Chapter XII: Part II: The Isles and the Folk (3)

Where the insects come, there follow the insect-eaters. On a June evening there are parts of the road where one may see kittiwakes and black-headed gulls hawking for moths. Wheatears and starlings, larks and pipits, and, more rarely, thrushes, blackbirds, and wrens, with an occasional stonechat, all come to prey on the insect life of the road. Swallows there are none in Orcady, but the ubiquitous sparrow is there. To his contented mind the road offers a continual feast. When the birds set up housekeeping in spring, many of them choose their nesting-places in the near neighbourhood of the road. It seems almost as if they argued that here, under the very eye of man, they run less risk of discovery than further afield, where he may expect to find their treasures. From crannies of the loosely-built walls that bound the road you may hear the hungry broods of starlings, sparrows, and wheatears chirping on every side as you pass in May. I have seen a nestful of young larks gape up with their foolish yellow throats from a tuft of grass on the very edge of a roadside ditch, and have found a grouse’s nest in the heather not fifty yards from the most man-frequented part of the road. Yellow-hammers, too, and other buntings often nest in the long grass by the ditchside. Here, in a hedge of whin or gorse which crosses the road at right angles, are the nests of the thrush, the blackbird, and the wren. If you drive along our road in spring you shall see the male pewit, in all the glory of his wedding garments, scraping, a few yards from the roadside, the shallow, circular hollow in which his young are to be hatched; and a little later you shall see his patient spouse look up at you fearlessly from her eggs, or even, if your passing be at noonday, you may watch her slip off the nest as her mate comes up behind to relieve her in her domestic duties. For these birds have learned that man on wheels is not to be feared, though man on foot is one of their most dreaded enemies.

In Orcady there are not many four-footed wild things, but those that dwell among us are drawn to the road as surely as the birds are. In the gloaming rabbits come down to the roadside clover where the bees have gathered honey all day. Great brown hares, too, come loping leisurely along the road—moving shadows that melt into the dusk at the least alarm. Hares always like to make their forms near a road of some sort, for it affords them a swift and ready means of flight when they are pursued. They must be hard pressed indeed before they will dive like rabbits into roadside drains or culverts, but these refuges are not to be despised when greyhound or lurcher is close upon their heels. Mice, voles, and rats find shelter in the banks of road-scrapings or in the walls and drain-mouths; and the sea-otter does not despise the road when he makes a nocturnal expedition inland. It is not long since a man who was early afoot on a summer morning met a pair of otters almost on the street of our sleeping island capital. Seals, of course, cannot use the road, but where it runs by the sea-marge their shining heads rise up from the water to watch the passers-by, and he who is abroad before dawn may find them on the beaches within a few yards of the roadway.

The deer, roe, foxes, badgers, stoats, weasels, wild-cats, and moles of Orcady are even as the snakes of Iceland. Tame cats ran wild, however, we do not lack, and they take their tithe from the road as surely as do the hawks and falcons. Neither snakes, lizards, nor frogs are found in the isles, but on a damp autumn evening the road is dotted with toads of all sizes, which sit gazing into infinity or hop clumsily from before the passing wheel.

In pursuit of beetles, mice, and small birds, hawks and owls come to the road. The kestrel of all hawks loves it the most. He sits upon the humming telegraph wires or hangs poised, like Mahomet’s coffin, in mid-air, ever watchful and ready to swoop down upon his prey. The same wires which give him a resting-place often furnish him with food, ready killed or disabled. When man first set up his posts along the road and threaded them with an endless wire, sad havoc was wrought among the birds. Plover—green and golden—snipe, redshanks, and grouse dashing across the road in the dusk, struck the fatal wires and fell dead or maimed by the wayside. I have seen a blackbird fly shrieking from a prowling cat, and strike the wire with such force that his head, cut clean off, dropped at my very feet. The older birds appear to have learned a lesson from the misfortunes of their fellows, but every autumn young birds, new to their wings, pay their tribute of victims to the wires. More especially is this the case with the plovers, and though the kestrel rarely touches so big a bird when it is whole and sound, he feasts upon their wounded.

The hen-harrier skims to and fro along the roadside ditches, but he is a wary and cautious fowl, and is never within gunshot of the road when a man comes down that way. The merlin, that beautiful miniature falcon, glides swift and low across the moors and meadows, flashes suddenly over the roadside dyke, and before the small birds have time to realize that their enemy is upon them, he is gone again—only a little puff of feathers floating slowly down the air showing where he struck his prey. The peregrine wheels high overhead, but is too proud and shy a bird to hunt upon man’s roads. Nor has the road any charm for the raven, who goes croaking hoarsely over it on his way from shore to hill. The little short-eared owls hide all day among the heather near our road, and come flapping up in the gloaming on noiseless wings to take their share of its good things. In the treeless islands the kestrel is not the only bird that sits upon the wires. There the starling sings his weird love song, mingling with his own harsh notes the calls of every other bird that the islands know; and the buntings chant their lugubrious and monotonous ditties there.

