Free The Silver Bough by Neil M. Gunn Page A

the robbers than with the urisk.
    â€œHas anyone been robbed by them in your time?” he had asked.
    â€œNo, I wouldn’t say it was in my time; no, not in my time; though the place had an evil name, and as boys we wouldn’t readily have gone that way, no, not that way.”
    He would talk many times with old Fachie were it only to be enchanted by the rhythm in his voice. The rhythm went on like the ridges of the hills or the slip and slide of the waves, and could use repetition for solemnity or wit, together with a light in the eye. Was he physically a stunted growth from Palaeolithic times? One of the little folk who followed the receding glaciers in the last Ice Age, while the island of Britain was still part of the continent of Europe, and the Thames flowed northward up through the middle of what became the North Sea and was joined by the river Ness from Inverness somewhere off the coast of Norway? Hunting reindeer in the Robbers’ Glen like any Lapp?
    Sweating by the time he got to the first ridge, he hardly noticed it, he was so interested in checking what he saw by the contour map in his head. He dipped down, to rise along a slow shoulder of dead-brown heather, with occasional pale-pink blooms of the cross-leafed heath and other growths that sometimes brought him to a standstill. For everything interested him, a flower, a bird, grass or moss, in a natural factual way that was friendly rather than emotional. He knew them as things come upon; now and then his eyes lit up.
    The Robbers’ Glen was nothing much to look at; it was indeed as bare as a scoop, except for some small birches on a steep slope in its lower reach before it faded out where its tiny tributary ran almost at right angles into the Clachar burn.
    The old drove road (long disused) went up by the mountains. Doubtless it was this cross-country traffic of the old days which the robbers had attacked! But where was their stronghold? At least, where could it possibly have been? For there wasn’t even a croft ruin to Grant’s practised eye, and his eye saw the whole two or three miles of the simple glen as it rose slowly towards the mountains. No life moved on it; not even a sheep. Indeed it seemed too deserted, too silent, with something dimly ominous in its air. Feeling he was now being moved by Fachie’s long-pondered fancies, he smiled and turned to the west.
    The sun was sinking beyond the rim of the western sea in a stupendous glory. Fiery cloud convoluted in a slowness that matched the majesty. A red visor veiled the sun god’s eyes; the wide-spaced shoulders humped; the great arms flattened and came to rest upon the horizon bar. Behind the red visor, seeing but unseen, the eyes. From them, Grant’s own eyes ran along the floor of the sea, tripped over the islands and fell into Clachar. Quieter the place was than the god’s thought; more secretively subtle than that thought’s vast extension might encompass; more innocent its mask than one who had never lost innocence might know. In stretching himself upon the hill-top, he slid happily behind the mask, behind the still faces of the cottages that gave nothing away; then quietly, invisibly, moved hither and thither, until he came to rest by the cairn in its circle of standing stones.
    The stones were like men turned to the cairn in homage or worship; but they were also like men guarding the cairn, motionless as soldiers he had seen guarding the tomb of a dead king, one tall like a leader, the others squat; and then in a moment he perceived, with a strange and disturbing twist of thought, that they were not only guarding the tomb, they were also hemming it in.
    No one really knew why these stones had been set in a circle; and it might now be taken as fairly certain that no one ever would. He had long ceased to wonder about it. Before some ever-youthful theory of sun worship, he smiled, with a tolerant “Perhaps—who knows?” All he did know was