Autumn by Melissa Harrison

Author:Melissa Harrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783962495
Publisher: Elliott & Thompson

‘Du’s back then? Fine that. I hae something to tell dee . . . ’

The old crofter pauses, weighing the awkwardness of what he has to say.

‘Something’s been takkin’ dy hens. I doot it’s da draatsi.’

The clocks went back the day before I returned home to Shetland. As I step outside into an unusually still, moonless October evening, I can hear the lisping calls of countless redwings as they stream overhead, invisible in the absolute darkness. The air is heavy with moisture, and below me the sea sloughs rhythmically on the shingle beach at the foot of my small croft. I open the metal gate that leads into the grassy yard where my hens live, and play my torch across the door of the old stone byre in which they roost at night. The pop-hole in the door is still open – night had fallen well before I got home.

There are neither streetlights nor immediate neighbouring houses here. My croft stands alone on the brow of a promontory at the north-eastern tip of one of Shetland’s smaller inhabited islands. My neighbours are the grey seals that watch me curiously from the sea, and my visitors at this time of year are the migrant birds that have blown in from Scandinavia. The news that an otter has been taking my hens while I’ve been away seems unlikely – in the ten years I have lived here in the islands I have never had any bother with them. Their local reputation seems entirely out of proportion with the reality of the charismatic animals I have spent many hours tracking and watching on the island. Apparently it’s not just domestic poultry that needs to worry about them:

‘When da draatsi bites du, he’ll no slip dee until he hears dy bones crack.’

This is all at odds with my time spent sharing their lives in their coastal territories. I have lain in the glistening, slimy bronze straps of kelp at low tide watching adolescent siblings twisting and turning in a Medusan knot as they play-fight mere yards from me. I have watched otters hunting slippery butterfish, misshapen lumpsuckers and writhing octopuses, tracking their trail of exhaled bubbles on the water’s surface as they dive again and again until a catch is made and they swim in to land to consume it. I have watched them noisily courting one another, have listened to the anxious whistling of cubs unseen in their holt, and have seen their mother drive them away when they’ve grown up and should be seeking territories of their own.

But I’ve never lost a hen to them.

Rough edges of stamped-down turves stop me in my tracks as I walk to the byre. There are muddy bootprints in the glistening wet grass and, sticking to them, myriad small, pathetic downy white feathers.

‘I’ve buried aa dat wis left. I didna ken what tae do. I doot du widna want dem cast ower da banks.’

Poor Lawrie, left in charge of feeding the free-ranging hens, has been left to clear away the remains of a daily incursion that has lasted a fortnight.

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