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BOBOON’S CHILDREN
FROM Knapdale to Lorn three wandering clans share the country between them, and of the three the oldest and the greatest are the swart Macdonalds, children of the Old Boboon.
You will come on them on Wade’s roads, – jaunty fellows, a bit dour in the look, and braggart; or girls with sloe-eyes, tall and supple, not with a flat slouching foot on the soil, but high in the instep, bounding and stag-sure. At their head will be a long lean old man on crutches – John Fine Macdonald —
Old Boboon, the father and head of the noblest of wandering tribes.
“Sir,” will Boboon say to you, “I am the fellow you read of in books as the teller of Fingalian tales; wilt hear one of them for a poor Saxon shilling, or wilt buy my lures for the fish? Or perhaps a display of scholarly piping by my daughter’s son – the gallant scamp! – who has carried arms for his king?”
If one must have the truth, the piping is bad piping, but the fish-lures and the tales are the best in the world. You will find some of the tales in the writings of Iain Og of Isla – such as “The Brown Bear of the Green Glen”; but the best are to hear as Boboon minds them when he sits with you on the roadside or on the heather beside the evening fire, when the brown fluffy eagles bark at the mist on Braevallach. Listen well to them, for this person has the gift. He had it from his father, who had it from his father, who had it from a mother, who, in deep trouble and disease, lay awake through long nights gathering thoughts as healthy folks gather nuts – a sweet thing enough from a sour husk.
And if time were your property (as it should be the portion of every wiselike man), you might hear many tales from Old Boboon, but never the tale of his own three chances.
It happened once upon a time that the captain in the town took a notion to make Boboon into a tame house-man instead of a creature of the woods and highways. He took him first by himself and clapped him into a kilt of his own tartan eight yards round the buttocks, full pleated, with hose of fine worsted, and a coat with silver buttons. He put a pickle money in his sporran, and gave him a place a little way down his table. The feeding was high and the work was to a wanderer’s fancy; for it was but whistling to a dog now and then, chanting a stave, or telling a story, or roaming through the garden behind the house.
“Ho, ho!” said Boboon, “am not I the sturdy fellow come to his own?” and about the place he would go with a piper’s swagger, switching the grass and shrubs with a withie as he went, in the way gentlemen use riding-sticks.
But when Inneraora town lay in the dark of the winter night, and the captain’s household slept, Boboon would hear his clan calling on him outside the wall.
“Boboon! oh, Boboon! old hero! come and collogue with your children.”
He would go to the wall, which was lower on the inside than the out (and is, indeed, the wall of old Quinten, where a corps of Campbells, slaughtered by Inverlochy dogs, lie under a Latin stone), and he would look down at his friends running about like pole-cats in the darkness, in their ragged kilts and trews, their stringy hair tossing in the wind. The women themselves would be there, with the bairns whining on their backs.
“Ay! ay! this is you, my hearty folk!” he would say; “glad am I to see you and smell the wood-fire reek off you. How is it on the road?”
“From here we have not moved since you left us, John Fine. We are camped in the Blue Quarry, and you never came near your children and friends.”
“God! and here’s the one that’s sorry for that same. But over the walls they will not let me. ‘If gentleman you would be,’ says the captain, ‘you must keep out of woods and off the highway.’”
“And you like it, Boboon?”
“Like it, heroes! But for the honour and ease of it, give me a fir-root fire in Glen Croe and a dinner of fuarag. It is not the day so much as the night. Lying in-by there on a posted-bed, I choke for the want of air, though the windows and doors are open wide.”
“Come away with us, Boboon; we have little lack with the fish, and few are our stories since you took to the town.”
“No, no, dears. Conan’s curse, and I tell you no! In this place there is comfort, and every day its own bellyful.”
“But the freedom outbye, John, old hero! Last night we had the bravest of fires; the sparks flew like birds among the Duke’s birches, the ground was snug and dry, and-”
“Begone! I tell ye no!”
