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The Last Wolf

Severn House Publishers Limited

1936

The loch water was dark and deep. It felt as cold as ice and yet as soft as silk.

When Stroma had been younger she had been afraid to swim in the loch because of the monster who lived at the bottom. He had once caught hold of her by the ankle and she had screamed her head off in terror. But she had stopped believing in him at about the same time that she had stopped believing in Father Christmas.

She sat in the stern of the dinghy while Hamish rowed to the windward end of the loch. When they had reached it, her brother shipped the oars and let the boat drift back gradually with the wind. She watched him prepare the split cane rod that Grandfather had given him, choose a fly from the box – also given by Grandfather – and attach it carefully to the hook. When he was ready, he stood athwart the boat to cast the line out into the water. He went on casting, twitching the line, pulling it in and casting again, and she went on sitting still and quiet until suddenly the line tightened and there was the swirl in the water which meant a take. The fish would be diving downwards and Hamish would lift the rod to set the hook through its lip before he played it on the end of the line. This was the part that Stroma hated – the part where the fish tried to get away, where it struggled and pulled against the line till it was worn out and rolled, exhausted, on its side. She felt sorry for the fish – sorry, too, for the deer when they sank to their knees, and for the pheasants and the geese when they plummeted out of the air, and for the woodcock and the snipe, the teal and the widgeon, and for the hares and rabbits. But she was most sorry for the fish because they always fought so hard and because the fight took so long. Of course, she would never have admitted such a feeble thing to Hamish.

'Get the net, Stroma! Quick!'

She grabbed the net and lowered it over the side of the boat while Hamish towed the fish towards it.

'Now!'

She lifted the net out of the water, the fish trapped inside. It was a brown trout with a beautiful speckled back and a shining white front: a big one, at least a foot long. It lay gasping and helpless.

'Nearly two pounds, I reckon,' her brother said, pleased. 'Pass me the priest.'

She handed him the lump of wood; he held the trout in his left hand and bashed it quickly on the head between the eyes before he put it into the creel. At least Hamish never let a fish flop about suffering, as she'd seen other people do.

He caught three more big trout while the boat drifted gently back across the loch.

'You can have a go now, if you like.'

'Thanks.'

Grandfather had taught them both to fish – trout in the lochs, mackerel in the sea and salmon in the rivers and pools. Salmon fishing was still hard for her because she couldn't handle the big rod well enough; trout were easier because the rod was smaller, and mackerel easiest of all because it only needed a line with hooks on.

She chose another of Grandfather's flies – and it wasn't long before the line jerked and the water swirled, but she was too slow with the next bit and too clumsy.

Her brother shook his head despairingly. 'You let him get away, you idiot! Hopeless!'

Angus was standing on the loch shore, knobbled stick in hand. Even from a distance he looked like a giant. When they were small he had carried them both for miles across the island, one on each shoulder, striding over the moors and peat bogs, up and down the hills and across fast-flowing burns that might have swept them away. He had a thick red beard and whiskers and always wore the same clothes: ancient deerstalker, tweed jacket, waistcoat, plus-twos, woollen socks and heavy brogues. He lived with Grace, his wife, in the gamekeeper's cottage on the estate and his father and grandfather and great-grandfather had lived there before him. He had the Gaelic and a Scottish-English that was sometimes hard to understand.

Hamish rowed the dinghy in and Angus helped them haul it up on to the quartz beach. He peered at the trout in the creel.

'Guid enough to eat. Well done, laddie.'

He would have seen Stroma lose her fish, though he kindly didn't mention it. That was the nicest thing about Angus – he never said a harsh word or yelled at you if you got something wrong, and where praise was earned, he gave it. Lots of it. In a while, he'd start teaching her to shoot – same as he'd been teaching Hamish who had been allowed out last year with the guns when they had spent Christmas on the island. She was still practising with targets at the back of the barn and she'd have to get good enough to hit them properly every time. The kill must always be clean, that was the strict rule. Meanwhile, she made herself useful by beating on the shoots whenever they were at Craigmore in the pheasant season – scaring up the game with a stick and making loud bird noises. It was hard and rather miserable work, out all day in wind and rain squelching across the boggy land and watching out for the hidden peat hags that filled up with icy water. Some of the holes could be so deep that if you fell in you couldn't get out. Angus had rescued her many times – hauling her out with his huge hand so that she dangled in the air like a half-drowned puppy. One day, perhaps, she'd go stalking, though the idea of killing such a big and noble beast as a stag seemed terrible to her.

Eating the fish made catching them more excusable – or so she reasoned to herself. At least they hadn't died for nothing. In fact, so long as you ate what you killed, it was all right. She and Hamish would often cook a fish on the loch shore or down on the beach by the sea. They would gut it, put a green stick through the mouth and prop it on two Y-shaped uprights, then they would light a wood fire underneath. When the fish was cooked they ate it with their fingers and it always tasted far better than any fish cooked indoors. This time, though, they were taking the trout back to the house for Ellen to cook for supper.

