The livestock were not part of this chapter. They were in the agricultural section of the book, which she’d finished, just about, at the end of last year.
Alice had gathered all the information she could find about these animals: details of their basic biology, diet, population size, rough date of introduction where available (since all, besides the seals, were introduced to Shetland by humans). She had also tried to document sightings of each species to allow her to describe more fully their habits and locations within the valley, which is why the stoats had proved problematic. Everything that seemed relevant would be included, and almost all of it had now been written. The chapter was nearly done.
Lifting her head again from her work, Alice rolled down the sleeves of her dark woollen jumper. She looked younger than her forty-five years but dressed older. She wore glasses when she was writing – wide-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses that were accidentally fashionable. Everything else was merely comfortable. The jumper, the jeans, the T-shirts, the fleece jacket: she liked not having to think about what to wear. It was one of those freedoms she had not even realised was missing until, coming here, she had found it.
Alice often became distracted around this time of the morning. She would rein in her straying thoughts for as long as she could until she was certain they would not come back into line. Then she would walk. Half an hour was all that was needed usually, unless there was something specific she had to find, observe or figure out. It was enough time for her to get partway up Burganess, then come back, or else to stroll, without hurrying, along the beach. Today, she had nowhere in particular to go, so the beach, probably, was where she’d end up. Putting down her pen, Alice straightened the pages on the desk, picked up a notebook, just in case, then went to get her coat. As she opened the front door, a curtain of cold air folded around her body, and she thrust her thick-gloved hands into her pockets.
* * *
At the top of the valley, where the road began its stoop towards the sea, David parked his pickup and got out. Sam, the collie, stayed behind in the passenger seat, keeping warm. Along the fence here, on a row of wooden pallets, small blue silage bales were piled, two high and three deep. In the field beyond the gate, the sheep were waiting. The sound of his arrival had brought them running in anticipation.
Though the snow was only shallow, the animals looked hungry and called out to him, impatient. David went to the far end of the row and reached up to a bale on the top. He scraped the snow away, then pulled the bale back towards him and rolled it slowly to the gate. He always took from the far end because he knew, as the winter went on, that his gladness at having done so would increase. The task would get a little easier each day.
He opened the gate and pushed the silage into the park, the sheep already gathered round him, their breath billowing. He split the metal feeding ring and pushed the bale inside, then took a knife from his pocket, slicing first in a circle around the top, then in four vertical lines to the bottom. He lifted the top of the plastic off and pulled the four strips down to reveal the silage. Carefully he peeled the netting away and bundled it into his boilersuit pocket, then began to unravel the bale, loosening and spreading it around the ring.
The sheep pushed their heads through the metal frame and chomped at the damp grass. The smell of it, and the lanolin of the animals, thickened the air like beer half-brewed. David counted them – two dozen – then watched as they forced their heads into the food. They were Shetlands, all of them, small and sturdy. He took a glove off and placed his palm against the cheek of one of the ewes and scratched. She pressed against his hand but kept eating. She’d been a caddy lamb, that one, four years before, abandoned by her mother then bottle-fed by David, so she had none of the jittery edge of the others. She still liked to be scratched sometimes, but she liked her food even more.
David thought back to the other caddies he’d had, generations of sheep hand-reared, some of them mothers and grandmothers of those in front of him now. When the girls were young, they’d looked after them. Emma, in particular. She would get up early to do the first feed, holding the bottles to their little mouths, two at a time, her face glowing in delight as they sucked and slurped and gulped the milk. Then, after school, she would rush home to see them again, carrying them like teddy bears, squirming, around the garden. For those first few months, the lambs were perfect pets. They were cute, they liked company, they played. But it was perhaps their neediness that the children responded to most of all – their utter dependence upon people. No child can resist being needed.
David let himself out of the feeding ring and walked back towards the gate, stopping once to look again at the sheep tearing their way through the grass as though they hadn’t eaten for a week. He felt tired, exhausted even, though he had no need to be, and as he sat down in the pickup again he allowed himself a long sigh. From the passenger seat, the dog sighed too, then shifted to rest its head in David’s lap. Sam raised his eyes, waiting for something or nothing to happen.
With Maggie gone, David was now the oldest person in the valley. And with Emma now gone, too, he was the only one left who’d grown up here. He wasn’t sure what that meant, exactly, but it seemed to mean something. It felt like a responsibility, a weight that couldn’t be lifted.
He had never lived anywhere else. Not really. He’d gone away to work after school was done, labouring in Aberdeen, but he’d come home again after only a year. He didn’t want the money enough to be away any longer. He came back to his parents’ house – now Terry’s house – then found a job at the oil terminal in the late seventies. Since then he’d never considered living anywhere else. This valley shaped his thoughts. Often it was his thoughts. The slope of it, the tender fold of the land. Somehow it was mirrored inside him. It was part of him, and he could no more leave this place than he could become someone else. That realisation had never once troubled him. Quite the opposite, in fact. It gave him a clarity of purpose, the lack of which he recognised in others. Life would be so much simpler, he thought, if people dreamed only of one place.
He sat in the driver’s seat, looking out over his place: his present, past and future. From there, at the edge of the upper park, he could see nearly all of the valley. Only the dip, south of this field, where the two little burns melted together, was hidden. Alice’s house, Bayview, was the closest, just up the road; then his own house, Kettlester, if you didn’t count the Smiths’ place up on the hill, which he did not. That was accessed from another track altogether, which came off the main road half a mile away, and neither looked nor felt like part of the valley. It had been built more than ten years ago now – a big, showy house with windows everywhere – but David had not yet fully accepted its presence.
Beyond Kettlester, the road curved southwest as it descended, until it reached the Red House, where Sandy now lived. There had been an old stone cottage there until the 1970s, when it was knocked down and replaced by the wooden one that still stood, which itself was not much more than a chalet. Willie, a cousin to Maggie’s father, had lived there all his life and agreed only reluctantly to the rebuilding, which Maggie herself had insisted on. He seemed to take the plan as an affront to his ancestors – to their ancestors – who might or might not have constructed the house. But his stubbornness was nothing compared to hers, and so the plan was eventually accepted. His only condition, to which Maggie consented but for which no one ever received a proper explanation, was that the new house should be painted a startling shade of red.
Willie lived another twenty years in that house. When it was first rebuilt, he had seemed old before his time, as though worn out by his own company. But when he died he really was old – almost a hundred – and had seemed to enjoy those final years as much as any he ever experienced. David bought the house, then, in part because he had the money and saw it as an investment, and in part because of what had happened to Flugarth, his parents’ house. Flugarth lay another few hundred yards down the road. That was where he had grown up and where he had lived until moving to Kettlester with Mary after they married.
His parents
