Gillon Cameron, Poacher

Fish were drying on the roofs all over Pitmungo and Gillon Cameron, looking down on the scene, thought that the whole town smelled of death and coal dust. To the north, he could see Loch Leven and beyond it the Leven hills, still green with patches of pine or brown with clusters of ash or oak, rising above the moorlands that were white under snow.

There would be deer over there, Gillon knew, nesting in the dark, silent pines. They would be stripping the bark off the aspens and ash trees, browsing in the mast beneath the oaks, nuzzling in the snow for acorns or beechnuts, fattening themselves for the hard winter to come. A swirl of misty wind blotted out the hills and Gillon licked his lips, tasting the mine dust on them.

Red meat and sinew, fiber of flesh and rich, warm blood; venison. Every man worthy of the name Scot deserved at least one roe deer for dinner in his life. It was bred in the bone--otherwise, what was the sense of God's having created him in Scotland and having put all that good meat roaming on Scottish grass? No salt-cod Christmas for the Camerons. Let all those poor bastards down there eat cod and skate's wings, but the Camerons were going to feast as Scottish families had feasted from the dark beginnings of time: on a haunch of deer, hot, heavy and bloody on the board.

Liar. Halfway down the hill, Gillon stopped. Liar--the great Highland romantic telling himself childlike stories. He had no ability to poach a deer, stalk it, shoot it, snare it. His heart could never go into the Highlands a-chasing the deer.

Just then the sun, which had been shuttered by clouds most of the day, came through and the leaden gray of Loch Leven turned bright blue amidst the whiteness of the snow--and Gillon realized what a fool he'd been. In the streams beyond that stretch of blue lay the other inalienable right of all Scotsmen--the fullsized salmon he must have on his table once before he dies. The king of fish. Gillon knew then that the Camerons were going to have saumont--as it was called in Pitmungo--on Christmas Day, if he didn't go to jail or die trying.

The December fish, the first of the big ones, even this morning would be swimming from the Firth of Tay, down the Tay into the fresh waters of the Earn, up the little tributary whose name he didn't know, through roiling, snow-fed waters in the Leven hills, through a hundred possible pools and, finally, to the places where they would spawn. Gillon's heart began to thump at the daring of his idea.

• • •

The rite Gillon had to perform was to unblacken himself, to drive the coal miner out of his mind and body, because a miner in salmon country is considered a poacher merely by being there. Gillon went down the hill to borrow the use of Mr. Selkirk's tub. When he heard Gillon's fears, the librarian was outraged.

"Guilty until proven innocent?" he asked Gillon, who was heating the water. "Oh, I wish Karl Marx had known about this. What a little chapter that would have made--the people's fish controlled by the gentry!"

Gillon had bought a little brush at the Pluck Me and a pumice stone to grind the coal dust out of the crevices of his body. As he washed, the surface of the water became coated with a scum of black, like a film on cooling soup. It would take three tubs, at least. As he scrubbed, Gillon told Mr. Selkirk the facts of life along the salmon streams.

First, there was the matter of the crown's owning the fishing rights to most of the salmon streams in Scotland--and then leasing them to the favored gentry. The second fact, he explained, lay in the nature of the fish, which no longer wanted to eat once they left the salt sea and arrived in the fresh water of the streams. Exhausted by their fight up the white water, they lay placid in the pools, storing up energy. A man could lie beside a pool and stroke the throat of one--and a poacher with gaff or grapple or big net could lift one out of the water as if it were a wading boot. Gentlemen anglers sometimes went years on end without hooking a fish. On the other hand, a man caught with a spear or a gaff was fined ten pounds and given a jail sentence, not to speak of the beating the water wardens would have given him beforehand.

It was Mr. Selkirk's idea, then, that Gillon should go north as a bird watcher, his excuse to wander in salmon country. As Gillon did his last rinses, Mr. Selkirk got down his handbook on the birds of Scotland and read the chapters on the red grouse and the golden eagle over and over in his penetrating voice.

When Gillon finally went home, Maggie, his wife, said to him, "My God, look at what you have done with yourself. You must be in loof."