“Listen! To-day we were among the white hares beyond the Beannan, thwacking the big fat fellows with our clubs. Such sport was not in all Albainn!”
“White hares!”
“White hares, old John! And Alasdair Beag has some new tunes since you left us – a piobaireachd he picked up from a Mull man.”
“Would it be ‘Failte an Roich ‘?”
“Better than that by far; a masterly tune! Come out and hear him.”
But Old Boboon leaned with his arms on the wall and made no move to be off with his children.
“Come and stravaig,” said the girls, and his daughter Betty put a foot in a cranny and pulled herself up beside him to put coaxing arms round his neck.
“Calf of my heart!” said Boboon, stroking her hair, soft handed.
“We have the fine feeding,” said the girl in his ear. “Yesterday it was plotted trout in the morning and tunnag’s eggs; dinner was a collop off a fat hind.”
“A grailoched hind?”
“No, nor grailoched! That is a fool’s fashion and the spoiling of good meat. But come with us, father. Think of the burns bubbling, and the stars through the branches, and the fresh airs of the morning!”
“Down, down, you bitch! Would ye tempt me?” cried Boboon, pushing the girl from the wall and hurrying back with shaking knees to the Latin stone. The night was deep black, and for all he could tell by eyesight, he might have been in the middle of breezy Moor Rannoch, but the town gables crowded ‘thick and solid round his heart. He missed the free flowing winds; there was a smell of peat and coal from dead house-fires, and he spat the dust of lime from his throat.
Over the wall the clan scraped and skurried as weasels do. They dared make no noise for fear the town should waken, but in hoarse voices they called all together —
“Boboon, Boboon, oh! come home to the wood, Boboon!”
“Am not I the poor caged one?” said Boboon to himself, and he ran in that he might hear no more.
It was the same the next night and the next, and it looked like going on without end. Ever the wanderers coming at night to the wall and craving their head to come out. And one night they threw over a winged black-cock, that fell with beating feathers at Boboon’s feet as he stood in the dark listening to the swart Macdonalds whining outbye.
He picked up the bird and ran kind fingers through its feathers. The heat coursed in its breast and burned to a fever in its wounded oxter. Its little heart beat on Boboon’s thumb like a drumstick.
“Poor bird!” said he; “well I ken where ye came from, and the merry times ye had. Ye hatched in the braes of Ben Bhuidhe, and clucked on the reedy places round about the side of that tall hill. Before your keen eyes in the morning was the Dubh Loch, and the Shira – winding like a silver belt. Sure am I ye took wing for it with the day, and over Stuc Scardan to Aora Glen to make merry among your mates in the heather and the fern. Oh! choillich-dhuibh, choillich-dhuibh, hard’s our fate with broken wings and the heart still strong!”
He thrawed the bird’s neck, and then went over the wall to join his clan.
His second chance ended no better. He was back in a new kilt and jacket a twelvemonth later, and this time the captain tried the trick of a dog’s freedom – oat on the road as he liked by day, but kennel at night.
One day Boboon was on his master’s errand round Stron. It was the spring of the year. The shore, at the half-ebb, was clean and sweet, and the tide lapped at the edge as soft as a cat at milk.
Going round Stron on the hard yellow road, he got to think of the sea’s good fortune, – of the many bays it wandered into by night or day; of its friendship with far-out forelands, and its brisk quarrels with the black rocks. Here was no dyke at any time, but all freedom, the restlessness and the roaming, sleep or song as the mood had it, and the ploys with galleys and gabberts; the cheery halloo of the winds and the waving of branches on foreign isles to welcome one.
The road opened before him in short swatches – the sort of road a wanderer likes, with not too much of it to be seen at one look. In the hazel-wood by the way the bark of the young trees glistened like brass; thin new switches shot out straight as shelisters.
John Fine, with the sun heating his back, started at the singing of Donnacha Ban’s “Coire Cheathaich”: —
“O ‘twas gladsome to go a-hunting
Out in the dew of the sunny mom!
