Beautiful Just! by Lillian Beckwith

the hill day and night and so until the time came for the evening feeding and milking there was really nothing that demanded my presence. Had I stayed at home I would have been weeding potatoes or stacking peats but so long as the weather did not betray me too badly those tasks would still be accomplished by my working twice as long another day. Meantime I was free; I had amiable company and the car was running sweetly. The auguries were all for a blissful day.
    Erchy said, ‘If you turn off to the left just down this road we’ll come to the place where the fellow lives that has the gun.’ I turned off to the left and drove for some miles along a track that snaked around the hill until it finally ended at a drab, peat-stained croft house which squatted beside the loch. Erchy and Hector got out of the car and strolled with apparent aimlessness towards the cottage and, watching, Morag and I saw a bent, cobwebby looking old man emerge, greet them with traditional Highland warmth and lead them into the house. I knew there would soon follow an invitation to Morag and me to go inside and take a ‘strupak’ but the day was too tempting to stay indoors and I decided on escape. I slung my binoculars round my neck and got out of the car.
    â€˜I’m going for a walk,’ I told Morag. ‘Blow the horn if they’re back before I am.’
    â€˜Indeed then you might just as well expect to hear the last trumpet as that horn,’ she said prophetically. ‘I’m thinkin’ once them men gets talkin’ guns they’ll not rouse themselves till one of us puts a rope on them.’
    I had made my escape just in time for I was barely out of earshot before I saw the old man approach the car and saw Morag accompany him back to the cottage. I picked my way along the shore until I was well out of sight and then I sat down on a lichened boulder at the edge of the water, savouring the still reflections and the near silence of the hill-guarded loch. In Bruach the water was almost always too shaggy for reflections and invariably there was a noise of sea, whether it was the violence of storms, the snarling surge of after-storm swell or simply the sucking and hissing of the tide. It was a change for me to rest beside quiet water for though this was a sea-loch the entrance was a narrow channel between opposing headlands so that, save in stormy weather, it was sheltered and still, the wavelets chiming against the shingle with a sound like the tinkle of draught-stirred baubles on a Christmas tree. I focussed my glasses on a thin crust of black rocks which reached out into the water about half way up the loch, intrigued by the pattern made by the quiescent gulls which had ranged themselves with such precision against their black background that the effect was of a piano keyboard. The loch itself was stippled with seabirds: mergansers, razorbills and shelduck. Drifts of eiders paddled around the margins voicing their prim-voiced exclamations; flights of oystercatchers rose to skim across the water as they shrieked their wild alarms while close at hand rock pipits flitted busily over the shallows. As always the beauty of it all filled me with humility while at the same time making me fearful of its desecration and I found myself murmuring my favourite lines from ‘Inversnaid’ and murmuring them with all the fervency of a prayer:
‘ What would the world be once bereft
Of wet and of wilderness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.’
    I stood up. I had suggested to Erchy that an hour was a reasonable time for him to conclude negotiations about the gun and after an extra half hour to allow for the crofters’ indifference to clock time I started back towards the car. There was no sign of them so I sat down once again to admire the scenery while keeping a sharp eye on the cottage since I knew that if, when they came out to