The Flying Years

Memory, as the years slipped past, always served Angus Munro with
Loch Brendan through a web of yammering gulls, but his mother
remembered it through a mist of tears.

There had come to her no omen that the Munros were to leave there.
An omen would have hinted the Hand of God in it, however strangely,
whereas there seemed to be only the callousness and rapacity of
man. Not that any supernatural warning was needed in face of the
bitter evidences, but her folk were prone to omens. Her
grandmother, as she often told, when recounting the stories of the
land, had been waked one night in the '45 by her brother who was,
as they said, "out". She had sat up in bed, staring at him in the
dusk of the kitchen. The smouldering seed of the fire had blazed
to a sudden puff of air--and he it was, without doubt, in that
flicker of light. He shook his head to her, forlorn-like, as in a
sign that something had miscarried, and then was gone. "So you
see," Angus's mother would say, "my granny was fully prepared when
the news came that her brother was dead on Culloden Field."

As for herself, when the news came that Angus's brother, Robin, had
been drowned in the Sound, she was prepared. She took it as his
father did not. Daniel Munro seemed to lose his reason for awhile,
marching to and fro like a soldier on sentry-go, back and forth.
At each sudden advance he appeared to be going for help; then he
would halt, aware that there was no help, stand dazed a moment,
wheel, and stride off again--back and forth. But Mrs. Munro spoke
slowly:

"That was the death candles burning over the Sound last night,"
said she. "I should never have let him go this day. I was
warned."

She was intimate with ghosts. "Shadows", by the way, was the word
for them among another folk in another land to which they were all
going--the father grimly, the mother in tears, the lad with a sense
of adventuring.

They were no great readers in Brendan in those days, though in the
winter great story-tellers, while sleet scoured the window and
night gave a hollow moan in the chimney, with narratives of the old
days, myth and truth: of King Hakon; of the Norse woman with the
flame-coloured hair; of Cromwell's soldiers that bided in Inverness
after the wars and, surrounded there by the Gaelic speech, kept
pure amongst themselves their own tongue and passed on to their
bairns the fine language of their time, so that, in after years,
Sassenach philologists would comment on how beautiful was the
English the folk of Inverness spoke; of Prince Charles Stuart; of
Cluny in his "cage" on Ben Alder when it was supposed by most that
he was long since in France; of the smoking out of the Macdonalds
in the cave of Sciur; of the pixies and the kelpies.