splitting beam had served its bloody purpose over decades, seasoned and weathered by all its years on the rock. On it, with knives as sharp as razors, the gugas were split from end to end and the tail removed. Three careful cuts were made above the ribs, and with one deft movement, fingers thrust between flesh and bone plucked out the ribcage and entrails. It was my job to take those entrails from the growing pile and drape them over the edge of the chimneys where Pluto and Artair were forging their angels. The fat immediately ran down into the flames, spitting and popping and fuelling their ferocity.
The final stage followed the splitting. Gigs and Seumas made four neat slashes in the flesh of the birds with their knives, creating pockets into which fistfuls of salt were thrust to begin the curing.
On ground as flat as they could make it, right next to the top of the chute, the two men spread out tarpaulins and laid the salted birds in a large circle, feet turned towards the centre, the outside flap of skin folded up to prevent leakage of the pickling fluids created by the salt. A second circle overlapped the first, and a third overlapped the second, moving closer to the centre until the entire first layer had been formed. A huge wheel of dead birds. Then another layer began on top of that, and another, and another, until it stood nearly five feet high. By the end of the two weeks, there were two huge wheels like that, each comprised of a thousand birds. All around us their wings lay scattered across the rocks, to blow away in the autumn gales on a final flight to freedom.
And that’s how it was on the rock for two stultifying weeks. Working our way across all the cliffs, through all the colonies. Ever-repeating cycles of killing, plucking, singeing, splitting. Until those wheels were completed. It was a numbing experience which after a while became wholly mechanical. You got up in the morning and you worked your way through the day until you crawled back on to your mattress at night. Some of the men even seemed to enjoy it. A kind of silent camaraderie, punctuated by the cracking of the odd joke and the relief of laughter. Something inside me just shut down, and I retreated into myself. I was not a part of the camaraderie. I don’t think I laughed once in fourteen days. I just gritted my teeth and counted them off one by one.
By the second Sunday the job was almost done. The weather had been reasonably favourable, and we had made good progress. It was dry, although not as sunny as the previous week. I made my way up to the lighthouse and stood on the concrete apron of the helipad and looked back across the island. The whole of An Sgeir was laid out beneath me, the prickly curvature of its spine, its promontories like three broken ribs, all that remained after an eternity of erosion. I could see, just off the north-west tip, stacks of black rock rising out of a deep green sea that frothed angrily against them, clouds of seabirds around their peaks, riding the thermals in endless, effortless circles. I turned and made my way to the edge of the cliff. It fell away sheer, in a three-hundred-foot drop. But it was cut through by cracks and splits and deep chimneys, and was transected in several places by ledges, white-caked by guano which had been worn smooth by the wind and the rain. There were thousands upon thousands of nests on the cliff. The richest pickings on the island. And the most inaccessible. Tomorrow we would climb down to the ledges below and reap our final harvest. A sickening little knot of fear tightened itself in my stomach and I looked away. Just one more day to get through, and then on Tuesday we would begin the process of decamping in time for the arrival of the
That night we had the finest meal of our stay. We ate the first of that year’s gugas. By now our supplies were running low. The bread was stale and sometimes mouldy, and always crawling with earwigs. The meat was all eaten, and we seemed to be living on porridge and eggs. The only constant at every meal was the diet of scripture and psalms served up from Gigs’s bible. So the guga was manna from Heaven, a reward perhaps for all our piety.
Angel spent the afternoon preparing. He took three gugas from the first wheel and washed and scraped them clean. Then he divided each into four and plunged them into a large pot of water boiling over the fire. While they boiled he peeled the last of our tatties and set them in water over a second fire. By the time they were near the boil, he was ready to change the water in which the gugas were cooking. He carefully removed the pieces of bird, tipped the greasy, salt-clouded brown water away over the rocks, and refilled it with fresh to bring back to the boil. Then the birds were returned to the pot for a final half-hour.