"I am not in love with anyone," Gillon said gravely. She smiled at him in a knowing manner, but he refused to explain. He simply waited, silent, until the boys had gone down to the pit and Maggie had gone to the washhouse. Then he put a grapple and a line wrapped up inside his tammie, took up the plaid that would serve him as a coat, got his brass-knobbed walking stick and stepped out onto Tosh-Mungo Terrace.

The sky was clear now; the day was cold and hard, a good one for the road. Gillon set out strongly and by afternoon he had reached the snow line. It was mysterious to him how swiftly he came upon it, first a trace of white in the air and then all at once snow coming in over the sides of his shoes. He knew that the shoes were a serious mistake, but wearing his miner's boots would have put him under suspicion at once. By the time he saw the lights of the inn down by Loch Leven, his feet were wet and beginning to freeze.

Those lights were inviting and the bar would be open--but, in all probability, the water bailiffs would be drinking there. He passed by, walking on to the lake's edge, where the bitter night wind struck his face. Among the pines, he found one of the little summer houses and managed to open a window. There, in one of the closets, he found blankets and, after he had eaten some snow and his four shaves of bread, he made a nest on one of the beds and fell asleep.

• • •

In the morning, he could see the lake from his bed; it was cold and gray, like sheet metal. During the night, a front had come through from the north, and Gillon could hear the wind whumpfing in the pines outside the cottage. He took his socks from inside his shirt, where he had put them to dry, and made plans as he put them on. The wind was driving and waves came up over the ice-covered ones on the shore, but that wind was a friend. It would cover his tracks, would keep the water bailiffs close to home and would make the big salmon shelter in the pools. The fish didn't like to move when the water went below 40 degrees. So as not to be at the inn too early, he waited and read two chapters in his bird book several times. At five, he rose and went through the snow.

In the darkened foyer, he saw no one until suddenly a woman spoke to him--an old woman, standing not three feet away.

"We dinna expect naebody until seven or eight."

"Aye, well, I'll go on, then."

"Nay, dinna gang. I'll bring ye some food."

She took him into the empty dining room and, in a few minutes, brought him a sun-dried haddock, bacon, shaves of toasted bread and some strong tea. He knew that he shouldn't eat it all--no gentleman would--but he was so hungry from two months of semistarvation that he couldn't control himself.

The woman watched him. "This isn't the normal breakfast, now, is it?" Gillon asked. "Why did you bring all this to me?"

She looked around the dining room, then leaned and whispered in his ear. Gillon turned as red as the sun, which was just now touching the far edge of the lake. "Does it show all that much?"

"To those who ken, it does. My daddie was ane; my son is ane." She put her lips near his ear again. "Are you goin' after something?" He nodded. "For the family, for Christmas?"

"Aye, that's it." The first person he'd met had exposed him.

"Guid," she said, not bothering to whisper, "get a mickle ane."

"How do I pay for all this?" he asked.

"For what?" she asked, and their eyes met. "God go wi' you, and watch out for Mr. Maccallum."

"God go with you," said Gillon, as if he believed in God, but when he stood up, he felt stronger than he had for weeks.

With his warm plaid around him, he walked until he reached the path of Condie, and there he turned down toward the salmon stream. At a distance, he could see anglers and their gillies, but no one paid Gillon any attention. He'd go on to where the glens got deeper and the pools more filled with promise. By that time, it would be "Setterday's slop," the dangerous time when salmon fishing was forbidden and anyone by the streams might be considered a poacher.

He made his way along, not trying to hide and waiting for two o'clock. The path was well trodden and there were steps in the steep places, cut by the gillies so that the gentlemen anglers wouldn't slip into the stream. Gillon pretended that he was strolling and paid little attention to the deep pools, but he could sense the fish resting under the dark waters, their silvery scales almost black, their tails waving slowly back and forth with the arrogance of size and self-control. Finally, he found a pool that he felt was perfect and he stopped--and this was where the water bailiff caught him. Gillon hadn't heard him coming.

"Looking for something?" The bailiff touched him on the shoulder with a gaff. Gillon was pleased with himself because he didn't jump, didn't turn and apologize for being there.

