge. It was a lot colder, too. Up by the lighthouse, where I had stood only yesterday with a warm breeze blowing in my face, you could lean into the wind without falling over. It was going to make the job of working the cliffs below all the harder. At first I could not see how we could possibly get down to the ledges I had seen the day before. The cliff fell away in a perpendicular drop of ninety feet to the first of them. But off to the left, Gigs led us down a steep gully, almost hidden by the fold of the rock. It developed into a deep chimney, cracks and fissures creating steps on one face, and you could ease your way down it by bracing your back against the opposite wall. The chimney was little more than three feet across, narrowing at the foot, so that finally you simply squeezed out on to the first of the ledges. And as we did, thousands of gannets took to the air, shrieking their alarm, wings beating around our faces. The ledge was thick with nests. The guano here filled every crevice in the rock, smoothing out its textures and hollows. Blasted by the wind and the salt, it had hardened to a smooth, white surface, like marble, and was treacherous underfoot. We were fortunate at this point to be in the lee of the wind, and the rain flew past us and above us. The sea thrashed against the rock at the foot of the cliff two hundred feet below. Gigs signalled that we should move quickly, and so we set off along the ledge, little more than four feet at its widest, killing as fast as we could, birds heaping up behind us, scarlet pooling around us on the white guano marble. Off to our right, a second team was working another ledge. I had no idea where the third team was.

The way it happened was wholly unexpected. There is something about killing that dulls the senses, but even now I don’t know how I could have been so stupid. We had returned to the chimney, piling up dead birds at the foot of it. Pluto climbed back to the top and lowered a rope, and we tied four birds at a time to the end of it so that he could haul them up. Gigs was exploring a possible route down to the next ledge, when I turned, startling a chick nesting in a crevice. With a screech and a flutter of down and wings, it was in my face. I felt its beak gouging my cheek. I raised my arms to fend it off and took a single step back into space. In that split second I almost believe now that I could have recovered my balance. I have thought about it so many times. But at that time, in that moment, it was just as though the cliffs had let me go, releasing me to my fate. There was air beneath my feet, my hands grabbing hopelessly for something to hold. But there was nothing. I can remember thinking how Gigs had told me that there had never, within living memory, been an accident on the cliffs. And I felt like I was spoiling the record. I heard the birds laughing as I fell, taking pleasure in my plight. Unlike them, I could not fly. Served me right for killing their children. I went silently, too surprised to feel fear and give vent to it. Like a dream, I suppose, I thought perhaps it wasn’t really happening. Not to me.

Then the first impact went through me like a hammer blow from a mallet. Somewhere about my left arm or shoulder. The pain was intense, prompting me at last to break my silence. I screamed. But I suppose it was that impact which saved my life. There were several other blows, more glancing than the first, before I came to a sudden stop. I heard my skull cracking, but consciousness was snuffed out in an instant, like the flame of a candle, and I felt no pain.

The first thing I remember hearing was the voices. Shouting. I had no idea what they were shouting, because as something like awareness returned it brought pain. They say that you cannot feel pain in two places at the same time. But I was conscious of it in my shoulder, searing, like something sharp cutting through flesh and muscle and tendon, all the way to the bone. And also in my head, which felt as if someone had clamped it in an iron vice and was slowly turning the screw. I must have been hurting elsewhere, pain I would become aware of much later, but at that moment all my senses were engulfed by those two centres of it. I couldn’t move, and through the mist of my suffering I wondered if I had broken my back. As I forced my eyes open, I found I was looking straight down at the sea, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet below, smashing itself furiously over the rocky outcrops. Waiting for me, urging me into its arms, cheated by this ledge of the chance to suck my shattered body down into its seething darkness.

With an enormous effort I rolled away from the precipice and on to my back. I bent my leg at the knee, and somewhere in the fog of my distress I found relief at the thought that, after all, my spinal cord might still be intact. The ledge was narrow, two feet or less. Miraculously it had stopped my fall and held me there, cradled in the bosom of the cliff. I could see blood on my hands, panicking briefly before I realized it was the blood of the gugas we had been slaughtering in the minutes before my fall. The frayed end of a green plastic rope dangled just above my head, and some fifty feet higher up I saw the heads and shoulders of men leaning out into the void as far as they dared, peering down to try to catch a sight of me. Even in my state of confused semiconsciousness I could see that there was no way to climb down. The rock was sheer and smooth and coated with guano. If they were to reach me, someone would have to come down on the end of a rope.