The sense of anticipation in the blackhouse that evening as we sat down around the fire, clutching our plates, was very nearly palpable. The tin box of irons that was usually passed around for us to select our cutlery was kept stowed in its place. You only ever ate the guga with your fingers. Angel served a piece of bird on to each of our plates and we helped ourselves to liberal portions of potato. And the feast began, there in the blue smoky light of the fire, skin and meat and tattie filling hungry mouths, savoured in silence. The flesh was firm, but tender, the colour and texture of duck, but with a taste that lay somewhere between steak and kipper.
A quarter bird was more than enough, along with the tatties, to leave us sated and sleepy, and listening in an almost trancelike state to Gigs reading from the Bible. And then bed, and the welcome mist of sleep. I doubt if there was a man in the blackhouse that night who gave a single thought to the dangers he would face on the final cliffs tomorrow. If he had he would almost certainly not have slept.
Yet again the wind had changed. Coming down from the northwest now, with a spit of rain on its cutting edge. It was a lot colder, too. Up by the lighthouse, where I had stood only yesterday with a warm breeze blowing in my face, you could lean into the wind without falling over. It was going to make the job of working the cliffs below all the harder. At first I could not see how we could possibly get down to the ledges I had seen the day before. The cliff fell away in a perpendicular drop of ninety feet to the first of them. But off to the left, Gigs led us down a steep gully, almost hidden by the fold of the rock. It developed into a deep chimney, cracks and fissures creating steps on one face, and you could ease your way down it by bracing your back against the opposite wall. The chimney was little more than three feet across, narrowing at the foot, so that finally you simply squeezed out on to the first of the ledges. And as we did, thousands of gannets took to the air, shrieking their alarm, wings beating around our faces. The ledge was thick with nests. The guano here filled every crevice in the rock, smoothing out its textures and hollows. Blasted by the wind and the salt, it had hardened to a smooth, white surface, like marble, and was treacherous underfoot. We were fortunate at this point to be in the lee of the wind, and the rain flew past us and above us. The sea thrashed against the rock at the foot of the cliff two hundred feet below. Gigs signalled that we should move quickly, and so we set off along the ledge, little more than four feet at its widest, killing as fast as we could, birds heaping up behind us, scarlet pooling around us on the white guano marble. Off to our right, a second team was working another ledge. I had no idea where the third team was.
The way it happened was wholly unexpected. There is something about killing that dulls the senses, but even now I don’t know how I could have been so stupid. We had returned to the chimney, piling up dead birds at the foot of it. Pluto climbed back to the top and lowered a rope, and we tied four birds at a time to the end of it so that he could haul them up. Gigs was exploring a possible route down to the next ledge, when I turned, startling a chick nesting in a crevice. With a screech and a flutter of down and wings, it was in my face. I felt its beak gouging my cheek. I raised my arms to fend it off and took a single step back into space. In that split second I almost believe now that I could have recovered my balance. I have thought about it so many times. But at that time, in that moment, it was just as though the cliffs had let me go, releasing me to my fate. There was air beneath my feet, my hands grabbing hopelessly for something to hold. But there was nothing. I can remember thinking how Gigs had told me that there had never, within living memory, been an accident on the cliffs. And I felt like I was spoiling the record. I heard the birds laughing as I fell, taking pleasure in my plight. Unlike them, I could not fly. Served me right for killing their children. I went silently, too surprised to feel fear and give vent to it. Like a dream, I suppose, I thought perhaps it wasn’t really happening. Not to me.
Then the first impact went through me like a hammer blow from a mallet. Somewhere about my left arm or shoulder. The pain was intense, prompting me at last to break my silence. I screamed. But I suppose it was that impact which saved my life. There were several other blows, more glancing than the first, before I came to a sudden stop. I heard my skull cracking, but consciousness was snuffed out in an instant, like the flame of a candle, and I felt no pain.
The first thing I remember hearing was the voices. Shouting. I had no idea what they were shouting, because as something like awareness returned it brought pain. They say that you cannot feel pain in two places at the same time. But I was conscious of it in my shoulder, searing, like something sharp cutting through flesh and muscle and tendon, all the way to the bone. And also in my head, which felt as if someone had clamped it in an iron vice and was slowly turning the screw. I must have been hurting elsewhere, pain I would become aware of much later, but at that moment all my senses were engulfed by those two centres of it. I couldn’t move, and through the mist of my
