HILLS OF HOME
By MALCOLM M. MacMILLAN, M.P. THE other evening in the hills of Ross I met a shepherd at the turn of the road. His collie at his heel, he was bound homeward after their work of the day. A tall man he was, big in proportion and with a certain grave courtesy of manner and voice when he spoke. As he turned downward towards me on the bend of the hill-road, he stood out for an instant against the evening skyline, rugged in his frame and feature, and I thought how magnificently he matched the stiong and rugged environment of our meeting. Above us towered massive Mount Rattigan and, farther, the snow-mitred lesser peaks. All about us the conifer forests tried to soften the coarser features of the dark mountain-sides with their mantle of green. Far below, in the long and lovely valley, the dark, placid waters of Loch Duich mirrored faithfully in their heart the majestic summits of the Five Sisters of Kintail.
Here and there, from a crofter's distant house down in the glen, thir. wreaths of smoke were wafted slowly on the evening air in a haze of fading blue ; and the last homing birds, winging slowly down the russet-golden moors, were but a faint, far crying and calling.
In Gaelic I greeted him, and, with an accent somewhat different from my Islands Gaelic, he replied. A grand evening, I greeted him, and he agreed ; but prophesied rain and probably storm for the morrow or the following day. Without halting on his downhill path and pointing only with his raised stick towards an ominous darken- ing in the south-west sky, he passed me and was gone. There is the difference between the visitor among the hills and the dweller on the heights. To the visiting stranger the weather is a thing of the moment and the present, which he can leave behind and evade by going indoors. But to him whose lot is cast in the great spaces, it is the constant company of his daily life and labour. The hill-dweller must have skill to read the weather's coming moods by present signs, as the true mariner reads the tides by the moon and the time by the sun and reckons for home by the stars. There was in the shepherd's tone no hint of complaint about the rain he knew must folt or against the coming storm. He had already adjusted himself mentally for the coming days. The weather might change ; but life must go on to its old rhythm and his work, too, go on as before The true countryman must serve a long apprenticeship with nature in these hills before he becomes skilled in the knowledge of her ways and rich in the deeper wisdom which is hers to impart. That is why it is the older shepherds who are the real masters of nature's lore and vigilant always for her vagaries. They know her as a fickle friend and unpredictable foe like her lovely, wild, rebellious child, the sea. And as the mariner knows the ocean, so does the shepherd understand the hills. The man who is out of reach and out of sight of the hills is out of touch and out of tune with the innermost heart of nature. The city-dweller is truly a dweller on the plains. But the countryman may read the hills' message carved upon the sky-line, the preface to the whole book of nature, knowing that even they are only the threshold of the infinite spaces beyond And hi i inward ear is filled with that music which hovers always on the edge of the silence of the hills.
The city has at best restrained, restricted forms and features. It has no horizons. Where horizons were, it has spread the ragged, articulated lines of its roofs and chimneys and punctuated the sky with factory-stacks and skyscrapers. Only in the country can the eye dwell for long on the skyline. From his doorstep, the country-
man scans the heavens for promise or warnings. Every dawn is for him no mere leaf of a petty, punctual calendar, or even another coming day ; but a new birth of nature in the dark splendour of her anger or the mellow beauty of her all-pervading peace. He does not, like his poor fellow of the tenement and the tramway, have to search out the smoke-filtered strips of rationed sunlight and sunset glory, slanting between the back-to-back buildings and slotted between tall chimneys. For there, among the Ross-shire glens, he sees a whole sunrise on a whole horizon and all the sunset over miles of coloured moorland and revealed ranges of hills.
The native Highlander knows the hills and the mountains by their individual names. They are to him no mere giant mounds and shadows. Every stream and burn is in his memory an oasis in sum- mer's heat for his thirsty sheep and his cattle ; and he knows the place of every loch and pool. He knows the still deep quiet waters and the green pastures and every valley where the boulders and hollows give shelter for his tired creatures. He is never alone and seldom lonely in the company nature provides him. The very rains are like his dogs that patter along by his side. The winds are like his dogs, so fleet they are ; or like his sheep when they wander away in the hills. The city protects men physically from the rough edge of nature, and builds up for them a walled material existence from which they need wander out only when nature smiles or sleeps. Yet men have been broken by the city, which is to say, by men. They have been spoiled and pampered, or persecuted and destroyed, when they have grown too big for its limitations or proved inadequate for its fierce, unnatural demands. But who has ever known the soul of man come to harm of the hills? He is bound to their inexhaustible lore and lure ; for always there remain some undiscovered details of beauty to be revealed, even when the greater grandeur is all-familiar.
The plaid of mist on the Lill's shoulder, the shawl of cloud draWn over the brow of the secret mountain of the dusk, are lifted aside for his eyes to give a hint of nature's coming mood. To him the trout of the burn, the furred and feathered things of fern and bracken communicate their sense of impending storm or promised peace. Imperious as nature is, he has no power to influence her moods, nor any of the foolish presumption to think he has.. But he under- stands them and provides accordingly. He has learned the lesson with nature's successful creatures. He survives by adaptation. The dweller in the hills shares surely, too, something of their quiet dignity and something even of their sublime and calm unworldliness. He looks, when the townsman is overawed, upon the unveiled face of utter beauty. He makes the practical calculations for his daily work by the sombre glooms of the storm-cloud and the colours of the sunset, and his home-coming is by the shining star of dusk. Does he not dwell nearer than the immured starveling souls of the city to he heart of their common mother, nature, and worship at the truer tabernacle of her beauty, with all the austere priesthood of the peaks attendant upon him in their white, immaculate robes of everlasting snow? Does he not sing in his heart every summer's evening when, from the shadowy colonnades of the pines and cypresses and out over the blending coloured zones of heathered moorland, the choirs of the birds swell into the golden rapturous chorus of • dusk-fall? And, when nature's other voices die away, does he not hear and feel the deep, far chanting of the western sea surging into the bosom,of the hills?
What are his thoughts, as he strides the hills and the moorland, haloed with the mountain-circled flame of sunset ; or when the sun- rise is a light for his path? The streams call gaily to him or in rumbling warning, and the hills for him are frank-browed or frown- ing as a sign. The hidden waterfalls clash on his ears and dazzle him with sudden cascades of shining, flashing light. And when, tired at the day's end, with his collie at his heel, he comes quietly homeward, and his flock wears the golden fleece of the sunset, what can a simple shepherd of the Highlands say that a townsman would understand? Let him pass on, nor seek to probe his thought, who has little ready on his tongue to say ; for his mind is upon the morrow and the many morrows following, and their gleams and gloorns, their pattering rains and drifting snows, their threatening storm and deep, ineffable tranquility. And above and beyond the foot-hills of the transient hour, there awaits him ever for his evening rest the bosom of the everlasting hills.
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