The Blackhouse by Peter May

Author:Peter May
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: cookie429, Extratorrents, Kat
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2011-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

I felt better the next day. It’s amazing what a few hours’ sleep can do to restore a broken spirit. Sunshine slanted through the tarpaulin draped across the doorway, blue peat smoke hanging in the light. I tumbled out of bed, blinking matter from my eyes, and squeezed into the circle of men gathered around the fire. The warmth of the glowing peats was almost soporific. Someone spooned me out a bowl of porridge and I dunked thick chunks of smoky toast into the hot goo of it and filled my mouth. I poured scalding tea into my mug and thought I had never tasted anything so good. I guess the first night is the worst, like maybe your first night in a prison. After that, you know the worst, and you just get on with it.

A hush fell on the group as Gigs opened his bible, a well-worn tome scarred and tashed from constant use. His voice rose and fell in soft Gaelic incantations as he read from it and we listened in the solemn first light of the day. ‘Right, then,’ he said as he closed it. And it was his signal, or so I thought, that the first killing spree of the trip was to begin. ‘Fin, Donnie, Pluto, you’re with me.’ I felt a great sense of relief that I would be with Gigs that first day. Artair was with another team. I tried to catch his eye across the fire and give him a smile of encouragement, but he wasn’t looking my way.

I had expected that we would make straight for the cliffs to begin the harvest, but in fact we spent most of the morning constructing a bizarre network of struts and cables across the top of the rock, from the killing grounds to the processing areas up by the cairns and down again to the top end of the chute. These aerial wireways, in hundred-metre lengths, were mounted on crude wooden tripods and cranked up to the correct tension with a jockey-winch. Operated by pulleys, this ingenious network would allow sacks of dead birds, suspended from hooks, to be whizzed across the island from one place to the next with minimum effort. Everything was dependent on the angle and tension of the cables, so that gravity would do most of the work, and Gigs was meticulous in getting each of these factors just right. Each bird weighed around nine pounds, and each sack carried ten birds. To have attempted to manhandle such cumbersome loads across this treacherous and uneven rocky moonscape would have been madness. And yet, before Gigs came up with his idea for pulleys and cables, that is just what the guga hunters must have done for all the centuries they had been coming here.

At midday, we were out near Lighthouse Promontory when I saw Angel making his way over the rock towards us, performing an extraordinary balancing act. In one hand he carried a large black kettle of hot tea,

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