"Yes, I'm looking for one of the big ones. They say they're all through here, but I haven't seen any."

"There's no fishing here. The streams are closed now."

Gillon continued to study the stream. When he finally turned to look at the man, he was surprised, because, for a moment, he seemed to be seeing Mr. Drysdale, the water bailiff at Strath Nairn. They're all a breed, Gillon thought, but he said aloud, "I don't want to catch one, I want to see it."

"You don't catch a salmon, you kill it."

"I've heard that they sometimes run as much as thirty pounds," Gillon said.

"Thirty? Fifty, man. I've even killed them at fifty-three." He was proud of his fish.

"I'm here studying the birds," Gillon said, "but the people at the Loch Leven Inn said I might see a salmon when all the anglers were gone. Is it true that the female builds a nest for her eggs in the sand? A real nest?"

The bailiff stared at Gillon's hands. "You're a workingman."

It was a terrible thrust, but Gillon had to keep talking. "I have to earn my way, like you, I suppose. Not like these toffs."

"A workingman along a salmon stream must be a poacher."

Gillon forced himself to laugh. "And how can I poach a fish if I don't even know where to look?"

"There are ways," said the bailiff, but Gillon could tell by his saying it that he'd already concluded Gillon was innocent. "You don't have the broad accent," the bailiff added.

"I wouldn't know about that. I'm from the Highlands, Cromarty hills, where we run a bull farm. Shorthorns crossed with Galloways."

"I'm Maccallum. Come on, then. You might as well see a salmon properly. I'll show you what a salmon stream is all about." There was a note of teaching in his voice, as if Gillon's point had been made. They were two Scotsmen, not English gentlemen with their hip-high waders and their gillies running up and down the banks to bring them meat pies and whisky.

He showed Gillon some hens in a gin-clear pool, where they were nudging stones and gravel into a redd for laying their eggs. They saw long, haggard kelts, spent from spawning and spilling their milt all over the redds. They came to pools--all of them too deep for Gillon's plan--where the cocks were at rest, sluggish in the cold water and saving their energy for the rapids ahead. As they walked farther downstream, they arrived at the pools where the clean fish would be, those that hadn't spawned yet. Even before the bailiff pointed it out, Gillon saw the pool. The pool he'd been waiting for.

"Quiet, now, and move slow," Maccallum said. And there was Gillon's fish, lying in the shallow pool away from the roiling water, the shadow of its body enormous along the bottom. Gillon was startled, almost frightened at the size. "A bull," said Maccallum. "You could go a year without seeing one, a lifetime without killing one." He suddenly clapped his hands and Gillon jumped, but the salmon didn't move. Gillon felt his heart racing.

"This one will stay for days," Maccallum said. "Do you know what I'm going to do? I think I'll come back Monday morning and kill it before the toffs get on the water."

"I thought the bailiff wasn't supposed to take a fish," Gillon said to make sure that they were now brothers in crime.

"Once a winter, every once in a while, when you see a cock salmon like that cock salmon, we bend the rule a little."

He winked at Gillon. And Gillon winked back, saying that it was a shame, but he would be gone home by then.

• • •

The waiting was the hard part. It was cold, but a fire was too dangerous, and Gillon made a little shelter of pine boughs close to the pool and waited for darkness. The bailiffs would make one last sweep of the stream to make sure that no one was trying to take fish by torchlight. He was starving again. The big breakfast had broken the chain of denial and he was paying for it. It was better to go without than to have and then have not.

As the light dimmed, he peered at the pool and thought he saw the water stirring--that would be the fish moving in its sleep to balance itself. His eyes were now beginning to adjust to the deep twilight when he saw the salmon rise, the clean and healthy silver of its side glinting before it sank again. "You're mine," Gillon whispered. "Now you belong to me."

He opened his coat and, with numb fingers, unbuttoned his shirt. His feet felt partly frozen and they made movement (continued on page 90)Gillon Cameron(continued from page 86) slow and clumsy. He uncoiled the oiled line he had wrapped around his waist that morning and took, the grappling hook from its hiding place. By this time, he was so cold that he couldn't feel the wind against his body, as if he had passed through to the other side of coldness. When he couldn't thread the grappling hook to the line, he went upstream a little and did it under water.