For the great red stag was never wanting,
Nor the fawn, nor the doe with never a horn.
My beauteous corri, my misty corri!
What light feet trod thee in joy and pride!
What strong hand gathered thy precious treasures,
What great hearts leaped on thy craggy side!”
Rounding Dundarave, the road lay straight before him till it thinned in the distance to a needle-point pricking the trees, and at the end of it was a cloud of dust.
“What have I here?” said Boboon to himself, stretching out with long steps, the kilt flapping against the back of his knees.
The cloud came close, and lo! here was his own clan on the march, draggled and stoury, rambling, scattered like crows, along the road.
“Boboon! Boboon!” they cried, and they hung about him, fingering his fine clothes.
He looked at their brown flesh, he saw the yellow soil in the crannies of their brogues, the men loose and blackguardly, the women red-cheeked, ripe, and big-breasted, with bold eyes, and all had enchantment for him! A stir set up in his heart that he could not put down.
“Where were you yesterday?” he asked.
“On the side of the Rest in Glen Croe, with dry beds of white hay and no hurry.”
“Where are you for?”
“Have you forgotten the wanderer’s ways, Boboon? Where does this road go to?”
“Well ye ken, my heroes! It goes to the end of a man’s will. If the man’ says, ‘I bide here,’ it’s the end of the road; but if he has the notion, it will take him to the end of days. That, by my soul! is the charm of all roads that are not in towns; and now that I think of it, let the captain whistle on his errand, for I’m Boboon and sick of the causey stones.”
So night found Boboon and his clan far in at the back of Auchnabreac, town-muir and bonny place, where some we ken would sooner be than wandering o’er the world.
And the days passed, and at Martinmas the captain was at Kilmichael Market, and he came on Boboon with his people on the edge of the market-place. Boboon in those days was as straight as a young saugh-wand, sharp and thin, all thong at the joints, and as supple as a wild cat. He was giving a display with the sgian-dubh, stabbing it on the ground at the back of his left heel and twisting his right arm round the leg to get the blade out of the ground without bending the knee. It was a trick to take the eye, but neither bardic nor soldierly, yet there was a throng of drovers about him. Along with him was his daughter Betty, who took after him for looks, but had her dead mother’s dainty tongue, and from her mother a little book-schooling John Fine had never the need of.
The eye of the captain fell on the two of them as they stood there, with their forty clan-folk going about the market, and he was gripped by a new notion to give Boboon the third and the last chance.
“Boboon!” he said, “come back to the town this once, and I’ll put you and your daughter up together in a house of your own.”
Before a week was out the thing was as he wanted. Boboon and Betty got a room in Macvicar’s Land, with a wooden floor, and a fire on the side of the wall with a built-in chimney, and other gentilities beside. They stayed for months, and they stayed for years, and the clan craved them in vain to come home. Betty was put to the books and the arts of ladydom by the captain’s mother and sister, and she took to them like a Ridir’s daughter. She lost the twang of the road-folk; she put her errant hair in leash; she grew to the habit of snodding and redding, until for grace and good looks she was the match of them that taught her.
One day the captain, walking in his garden in deep cogitation, fell in the way of the girl as she roamed among the bushes. He got for the first time the true glance of her (for one may look at a person for years and not see the reality till a scale falls from the eyes), and behold! here was a woman who set his heart drumming.
It was that very night Boboon put an end to his last chance.
The strong sun of the day left the night hot and clammy, and a haze hung on the country such as one sees in these parts in keenest frost. Macvicar’s Land was full of smells – of sweating flesh and dirty water, of fish and the rotting airs of sunless holes – and the dainty nose of Macdonald took a disgust. He flung open door and window, and leaned out at the window with his neck bared and his mouth stretched wide gasping to the air. The bairns in the back-land looked up and laughed.
