The Horn Lantern

The glen still tells how Isobel's herd came down from the shielings that Samhain fatter than any herd in Glen Durrach, how it stayed hers for less than a day, and how next morning at the chapel door she asked the chief's best fighting man to handfast her instead. The glen tells it with some pleasure. It likes a story that begins well and goes wrong, because then it can say what it would have done.

They came down in the grey of the afternoon, under a sky like old milk. Neil walked at the front with the hazel switch and Elspeth walked at the back with her skirts tucked up to the knee, and Isobel walked in the middle where she could see all of them. The cows came heavy and slow down the last of the hill track, swinging their bellies, their coats thick for the winter and red and black and dun. The calves of that spring trotted at their mothers' flanks and bawled at the burn as if they had never seen water. The bull came last of all, as a bull will, in his own good time.

Isobel had her plait down her back and her mantle pinned at the shoulder with her father's brooch, and the wind off the ridge pulled at both. Under the mantle her crotal kirtle was laced close from the shieling butter and the shieling milk, and it fitted her waist and her hips like the skin on a plum. She had not been thin at Beltane and she was not thin now. She had gone up the hill with a herd and come down with a better one. She thought she had a right to look well on it.

At the low fold below the house she stood at the gap and counted them in. She counted them by name and not by number, the way her father had, and then she counted them again by number, the way her father never had. Both counts came right. Neil grinned at her over the wall. Elspeth sat down on a stone and took off one shoe and shook a pebble out of it.

"Every one," Isobel said.

"Every one," said Neil. "And fat."

"Fat as a priest at Easter," said Elspeth, and put her shoe back on.

The in-calf heifers had not come down with the rest. They were up at the high fold on the hill, behind its own wall, where the grass held longer and the wind could not get at them. Isobel had left them there on purpose. Neil would take them hay when the snow came, and she would bring them down to the byre when they were near their time and not before. She looked up the hill at the high fold now, a grey ring of stone on a green shoulder. She could see the backs of them, small as lice from here, grazing.

Then she looked the other way, up the glen, to where the track went on past the head of her own land and climbed to the pass. Beyond the pass was Glen Brannoch. Nobody from her house went up that track if they could help it. It was a short way to a bad place.

Her house stood long and low on its rise above the burn, stone at the foot and turf above, the heather thatch roped down with stones against the wind. People lived at the upper end and the goats and hens at the lower, and in a fortnight, when the frost came hard, the best of the cows would be in the byre across the yard, and the whole holding would smell of dung and hay and warm hide all winter. Isobel liked that smell. It was the smell of a holding that was doing well.

Her father had died at the end of the spring, in the week before Beltane, of a cough that had sat in his chest since Candlemas. He had leaned on her for every single thing since her mother went, and she had let him. She had milked and churned and cut the peats and kept the count of the cattle and argued with the chief's man over the rent. At the end he had leaned on her to sit up and leaned on her to drink, and then he had stopped leaning. She had buried him at St Fillan's with the whole glen at the graveside. Then she had come home, and taken the herd up the hill at Beltane as if nothing had changed, and asked no one's leave.

The glen had noticed. The glen had opinions. The women at the peat bank had told her she would want a man up there at the head of the glen, so near the pass. The women at the churn had told her she would want a man for other reasons, and had laughed a good deal about which reasons. One or two men had come up the track in the summer with their hair combed and a sheep on a rope, as a gift. She had taken the sheep. She had sent the men back down.

"You could have kept the big one," Elspeth had said after the second.

"He was the size of a door and about as clever."

"A door keeps the wind out," Elspeth had said.

That was the summer. Now it was Samhain, and the light was going, and there was a beast to kill for the salting and the fire to build up against the long night. The glen would have its fires on the hills by full dark. Down the loch the castle would have its torches lit on the wall. Isobel went into the house and blew the peat to a red glow and put the griddle over it, and Elspeth came in after her with the meal, and for a while there was nothing in the world but oatcakes and smoke.

It was Neil who heard them.

He had gone back down to the low fold to see the gap was stopped with its hurdle. Isobel heard him shout once, high and cracked, the way a boy of fourteen shouts when his voice cannot make up its mind. Then she heard the cattle.

She knew the sound of her own cattle the way she knew the sound of her own feet. This was not grazing and it was not settling for the night. It was the low, hurried bawl of beasts that are being driven where they do not want to go.

She was out of the door with the griddle iron still in her hand. Elspeth was behind her.

The dusk had come down blue and cold over the whole head of the glen. On the track above the low fold there were men. She counted them because she could not help counting. Eleven she could see. More behind, in the dark under the ridge. They had come down off the pass on foot, light and quick, with spears and staves, and two of them had ponies. They had pulled the hurdle out of the gap and thrown it down. The cattle were coming out of the fold in a press, shoving and lowing, and the men were round them on both sides with their staves, turning them up the track toward the pass.