Still, he was moving with complete confidence. He dragged from hiding the pine pole he had found earlier in the afternoon and began to work it out over the water until he could lodge the end of it on a boulder at the far side of the pool. Then, straddling the pole, he began to wade into the pool. There were a moon and stars now and Gillon could make the fish out; he even thought that he could see scars and bruises on its back, the marks of its battering from stones and weirs and rapids on the way up. It was almost certainly one of those rare salmon to take the spawning journey twice, and that made Gillon feel better. He wouldn't be denying the fish the right to perform its function in life.

"I'll make this quick," he promised it. "As painless as possible." Stupid to talk to a fish, but, in a way, it was calming.

When he had edged out to reaching distance of the salmon, he dropped the grappling hook until it hung just in front of the salmon's eyes. Gillon knew that the fish wouldn't take the hook, and thus the hook must take the fish. He eased the line slowly to bring the grapple alongside, until at last it was resting on the gill cover. Then, trembling from both cold and tension, he let it slide down with enormous care until the hook was under the gill flap. Then he ripped.

It must have been a great and terrible pain, the barbs raking the scales and even the tissue itself. The bull leaped, sank to the bottom of the pool and stayed there, a long blackness against the shadowy water. It was moving back and forth in hurt or anger, rubbing its head against an edge of stone, using the motion salmon employ to scrape off accumulated sea lice from their gills. With little hope, Gillon lowered the grapple again, giving it the Ballyshannon waggle, just on a chance that the fish would be furious enough to snap at it. But salmon have more patience than men. It flicked its tail and went to a far part of the pool. A stream of bubbles arose, almost as if the fish were spitting at him, and Gillon felt perversely proud of the defiance.

He knew that he had the fish, but the fish had him, too, and the only question between them was the kill. Gillon thought of using a heavy rock--but he realized at once that it would sink slowly as the fish moved to another part of the room. But then the word room seized him with exhilaration. Any good miner knows how to seal off one room from another, or even one part of a room, in case of fire or flood in the pit. In the same way, Gillon could make a brattice of stones and clay to close off part of the pool. It nearly made him laugh aloud to think of it: Just because he was a miner, working most of his life in wet and darkness, he knew the means to win in this faraway glen.

He decided to work in his clothes and later dry them by a fire--that would mean little risk at three or four in the morning. Standing in water above his knees, he began to build the first of his brattices. He had hands for stone, an instinct about where to reach in the darkness for the next, right one. At making a pack to support a mine roof, Gillon had always been considered the best workman in Lady Jane Number Two. And, since most of the stones had been worn flat by ages of water, the job went swiftly. Still, only a Geordie could labor that way, bent double for hours.

At last, the first wall was finished. The salmon could no longer retreat to the deeper part of the pool. The pain in Gillon's feet had begun again and he didn't know whether that sign was bad or good. He resisted the notion of getting out to start his fire. As long as the water didn't freeze, his blood would run. He began the second brattice.

He had no idea what time it was when he finished that wall and came out of the water. The fish was within three walls now--the row of boulders in front of it and a brattice on either side. He could try now or he could build one more barrier, locking the salmon completely. He decided to build.

It took what he thought to be about an hour. Then he came out, walking on legs with all feeling gone, and began to make his fire. It had to be a little one, a tempting one just at the edge of the pool. The salmon in its way was like the Druid, in love with fire and sun, helplessly drawn to their light. As the flame started up, Gillon waited with the brass-knobbed stick in his hand.

The silvery head suddenly split the surface and he struck. At first, he thought that the hit was true, but the head dipped under and the fish flicked away. "Arrogant bastard," Gillon said between his teeth. He had a sense that the night was running out on him. He knew that all of his chances had now narrowed down to a single, last one.