Angus went part of the way with them, striding out so that she had to hop and skip to keep up. He left them before they reached the house gates and went off with a wave of his stick towards the cottage where Grace would be waiting for him with a rich stew simmering over the peat fire and a large dram poured ready.

In the kitchen, Hamish presented the gutted trout to Ellen who inspected them with her sharp eyes before she passed them as good enough for the table. She was very particular. The plucking and the skinning and the gutting must be faultless and game had to be hung for just the right length of time. Anything not up to scratch was thrown to the gun dogs in the kennels. When Hamish had shot his very first rabbit Ellen had told him to get it ready for the pot: to take out the insides, hang it up in the outhouse for a day till it went stiff, then cut its head off and strip away the fur and skin in one piece. Even Hamish had been a bit squeamish that first time.

The kitchen maid, Sally, was frightened to death of Ellen, and so was Meg, the woman who came to clean the house every day. Logan, Grandfather's butler, was too old and deaf, and often too tiddly, to pay her any notice but there was a non-stop war between Ellen and Mack, the gardener, over the vegetables and fruit that he brought in from the kitchen garden. To Ellen, the vegetables were either too small or too big, the fruit under-ripe or over-ripe; to Mack, anything he grew and picked was perfect. Stroma had once come into the kitchen to find them fighting hand-to-hand, like wrestlers. Mack was trying to make Ellen take some runner beans and she was thrusting them back at him. They were too big and stringy, she'd said, and not fit for the table. Mack, who won prizes in shows for his beans, was purple in the face with fury and beans were flying all over the floor. In the end, of course, Ellen had won.

Almost all the food they ate at Craigmore came from the island. The milk came straight from the cows on the farm, carried over in a can and kept cool in the larder. They ate fish and game and venison and rabbits from the estate, fresh vegetables and fruit from the kitchen garden. The cooking was done by Ellen on a great iron range fuelled by peat dug from the Craigmore moors.

Stroma's shorts were wet from the fishing so she went up to her bedroom to change them and to put on her sandals before supper. The grandparents didn't mind much what she and Hamish wore, except for going to the kirk on Sundays or if there were visitors, when they had to wear proper clothes and shoes. During the long summer holidays they were left to run wild on the island – to sail and row on the loch, to swim, to fish, to ride the half-wild ponies bareback across the moors among the gentle Highland cattle. They climbed the hills and tracked the red deer, watched the surf pounding against the western shores, the otters lolloping across the beaches, the grey seals lying on the rocks and followed the wild birds through Grandfather's old binoculars – sandpipers, geese, curlews, puffins, oystercatchers, choughs, cormorants, reed buntings, skylarks, countless gulls ... They slid down the sand dunes, collected fishy-tasting gulls' eggs, explored the rock pools at low tide – each one a limpid aquarium of scuttling crabs, flowery anemones, bootlace worms like liquorice, frondy seaweed and clinging limpets. They beachcombed for wreckage washed up from old sunken ships, hunted for the most beautiful shells and gathered driftwood to store in the barn for the winter fires.

Apart from the thousands of rabbits on the island, there were hundreds of adders – serpents, the islanders called them, which made them sound much worse than they really were. They'd come across them basking in the sun and, once, they'd spotted the shed skin of one – left whole and perfect on the bank of a burn, the V-mark on its head, the dark zigzag pattern marking its back down to the tail. Hamish had picked it up carefully and taken it back to the house to keep on the mantelpiece in his bedroom. The weather never stayed the same for long; it changed, and changed, and then changed again, the clouds always on the move, the light and the shade coming and going, the gentle colours glowing and fading. When it rained, which was often, the rain was soft, like mist.

The island of Islay was shaped like a diamond – a precious jewel set in the southern Hebrides and studded with standing stones as old as time itself. Stroma's favourite place on earth.

In early September, when the summer holidays came to an end, they had to make the long trek back to London. The paddle steamer Lochiel took them over to Kennacraig on the mainland, and from there they went by bus and ferry and cart, in stages, across to Glasgow where the night train would bear them away clickety-clack, clickety-clack, down to London, and back to the house in Bayswater.

But not yet. Not yet.

She went over to the open window and looked out at the silver-grey sea. The wind carried the lovely smell of salt and seaweed to her, and the harsh mewing of the gulls. She shut her eyes, breathing in deeply.

Sturmwind had crossed the North Sea without difficulty, the yacht helped along by the strong south-westerlies, but sailing round the coast of Scotland proved much trickier. After passing south of the Orkneys and battling through the rip tides of the Pentland Firth, they had rounded the north-west corner of Scotland slap into a fearsome head wind and an Atlantic swell that had given them no sea room and done its best to hurl them on to the shore. Once or twice Reinhard had thought Sturmwind was going to join the other wrecks littering the coast.

