The Blackhouse

blood.

At first I had thought that Gigs was selecting the chicks at random. Some he took, others he left in the nest. It was Donnie who explained to me that the fledgling gannet went through three stages of development. The downy young chicks of the first stage produce very little meat, and so Gigs would leave them to grow to adulthood. The slim, black, young birds at the third stage of development were harder to catch. It was the second-stage chicks that were the real prize, easily identified by the three remaining clumps of down on the head, back and legs. Fine and meaty and easy to catch. Gigs had years of practice in identifying them at a glance.

We moved across the cliff with astonishing speed, in a wave of killing, leaving piles of dead gugas in our wake. Until finally we met up with the second group. It had taken just over ten minutes, and Gigs signalled that the carnage was over for the day. And so we retraced our steps, carrying back as many gugas as we could, piling them up, and then forming a chain to pass them one by one to the top. There, the heap of dead birds harvested by the three groups mounted, and Gigs took out a pencil and a small notebook and carefully counted their number and noted it in his book. I looked back across the cliffs at where we had been, blood streaking red against the black, and realized that I had not even had time to be afraid. Only now did I become aware of how one slip, one careless move, would have led to almost instant death.

Gigs turned to me, and as if giving up some great secret handed down to him across generations, said simply, ‘Well, Fin, that’s what we do.’

‘Why?’ I said to him. ‘Why do you do it?’

‘It’s the tradition,’ Donnie volunteered. ‘None of us wants be the one to break it.’

But Gigs shook his head. ‘No. It’s not the tradition. That might be a part of it, aye. But I’ll tell you why I do it, boy. Because nobody else does it, anywhere in the world. Just us.’

Which, I supposed, made ‘us’ special in some way. Unique. I looked at the pile of dead birds on the rock and wondered if there was not, perhaps, some better way to be special.

We bagged the birds in hessian sacks, and I watched the strange spectacle of sack after sack swooping across the rock, dipping to a halt at the lowest point, and then being hauled on ropes up to the area by the cairns where eventually they would be plucked. There they were tipped out on to tarpaulins and left to dry in the wind.

I slept that night the sleep of the dead, and woke to find that the weather had changed again. Rain beat steadily against the rock on the leading edge of a blustering south-westerly, and it was mid-morning before an edgy Gigs decided that we could not afford to sit around any longer waiting for a break in the rain. So with silent resignation we got into our oilskins and headed out again on to the cliffs, with poles and sticks and machetes, feeling the icing of guano slippery beneath our boots as we worked our way through the colonies tucked away in the lower reaches of the Lighthouse Promontory.

The pile of birds grew, covered now to save them from a soaking. The process of plucking them did not begin until the rain was by. Which was not until the Sunday, but since the guga hunters would not work on the Sabbath, all we could do was remove the tarpaulins and let the sun and the wind labour at drying the birds while we took our leisure.

It was strange. During that whole two weeks on the rock, I was never once on the same team as Artair. Hardly ever saw him, in fact. It was almost as if they were keeping us apart, although I cannot imagine why. Even on the two Sundays I barely saw him. Or his dad. When I think back I can’t really remember Mr Macinnes at all. But I suppose that wasn’t really surprising. We were never on a team together, and the factory process of plucking, singeing, gutting and curing meant that groups of us worked on different parts of the process in different places at different times. The only time we were all together was when we ate, squeezed around the peats in the gloom of the blackhouse, too tired some nights even to talk. We were just faces in the firelight. It was not unheard-of for Gigs to insist that we went back out after our evening meal to catch up on that day’s plucking. There were occasions when we were out there by the cairns until midnight, pulling out fistfuls of feathers by the light of a tilley. We had little inclination to talk, and not much to say if we did.