He had heard of it often, the wrestling of the fish. It was the initiation to manhood in the west of Scotland, along the Highland shores, where boys were sent into the tide pools to kill their first salmon. But those pools would be warm and shallow and the fish not so savage as a salmon on the drive to reproduce. As he forced himself to move forward into the water again, he seemed to have an understanding of all the endurance it must have had to come this far--the years in the North Atlantic, on the never-ending run from porpoises, seals, sea lions and sharks; finally, the run for home and death, hundreds of ocean miles; then up the rushing rivers and snow-fed streams to this very pool and its fate at the hands of Gillon Cameron, miner and poacher.

By now, Gillon had climbed over the rear brattice and was herding the fish up against the boulders at the head of its pen. Soon its nose was touching stone. Gillon sprang.

The strength of the fish, the force of its thrust to get free was shocking. He held it in his arms, thrusting it against the smooth stone and trying to crush its head against the rock. It whipped powerfully against him, torquing its body back and forth to spring free. When it broke Gillon's hold, it sank back to the bottom of the pool and lay quiet, possibly somewhat stunned.

"I'm sorry, fish," Gillon said. He leaned against a boulder and let the water run from his shirt and trousers. I must be mad, he thought. I have come a long way to this forest; in the dead of winter, in the dead of night, in danger of jail, in danger of freezing to death, I have built three stone walls and now with my bare, bleeding hands, I am trying to kill a 40-pound fish.

Almost automatically, his hand was searching for a pointed stone. He hadn't wanted to disfigure the fish, but now it was the only way. He got one arm around it, half lifted, and drove the stone into the back of its head. Its dorsal fin was cutting his chest now and he had to let go. The salmon was frantic as it broke free again. It lashed its tail against the brattice, but the wall held. Gillon sensed what would happen next.

There was no room to run in the pool and so, when the jump came, it was almost straight up and slow, the body of the fish barely arching, a beautiful gold and silver in the firelight from the shore. The fish was alive with death in him--and Gillon drove the stone with all the force he had left.

"Die, for Christ's sake, die," he said. The salmon dropped, descended to the bottom of the pool and then rose again very slowly. Gillon lifted it and found that the body was still. He stood exhausted for a moment, cradling it, tasting sand and gravel and something of salmon. He realized that he was tasting milt, the seed at last being poured out onto the waters to fertilize no eggs now. (continued on page 204)Gillon Cameron(continued from page 90) the ritual of life played to its very end.

Clambering and stumbling over the brattice, Gillon got up the slippery way and threw the salmon into the snow near his fire. One eye seemed to follow him as he got his staff. With a neat, quick blow on the back of its head, Gillon killed his fish. "I'm sorry. I'm truly sorry," he said aloud.

• • •

Before the fish froze, Gillon threaded his line through the gills and tied the tail to the head in a bow, so that he could carry the burden with his staff across one shoulder. He took off his clothes and stood in his plaid while he dried them. The fire frightened him now; its enormous lights and shadows seemed to dance all through the glen. But the drying would have to be done or he would die.

He looked at the walls he had built in the pool and he was astounded at the work he had done. He'd planned to break down those brattices so that the water bailiff would never know what had happened, but he decided against it. They would know the truth by the way the stones were packed, and he wanted it to become part of the legend of the stream--the man who came in the night and mined a fish.

He doused the fire with snow. Then, with his burden, he backed slowly up along the path through the pines, brushing out his footsteps with a pine bough. An hour or so before sunrise, he set his face toward Pitmungo. The sun was almost up when he reached the edge of the forest. He sat down in the last row of trees to rest and to study out the land ahead. On the moor, perhaps a half mile to his left, lay a thatched cottage, smoke rising from its chimney. There would be bacon and eggs there, but Gillon was wary of crofters--bleak, maybe dangerous people, who lived their lives in harsh winds.

He didn't hear the man come on him. He must have dozed off. He felt the tap of something against one of his swollen feet and looked up. The crofter carried a bundle of wood under one arm and an ax in the other hand.

"Aweel, let's tak a bit o'it," he said.

"What do you mean?"

