glides. Between the gannets, fulmars and kittiwakes were cutting the sky up in arcs and curves, leaving – to my night eyes – trails of light like the traces on an overexposed photograph. I looked up at the sky of birds, feeling vertiginous, unstable. Lines from one of Ian’s poems came into my head: ‘ Wheeling flights / would drag you sky-high / if your wide feet failed / to suck the deck.’
Ian was pointing, saying, ‘Look over there, look there!’ A battered fishing trawler anchored a few hundred yards away: The Heather Isle . On her decks stood men, some facing us, others looking to the island. It was the guga hunters, ready to start their two weeks on the Rock, crashing into the geo to begin the work of unloading. We had by chance coincided with them to the hour.
Jubilee sloshed and rocked in the swell. Rona was a wedge of green to the east. Death and murder were everywhere underway. For Sula is a killing ground: a gathering point for predators and prey. Seals come for the big fish, gannets come for the herring and the sand eels, skuas come for the adult gannets, and the men come for the gugas . I watched gangs of skua pursue single gannets: their method was to fly above a gannet, drop onto its back, force it down onto the sea, smash its skull with their beaks until the gannet was dizzied, then paddle its head underwater with their feet until it vomited up the contents of its stomach, which the skua then ate. But other gannets were on their own hunts, slamming down into the water after fish invisible to me; you could see how they might pierce a hull. They came back out of the sea like white flowers unfurling. Fold, tuck, dive, unfurl: avian origami.
We boiled up black coffee in the galley bucket, then two of us set to the oars and rowed Jubilee once round Sula Sgeir; a circumnavigation under sail and oar. Ian was keen that we carry out this ritual circling to mark our passage.
It took us an hour to get round the island. Cormorants stood cruciform on low rocks, drying their wings. We turned the point of Pal a’ Cheiteanaich, went through the narrow gap between the black skerries of Bogha Leathainn and Dà Bhogha Ramhacleit, sharp stacks over which the sea foamed, past An Sgor Mhòr, past Sròin na Lic on which the lighthouse stood, past the geo and Bealach an t-Suidhe. Sula Sgeir, a scrap of rock hardly ever inhabited, bears almost thirty toponyms .
As we rowed into the geo , we saw the guga men standing on the steep rock that slopes to the landing point. They had stopped their unloading and formed up in a group. They looked out at us, unsmiling. Their leader, Dodds, was in the centre. They knew the boat, and they knew Ian, but the implication was clear enough: Keep away, this is our day, our rock . Ian waved a greeting, they nodded back and we left the geo .
So we ended our circumnavigation near the southerly cliffs where the rock jutted out like the prow of a ship. A guillemot glided above, its sharp black head reminding me that I had carried Dilworth’s kist with me and not needed it.
Suddenly Diyanne pointed. ‘Look there,’ she said, ‘a cross in the rock!’
And there was, too: a rough cross twenty feet or so high made of pinkish rock, set into the dark gneiss prow of the headland: geology as theology.
Then she called out again: ‘No, it’s not a cross, it’s a diving gannet.’ And it was, too; we all saw it to be so. The downstroke of the cross tapering to a point was the bird’s body and beak, and the cross-stroke was the bird’s wings. It was as if, like the bird in Ian’s story, a gannet had plunged down into the gneiss and crashed down through the rock to petrify right there on the prow of the island. Shock metamorphosis. I thought of a sentence I had read in a geological guide to the islands: Garnets can sometimes be found within Lewisian gneiss . I’d misread it first time through – Gannets can sometimes be found within Lewisian gneiss – and now my error had come true.
Ian was pointing, saying, ‘Look over there, look there!’ A battered fishing trawler anchored a few hundred yards away: The Heather Isle . On her decks stood men, some facing us, others looking to the island. It was the guga hunters, ready to start their two weeks on the Rock, crashing into the geo to begin the work of unloading. We had by chance coincided with them to the hour.
Jubilee sloshed and rocked in the swell. Rona was a wedge of green to the east. Death and murder were everywhere underway. For Sula is a killing ground: a gathering point for predators and prey. Seals come for the big fish, gannets come for the herring and the sand eels, skuas come for the adult gannets, and the men come for the gugas . I watched gangs of skua pursue single gannets: their method was to fly above a gannet, drop onto its back, force it down onto the sea, smash its skull with their beaks until the gannet was dizzied, then paddle its head underwater with their feet until it vomited up the contents of its stomach, which the skua then ate. But other gannets were on their own hunts, slamming down into the water after fish invisible to me; you could see how they might pierce a hull. They came back out of the sea like white flowers unfurling. Fold, tuck, dive, unfurl: avian origami.
We boiled up black coffee in the galley bucket, then two of us set to the oars and rowed Jubilee once round Sula Sgeir; a circumnavigation under sail and oar. Ian was keen that we carry out this ritual circling to mark our passage.
It took us an hour to get round the island. Cormorants stood cruciform on low rocks, drying their wings. We turned the point of Pal a’ Cheiteanaich, went through the narrow gap between the black skerries of Bogha Leathainn and Dà Bhogha Ramhacleit, sharp stacks over which the sea foamed, past An Sgor Mhòr, past Sròin na Lic on which the lighthouse stood, past the geo and Bealach an t-Suidhe. Sula Sgeir, a scrap of rock hardly ever inhabited, bears almost thirty toponyms .
As we rowed into the geo , we saw the guga men standing on the steep rock that slopes to the landing point. They had stopped their unloading and formed up in a group. They looked out at us, unsmiling. Their leader, Dodds, was in the centre. They knew the boat, and they knew Ian, but the implication was clear enough: Keep away, this is our day, our rock . Ian waved a greeting, they nodded back and we left the geo .
So we ended our circumnavigation near the southerly cliffs where the rock jutted out like the prow of a ship. A guillemot glided above, its sharp black head reminding me that I had carried Dilworth’s kist with me and not needed it.
Suddenly Diyanne pointed. ‘Look there,’ she said, ‘a cross in the rock!’
And there was, too: a rough cross twenty feet or so high made of pinkish rock, set into the dark gneiss prow of the headland: geology as theology.
Then she called out again: ‘No, it’s not a cross, it’s a diving gannet.’ And it was, too; we all saw it to be so. The downstroke of the cross tapering to a point was the bird’s body and beak, and the cross-stroke was the bird’s wings. It was as if, like the bird in Ian’s story, a gannet had plunged down into the gneiss and crashed down through the rock to petrify right there on the prow of the island. Shock metamorphosis. I thought of a sentence I had read in a geological guide to the islands: Garnets can sometimes be found within Lewisian gneiss . I’d misread it first time through – Gannets can sometimes be found within Lewisian gneiss – and now my error had come true.
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