The telegraph wires are not the only mysterious works of man which have disturbed and interfered with the feathered life so near to and yet so far apart from his. What a mystery must he be to those fellow-creatures who watch him, with his continual scratching and patching of the breast of kindly Mother Earth! Not wholly does he yield the road to them between sunset and sunrise; but when he goes abroad in the dark it is often in the guise of a rumbling dragon with great eyes of flame. Once, to the writer’s knowledge, a gannet swooped down in valiant ignorance on such a horrid creature of the night. He flashed suddenly, white out of the darkness, into the circle of light of a doctor’s gig lamps. That bold bird his fellows saw no more; and one may fancy that with his disappearance a new terror was added to the fiery-eyed creatures that roam the roads by night. He died, though not without a fierce fight for his life; and his skin, cunningly filled out with wire and straw, stands under a glass case in his slayer’s home even unto this day.

It is in spring and summer that the road sets forth its choicest lures for its lovers, yet even in “winter and rough weather” it has its beauties for the seeing eye. The puddles and cart-ruts shine like dull silver when the clouds are heavy and gray overhead. When the rain cloud blows over and the sky clears, these same shallow pools and channels gleam with a cold, clear blue, more exquisite than that of the heavens they reflect; and at night the stars besprinkle them with diamonds. Again,—

“Autumnal frosts enchant the pool,
And make the cart-ruts beautiful.”

“When daisies go”—and of all roadside blossoms they linger latest and reappear earliest (I have seen them lifting their modest crimson-tipped heads in December and opening their yellow eyes before the coltsfoot stars begin to shine)—but even when they are gone the gray stone dykes have still a glory of green moss, of gray and golden lichens.

When all the land is soaked and sodden with heavy rains, the road, where it climbs that low brown hill, will suddenly shine out across the intervening miles like a sword flung down among the heather.

When the winter rains have given place to the first snowfall of the year, go out early in the morning, before hoofs and wheels have blotted out the traces of the night, and you shall learn, as nothing else save long and close observation can teach you, how great is the nocturnal traffic of birds and beasts upon the road. Like fine lacework you shall find their footprints, to and fro, round and across, up the middle and down again. Hares and rabbits, rats and mice, gulls and plovers, thrushes and larks, water-hens and water-rails—these and many more have been busy here while you slept. And even now bright eyes are watching you, themselves unseen—those unsuspected eyes which are ever upon us as we follow the road on our daily round of duty or pleasure. Do they look on us with fear or wonder, with contempt or admiration, or with a mingling of all these feelings? That we can never know while the great barrier of silence stands between us and them. We blunder across their lives, doing them good and evil indiscriminately, but we understand them no more than they can understand us.

Now in winter, new birds come to our road. Great flocks of snow-buntings, circling and wheeling with marvellous precision, at one moment almost invisible—a dim, brown, moving mist—and the next flashing a thousand points of silver to the level rays of the wintry sun. Scores of greenfinches, which we never see in summer, rise from the road edges to circle a little way and settle again. The “spink spink” of the chaffinch, also unknown to us in summer, may now be heard; fieldfares spring chuckling through the air far overhead, and red-winged thrushes hop among the stubbles. Down this shallow pass between the low hills come in the gloaming the lines of the wild swans, flying from the upland lochs to the sea. Their trumpet call rings far through the frosty air, and as we hear them there stir within us vague thoughts and dreams of the white north whence they came. As if answering the thought, the wet road shines with a new, faint, unearthly light, as flickering up the northern sky come the pale shifting streamers of the aurora borealis.

Of the human life that pulses intermittently along our road there is not space now to write. Boy and girl, youth and maiden, man and woman, day by day, year in, year out, they follow the winding line, till for each in turn the day comes when it leads them to the kirkyard or to the sea, and the roads of Orcady know them no more.

DUNCAN J. ROBERTSON.
(_“Longman’s Magazine.” By permission._)

A LOCH IN ORCADY.

It is one among many, in an island where the lochs lie scattered like fragments of the sky fallen among the hills—one among many, and one of the least known of them all. On it the fisherman casts no fly, or casts it in vain, for fish have never prospered in its waters. It can never be an ideal trout loch, for it is not fed, like its sister lochs, by the innumerable small burns that channel our low hills. One surface-fed streamlet indeed flows into it, a streamlet hardly worthy of the courtesy-title it bears; but for the most part its waters are drawn from the secret sources of the springs.

Its placid surface mirrors no hillsides purple with heather and green with waving fern, but from its margin the land rolls back in low billows, squared with fields that year by year darken under the plough and smile again in due season with the homely crops of the isles. Yet the little loch has charms of its own for those who know it—charms that its wilder and more romantic sisters cannot boast. Not a quarter of a mile from its western shore the Atlantic billows boom and thunder upon the cliffs, or roll in, great and green, to burst and spread in a whirling smother of foam upon the sands; and the quiet of the inland water is thrice welcome to eye and ear when these are dazzled and wearied by the ceaseless turmoil and tumult of the sea.