They were still shouting. At first I thought it was to me. I saw Artair leaning right out from the cliff, his face pale and shocked. He was shouting, too, but I couldn’t make out his words. And then a shadow fell across my face, and I turned my head as Mr Macinnes pulled himself up on to the ledge beside me. He looked terrible. Unshaven, his face liverish yellow, eyes sunk deep in his skull. He was sweating and shaking, and it seemed it was all he could do to find a handhold to keep himself from falling, kneeling in that narrow space, pressed hard against the face of the cliff. ‘It’s going to be okay, Fin.’ His voice sounded hoarse and thin. ‘You’re going to be okay.’ And with that he grabbed the green rope, winding it several times around his wrist, before swinging out from the rock and turning himself around so that he ended up sitting on the ledge right beside my head. He pushed himself back against the cliff, eyes closed, breathing deeply. Somehow he had climbed up from down below to reach me. To this day I have no idea how he got there. But I could almost smell his fear. It’s odd, in that moment I can remember, even through all my pain, feeling sorry for him. I reached up a hand and he grabbed it and squeezed it.

‘Can you sit up?’

I tried to speak, but no words would come. I tried again. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘We need to get you sitting up, so I can tie the rope under your arms. I can’t do it on my own, I’ll need your help.’

I nodded. ‘I’ll try.’

With one hand still clutching the rope, he put his other arm around my waist to try to pull me upright. The pain that shot through my arm and shoulder was excruciating and I cried out. I paused for several minutes, gasping for breath, hanging on to him like grim death. He kept muttering words of encouragement, words that were just sounds blown away in the wind. But still, I took comfort from them. And courage. With my good arm I clutched his and held on, bracing myself with the leg I had been able to bend, and heaved with all my might until I had dragged myself up into a half-sitting position. I cried out again, but now I was propped against his legs, and he was able to thread the rope quickly under both arms, around my back, and start tying it in a big, secure-looking knot on my chest.

When he had finished, we both sat breathing hard, trying not to look down, and trying harder not to anticipate the moment when he would release me from his grasp and swing me free of the ledge. For then I would be suspended on the end of this length of frayed green plastic, my life dependent upon his knot and the strength of those above to pull me to safety. In some ways, I think I might have settled then for the fall, the few seconds the drop would take, a swift death on the rocks below putting an end to my pain.

‘You’re bleeding,’ he said. And even as he spoke I felt the blood running warm down my neck from a head wound somewhere above my ear. He searched for a handkerchief and wiped fresh blood from my face. ‘I’m so sorry, Fin,’ he said. And I wondered why. It was not his fault I had fallen.

He tipped his head back and shouted up to the others that he was ready, giving three sharp tugs on the rope. There was a responding pull, and all the slack was taken up.

‘Good luck,’ Mr Macinnes said. The rope jerked me up and I screamed again from the pain. He let go of me, then, and I swung free of the rock, spinning crazily in the wind, rising in a series of short, painful bursts. Twice I smacked against the cliff face before swinging out again into the updraught from the sea. And all the while, the gannets flew around my head, shrieking their fury, willing me to fall. Die, die, die, they seemed to be calling.

I was barely conscious by the time they got me on to the ledge I had fallen from, concerned faces crowding around me. And Gigs’s voice. ‘Hell, son, I thought you were a goner.’

And then someone shouted, and the alarm in his voice was chilling, commanding. I turned my head in time to see Mr Macinnes sailing through the air, arms stretched out like wings, as if he thought he could fly. It seemed to take for ever for him to reach the rocks below, where his flight ended abruptly. For a moment, he lay face down, his arms pushed out to either side, one leg bent at the knee, like a parody of Christ on the cross. And then a huge wave washed over him and dragged him off, white foam turning pink as he vanished for ever into its bottomless green depths.

There was the strangest hush then, as if all the birds had answered some call for a moment’s silence. Only the wind continued with its mournful whine until rising, even above that, I heard Artair’s howl of anguish.