Hard to know the right madness here— Skye's hills have the twisted pine scent of Montana, the air of Coyote's bitter-bright games—but here the road crosses the bridge where Macleod said goodbye to his faery wife and leads to the ruins of Trumpan Church where Clan Macdonald was burned alive by Clan Macleod. The crofts crumple like abandoned ranches, houses and barns folding in on themselves, stones falling one by one. Here it was not hard weather that emptied the fields but the Clearances: the landlords and everywhere their sheep. Stacks and hills and emptiness. Stones rearing to the sky: churches and brochs bending stone by stone nearer the grasses, castles full of nettles and sheep, weeds growing right to the sea, and everywhere, on church walls, sea rocks, corners of the castle windows, a strange green fern, bright with brownish stems, everywhere springing from the cracks in stone. I dreamt a dog whose hair was these ferns, thick, rich, alive. Looking at her I saw how the stones love this land, how the rain and wind and tides love stone, how the grass does, how the woman who once lived in the fallen croft shaped scones from flour and sang while her children— who grew to leave for the New World— woke to the sure rhythm of her work and the haunting lilt of a piper's tune reeling in the righteous wind. All this, with my fingers woven into fronds on her back, moving from the cool green growth to the warmth that rose from her skin. And in the pause of flying home, right at the Rockies' feet, there she is again: standing stiff in the wind as my plane touches down on the runway right by her. A wolf on the tarmac, the blowing snow swirling around her feet like fog, like the cold and deep warmth of her feral, human breath.© Neile Graham
First published in the anthology, VINTAGE 1995