Kenneth McAlpine: A Tale of Mountain, Moorland and Sea

“Just a moment,” said Dugald, laying a hand on Kenneth’s shoulder. “Have you got your flute?”

“Yes.”

“Well, just give us a toot. If Nancy has company that’s no’ canny, it will give them time to bolt up the chimney. Sirs! Sirs!”

Kenneth laughed, put his flute together, and started a merry air.

“The Campbells are coming; hurrah, hurrah?” was the tune he played.

Dugald forgot his fear, and began to sing. The “twa dogs” forgot theirs, and began to dance and caper and bark, and in the very middle of this “rant” the cottage door opened, and Nancy herself appeared.

“Come in, come in, you twa daft laddies,” she cried, “or ’deed you’ll start Nancy hersel’ to dance, for as auld as she is. Come in; you’ll leave the dogs outside, winna ye, for fear o’ my poor cat?”

“Ay, Grannie,” said Dugald, “we’ll leave the dogs outside, and I’m thinkin’ neither o’ them would show face inside your door if you asked them e’er so kindly. My Shot there hasn’t forgotten the salute your cat gave him last time he came here. If you mind, Grannie, she jumped on his back and rode him a’ round the kail-yard, and never missed him a whack, till he flew out o’ the gate and ran helter-skelter o’er the moor. I dinna think your cat’s canny, Grannie.”

“What a beautifu’ nicht!” said Grannie; “but come in, laddies.”

“You’re sure you have no company?” said Dugald, still hesitating to enter.

“Come, ye stoopid loon,” she replied. “There’s nobody here but me and the cat. Sit doon. Tak’ a stool, Kennie, my bonnie boy.”

A bonnie boy? Yes, there was no denying it. Kenneth, our hero, was a bonnie boy, and gave promise of growing up into a fine handsome man.

His broad blue bonnet was usually worn pretty far back, but even had he worn it forward, I do not think it would have been possible for it to suppress the wealth of dark short curls that rose up over his broad brown brow. His cheeks had the tint that health, the winds, and the sun had given them. His lips were rosy, and when he laughed he showed a set of teeth even and white, and a merry twinkle went upwards and danced about his dark, dark eyes. But at all other times those eyes were somewhat dreamy withal. Such was Kenneth McAlpine, and it was probably that same dreamy, thoughtful look in his eyes that made him appear older than he really was, for he had not yet seen his thirteenth year.

But there was one other reason to account for Kenneth’s looking somewhat older than his years. He had already come through a good deal of grief.

His father had once been a prosperous crofter or small farmer. Not that the crofts in Glen Alva were very large or very wealthy, but, when well cultivated, the land was grateful and yielded up its fruits abundantly.

Then the sea was not very far away, only a few miles, and fish therein were abundant and to be had only for the catching.

It was the broad Atlantic Ocean whose waves broke and thundered ceaselessly on the rocky shore just beyond the hills yonder. Only two years ago – what long, long years they had seemed to Kenneth! – this lad had used to spend many an hour by the seashore. Indeed, every hour that he could spare from school, or from home, he spent with the ocean.

I am quite right in saying with the ocean instead of by the sea, for Kenneth looked upon the sea as a friend and as a companion; he used to speak with it and talk to it; it seemed to understand him, and he it. What baskets of glorious fish he used to get from the sea! and what dozens of splendid steel blue lobsters and lordly crabs!

Kenneth used to fish from the rocks on days when he could not borrow old Duncan Reed’s cobble. Old Duncan was frail and rheumatic, and could not always go out to fish himself, but one way or another he had taught Kenneth nearly all he knew about the sea and fishing. He had taught him to row, and to scull, and to make and bait and busk a line, and to swim as well.

The making of a good strong line used to be a great pleasure to Kenneth. It was manufactured from horsehair. There was first and foremost the getting of this horsehair, for quite a quantity was required. It consisted of combings from the manes and tails of horses, and many a mile Kenneth used to pad to procure it. The main source of supply was the stables of a noble lord who lived in a great old-fashioned castle miles from Glen Alva. For the horsehair so obtained Kenneth used to give to the stablemen largess in fish. Then, having obtained his supply and carried it home, it was quite a long and tedious process to plait the line. But Kenneth knew no such word as tire, so he worked and worked away at early morning and late at night, and as yard after yard of the line was made, it was rolled upon a reel roughly hewn from a branch of the silvery birch, and probably at the end of a fortnight the line would be complete, and away Kenneth would rush like a young deer over the hills.

Nancy’s house on the moor lay between him and the shore, and however great a hurry Kenneth was in, he did not fail to call and speak a few moments with the “old witch wife,” as she was universally called, the truth being that she was no more a witch than you or I, reader, only she was an herbalist, and wise in many other ways.

