The Walking Dead

Two men trudged into the teeth of the elements and returned to their home. They came over a hill, too slight in elevation to have been given a Gaelic name but it had provided them with a minimum of protection while they were in its lee. Now they were exposed: the wind whipped them and the rain thrashed them, but they struggled on with the determination that was their hallmark. The taller of them carried a new-born heifer calf under his waterproof jerkin and the shorter steadied his friend when they came down off the hill and over weather-smoothed stones where the lichen was soap-slippery. Trailing them was a Highland cow and, behind them, the afterbirth mess that by the following morning would have been taken by the carrion crows or the ravens if the pair of big eagles that nested on the duff, the Cnoc nan Gabhar, had not ventured up and found it. The calf, still wet and with slime on it, was under the jerkin of Xavier Boniface. The steadying hand was that of Donald Clydesdale.

It had been dark still when they were woken, in their separate rooms but at the same moment, by the distant bellow of the cow, perhaps a mile away. They had dressed, gulped a mug of tea and gone out with the wind on their backs propelling them forward. They had found the cow in a difficult labour under the shelter of the millennia-aged stones on the slope of Cnoc Mor. Neither man would have considered turning away from the cry of anguish.

On a better day, as they had tramped to Cnoc Mor, as they had assisted at the birth, as they had turned for home, they might have seen the slow, languid turns of the great white-tailed eagles, the flying barn doors with a wing span in excess of seven feet, and that would have given them rare pleasure. They had not seen the majesty on the wing of the birds, or the hobby hawk, but they had heard the coughed shout of the ravens that had a nest on Aird a Chrainn.

Xavier Boniface and Donald Clydesdale, in the tiny community — twenty-six souls when the summer tourists were away from Ardchiavaig — that was their home, had no past, only a present, and their future was unknown. The two men, lankily tall and muscularly short, had arrived fifteen years before at this remote corner of an Inner Hebridean island, had taken over a ruined croft's shell, built a roof for it, dug out a damp course and plastered the interior walls. They had used rough carpentry skills to construct a staircase, had laid a sewage pipe to a cesspit, and excavated the ditch that brought them water from an historic well. Electricity and the telephone links came on the wires that the wind bent and were held up on posts that the wind had angled. It was a place well suited to two men whose expertise and past were best hidden.

The head of the heifer calf, born with a red-brown coat, peeped from between the opened buttons of the taller man's waterproof jerkin; he held it tight against him as if with love. The shorter man held his arm as they came off the last stones of the hill, then sank down into a reedy bog; the grip showed the extent of their friendship. The cow followed them. Unsaid between them was the extent of their guilt that she had been left out and had dropped the calf in foul weather, but the birth had been a full ten days before the scheduled time and a week before they had expected to lead her down to the stone byre behind the croft. They owned, the two of them, the one Highland cow and now one Highland heifer calf, fifteen ewes and a ram, half a dozen goats, eight chickens and a cockerel, and two geese. All were loved.

But they were now on stand-by status: the call had come from London, from Mr Naylor, and if a second phone call was received, they would be gone because that was their past, and the McDonald family, who had the nearest farm to them would see to their beasts and birds. It was five years since they had last been called away, and they had travelled then from the Inner Hebrides to the mountain towns of Bosnia; seven years and ten years before, they had gone to the wild border country of the province of Northern Ireland. Whenever the past demanded their presence, they responded. And the McDonald family would not have queried where they went and why, or the McDougalls, and not the McPhersons, or Hamish who brought the post each day in mid-afternoon, or the Sutherland widow whose husband had been lost from an upturned crabbing boat. When they had returned they had not been quizzed on their business away from the island.

When they journeyed away it was because of their knowledge of thresholds.

A warm smile crossed the face of the taller man. 'Look at it, Donald, it's breaking. It's the last of the rain and the gale's taking it. See the sunlight coming?'

With reverence, the shorter man said, 'And there'll be a rainbow to follow it, and then good skies, Xavier. It's a sign she'll be a fine beast. We did it. We saw her into this world.'

'Makes you feel well.'

'Makes you feel the best, Xavier.'