Island (50 page)

He and the dog walked down to his little fishing shanty. He opened the door and took down the beautiful salmon nets from the pegs where they were hung. He went to rub the cork buoys between his fingers, but they crumbled at his touch. He came back out and closed the door. He looked at the land once cleared by his great-great-grandfather and at the field once cleared by himself. The spruce trees had been there and had been cleared and now they were back again. They went and came something like the tide, he thought, although he knew his analogy was incorrect. He looked toward the sea; somewhere out there, miles beyond his vision, he imagined the point of Ardnamurchan and the land which lay beyond. He was at the edge of one continent, he thought, facing the invisible edge of another. He saw himself as a man in a historical documentary, probably, he thought, filmed in black and white.

He felt the dog grow tense beside him and emit a low growl. He turned to see his neighbour’s pitbull advancing towards them. The large beast wore a collar covered with pointed studs and moved with deliberate measured steps. Its huge jaws were clenched firmly and strings of saliva hung, like beaded curtains, from its bloated, purple lips.

He glanced at his own dog and saw the black and white hair rising determinedly on its neck. “Both of us are overmatched here,” he thought, but he heard his voice say softly in Gaelic,
“S’e thu fhein a tha tapaidh
(It is yourself that’s smart).”

He looked up at the sun. It had reached its zenith and was about to decline. He looked down at his dog as it trembled beside him. “Neither of us was born for this,” he thought, and then, from a great distance, across the ocean and across the years,
he heard the voice of his friend the shepherd. He lowered his right hand until his fingertips touched the bristling hair on the dog’s neck. A small gesture to give each other courage. And then they both took a step forward at the same time. As the blood roared in his ears, he heard the voice again, “They will be with you until the end.”

The stories in this book originally appeared in the following publications, to which grateful acknowledgement is due:

I would like to thank Kerstin Mueller of the Eastern Counties Regional Libraries and Roddie Coady of the Coady and Tompkins Memorial Library for providing me with much-needed and much-appreciated writing space.

I would also like to thank A.G. MacLeod, Murdina Stewart, and the University of Windsor for their different kinds of help and cooperation. The translations of the longer Gaelic songs are from
Beyond the Hebrides
(1977), edited by Donald A. Fergusson. Again, my thanks.

Alistair MacLeod was born in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, in 1936 and raised among an extended family in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. He still spends his summers in Inverness County, writing in a clifftop cabin looking west towards Prince Edward Island. In his early years, to finance his education he worked as a logger, a miner, and a fisherman, and writes vividly and sympathetically about such work.

His early studies were at the Nova Scotia Teachers College, St. Francis Xavier, the University of New Brunswick, and Notre Dame, where he took his Ph.D. He has also taught creative writing at the University of Indiana. Working alongside W.O. Mitchell, he was an inspiring teacher to generations of writers at the Banff Centre. In the spring of 2000, MacLeod retired from the University of Windsor, Ontario, where he was a professor of English.

He has published two internationally acclaimed collections of short stories:
The Lost Salt Gift of Blood
(1976) and
As Birds Bring Forth the Sun
(1986). In 2000, these two books, accompanied by two previously unpublished stories, were brought together in a single-volume edition entitled
Island: The Collected Stories of Alistair MacLeod
. In 1999, MacLeod’s first novel,
No Great Mischief
, was published to great critical acclaim, and was on national bestseller lists for more than a year. The novel won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction, the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, The Trillium Award for Fiction, the CAA-MOSAID Technologies Inc. Award for Fiction, and at the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Awards, MacLeod won for Fiction Book of the Year and Author of the Year.
No Great Mischief
premiered as a stage play at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre in 2004.

Alistair MacLeod and his wife, Anita, have six children. They live in Windsor.