The Lost Pibroch, and other Sheiling Stories

The wood opened, the hunting-road bent about the hill-face to give a level that the eye might catch the country spread below. Loch Finne stretched far, from Ardno to French Foreland, a glassy field, specked with one sail off Creaggans. When the company came to a stand, Calum Dubh tossed his head to send the hair from his eyes, and looked at what lay below. The Scaurnoch broke at his feet, the grey rock-face falling to a depth so deep that weary mists still hung upon the sides, jagged here and there by the top of a fir-tree. The sun, behind the Dun, gave the last of her glory to the Cowal Hills; Hell’s Glen filled with wheeling mists; Ben Ime, Ben Vane, and Ben Arthur crept together and held princely converse on the other side of the sea.

All in a daze of weariness and thinking the Diarmaids stood, and looked and listened, and the curlews were crying bitter on the shore.

“Oh, haste ye, lads, or it’s not Carnus for us to-night,” cried Niall Mor. “We have business before us, and long’s the march to follow. The secret, black fellow!”

Calum Dubh laughed, and spat in a bravado over the edge of the rock.

“Come, fool; if we have not the word from you before the sun’s off Sithean Sluaidhe, your sleep this night is yonder,” and he pointed at the pit below.

Calum laughed the more. “If it was hell itself,” said he, “I would not save my soul from it.”

“Look, man, look! the Sithean Sluaidhe’s getting black, and any one of ye can save the three yet. I swear it on the cross of my knife.”

Behind the brothers, one, John-Without-Asking, stood, with a gash on his face, eager to give them to the crows below.

A shiver came to Uileam’s lips; he looked at his father with a questioning face, and then stepped back a bit from the edge, making to speak to the tall man of Chamis.

Calum saw the meaning, and spoke fast and thick.

“Stop, stop,” said he; “it’s a trifle of a secret, after all, and to save life ye can have it.”

Art took but a little look at his father’s face, then turned round on Shira Glen and looked on the hills where the hunting had many a time been sweet. “Maam no more,” said he to himself; “but here’s death in the hero’s style!”

“I thought you would tell it,” laughed Niall Mor. “There was never one of your clan but had a tight grip of his little life.”

“Ay!” said Calum Dubh; “but it’s my secret. I had it from one who made me swear on the holy steel to keep it; but take me to Carnus, and I’ll make you the heather-ale.”

“So be’t, and – ”

“But there’s this in it, I can look no clansmen nor kin in the face after telling it, so Art and Uileam must be out of the way first.”

“Death, MacKellar?”

“That same.”

Uileam shook like a leaf, and Art laughed, with his face still to Shira, for he had guessed his father’s mind.

“Faith!” said Niall Mor, “and that’s an easy thing enough,” and he nodded to John-Without-Asking.

The man made stay nor tarry. He put a hand on each son’s back and pushed them over the edge to their death below. One cry came up to the listening Diarmaids, one cry and no more – the last gasp of a craven.

“Now we’ll take you to Camus, and you’ll make us the ale, the fine ale, the cream of rich heather-ale,” said Niall Mor, putting a knife to the thongs that tied MacKellar’s arms to his side.

With a laugh and a fast leap Calum Dubh stood back on the edge of the rock again.

“Crook-mouths, fools, pigs’ sons! did ye think it?” he cried. “Come with me and my sons and ye’ll get ale, ay, and death’s black wine, at the foot of Scaurnoch.” He caught fast and firm at John-Without-Asking, and threw himself over the rock-face. They fell as the scart dives, straight to the dim sea of mist and pine-tip, and the Diarmaids threw themselves on their breasts to look over. There was nothing to see of life but the crows swinging on black feathers; there was nothing to hear but the crows scolding.

Niall Mor put the bonnet on his head and said his first and last friendly thing of a foe.

“Yon,” said he, “had the heart of a man!”

BOBOON’S CHILDREN

FROM Knapdale to Lorn three wandering clans share the country between them, and of the three the oldest and the greatest are the swart Macdonalds, children of the Old Boboon.