Neil was in the burn.

She saw him come up out of the water on his hands and knees, black against the white of the falls, and go down again, and come up. One of the men stood on the bank above him with a stave across his body, not striking him, only keeping him there. The man was laughing.

Isobel ran.

She did not decide to. Her feet decided, and she went down the slope from the house in the dusk with the griddle iron in her fist and her skirts in the other hand. Elspeth was shouting her name. The man on the bank turned his head and saw her coming, a woman alone with a griddle iron, and he laughed harder. Then he put his stave across the track in front of her, at the height of her waist, and held it there.

She stopped. She was not a fool.

There were eleven of them she could see, and more she could not. They were Brannoch men. She knew it the way she would know a Brannoch cow, by nothing she could have put a name to. One of them called something to the man on the bank, and the man on the bank called something back, and they both looked at her the way men look at a heifer at a fair. Then they looked away again, because the heifer was not what they had come for.

Her cattle went past her up the track.

She stood behind the stave and counted them going. She could do nothing else, so she did that. She counted the red cow with the white face that had calved twice without help. She counted the old dun cow who led the rest to the water. She counted the black heifer of last year, and the calves, and the calves' mothers, and the bull last of all, as a bull will, going up into the dark in his own good time. She counted them by name because the names were what she had. The count came right, every one, and every one was going the wrong way.

Then the man took his stave away from her waist and went after the others at a trot. He did not look back. There was no need.

Isobel went down into the burn to Neil.

The water was as cold as a well in March and came above her knees. She got him by the back of his shirt and hauled him up onto the stones. He was coughing, and he had a cut on his scalp that was bleeding into his eyes, and he was crying with rage, which she thought was right and proper.

"I had the hurdle in," he said. "I had it in. They came down the side of the wall like water."

"I know."

"I could not hold them."

"Nobody could have held them. Get up to the fire."

Elspeth had come down by then. She took Neil by the arm and looked at his head and said something rude about Brannoch's mother. Isobel climbed back up to the house. Her skirts were soaked to the thigh and the wet wool clung to her legs and was heavy as a sack of meal.

The horn lantern hung on its hook beside her door, where it had hung all her life. Her father had bought it from a pedlar at Lammas the year she was born, and its panes of scraped horn had gone the colour of honey with the years and the smoke. She took it down. She opened the little door in its side and took a coal from the hearth with the tongs and lit the rushlight inside from it, and shut the door, and the horn glowed up yellow between her hands.

"Where are you going?" said Elspeth from the doorway.

"After them."

"With a lantern."

"I cannot see them without one."

"And they cannot see you without one," said Elspeth. "You will light their way home for them."

Isobel went anyway.

Neil was to go down the glen, as soon as he had his breath, to the castle and the chief. She told him so, and he went, limping and dripping, with Elspeth's shawl round his shoulders. The chief's men would ride for the pass. Somebody always rode for the pass. Nobody had ever yet come back from it with a cow.

The track went up past the head of her land and through the birches and out onto the open hill. The hoof-marks were easy in the light of the lantern. The ground was soft from the autumn rain and the herd had cut it to porridge. She could see the print of the dun cow's split hoof, and the long scrape where the bull had slid on a wet stone. She could smell them on the wind, the warm hide and dung smell of her own cattle, going away from her.

She walked fast. She climbed, and slipped, and swore, and climbed on. The lantern swung in her hand and threw her shadow out huge across the heather and pulled it back again.

Above the birches the wind got up. It came off the ridge in long hard pushes and it had sleet in it. The sleet ticked on the horn of the lantern and stung her face and found its way down inside the neck of her kirtle. Her wet skirts went stiff with cold. The track steepened under the shoulder of the ridge, and the ground went from soft to stony, and the hoof-marks got harder to find.

At the foot of the pass she stopped.

There was a great grey stone there that the glen called the Bull, though nobody living knew why. Beyond it the track went up in the dark between the two shoulders of the ridge, and the wind came down it like water out of a sluice. She held the lantern up. The light went a little way up the track and gave out. She could hear nothing but the wind. She could not hear a single beast.

She stood there by the Bull a long while. The sleet thickened into snow and then thinned back into sleet. Her fingers on the lantern handle went from cold to sore to nothing at all.

They were over by now. They were down the far side and into Glen Brannoch, and her cattle were going into Brannoch folds and would be killed for Brannoch's salting. A woman on her own with a horn lantern could walk into that glen. She could not walk out of it with anything.

She turned round. That was the hardest thing she did that night, and she did it.

It was full dark when she came back down through the birches. Below her she could see the fires of Samhain on the hills of the glen, small and red, one after another down toward the loch. At the far end the castle torches burned on their rock in the black water. Somewhere down there the chief's men would be getting into their mail. She thought of that without any hope at all.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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