“Look at Boboon, Boboon, Boboon, the father of Lady Betty!” they cried, and John Fine shook his fist and cursed their families.
But there was no ease from the trouble in this fashion, so he got up and went behind the town, and threw himself under the large trees with an ear to the ground. Beside him the cattle crunched the sappy grass in so sweet and hearty mouthfuls that he could well wish he had the taste of nature himself, and they breathed great breaths of content. His keen ears could catch the hopping of beasts on the grass and the scratching of claws in the wood, he could hear the patter of little feet, and the birds above him scraping on the bark when they turned in their sleep. A townman would think the world slept, so great was the booming of quietness; but Boboon heard the song of the night, the bustle of the half world that thrives in shade and starshine.
Leaning now on an elbow, he let his eyes rove among the beeches, into the bossy tops, solemn and sedate, and the deep recesses that might be full of the little folk of fairy-land at their cantrips. And then farther back and above all was Dunchuach the stately, lifting its face, wood-bearded, to the stars!
“If a wind was here it was all I wanted,” said Boboon, and when he said it the wind came – a salty air from the sea. The whole country-side cooled and gave out fresh scents of grass and earth.
“O God! O God!” cried the wanderer, “here we are out-by, the beasts and the birds and the best of Boboon together! Here is the place for ease and the full heart.”
He up and ran into the town, and up to the captain’s gate and in.
“Master,” he cried, ‘it’s the old story, – I must be taking the road for it; here’s no rest for John Fine Macdonald!”
“But you’ll leave the girl,” said the captain, who saw the old fever in the man’s eyes; “I have taken a notion of her, and – ”
“So be it! let her bide.”
“I’ll marry her before the morn’s out.”
“Marry!” cried Boboon, putting back his hair from his face with a nervous hand. “You would marry a wanderer’s child?”
“Well, they’ll talk, no doubt; but she has gifts to make them forget, and she’s good enough to make a king’s woman.”
“Sir,” said Boboon, “I have but one thing to say, and that’s our own Gaelic old-word, ‘There are few lapdogs in a fox’s litter.’” The captain’s face got as red as his vest, and he had a ready hand up for an answer to Boboon, but he had mind the man was the girl’s father.
“I’ll risk it,” he said, “and you can go your wandering ways, for Betty is willing.”
“No doubt, no doubt,” said Boboon, and he went. In the hollow of the night he was hooting back like a boy at the hoolets on the slopes of Coillevraid, and at the mouth of day, in a silver wet light, he was standing on the edge of the hills that look on two lochs, his head high like a scenting deer’s. He turned him round about to all airts with his eyes from Cruachan to Cowal, and as far between Knapdale and Lorn as a wanderer has vision, and yonder, down at Kames, was the camp of his clan!
Betty his daughter left Macvicar’s Land in the morning and went to be captain’s wife, with a seat in the kirk and callers from the castle itself.
“Wait, wait,” said old Craignure, when the tale reached him, “you’ll see the fox come out on her ere long.”
But the fox was not there; it was skipping a day, as the fox will do sometimes when the day before has been good hunting. All went well with the woman till the worst that might have been the best happened, and she died with her first child. It was the year of the stunted oats, that brought poverty to Inneraora and black bread to the captain’s board; but black bread and brochan would have been the blithest of meat for him if Betty was left to share it. He took to the bottle, and left the boy to women who had no skill of wild youth.
And the child grew like a fir-tree, straight and tall, full of hot blood, swung about by whim and the moment’s fancy. For him it was ever the horse and gun, a snatched dinner and hearty, and off to the wood or hill. He got to know the inner ways of the beasts that hide in the coarse grasses and the whin; at a whistle he could coax flapping birds to come to heel. A loose vest and a naked neck for ever were marring his gentility, and his closest friends were countrymen with hard hands and the loud ready laugh.
One day it came to the captain’s mind that something must be made of this young blade, and he sent for him.
“Boy,” said he, “are you at your books?”