You will come on them on Wade’s roads, – jaunty fellows, a bit dour in the look, and braggart; or girls with sloe-eyes, tall and supple, not with a flat slouching foot on the soil, but high in the instep, bounding and stag-sure. At their head will be a long lean old man on crutches – John Fine Macdonald —

Old Boboon, the father and head of the noblest of wandering tribes.

“Sir,” will Boboon say to you, “I am the fellow you read of in books as the teller of Fingalian tales; wilt hear one of them for a poor Saxon shilling, or wilt buy my lures for the fish? Or perhaps a display of scholarly piping by my daughter’s son – the gallant scamp! – who has carried arms for his king?”

If one must have the truth, the piping is bad piping, but the fish-lures and the tales are the best in the world. You will find some of the tales in the writings of Iain Og of Isla – such as “The Brown Bear of the Green Glen”; but the best are to hear as Boboon minds them when he sits with you on the roadside or on the heather beside the evening fire, when the brown fluffy eagles bark at the mist on Braevallach. Listen well to them, for this person has the gift. He had it from his father, who had it from his father, who had it from a mother, who, in deep trouble and disease, lay awake through long nights gathering thoughts as healthy folks gather nuts – a sweet thing enough from a sour husk.

And if time were your property (as it should be the portion of every wiselike man), you might hear many tales from Old Boboon, but never the tale of his own three chances.

It happened once upon a time that the captain in the town took a notion to make Boboon into a tame house-man instead of a creature of the woods and highways. He took him first by himself and clapped him into a kilt of his own tartan eight yards round the buttocks, full pleated, with hose of fine worsted, and a coat with silver buttons. He put a pickle money in his sporran, and gave him a place a little way down his table. The feeding was high and the work was to a wanderer’s fancy; for it was but whistling to a dog now and then, chanting a stave, or telling a story, or roaming through the garden behind the house.

“Ho, ho!” said Boboon, “am not I the sturdy fellow come to his own?” and about the place he would go with a piper’s swagger, switching the grass and shrubs with a withie as he went, in the way gentlemen use riding-sticks.

But when Inneraora town lay in the dark of the winter night, and the captain’s household slept, Boboon would hear his clan calling on him outside the wall.

“Boboon! oh, Boboon! old hero! come and collogue with your children.”

He would go to the wall, which was lower on the inside than the out (and is, indeed, the wall of old Quinten, where a corps of Campbells, slaughtered by Inverlochy dogs, lie under a Latin stone), and he would look down at his friends running about like pole-cats in the darkness, in their ragged kilts and trews, their stringy hair tossing in the wind. The women themselves would be there, with the bairns whining on their backs.

“Ay! ay! this is you, my hearty folk!” he would say; “glad am I to see you and smell the wood-fire reek off you. How is it on the road?”

“From here we have not moved since you left us, John Fine. We are camped in the Blue Quarry, and you never came near your children and friends.”

“God! and here’s the one that’s sorry for that same. But over the walls they will not let me. ‘If gentleman you would be,’ says the captain, ‘you must keep out of woods and off the highway.’”

“And you like it, Boboon?”

“Like it, heroes! But for the honour and ease of it, give me a fir-root fire in Glen Croe and a dinner of fuarag. It is not the day so much as the night. Lying in-by there on a posted-bed, I choke for the want of air, though the windows and doors are open wide.”

“Come away with us, Boboon; we have little lack with the fish, and few are our stories since you took to the town.”

“No, no, dears. Conan’s curse, and I tell you no! In this place there is comfort, and every day its own bellyful.”

“But the freedom outbye, John, old hero! Last night we had the bravest of fires; the sparks flew like birds among the Duke’s birches, the ground was snug and dry, and-”

“Begone! I tell ye no!”

“Listen! To-day we were among the white hares beyond the Beannan, thwacking the big fat fellows with our clubs. Such sport was not in all Albainn!”

“White hares!”

“White hares, old John! And Alasdair Beag has some new tunes since you left us – a piobaireachd he picked up from a Mull man.”