Interrogating Duncan Stalker’s sandwiches.
You see the loch far below because the road runs high on the bald hillside yellow with long dry grass, and you can look down and wonder at the way the water surface varies into different textures and the wind pulls lines of foam across the patches. Patches and patterns made by the wind maybe, or the currents, or even by the oiliness rising from a shoal of herring, though I’ve never seen this and been sure of it. If you left the road there wouldn’t be much to stop you ending in the loch, which is why when the convoy met a mini the driver shut her eyes and locked the doors. We had to pick the car up and carry it to the passing place. We were in a hurry, and we left her there looking like a hedgehog not sure whether to uncurl, and continued along the dirt road up the glen.
The grassy slopes at the Falls are worrying too, because they slope progressively more the nearer you get to the edge of the gorge. Unless you are bold enough to risk the grassy slopes, all you see of the gorge is the spray rising from the falls until the wind takes it. There is a path worn into the hillside some of the way, with a grassy kerb of tussocks on the side above the gorge. The waterfall drops into the gorge over an edge of hard rock, washing away the soft schists below, leaving red garnets in the river gravels. We had come because a young girl had fallen down into the gorge. Clearly she had not been lucky, although that’s the sort of thing that people say if you aren’t actually dead. But she had landed with her body in the cold water of Allt a Glomaigh and her head on a bank of gravel. It could have been worse. She was thought to be alive.
The rescue was difficult. Some of the mountain rescue team were shepherds and ghillies. They used ropes in their work, rescuing sheep or dragging deer carcasses off the forest. Having a rope around the shoulders and across the tweedy suit was a badge of office. One of them had been seen getting out of his van outside the hotel without his rope, and then returning to his van to put it back on before going into the bar. He had spotted some attractive tourists in the bar and decided his rope might give him a little Highland glamour.
The ghillies’ ropework was fairly simple. They would wind the rope around themselves, jam their tacketty boots into the ground and lean back to take the strain. Some of the team were climbers but they respected the ghillies. Their approach to ropework, and to mountain rescue, was very different. They knew about belays, and abseiling, and all the other techniques that we were going to need to get this girl out alive. The climbers’ respect for the ghillies was for their hardihood, for their local knowledge, and especially for teaching the climbers how to pronounce everything. These climbers set great store by being able to pronounce the Gaelic place names, and pronouncing the word ‘Gaelic’ correctly too. And maybe some of them had read their John Buchan, where the ghillie is often a father figure to the young hero spending his public school summer holidays in the Highlands on his absent father’s estate.
When we got to the spot and made preparations, the ghillies were making one kind of plan and the climbers making another. The team did not have a leader. No climber was going to tell a shepherd or a ghillie that his rope work was dangerous. And no ghillie was going to ask the climbers how to do abseiling. The ghillies all had the ambivalence towards incomers that comes from having your culture swamped by rich resented southerners who are also your employers and let you live rent-free and give you a Landrover and don’t notice when you poach the salmon because they are mostly not around. There was no-one in the team who was able to get us all together and point out that there was going to be an accident if we didn’t sort this out. And so this rescue was what we called a bùrach, a botch job, though both sides agreed that a handy rowan tree was good to tie a rope to, or, if you were of the climber faction, to secure a belay.
I had to shut my eyes a time or two, and it is a wonder the girl survived. She was lucky again. A wonder one of us didn’t fall too. But far from this episode ending with a fall, it ended with a picnic. The ambulance took the girl away to Inverness, and we all sat down and got out our flasks, which is how we started to interrogate Ian Stalker’s sandwiches.
He was eating smoked salmon sandwiches, though he of course called them ‘pieces’.The bread was home baked, though not by him, and his wife had made the butter too. He had smoked the salmon, of course, and in a salmon smoker that he had built. Some of the climbers were getting very interested in this, questioning him keenly, though the shepherds and ghillies tended to be discreet about catching salmon. But many of us knew that Duncan had caught the salmon in his set-net. And that he had got the loose netting in the post from Lochgilphead, and he had himself mounted it as a set-net, using a netting needle to bind its edges with clove hitches to a float rope and a lead rope, and he had set it in the loch from his boat. (He had built the boat himself, of course, as you may have been expecting, though by this time I’m in so deep I’d have had to say he built it himself even if he hadn’t).
You may have been wondering about how we had time to cut sandwiches when the ‘shout’ came. We didn’t, but Duncan had grabbed a loaf and some butter and some salmon as he went out the door. So he was making the sandwiches, cutting the bread and slicing the smoked salmon with a great horny-looking clasp knife. So we ended up interrogating the knife too. He’d made the knife himself one winter using a bit of steel from an old farm machine for the knife blade. And the horny knife handle, of course, was made by Duncan too, from a red deer stag’s antler. No one asked if he had also shot the stag. He wasn’t nicknamed Duncan Stalker for no reason. His birth certificate would have said McRae, but the old Gaelic system didn’t take much account of surnames.
Although Duncan lived in a clachan way up the glen, featured in old postcards when it had heather thatching, he’d been around the world a bit, on oil tankers, before he came back home, and when he came back he had decided that if his children had Gaelic as their first language it would hold them back in school, so he and his wife spoke to them in English. Extraordinary it seems to me now, that a man of such skills didn’t expect his children to be able to cope with two languages. He didn’t know that being bilingual is actually an advantage. The research that proves this had maybe not been done then, or had not filtered back to the communities that needed the knowledge most. It’s good for your general brain development, apparently. But if Duncan broke the links in the language of the place, from a misguided concern for his children’s welfare, he did at least pass on some of his skills. Last time I was round there someone pointed out where his son lives now, and I saw the homemade salmon smoker that he had built behind the house. I don’t know how he gets hold of the salmon that he smokes in it. I hope I’d be too discreet to ask.