Still, it was odd that Artair and I did not get together on that first Sunday, even if just to share our misery in silence. I climbed down to a spot near where we had landed our supplies. It was more sheltered from the wind here, and seawater trapped in pools among the rocks warmed gently in the August sunshine. Several of the men who had been before sat around the pools with their boots and socks lined up along a ledge of rock, trousers rolled up to the knees, bare feet dangling in the tepid water. There was some idle banter and smoking of cigarettes, but the men seemed to clam up when I arrived, and so I didn’t stay long. I climbed instead towards the top of the promontory where I found a slab of flat stone, angled towards the south, on which I could lie out in the sunshine and close my eyes, escaping, at least in my mind, to the summer idyll I had been forced to abandon so prematurely.

It was wonderful just to do nothing, simply to lie there and relax aching muscles and let the sun warm your bones. Later I went back to the blackhouse to drag out my mattress and try to get the dampness out of it, but it was so deep inside that it would have taken days of constant sun to dry it out completely.

All too soon our day of rest was over, and we were crawling back on to our shelves after an evening meal of bacon and eggs and fried bread, and Gigs’s nightly reading from the Gaelic Bible. I caught Artair watching me from his mattress on the other side of the blackhouse. I smiled and called goodnight, but he just turned his face to the wall without a word.

We began the plucking on the Monday. The birds had dried off nicely in the Sabbath sunshine and we sat up amongst the cairns with the wind blowing around our ankles to do the job. It was a messy business. Gigs showed me how it was done. First he placed a bird between his knees and plucked the neck, leaving only a narrow collar of feathers. Then he turned to the breast, pulling out handfuls of feathers all the way down to the tail. He ripped off the new primaries from the upper wing and pinched off the leading edge quills. Then the bird was turned over and the back and the legs were plucked until only the finest white down remained. Gigs could pluck a guga in under three minutes. It took me more than twice that long.

It was relentlessly hard and competitive. We stopped every hour to count and call out the tally of how many birds we had plucked. Gigs had always plucked the most, Artair and myself the fewest. And then we would start again.

By the end of that first morning, my hands had all but seized up, every muscle and joint aching to the point where I could hardly hold a single feather between thumb and forefinger. And the feathers got everywhere. In your eyes and up your nose, in your ears and mouth. They clung to your hair and stuck to your clothes. At the height of the plucking, with the wind whistling around us, it was as if we were trapped in a blizzard of feathers and down. Artair’s asthma reacted badly to it, and after two hours he could scarcely breathe. Gigs excused him from further plucking, and he was sent to light the fires for the singeing.

The fires were lit in low, metre-square chimney stacks built of loose stone in an area almost directly above where we had first come ashore. It had been discovered decades, perhaps centuries, earlier that this was an ideal spot for providing the strength and direction of draught the fires needed to burn at their fiercest. And so the stacks were always assembled at the same spot. As we sent the plucked birds in sacks of ten screaming nearly two hundred yards down the wire to what Gigs called the factory, I saw Artair carrying glowing peats in makeshift tongs from the blackhouse to get the fires started. By the time the birds had been successfully transferred, and we had climbed down to join him, Artair had a fire blazing in each chimney. He and Pluto were delegated to do the singeing. I watched as Pluto showed Artair how. He took a bird and snapped its wing joints across his chest. Then, with a wing in each hand, and the guga hanging limply between them, he lowered it into the flames to singe away the remaining down. I watched as the flames licked up around the dead bird, turning it for a moment into a fiery angel, before Pluto withdrew it sharply from the fire. The down had dissolved to a fine, black ash, its webbed feet burned to a curled crisp. It was important not to scorch the skin and ruin the flavour, but it was equally important to leave it free of quills, because these would ruin the texture. Artair and Pluto began working their way through all the birds we had plucked that day, creating in turn dozens of their own fiery angels on that gusty Monday afternoon.

From the fire they went to Old Seoras, a wiry skeleton of a man with a head like a skull. Protective goggles increased the illusion. He scrubbed the ash off the birds before handing them on to Donnie and Malcolm, who exercised a kind of quality control, burning off anything missed by the flames with blowtorches.

They went then to John Angus, who hacked off the wings with a hand-axe and passed the birds for splitting to Gigs and Seumas, where they sat facing each other astride a thick oak beam raised up on two low cairns. The