I’d had that last drink with him and walked with him back to his barracks. Standing there, with the sentry looking on, he’d taken hold of me by the shoulders. ‘I’ll make a bargain we’ ye, Donald my Donald. If ye die first, which I know bloody well ye’ll never do, I’ll take your body to Laerg and dump it there in a cleit to be pickled by the winds. You do the same for me, eh? Then the old bastard can lie in peace, knowing there’s one of the family forever staring with sightless eyes, watching the birds copulate and produce their young and migrate and come again each year.’ I had promised because he was tight and because I wanted to get away and forget about not being old enough to be a soldier.
Damn him, I thought, knowing he was out there somewhere in the fog. He wouldn’t be thinking of me. He’s be thinking of the last time he was in these waters — a Carley float instead of a lobster boat and men dying of exposure. All those years ago and the memory of it like a worm eating into him. Had Lane been right, making that wild accusation? Quite ruthless, Field had said. I shivered. Alone out here in the darkness, he seemed very close.
CHAPTER THREE
(March 7)
Thinking of him, remembering moments that I’d thought obliterated from my mind, the time passed, not quickly, but unnoticed. I got the weather forecast just after midnight — wind north-westerly force 3, backing westerly and increasing to 4. Fog. Cliff Morgan at 01.00 was more specific: Fog belt very extensive, but chance of clearance your area mid-morning. The wind was westerly force 4 already and my problem remained — how to locate the island.
Between two and three in the morning I became very sleepy. I had been at the helm then for over twenty hours and it was almost impossible for me to keep my eyes open. The engine noise seemed to have a brain-deadening quality, the compass light a hypnotic, sleep-inducing effect. Every few moments I’d catch my head falling and jerk awake to find the compass card swinging. This happened so many times that I lost all confidence in my ability to steer a course, and as a result began to doubt my exact position.
It was a dangerous thing to do, but I took a pull at the flask then. The smell of it and the raw taste of it on my dried-up tongue, the trickle of warmth seeping down into my bowels — I was suddenly wide awake. The time was 02.48. Was it my imagination, or was the movement less?
I picked up the chart, marked in my DR position for 03.00 and then measured off the distance still to go with a pair of dividers. It was 4.8 miles — about an hour and a half.
I hadn’t noticed it while I had been dozing, but the wind had definitely dropped. I could, of course, already be under the lee of Learg if my speed had been better than I’d reckoned, but I’d no means of knowing. The fog remained impenetrable. I switched off the compass light for a moment, but it made no difference — I was simply faced with darkness then, a darkness so absolute that I might have been struck blind.
With my ETA confirmed now as approximately 04.30, I no longer seemed to have the slightest inclination to sleep. I could easily be an hour, an hour and a half out in my reckoning. At that very moment I might be heading straight for a wall of rock — or straight past the island, out into the Atlantic.
I topped up the tank so that there would be no danger of the engine stopping at the very moment when I needed it most, and after that I kept going. There was nothing else I could do — just sit there, staring at the compass.
Four o’clock. Four-fifteen. And nothing to be seen, nothing at all. If this had been a night like the last, the bulk of Tarsaval would be standing black against the stars. There would have been no difficulty at all then.
At four-thirty I switched off the engine and turned out the compass light. Black darkness and the boat rocking, and not a sound but the slop and movement of the sea. No bird called, no beat of waves on rock. I might have been a thousand miles from land.
I had only to sit there, of course, until the fog cleared. But a man doesn’t think that rationally when he’s bobbing about in a rubber dinghy, alone in utter darkness and virtually sitting in the sea. My grandfather’s voice again, telling us of fogs that had lasted a week and more. I switched on the torch and worked over my figures again, staring at the chart. Was it the tide, or an error in navigation or just that, dozing, I had steered in circles? But even a combination of all three wouldn’t produce an error of more than a few miles, and Learg was a group of islands; it covered quite a wide area. The only answer was to cast about until I found it. The search pattern I worked out was a simple rectangular box. Fifteen minutes on my original course, then south for half an hour, east for fifteen minutes, north for an hour. At four forty-five I started the engine again, holding my course until five o’clock. Stop and listen again. Steering south then, with the grey light of dawn filtering through and the sea taking shape around me, a lumpy, confused sea, with the white of waves beginning to break.
The wind was freshening now. I could feel it on my face. At five-fifteen I stopped again to listen. The waves made little rushing sounds, and away to my left, to port, I thought I heard the surge of the swell on some obstruction — thought, too, I could discern a movement in the fog.
It was getting lighter all the time, and I sat there, the minutes ticking by, straining to listen, straining to see. My eyes played tricks, pricking with fatigue. I could have sworn the clammy curtain of the mist moved; and then I was certain as a lane opened out to starboard and the fog swirled, wreathing a pattern over the broken surface of the sea. Somewhere a gull screamed, but it was a distant insubstantial sound — impossible to tell the direction of it.
I continued then, searching all the time the shifting, wraith-like movements of the fog. A gust of wind hit me, blattering at the surface of the sea. A down-draught? I was given no time to think that out. A sudden darkness loomed ahead. A swirling uplift of the fog, and there was rock, wet, black rock ahead of me and to port.
I pulled the helm over, feeling the undertow at the same instant that I saw the waves lazily lifting and falling against a towering crag that rose vertically like a wall to disappear in white, moving tendrils of mist. Laerg, or Fladday, or one of the stacs — or was it the western outpost reef of Vallay? In the moment of discovery I didn’t care. I had made my land-fall, reached my destination.
I celebrated with a drink from my flask and ate some chocolate as I motored south-west, keeping the cliff-face just in sight.
It wasn’t one of the stacs, that was obvious immediately. That darkening in the fog remained too long. And then it faded suddenly, as though swallowed by the mist. I steered to port, closing it again on a course that was almost due south. The wind was in front of me, behind me, all round me; the sea very confused. Then I saw waves breaking on the top of a rock close ahead. I turned to starboard. More rock. To starboard again with rocks close to port.
A glance at the compass told me that I was in a bay, for I was steering now north-west with rock close to port. The rocks became cliffs again. Four minutes on northwest and then I had to turn west to keep those cliffs in sight. I knew where I was then. There was only one bay that would give me the courses I had steered — Strath Bay on the north side of Laerg itself.
I checked with the survey map, just to be certain. There was nowhere else I could be. Confirmation came almost immediately with a ninety degree turn to port as I rounded the headland that marked the northern end of Aird Mullaichean. Course south-west now and the sea steep and breaking. I hugged the cliffs just clear of the backwash and ten minutes later the movement became more violent.