The Loud Halo by Lillian Beckwith Page A

the way.
    â€˜Dugald’s just away and he says you’re to get rhubarb tonight on your way back.’ She tugged at my hand, pulling me round so that we faced in the opposite direction to which I had planned. ‘We’re goin’ this way,’ she announced.
    â€˜No, we’re going this way,’ I told her firmly. The trouble with Fiona was that she was so used to getting her own way she was completely deaf to correction. She continued to pull me in the direction she wanted to go but on this occasion I had resolved that I must be equally firm.
    â€˜I am going this way, Fiona, and if you want to go the other way you may. We’ll share out the food now,’ It was a risk because she was quite capable of agreeing to go off by herself and I should then have had to trail surreptitiously in her wake to make sure she came to no harm. Her sudden capitulation appeared to stagger her as much as it did myself for she was too speechless to issue a single command while we plodded over the brittle dry moors and picked our way across the beds of dried-out burns.
    â€˜Why did you no’ want to go the other way?’ she demanded when she had regained her complacency, and while we helped each other to descend a narrow path that led to a beach which Fiona had never visited before and which I loved for its seclusion I explained to her why I had chosen to come this way. It was really to avoid Bonny, for when I had first bought her and put her out on the hill with the rest of the village cattle she had been friendless and alone for a time and so whenever she saw me she had got into the habit of following me. I had made the mistake then of packing a ‘wee potach’ for her along with my own picnic lunch and had then had to endure her standing over me ecstatically chewing a juicy green cud from which webs of saliva drifted all over my own food. The next time she had spied the lunch bag on my shoulder she had grown impatient for me to open it and had insisted on escorting me so very closely that when I had come to the stepping-stones of a burn and had stood poised hesitantly in the middle she had urged me on so eagerly with her horns in my back that I and the lunch bag had emerged in a wet and sorry state. Her devotion to me was touching and because of it I did not try too much to discourage her until she had progressed from being merely accepted by the other cattle to become the acknowledged leader of the younger set. Then I had to find a different location for my alfresco meals. It was one thing to take one’s own cow for a picnic. It was quite another to take thirty or forty other cows, each one of them curious to discover what it was in my lunch bag that was so attractive to their leader.
    Fiona stared at me expressionlessly as I talked and when I had finished she asserted flatly, ‘See that boat out there,’ as though she had not listened to a word I said. She was looking out across the listless water through which a ringnetter was tearing its way with emphatic urgency.
    â€˜She has plenty fish,’ she added with adult self-assurance.
    â€˜How do you know she has fish, clever puss?’ I teased.
    â€˜Because she has the gulls with her,’ replied Fiona through tightened lips. She did not call me a silly old cailleach as she would have had I been her mother or aunt, but her tone was unmistakable. I stared out at the ringnetter. There was a trail of fuzzy smoke from her galley chimney and in it the gulls whirled and eddied with the sun glancing off their wing tips so that it looked as if the boat had thrown over herself a gauzy, sequin-studded scarf.
    I suggested beachcombing, a pastime which the child revelled in and which I found at least as pleasurable as at one time I would have found a shopping spree in town. It added to one’s feeling of self-sufficiency and independence to gather driftwood for one’s fire and in addition there was always the exciting prospect of