The valley in which lies the loch runs down to a deeply curved bay, swept and scoured out by the sea, where there is a breach in the great cliff rampart that guards our island’s western coast. Up this valley the wind has, through the ages, heaped a huge sandhill which rolls and ripples under its greensward down to the lip of the bay. Between the sand and the clay lies the loch, narrowed by the rising slope of sand that forms its northern bank.

At its eastern end is the germ of a village. A little shop, a post office, the long, low building which was a school before these days of school boards—these and a few cottages stand between the loch and the sunrise. Close to the water’s edge runs the highroad leading from a steep little seaport town, away through the quiet country, luring men to the sea and the great world of adventure beyond it. For with us isles-folk the tune that sings itself in the dreams of youth is not “Over the _hills_,” but “Over the _seas_ and far away.”

Along the northern shore, as close as may be to the water, runs another road—a road that leads to the kirk and the kirkyaird, and, incidentally, to the laird’s house. Yet because men, who made the road, must preserve an apparent sobriety and straightness of purpose, while Nature, who laid the line between land and water, need care nothing for her reputation, there runs between the road and the water a grassy margin. Here it is of the narrowest, and there it spreads out into miniature capes and peninsulas, where teal love to rest in the early morning, and rabbits come down to nibble the juicy water-plants long before man is afoot.

1. Skaill, Sandwick. 2. Binscarth. 3. Hall of Tankerness. 4. Westness, Rousay. 5. Holodyke, Harray.]

On the other side of the road the sandbank rises steep and green, a cliff of sandy sward sometimes attaining a height of full twenty feet. There the rabbits have their outposts. The green turf is splotched with the scattered sand from their burrows, and their white tails bob and flutter among the mounds they have made.

This is but the flank of the sandhill. Farther to the west, where man has never ploughed the sand, the loch is bounded by low, green links which swarm with rabbits. Bunkers and hazards there are to delight the soul of the golfer; yet hither that lover of links comes but seldom. The rabbits and the birds have it all to themselves, save where some little fields are set amid the links, and one or two houses of men.

Out of the turf of the bank projects a great stone, gray with lichen, and looking like the broken and petrified shaft of a mighty spear flung by one of the giants who of old waged a titanic warfare from isle to isle. Yet if a vague legend be true, the great stone is rather some bewitched living creature waiting the breaking of spells; for, so they say, there is a certain night in each year when it leaves its sandy bed and goes down to quench its thirst in the waters of the loch.

Yet the birds do not fear it. The wheatear jerks and bobs upon its topmost edge as we gaze and wonder how and when he came hither. Then with a flirt of his tail he is off to repeat his cheerful, tuneless call upon the nearest mound.

At its western end the loch widens and is divided into two little bays, a bay of sand and a bay of mud. In the more northerly of these bays there is being fought a long skirmish in the great, slow, endless war between land and water; and now victory leans towards the land, for the sand, blowing up day by day from the sea, settles here in the shallow water and drives it back.

Twenty years ago, between the loch’s edge and the links lay a field of shining yellow sand, to which the golden plover were wont to come down in great flocks of an autumn evening. Once the sand had established itself, the advance of grass and flowers began. Pushing forward a vanguard of reeds and rushes, they pursued their steady march down to the water’s edge; and now, where the sands were, is a grassy meadow, starred in its season with the pale blooms of the grass of Parnassus, its landward side meshed by rabbit tracks, the tiny rivulets winding through it beset with scented beds of wild peppermint and haunted by snipe, and its outer margin giving cover to duck and coots, to water-hens and dabchicks.

There are little islets beyond the meadow, some grass-grown, some still of bare sand, and a little sandy beach at one place, where redshanks and ringed plover run in the shallows. Thither too come the dunlin and the sandpiper, and rarer birds—knots and ruffs, greenshanks with their triple call, and whimbrels, the “summer whaups” of the isles-folk. Here you may wade, knee-deep in clear water, to the very outer edge of the reeds and find all the way a footing on hard sand. And the reeds will yield their secrets. On this heaped pyramid the little grebe is hatching her eggs, and that reedy platform is a coot’s nest. Or at a later season you may chance, if the Fates be kind, to catch a glimpse of scurrying dusky ducklings vanishing among the green stems, while their mother flutters off, making-believe to have a broken wing.

A wide, shallow ditch divides the marsh from the fields on the south, and where the ditch ends an old stone wall begins, marches a little way towards the water, and then breaks off to run round the bay of mud, and so up along the south shore of the loch. Where it turns off, this wall seems at one time to have meditated an advance into the water, and in its retreat has left a tumbled straggle of stones which runs out along a little cape. Here at twilight come great gray herons, shouting hoarsely, to sit gazing into the waters. Here, too, curlews are wont to gather, keeping well out of gunshot from wall or ditch.

The southern bay—the bay of mud—holds a great reed-bed, where shelter many water-fowl. The swans breed there, with coot and water-hen and grebe. There, too, come the wild duck after their kind, mallard and teal, pochard and scaup, golden-eye and merganser. But the bottom there is muddy and treacherous, and it is a very doubtful pleasure to follow the wild-fowl through their haunts in the reeds. About the inner margin of the reed-bed, among the grassy tussocks and muddy pools, is a favourite feeding-ground for snipe. There, too, the pewits gather, and gulls of many kinds, while redshanks rise screaming from the water’s edge.