"The saumont. I'll hae my share now." The man had a hard, sharklike face, the kind you'd expect to see in a jail. "You're trespassin' on my property. You stole the fish from crown waters. Y'ken what Maccallum would do to you gin I told him?" He kept swinging his ax in front of Gillon's eyes. Gillon wanted to call that bluff, but his feet were too painful for a quick move.

"A forty-pound bull you gat. How'd you get him?"

"With my bare hands."

"Fewkin' liar." He lowered the ax. "Ah, well, keep your fewkin' secret. Five pounds fish is your passport price or I tell Maccallum." Gillon untied the line. The salmon looked beautiful lying there in the snow among the pines.

"What are you carryin' the heid for?" The ax came down and the head was severed.

"You bastard," Gillon said.

"And the dock." The ax came down on the tail. "I would say about there is richt." The ax came down once more and a chunk of the fish, perhaps one eighth of the whole, was cut off. "Guid saumont, I'll say that for you. Clean and just in from the sea. Next time you maun gae hame by nicht." The man turned his back and headed down the path toward the moorland farm.

Gillon wanted nothing more than to sink back and rest on his cushion of snow and pine needles. But the thought gave him a spurt of fear and he got up. If the crofter hadn't come, Gillon would have sat there with his back to the tree and he'd have frozen to death.

"You saved my life, you bastard," Gillon shouted after him. "Thank you." Let that bewilder him the rest of his wind-riven life.

• • •

After a long time of walking, he really didn't know how long, he found that the snow on the moor had thinned and there were islands of green. Finally, he came out on a rise and, looking around, saw Loch Leven far off to the east, deep blue, with an icy edge of white. He had gone miles too far west and there was nothing to do but change his direction. He started down into a place called the Rough Grazings, clumpy, rutted moorland that blackface sheep did their best to rip up. He could see a few crofts tucked away in the creases of the moor and, eventually, he came across a rough track that led him to a little clachan of five or six houses. There were several people about, staring shyly at his fish.

"How far to the Cowdenbeath Road?" Gillon asked. He could smell oatmeal cakes being cooked somewhere in the hamlet. "I'll trade part of this saumont for some bannocks," he said. They stared at him. "It's all right; it's a legal saumont!" he shouted. The people went inside their little white cottages and shut their doors.

He could see them looking at him through the small, leaded windowpanes. He was going to shout again, when he suddenly realized that he'd come across one of those little islands of Gaelic-speakers on the moor, innocents who were frightened of anything they couldn't understand. The only one who hadn't fled was a man with a muck rake in his hand, wearing a dung-stained kilt and standing by a byre.

Gillon walked until there was no more snow and searched for just the right kind of farm. At last he found it--a large two-storied house with a bothy for the hired hands behind it. Beyond that, all kinds of outbuildings, a byre for the cows, a cote for the sheep. Apparently, the milking had been finished and somewhere a man shouted something about feeding turnips to the cows. Then a man with a lantern came out of the milkhouse, walked across to the bothy and went in. Somewhere over by the sheepcote, a Border collie was barking.

Gillon slipped inside the byre and closed the door behind him. The odor of cow dung and urine took his breath away for a moment. The next moment, he'd gone up the hayloft ladder. He made a nest and covered himself with the plaid. He reached out his hand and slid it down the silvery, still-frozen flank.

• • •

Feet woke him--sharp, scurrying little feet over his chest and even his face. Then he heard the squeaks of anger and excitement and felt them tugging and tearing at his fish--rats. "Get away!" Gillon yelled as he felt for his walking stick in the half-dark. He began striking wildly and he heard some of them squeal, but others kept coming. Then there was a light on and the voices of men below.

"What in the name of God is this?" one of the men called.

"The rats are eating my fish!" Gillon shouted. Two men came up the ladder into the loft.

"Oh, Christ Almighty, what a braw fish!" With the aid of the light, the farm hands began killing the rats joyfully. "They never seen a saumont before," said one of them as he threw rat bodies into a tub.

"What's the matter, mon? Ye're shiverin', mon." It hadn't been the rats on his own body that had bothered Gillon but the thought of them chewing at his salmon.

"This is my family's Christmas dinner," he managed to say.