“No, but – but I ken a short way with the badgers,” the lad made answer.
“Did you have a lesson this morning?”
“Never a lesson,” said the lad; “I was too busy living.”
“Living, said ye?”
“Living. I was at the swimming at the Creags, and beaking in the sun on the braes above the Garron beside the march wall where the hedgehogs creep, and I am new from the shinty,” and he shook the shinty-stick in his hand.
The captain took to pondering, his chin on his hand and his elbows on the table, where a bottle and glass lay beside him.
After a bit he said, “Look ye, my son, what are ye meaning to be?”
“I’m for the sword-work,” the lad said, in a flash, his face twitching.
“I would sooner see you in hell first!” cried the captain, thumping the board till the glass rang. He had seen foreign wars himself and had a hack on the groin.
That was the first of the feud between them. They fought it dour and they fought it hard, the father for the crafts of peace and the lad for his own way, and at last one day the captain said —
“To the door, brat, and your lair with the Boboons you belong to! Faith, and your grandfather was right when he said there was never a lapdog in a fox’s litter.”
Who he came of, the lad had no notion, for the swart Macdonalds never came near the town after Boboon left it for the last time; but he put on his bonnet, and went out of the house and on to the highroad.
It was well on to winter, a brawling day, with the leaves of the Duke’s trees swishing thick and high over the thatch and through the streets of the Duke’s town. Snug stood the gables, friendly and warm, and the window-lozens winked with the light of big peat-fires within. Over the breast the seabirds yelped and crows craked without a stop, stirring about in the branches behind Macvicar’s Land. And the salt wind! It blew in from the low bay at one end of the town and through it to the other, and before it went a lad into the wide world that starts at the factor’s corner.
“By the shore-side to the low country, or by the woods to the hills?” the lad asked himself. He had the caman still in his hand, and he tossed it in the air. “Bas for the highway, cas for the low,” said he. The shinty fell bos, and our hero took to it for the highway to the north. He swithered at the Arches, and looked back on the front of the town and the quay with the oil-lights on it. He was half in the humour to bide, but he put the notion behind him and stretched to the brae, whistling a piper’s march. At the head of the brae the town houses were lost to him, and this so soon he could not put up with, so he went down on a way to the right a little and stood on the grass of the Winterton field.
Fast and dark the night was falling, a heavy smirr of rain was drooking the grass, and the trees on every hand shook the water in blobs from the branches. Through them the lights of the finest town in the world shone damp and woe-begone.
“There are good folk in’t, and bad folk in’t,” said the lad to himself; “but somehow ‘twas never the place for me!”
He turned and went into the road through the wood, savage at heart, without a thought of where his sleep would be. When he came to Kennachregan, there was the scad of a fire above the trees beside the roaring river, and he went down and looked over a march dyke at a band of wanderers under the trees. Young and old, men and women, they lay steaming on soft beds of springy spruce-branches with their toes to the crackling logs, snoring as snore sound sleepers, sheltered from the rain by the thick branches, the side of the hill, and here and there a canvas covering. There was but one of them up – a long old man with lank jaws and black eyes – John Fine Macdonald. He was stirring up the logs with the shod of a crutch and humming a Perth song, and before the hottest of the fire a plucked bird was roasting.
The smell of the meat and the wood-fire rose to the dykeside where the lad stood shivering in his wet clothes, and the comfort of the camp was something he could not pass by.
He took a jump over the dyke and went out in the light of the fire, wondering what would be his welcome. Old Boboon looked up with his hand over his eyes, then rose on his crutches and put a hand on the young fellow’s shoulder.
“You’re from Inneraora town?” said he.
“I am,” said the lad; “but it’s Inneraora no more for me.”
“Ho! ho!” laughed the old wanderer. “Sit ye down, ye scamp, and take your fingers to a pick of your grandfather’s hen. Boboon’s children may be slow and far, but home’s aye home to them!”