Out in the middle of the loch is a small islet or holm. This islet is nested on every summer by a colony of black-headed gulls. There, too, the terns breed, and there the great white-breasted cormorants, which come up after the eels of the loch, sit with black wings widespread in the sunlight. The circling, screaming cloud of gulls which hovers over the islet is a sight never to be forgotten, and the very thought of the sound of their calling brings back those wonderful summer days when all the world was young, and a brighter sun shone in a bluer sky.

There are men scattered here and there about the world who look back to the loch and its environs as to an earthly paradise; and ever in their dreams the loch, the links, the shore are but a beloved and beautiful background to one central figure—a boy with a gun. The seasons may change and mingle, as seasons do in dreams, but the boy treads again the familiar places, and renews his old disappointments and triumphs. Each man sees different pictures and a different boy, but a boy with a gun is always there.

It is strange to think that there may be other boys to-day who hold the loch and all its pleasant places in fee as we hold it by the tenure of our memories. Stranger still to think of all the vanished boys, back through the years, the generations, the centuries, who have loved our little loch, hunted by its margins, and dreamed strange dreams among the sunny hollows of the links. Could they return to-day, islesman born, Norseman, Pict, or Scot, they would find many changes; for man is ever busy improving and altering the face of his kindly Mother Earth: yet the loch they would see but little changed.

The waters shine as of old under the same sunlight, or ruffle into miniature white-capped billows with the autumn winds, and by night they mirror the unchanging stars. The splendour of the sandhills in summer, when they robe themselves like kings with the purple and gold of crowfoot and thyme; the hot scent of wild peppermint crushed under foot; the trumpet call of the wild swans ringing through the frosty air on winter nights; the pipings and flutings of the water-fowl among the summer reeds; the screaming of falcons and croaking of ravens from the cliffs; and overhead, from dawn to dusk, in the long days of the northern summer, the myriad music of the larks;—all these things they would find unchanged. And though the little fences and fields, the roads, the byres and barns of men have changed the nearer scene, yet man has not altered the “beloved outline of familiar hills,” nor silenced the deep music of the eternal sea.

DUNCAN J. ROBERTSON.
(_“Longman’s Magazine.” By permission._)

AMONG THE KELPERS.

In the end of March and the beginning of April, when the isles rise brown from a steel-gray, wind-ruffled sea, their bare unloveliness is veiled by pale blue smoke-drifts, which cast over the low, sloping shores a certain charm of remoteness and of mystery. Later in the year, when the summer seas are only less blue than the skies above them, and every island shines like an emerald, white jets and spirals as from many altars rise round all the shores. For spring and summer are the kelper’s seasons, and long, dry days, which scorch and wither the young crops, are welcome to the crofter who has secured a good stock of “tangles” in winter and a big share in a “brook of ware,” now that “burning weather” has come.

Until recently no kelp was burned after Lammas—that is, August 2—but of late years, when the season has been dry, the fires have been burned even so late as October.

The kelper’s year may be reckoned from mid-November. Then he is paid for his work in the year that is ended. Then the gales sweep up from north or west, tearing from its deep sea-bed the red-ware, of which the long supple stems are known to the islesmen as “tangles.” Should the wind freshen to a gale during the night, the diligent kelper is up and out before the first glimmer of dawn. Buffeted by the wind and lashed by the stinging spray, he peers through the darkness, watching for those shadows against the white surf of the breaking waves which he knows to be rolling masses of seaweed and wrack. He is armed with a “pick,” an implement resembling a very strong hayfork, but with the prongs set, like those of a rake, at right angles to the handle. With this pick, struggling often mid-thigh deep in the rushing waters, he grapples the tumbling seaweed and drags it up the beach, out of reach of the waves. For the wind may change, and the “brook,” as he calls a drift of weed, if not secured at once, may be carried out to sea again, or even worse, to some other strand where it will be lost to him. Of course, the winds and waves often do this work alone, and pile the tangles in huge, glittering rolls along the beaches.

When the brook is fairly on the strand, the work of the kelper is only begun. He has to carry the tangles from the beach to the seabanks above, in carts where that is possible, and where no carts can pass, then laboriously on hand-barrows. I know of one strand on which the great gale of November 1893 landed a brook of tangles which kept the kelpers busy for three months. Once on the banks, the tangles are stacked in great heaps on “steiths,” or foundations built of sea-rounded stones arranged in such fashion as to give free ingress to the air. There they lie till spring, when by the action of wind and sun they have become hard, dry, and wrinkled—brands ready for the burning.

1. Trumbland, Rousay. 2. Graemeshall, Holm. 3. Melsetter. 4. Balfour Castle. 5. Smoogro, Orphir.]

Only the tangles can be dried in winter; but the softer parts—the foliage, one may call it—of the red-ware is not lost, but goes to manure the fields, and until a sufficient quantity has been obtained for that purpose none is made into kelp.