"Och, gie me that, then." One of the men picked up the fish and went away. Gillon could hear a pump working and, a little later, he came back. The salmon was cleansed of blood and there were only a few small tears in it.

"Poacher, are you?" asked the other man. "Workingman?"

"Coal miner," said Gillon. "From Pitmungo. But there's no work any longer. There's nothing but salt cod for Christmas."

"Och, mon, that's crude. Stay here and we'll sneak you out with half a goose. Micht as well pit a stake through your heart as go withoot a Christmas goose on the table."

"A saumont will do very well," said Gillon, a touch annoyed.

"I dinna ken. I never tasted one." They were staring hungrily at his fish. Gillon sighed and took the man's knife. He cut two steaks from the salmon.

"Bake it with some butter, understand? Don't boil it."

The men nodded and thanked him. One of them was already looping a rope around the fish to hang it from a beam. "You'll be gone by day-sky, mon? Master thinks a mon who'd steal a saumont would steal a sheep quick as you can say Jock Hector." Gillon nodded.

• • •

When he woke again, it was dawn. The cocks were telling him. Through a little window in the loft, he could see the paling stars in a clean sky. The weather was holding.

When he'd got down the ladder, he saw that almost half his salmon was gone. Dry-mouthed with rage, he swore at those filthy bastards--coming back in the night to steal his fish. He thought of setting fire to the byre.

Then he saw a Galloway come across the floor and, just as if she were a trained circus animal, rise up on her hind legs until her nose and tongue just tipped what was left of the fish. The salmon had been trimmed to the exact height of the tallest and longest-necked cow in the byre.

About 20 pounds of salmon left. Who could ever tell that this had once been a great salmon, a cock among cocks? Still, there was enough for Christmas dinner. For all that, it wasn't salt cod. He shouldered it and started out to the Cowdenbeath Road. If everything went right, he'd be in Pitmungo before the stars came out again.

The blister came without warning. He'd been walking well for some time, but suddenly there came a great pain, as if he'd been struck by something. He took off his shoe and sock and was frightened by the mess he found. The swelling of his foot had given birth to the blister and the freezing of it had masked the pain. His heel was a raw-looking red-and-purple knob and the flesh burned in the icy wind. There was nothing to do but sit by the road and hope for a ride.

In time, a farmer's cart came trundling down the road toward Cowdenbeath. "Can you take a man along?" Gillon called. "I'm trying to get home for Christmas."

The farmer looked at him and was slow to answer. Finally, he said, "It's a weak horse and a sair fraucht." He paused. "But if you could make it worth his while?"

Gillon winced. "Would he like a salmon steak?"

"Aye, if it's fresh. He's gey fickle."

Gillon looked at his foot and then back to the man. "Give me your knife," he said dourly.

They didn't talk until they'd reached the town. When Gillon was getting out, the man said, "Wrap the foot in beech leaves; that will drain and poultice it." Then he suddenly held out his hand and added, "God bless you, and a joyful Christmas to you."

Gillon hobbled directly to the house of a widow on Fordell Street. He knew her because she sold knitted socks and underwear to miners. He bought a pair of heavy socks, put them on and went shoeless. Out on the road again, he found that his foot felt better and he began to walk with less pain.

When he reached a beech grove, he took off his socks and went over a plashy part of the moor to get some leaves. He brought them back and, without looking at the blister, covered it. Then he donned the socks again. Gillon labored on.

By the time he had reached High Moor, the sun was resting on the horizon. It seemed only a few paces after that before he saw the cold moon in the sky and the first star. All that kept him going was the thought of his salmon over a good, dancing flame. He could smell the richness. In the rest of Pitmungo, they would be making sauces to disguise the cod. They'd be boiling the bony fish to soften its leathery hide. He stopped a moment at the top of High Moor to savor both thoughts.

The first cat picked Gillon up just before the path went down through White Coo plantation. At first, it seemed to be interested in his foot. Then, without warning, it sprang halfway up his back in an effort to get at the fish. He shook it off and shouted. But when he turned away, the cat leaped with a thump and Gillon felt the claws through his plaid. He shook it off again wearily and gave a cut at it with his stick. But now there were four of them, stalking him just out of his range. Gillon backed to one of the orchard trees, took off his plaid, folded it and placed it, along with his shoes, in a high crotch. He'd have to battle his way home through these last, ludicrous predators.