At Skye, in the Inner Hebrides, they had re-provisioned and sailed on to Mull and then by the Strait of Corryvreckan between the northernmost tip of Jura and Scarba. They had sailed close to the notorious whirlpool – at flood tide a swirling, roaring maelstrom that could suck a ship down to its doom. According to Reinhard's father, who knew those seas well, they were among the most perilous in the world. Apart from the Corryvreckan there were other whirlpools, treacherous currents, back-eddies, standing waves like solid walls, gale-force winds, violent storms and jagged rocks.

None of this worried Reinhard – quite the opposite. He relished the risk. His father had taken him and his brother Bruno sailing since they could walk and they were not afraid of the sea, though they had plenty of respect for it. Father had taught them that, too. A man foolish enough to disrespect the sea was likely to die in it.

They sailed along the western coast of Jura, Father at the helm of Sturmwind, Bruno and himself a well-drilled crew following his commands. They sighted a minke whale, which swam around close to them before arching its back to dive deep. A group of dolphins escorted them for a while – show-offs somersaulting high in the air and vanishing beneath the ketch to reappear on the other side. As they passed the Rhuvaal lighthouse at the north-east point of Islay and entered the narrow sound between the two neighbouring islands, Jura and Islay, the wind moderated and the sea calmed. Colonies of seals slumbered on the rocks, wild goats leaped nimbly up the steep cliffs and deer and cattle and sheep roamed the beaches, grazing on the seaweed.

They passed a whisky distillery to starboard with a wooden pier jutting out into the sound and, to port, the misty mauve Paps of Jura sloped down to a narrow strand along the shore. There were a few stone cottages huddled round a slipway at the narrowest point of the sound where the ferry crossed between Feolin on Jura and Port Askaig on Islay.

Father had sailed here in the German navy during the Great War. He had served with the U-boat Force, commanded his own submarine and had been decorated with the Knight's Cross for his skill and bravery. Before the beginning of the war, he had told them, submarines had been thought a useless weapon against civilian shipping: they had no space to take prisoners on board and no spare crew to man a captured ship. But, once the war had started, it had been decided that it was not necessary to capture a merchant ship – merely to sink it. After that, the U-boats had prowled after enemy merchant ships and torpedoed them mercilessly. At the height of the war, one enemy ship in every four had gone to the bottom. Father himself had sunk no less than seventy-eight. England had been brought close to starvation and defeat by German U-boats until America had finally entered the fray and the convoys began to be escorted by Allied warships.

Father had talked about it all. He had told them what it had been like to go to war at sea for months on end with forty or more other men, to be sealed up in a metal tube less than a hundred metres long and six metres wide, and about the fetid air and the damp. He had told them about the all-pervading smell of diesel oil and the reek from the bilges, the stench of unwashed bodies, and the stink from the heads. He had described the green mould that had to be scraped off rotting food, the head-splitting pounding of the pistons, the non-stop rocking of the boat, sometimes pitching and corkscrewing and yawing so violently in heavy seas that men were catapulted out of their bunks. And he had talked of the lack of fresh air, exercise, privacy, comfort, of men driven mad by claustrophobia and the dread of a horrible death. But he had also talked about the comradeship, where every man shared the same hardship and fate and depended upon the rest for their lives.

He had described the thrill of the hunt for the enemy, the skill of closing in for the kill, the elation, tempered with any sailor's natural regret at the sinking of a good ship and the loss of a crew who would seldom be saved. Once, he had torpedoed a steamer carrying cavalry horses in wooden stalls on the decks. As he had watched through the periscope, the ship had gone down and the horses – beautiful, long-tailed beasts – had leaped in terror over the rails into the sea. He had turned his head away from the sight.

It had been during a patrol off Scotland, lying in wait for the British convoys approaching the Clyde, that Father had discovered the cove on the island of Islay. Urgent repairs had been needed to his boat and a safe, quiet place to carry them out. He had taken the submarine at periscope depth along the sound, hunting for such a place, and where it widened out to rejoin the sea he had spotted what had proved to be a perfect refuge – a hidden cove deep enough for the U-boat to enter submerged, even at low tide.

They had stayed in the cove until the repairs were done – spending the daylight hours concealed under water and surfacing at night. It had been a memorable time, he had said, smiling. Almost like a holiday. The cove was remote and well-hidden, their only observers sheep. After dark, the men were permitted on deck in turns and he had allowed them to go ashore in the moonlight, even to swim. During their stay they had killed and eaten one of the sheep – a rare feast of fresh meat for the crew.

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Excerpted from The Last Wolf by Margaret Mayhew. Copyright © 2011 Margaret Mayhew. Excerpted by permission of Severn House Publishers Limited.
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