Each proprietor in the islands has right, generally under a charter from the Crown, to the weed cast up on his shores. Each ware-strand, or beach where drift-weed comes to land, is set apart for a certain number of tenants on the estate to which it belongs, and each brook of ware as it comes ashore is divided among these tenants, usually in proportion to their rents. The general custom is, that it is decided by lot from which portion of the brook each man shall draw his share. The middle is generally considered the best part, as there the weed is in its greatest bulk, and less rolled and beaten by the sea than at the ends; but it may happen that one end is near the only part of the beach where the ware can be carried up, and then the man who draws his lot there is saved much labour.

The sharing of the ware is a fertile seed of dispute and an inexhaustible source of quarrel. The “kelp grieve,” or overseer who acts for the proprietor, generally settles all disputes; and each kelper, with the aid of his family, carries up his share of the brook, and spreads it on the drying-greens. These are most frequently links that know not cleek or driver, and upon them in the early morning the ware is spread, as thinly as may be, to be dried on the short, crisp grass by sun and wind.

To the man whose daily life is built about with stone and lime, the summer work of the kelpers shines tempting as the waters to Tantalus. He thinks not of that kelper in winter, plunging and struggling with the slippery tangles amid the turmoil of the surf, but dreams only of quiet summer days and the gray glimmer of sunlit waters seen through a veil of drifting smoke.

The links roll down in long, green billows from the ruins of an old feudal castle, where the brown rabbit is the door-ward, and in whose towers the starling nests unscared—roll down to a little bay, where the long waves of the Atlantic come up unceasingly, curving in great, green arches, before they break in thunder of white foam on the brown rocks and yellow sand. Where the grass is thin and scant the sand shines through, and this makes a bad drying-green, as kelp is of less value when mixed with sand. But here is a short, close turf, nibbled upon by rabbits, a racing-ground for lambs, where the thrift or sea-pink meets the meadow-clover, and thyme and crowfoot break in ripples of purple and gold to sweeten all the summer air.

Than this a better drying-green cannot be found. On one side of the bay a long stretch of flat rocks runs down from the grass to the sea, and they too are utilized, when tides allow, to dry the seaweed. Here, in May and June, the whole air tingles with the song of larks innumerable. Long before sunrise, before the last stars have faded in the west, they are up, weaving a magical garment of song over all the green land. All day and far into the dim twilight that is our northern night they sing without ceasing. Larks are everywhere. In that tuft of grass at our feet is a nest with four of the dusky-brown eggs which hold next year’s music. There, in the ditch by the roadside, is another nest, from which the featherless young raise feeble necks to gape for food, showing their yellow tongues with the three black spots, which children here are told will appear on the tongue of that child who takes the laverock’s nest. Again, a fledgeling, speckled like a toad, rises suddenly from the clover and flies a few yards, while its anxious parents circle close overhead with little tremulous bursts of song, or flutter with trailing wing along the grass.

That pretence of a broken wing, which now seems to be an instinct, must surely at first have been arrived at by a process of reasoning. There must have been long since a broken wing, and a boy, or a dog, or a snake to chase the fluttering sufferer, and some wise observer among the mother-birds of that forgotten day to see and make a note of the chase, and with the heart-leap of a happy inspiration to find in it a new method of protecting her eggs and tender young, and to hand down the lesson she learned to our blithesome bird of the wilderness.

But this summer world, so thrilled with lark music, is not held by the lark alone in fee. From every dry-stone wall young starlings are calling, “Chirr! chirr! chirr!” and the old birds hurry to and fro between their nests and the brown fields, soon to wave with oats and bere, where they gather the insects and grubs their younglings love. Their bronze feathers gleam in the sunshine as they pass, and at their harsh note of warning as they see strangers near their homes the tumult of the young birds among the stones is instantly hushed. The farmer owes these cheerful and busy birds a heavy debt of gratitude, as the number of his insect enemies which they destroy is incalculable.

On the smooth turf the dried ware is piled in conical heaps, like giant molehills, to preserve it from the heavy night dews and from possible rain, and among the brown hillocks the wheatear bobs up and down, flirting his tail and repeating his cheerful “Tchk! tchk! chek-o! chek-o!” At times the rapture of summer and of his love inspire him with a vain desire of song. Up he goes, as if he were in very deed the skylark he takes as his model, uttering harsh and unmelodious notes—a feeble travesty of the golden rain of song that falls from the blue above him. But his flight extends upwards only a yard or two, and he sinks down again, chuckling to himself, as pleased with his song as any minor poet.

As the day wears down to afternoon the corncrakes begin to call from the young grass, and all night long they answer each other from field to field. Speak of them to the kelpers, and everywhere one hears the same story of their hibernation in old walls. That landrails migrate has been proved beyond question, but equally beyond question does it seem that some few sleep out the winter here. Any kelper will tell how he, or if not he himself then some one of his neighbours, once in winter found a corncrake in some old dyke, to all appearance dead. He carried it home, and, laying it before the fire, watched the death-like trance slowly melt into life and motion.