Yes, Kenneth would always find time to call at old Nancy’s hut, and he never left the house without a drink of milk or whey – for Nancy kept a cow – or a cupful of heather ale. Nancy was famed far and near for making heather ale, and on Sundays the lads and lasses from a good way round, used to make a pilgrimage to Nancy’s and taste her wondrous brew.

Many a word of good advice Nancy had for Kenneth, too, her bonnie boy, and many a blessing.

He would soon arrive at the old fisherman’s hut, which was a boat turned upside down and let into a crevice of the rocks high enough up to prevent green seas from swamping it, although in stormy weather, with a west wind blowing, the spray used to dash right over the roof.

“On days like these,” old Duncan used to say, “I don’t need to put any salt in my porridge, for the sea-bree that drops down the chimney makes it salt enough.”

When Duncan got Kenneth’s horsehair line, he used to unroll it and try the strength of it, foot by foot and yard by yard, and if it bore the test, then Duncan would put his hand on the lad’s head and say, —

“My dear Kennie, you’ll be as good a fisherman as myself yet.”

And Kennie would smile, and say he hoped so, for he never meant to be anything else. How little he knew then the truth of the poet’s words, —

“There is a Divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them as we will.”

There isn’t much fancy work about the flies one needs to catch fish with, on the western shores of Scotland, nor about the rod you use. Only a strongish hook, and tied over that a morsel of white feather or even a bit of wool from the back of a lamb. The fish are not particular when hungry, and they nearly always are hungry, and there are times when you really cannot draw them in fast enough.

But at certain seasons of the year they don’t rise; they then prefer bait lowered down to them. They take breakfast in bed. The bait which they love most dearly of all is the inside of a crab, but as this is rather expensive, Kenneth and Duncan Reed were in the habit of using limpets, and they never failed to have good fortune with these.

Of course the limpets had to be gathered first, and as Kenneth was young and Duncan was old, it was the work of the boy to collect these. And when the tide was back you might have seen him at any time, far away out among the weed-covered boulders and rocks, with a chisel and hammer to knock the limpets off and a tiny basket on his back to pop them into.

Nor was there a deal of fancy work to be learned in rowing or sculling a cobble, but then, you know, the fisherman and little Kennie used to venture quite a long distance out to sea, for there was an island three miles away where the fish were very numerous, and thither they often went. And sometimes the sea was both rough and wild before they got back, and skill was then needed to keep her right and straight. For had a sea struck her broadside on, it might have capsized or staved the cobble, and if a great wave had broken over the stern, it might have swamped her, and she would have sunk, and both Kennie and his friend would then have been food for the creatures that dwell down in the dark caves beneath the ocean.

As to swimming, Kenneth seemed to take to it quite naturally, and many a little adventure he had in the water.

Once when swimming he was bitten on the knee by a horrible fish called on the shores of the Atlantic the miller’s thumb. It is a kind of skate or ray of immense size, with a fearfully large mouth filled with sharp teeth.

On this particular day the sun had been very bright and the water warm and clear, and Kenneth swam a long distance from the shore. When he returned he was very faint, and his knee was bleeding; he fell and lost consciousness almost immediately after he reached the pebbly beach. Duncan ran to his assistance, and soon got him round; then he bound up his knee.

“Was it a shark?” Kenneth had inquired.

“Oh! horrible! no, Kennie, no, for had a shark seized you, his teeth are so arranged and so hook-like that he couldn’t have let you go again had he wanted to ever so much.”

Another day, when Duncan and he were hauling in a hand line with an immensely great cod at the end of it, suddenly, for some unexplained reason or other, the line slipped, and almost at the same moment Kenneth fell overboard.

A codfish of say twenty pounds pulls with fearful force.

Kenneth was dragged under the water.

It was a trying time then for old Duncan’s nerves. Would the poor boy be dead before he got the great fish checked and in charge again?

Duncan dragged in the line as speedily as he dared.

Oh! how his heart had throbbed to think that there was a possibility of the line breaking, and his little friend being kept under the water till dead.

And oh! how joyful he was when Kenneth reappeared.

Kenneth really came up smiling, though he was spluttering a great deal as well. “I’m sure,” he said when he got into the boat again, and the fish was there as well, “I’m sure I’ve swallowed fully a pint of salt water, Duncan.”

Yes, Kenneth laughed heartily about it, but poor old Duncan was weeping, and before he could be himself again he must take off his broad blue bonnet and kneel down upon it in the stern sheets of the cobble, and return thanks to Him who holds the sea in the hollow of His hand.

There were days in summer when the sea was so blue and bright and still, that I think Kenneth used almost to go to sleep while floating on its surface.

Gathering the eggs of the sea-birds from off the cliffs and rocks was dangerous sport, but Kenneth loved it all the more on that account.