Baudrons they called them in Pitmungo--the wild and homeless cats of the neighborhood. By the time he got down through the orchard, there were six of them, circling and waiting for a misstep, eying their Christmas dinner under Gillon's arm.

It was a bad half mile, with Gillon trying to keep his tortured feet under him and striking only when he had to. Once, he twisted quickly and caught a fierce black one coming in almost chest high. The brass knob struck it just behind the ear. He swung the stick sharply to his left and a wail told him that he'd scored another hit. That gave him enough respect from the cats to let him hobble on to the terrace.

There were lights in every window on Tosh-Mungo Terrace and smoke from the chimneys. Salt-cod Christmas wouldn't be dark and cold, at least. From several houses came the sound of singing, the old Scottish carols that always made Gillon sad.

He looked through the window of the Japps' house and he could see a quarter barrel of ale in the front room. He could almost taste it on his tongue--that with a wee drop of whisky.

His attackers were caterwauling now. When somebody came to a window and looked out into the darkness, Gillon imagined what an absurd sight he must be. A shoeless, half-frozen man, unshaven, his hair wild from the wind, his shirt ripped by fish and rats and cats, starvation in his face. A man with a pillaged chunk of fish held high on his shoulder and driven along the street by a wild band of reiving cats.

Now he was approaching his own door. The poacher home from the hills--Christ knew, he hadn't much to show for it all, only about 16 or 17 pounds of cock salmon. But Gillon was happy. He'd stood up and made some kind of testimony to a world that left nothing but salt cod to the poor on Christmas. And none of the rest of them, all up and down the rows of Pitmungo, had done it.

He looked through the window and saw the family seated around the bare table. His boy Andrew seemed to be saying grace. It was time to enter. He pushed through the door and stood in the brightness inside, triumphantly.

"Oh, what did they do to you, Daddie?" asked Sam.

"Nothing," said Gillon. "I did it to them this time."

He crossed the room and laid his fish on the table amid exclamations. It looked big and beautiful on the bare wood. "A bonny saumont!" said Andrew.

But Maggie was looking at her husband. "You've lost your tammie! You've lost your braw bonnet!"

Gillon's hand went to his head; he had no memory of any tammie. Had it gone under in the pool? That must be it. "Who cares about a bonnet?" asked Sam. He went to the sideboard and got out a bottle of whisky. He poured everybody a drink, in teacups and tassies.

"No salt-cod Christmas for the Camerons!" said Gillon in a ringing voice, and they all lifted their whiskies and drank to that toast.

• • •

It was Gillon's daughter Sarah who saved his foot. She tended him, but, after a week, when it got no better, Dr. Gowrie was called in. He stared at it and said, "In some daft way, you've managed to get yourself a good frostbite, and after you did that, you went on and humiliated the flesh. If you want my opinion"--he touched the ankle with his forefinger--"it wants taking off about here."

"No!" said Sarah. "We've lost two legs in this family and we'll keep this one, thank you."

"When it turns black, you'll come crawling to me, Cameron. Don't crawl too late," the doctor said as he left.

But Sarah's faith and patience were unending. She drained the wound constantly; she mixed a poultice of oatmeal to draw the infection out; when the smell grew very bad, she burned pulverized coffee beans in a shovel over the fire. She sat by his bedside.

There was no single day when he got better, but at least he got no worse. In February, Gillon decided that he could walk. But when he tried, the foot swelled like a frog's throat, ugly and white. In March, there seemed to be some improvement and he got a shoe on for an hour or so. Things went better after that.

On the first day of May, called Beltane, when people all over Scotland were washing their faces in the May dew on the moors, Gillon dressed in his pit duds and went down the hill to get work in Lord Fyffe Number One. By afternoon, he was howking coal 3000 feet below the surface of the earth, and it seemed to him that he could never remember doing any other thing in his life.