As to the winter sleep I can only speak at second-hand; but I have seen the birds in summer run like rats into the dry-stone dykes with which our crofters so love to encumber and adorn their land. That these dykes can be meant only for ornament is evident to the most casual observer in this land where ponies, cows, sheep, ay, and the very geese, are ofttimes tethered by the leg.

Yet if the dykes serve no other purpose, they provide nesting-places for the starling and the wheatear, for the rock-pipit and the sparrow, which save the crops of the crofter from destruction by grub and fly. Mice also shelter in them, and rats in those islands where rats are found. In the happy isle of which I write no rat can live. They come ashore time and again from vessels touching at the little pier near the village, but where they go or what fate awaits them none can tell—only this, that they are seen no more on the green lap of the world.

But we have left the ware too long in the sun. Should rain come, the kelper sees much of his profit melt away, for the salt which it causes to crystallize on the dried weed wastes, and what is left makes inferior kelp. All along the edges of the drying-greens are the burning pits or kilns—hollows for all the world like huge plovers’ nests in shape, lined with flat blue stones from the beach. They are about two feet deep and some five feet in diameter.

When the ware is ready to be burned a smouldering peat or a handful of lighted straw is laid in the bottom of the pit. Over this dry ware is piled, slowly at first till the fire catches, and ever more rapidly as the red core of smouldering flame waxes.

Sometimes ware and tangles are burned separately, but more frequently the kelper burns them together. The tangles make the stronger and better kelp. The pit is filled, and the ware or tangles are piled on till the mass rises two feet or more above the level of the earth. Then for six or eight hours it must be carefully watched and tended, and ever new fuel piled on to prevent a burst of flame. When tangles are being burnt alone, the kelper finishes off his pit with dried ware, as otherwise the tougher knots and lumps of the latest burned tangles would not be thoroughly consumed.

Each pit holds about half a ton, and takes the best part of a summer day to burn, the actual time depending on the state of the wind and the condition of the weed. When at last it smoulders low, it is “raked” before being left to cool. One man takes a spade with a very small blade and a handle fully seven feet long, the lower half being of iron; two other workers, as often women as men, have “rakes,” implements not unlike a rough caricature of a golfer’s iron, but with handles as long as that of the spade. With these rakes the kelp is mixed and smoothed, while the spadesman turns it up from the bottom of the pit. Hard work it is and hot, great jets of flame shooting out under the spade from what looks like gray crumbling earth mingled with black ashes and white quartz; for the kelp assumes so many colours and forms that to describe it accurately were impossible. As the kelper turns and tosses the glowing mass on a warm June evening, he knows he has come near the end of that labour which began in the gray winter dawn, when the rolls of red-weed lashed about him amid the roaring backwash of the waves.

When the kelp has been sufficiently mixed, the pit is levelled and smoothed over, all the outlying ashes are swept in with a handful of dry ware, and it is left to cool and harden. Then, as the kelpers turn homewards, the white sea fog creeps up by the rocks where all day long the kelp smoke drifted.

Such is the work of the kelper, and such the places of his toil. An easy and a pleasant life it is compared to that of the men who labour in the bowels of the earth or in the great manufactories of smoke-darkened cities. He has the green turf under his foot and the clear sky over him, the sea makes music for him unceasingly, and the salt winds bring him health and strength. The furred and feathered folks share his land with him, and gather their harvest on the same shores. As he goes to his work in the morning, through the silver mists of dawn, a flock of blue rock-doves with great clatter of wings flash off through the clear air. The redshank pipes shrilly at him from the copestone of the nearest wall, and over the ploughed fields where their precious eggs are lying the pewits wheel and scream. “Pewit-weet! pee-weet!”—their note has in it for the isles folk, to whom the cuckoo is but a name, the very voice of spring and hope and love. The ringed plover stands motionless on his three-toed yellow feet, calling with his sweet, low note, and invisible save to the keenest eye until he makes a little run and betrays himself. Linnets swing and sing on the swaying thistles and among the heather. On the blue waters of the bay a little fleet of eider ducks is afloat, and their curious, hoarse, barking chuckle rolls up over the waters. Perhaps a seal raises his round head, shining like a bottle, and gazes with mild eyes at the men upon the beaches; while overhead gulls and terns swing past, cleaving the strong air with careless wing. Far out to sea the white gannets hawk to and fro. Suddenly one poises in mid-air for a moment, then drops like a stone into the water, a fountain of white spray flashing up in the sunlight as he disappears. Your kelper will tell you how in his younger days he caught the solan geese by means of a herring fastened to a board and sunk a few inches below the surface of the water. The bird sees the fish, poises, and swoops down only to drive his mighty bill through the board and break his neck.

Nearer shore than the gannets the kittiwakes are fishing, when suddenly there glides among them a dusky skua, who forces the luckiest fisher to drop his spoil, which the ravager catches in mid-air and bears off. A true pirate of the air is the skua, and reminds me always of those low, dark feluccas so dreadful and so dear to the sailor on the high seas of romance. Far up in the blue ether a peregrine falcon sweeps round, circling wide on motionless, outspread wings, or a raven goes croaking from the cliffs to seek a prey, as he may have done for years unnumbered. If the tradition of his longevity may be believed, that dark corbie who flies croaking over the kelpers toiling in the morning sunlight, and sees the white smoke rise from their harmless kilns—what fires may he not have seen upon these beaches, and what strange smoke of sacrifice go up from forgotten altars to the unchanging heavens? Give him even a shorter lease of life than that which tradition assigns him, and still he may remember the blazing beacons leap up to carry from isle to isle a warning of the coming of Norse invaders. Allow him only two short centuries, and yet he must have watched the smoke of many a burning homestead in the days when the followers of the “Wee, wee German Lairdie” avenged their private wrongs in the name of their king. The older men among the kelpers still tell tales of the Jacobite lairds who lay hid like conies in the clefts of the rocks till these calamities were overpast.

The old stories—the folk-tales of the isles—linger fragmentary among the kelping people. One may hear from them how all the fairies were seen to leave some island riding on tangles, and how they all went down in the windy firth, never to be seen again of mortals. Here is a man, bowed and crippled by rheumatism, who will tell how he was shot in the back by a “hill-ane” when ploughing. He saw not his assailant, but only the shadow of him on the earth. Another old man remembers having his side hurt as a boy, and going to a “wise woman” to be cured. She told him he had been “forespoken”—that is, bewitched—by a woman then dead, and made him drink water mixed with earth from the “fore-speaker’s” grave. She then put a hoop covered with a sheep’s skin on his head, a basin of water on that, and poured melted lead through the head of a key into the water, giving the patient a piece of the lead in the form of a heart as a charm. The cure wrought by this modern Norna was not, however, effectual.

There are many quaint and even beautiful turns of speech among these hard-working crofters. Their faces shine on my memory red like setting suns through the white reek of the kelp pits. Here is one whose fathers fled from Perthshire after “the ’45,” and who thinks that some day he would like to go back to see the old place again—the “old place” which none of his have looked upon for one hundred and forty years! He toils night and day in summer cultivating his croft, fishing for lobsters, and making kelp. His rent is perhaps seven or eight pounds. Books, you would think, must be unknown to him; yet he will tell you he has “always been a great reader of Sir Walter Scott’s works,” and under the spell of that mighty wizard his hard life has budded and wreathed itself with romance.

At the next pit is a man of a very different type. Quiet and slow, this man has led an honest life, with an eye ever to the main chance. Pressed once for an answer to some question important to the settling of a kelp dispute, after vain attempts at evasion, he burst out, “Gie me time, Mr. Blank, to wind up me mind.”

Across the bay the pits are watched by an old bachelor—a _rara avis_ among the kelpers—a little, clean-shaven, mouse-like man, who has “money in the bank.” He holds a croft where his ancestors have dwelt longer than the memory of man extends. The peat fire smouldering on his hearth has, to his certain knowledge, burned unquenched for two hundred years. How much longer ago it was kindled tradition recordeth not. Every night his last work is to “rest” that precious fire, and every morning it claims his earliest care. All his life he has toiled, gathering a harvest both from land and sea, and a harvest of content and happiness as well, such as few crofters know how to reap. “When I come oot on a fine simmer morning at four o’clock wi’ never anither reek but me ain, I’m laird o’ a’ the land as far as I can see.” He has the secret of the lordship of the eye, which can give to a penniless man more profit of the pleasant earth than to the greatest lord of land among them all.

Look at this fellow, gaunt, black, and shaggy; he might be one of _Punch’s_ Scotch elders. Asked if he remembered some event of thirty years ago—“No, sir,” he said. “Ye see, I wasna at hame then; I was divin’ in the face o’ the sea for a livin’.” He had been a fisherman, and quite naturally chose to say so in this poetic phrase.

These are only a few from among the many typical kelpers whose friendship I am proud to own. But if the types among them are many and various, in one thing they are all alike—their capacity for hard work. That work does not cease with the smoothing over of the smouldering pits. When the kelp has cooled it is broken up and lifted out of the pit in great lumps which look like gray slag, with streaks of white, blue, and brown running through it. Should it be exposed to rain its quality is much deteriorated, and to avoid this danger storehouses are built by the lairds, to which the kelp is carted. The kelp grieve weighs each man’s quantity as it is brought in, and he is paid a fixed sum per ton. When a sufficient quantity is gathered in the store a vessel is chartered, and where there is a pier the kelp is carted alongside. In islands where there is no pier it must be taken off in small boats. The kelpers themselves provide the carriage. Then the sails are spread, and the produce of the year’s work is carried off to chemical works far over sea, where, by processes unknown to me, iodine is extracted from it. The kelper receives about two pounds ten shillings for each ton of kelp he manufactures, and the importance and benefit of the industry to these crofters cannot be overestimated. I have known a man paying a rent of eight pounds receive thirty-four pounds for his kelp in one year. Nor is the actual price he receives the only benefit the crofter derives from kelp. Were it not for the share of the profit falling to the laird, he too often could not, in these days, afford to assist his tenants in improving either their houses or their land. On the whole, then, the kelper’s lot is not an unhappy one. His work lies in pleasant places, and it is eminently healthy, and his days, as a rule, are long in the land and on the sea.

DUNCAN J. ROBERTSON.
(_“Longman’s Magazine.” By permission._)

A WHALE-HUNT IN ORKNEY.

“Whales in the bay so soon in the season!” exclaimed the clergyman, starting to his feet. “Come away,” he continued, “you have yet another day before you; we imitate the great of old, who entertained their guests with tournaments.”

The manse garden commanded a fine view of Mill Bay, and on rushing out into the open air we saw a long dark line of boats, some with sails and some with oars, stretching across the blue waters of the broad voe, upwards of a mile from the shore. The practised eye of my host caught the gleam of dorsal fins in front of the boats, and we immediately hurried down to the beach, scarcely drawing breath till we stood on the bank above the sands of Mill Bay. The inmates of the neighbouring cottages had already assembled in eager groups on the grassy downs, and other islanders still came flocking from remoter farms and cabins to the shore. Several of the men were armed with harpoons, while farm lads flourished over their shoulders formidable three-pronged “graips” and long-hafted hayforks.

Many of the matrons had their heads encased in woollen “buities,” and this peculiar headdress imparted a singular picturesqueness to the excited groups on the sea-bank. Other boats with skilled hands on board put off from various points along the shore, and the fleet of small craft in the bay was rapidly increased by the arrival of fresh yawls. The crowd of urchins on the beach, who “thee’d” and “thou’d” each other like little Quakers in the Orcadian vernacular, cheered lustily as boat after boat hove in view round the headlands, swelling the fleet of whalers.

The line of boats was now little more than a quarter of a mile from the beach. The bottle-nosed or ca’ing whales, showing their snouts and dorsal fins at intervals, seemed to advance slowly, throwing out skirmishers and cautiously feeling their way. As the beach was smooth and sandy, with a gentle slope, the boatmen in pursuit were endeavouring to drive the “school” into the shallows, where harpoons, hayforks, and other weapons could be used to advantage.

The excitement of the spectators on land increased as the long line of the sea-monsters drew closer inshore. From the boats there came wafted across the water the sound of beating pitchers and rattling rowlocks, and the hoarse chorus of shouting voices. This babel of noises, which the water mellowed into a wild war-chant with cymbal accompaniment, was meant to scare the “school” and hasten the stranding of the whales. But an incident occurred that changed the promising aspect of affairs, turned the tide of battle, and gave new animation to the scene.

Eager to participate in the expected slaughter, two or three farm lads, whose movements had escaped notice, suddenly shot off from the shore in a skiff rowing right in front of the advancing line. The glitter and splash of oars alarmed the leaders, and the entire “school,” seized with a sudden panic, wheeled round and dashed at headlong speed into the line of pursuing boats.

A shout rose from the shore as the flash of tail-fins, the heaving of the boats, and the rapid strokes of the boatmen showed all too plainly the escape of the whales, and the success of their victorious charge. Away beyond the broken line of the fleet they plunged in wild stampede, striking the blue waters into spangles of silver foam. Arches of spray, blown into the air at wide distances apart, served to indicate the size of the “school” and the speed of the fugitives.

“Whew!” exclaimed my reverend friend, “that was a gallant charge, and deserved to succeed; but I hope our brave lads will yet put salt upon their tails. The boatmen have toiled hard for their share of the fish, and great would be the pity if the whales made right off to the open sea. It is not every day that a ‘drave’ a hundred strong visits our shores, and there they go round the head of Odness in full career.”

A commotion among the crowd at a short distance along the beach here arrested our attention. The exciting spectacle of the grand charge and wild flight of the whales had so absorbed our gaze that we failed to notice a mishap which was fortunately more ludicrous than alarming. The three youths who foolishly rowed off from the shore and caused the stampede had suffered for their rashness by getting their skiff capsized when the sea-monsters wheeled round to the charge. On gaining the outskirts of the crowd, we found the three luckless whale-hunters already beached. Bonnetless, dripping, and disconsolate, they were the objects of mirth to some, of commiseration to others.

At last they made off, and we immediately set out in the direction of Odness to catch a sight of the whales, which had quite disappeared from the bay. The boats had turned in pursuit when the “school” escaped, and they were now making all haste to double the headland. On gaining the top of the cliffs, we were glad to observe that the whales, recovered from their fright, drifted leisurely along the coast, giving way at times to eccentric gambols.

“All right!” cried my friend, handing me back my binocular; “they are coasting away famously round Lamb Head, and they are almost certain to take a snooze in Rousholm Bay, which is the best whale-trap I know in Orkney. Let us sit down here on the top of the cliffs till the boats come abreast, and then we shall take a nearer way to Rousholm than following the coast.”