I have pleasant memories of that night, apart from the cares and excitement of it. I was on the oars and was directed by the movement of a hand or a quiet word, while the old man set the net. In his eagerness, he was pessimistic. He did not expect anything. The weather was too cold. There was no fire (phosphorescence) in the sea. But it would do no harm whatever to give it a trial. So we beat up the water, he with mighty sweeps of the boat-hook and myself with wild splashings of backwatering oars, until we must certainly have frightened whatever lay in the seaweed between the net and the mouth of the stream.

‘Did you see anything?’ he asked me.

‘Nothing.’

‘I told you!’

So I backed her up to the inner end of the net and he began hauling.

‘I’m feeling something,’ he said. (That nig-nig-nig on the back line!). ‘It’ll be just a mackerel,’ he whispered, taking the net in fast. ‘Get the skummer—aft there.’ But before I could move he had stooped over the side of the boat, swift as a gannet, and brought up a meshed white fish. And, strange to say—and how were we to blame?—it was no mackerel. It was a fine sea trout, caught by the gills, and by the time he had got it out of its entanglement, it was dead. So what could we do but make the best of our misadventure? ‘A good one!’ said he, in a husky voice, his face all lit up with a smile. It was, under the moon, the expression of a boy, quick and eager and lovable. ‘I cannot help it,’ he said. ‘It is in my blood.’ And it came over me that if blood were never created for anything better than that moment, it might still be enough.

When we had set the net in a new place, we drew to the shore and talked quietly. He told of the bays and rivers of Harris that swarmed with salmon and how he went down from his house to the sea and hauled a bagful when they were on the run, ‘many’s the time that’; how as a young man he had gone to the herring fishings. ‘You will be thinking your boat is small with that big cabin in her, but I have been to the winter herring fishing in Loch Hourn and the whole four of us slept in the fo’castle, which was just seven feet long, and narrow. There were no motors then.’ The sea was in his blood as it is in the blood of all the Harris men I know —mostly men of medium build, very agile, with strong bone.

That very day I had gone up to see another Harris man who had a small galvanised anchor of about twenty-five pounds stuck in the grass beside the hauled boat with the blue gunwales. As a second anchor, it would suit me very well, if I could manage an exchange with him for my heavy one. However, I did not blame him for considering my anchor far too heavy, and, in the course of conversation, I asked him how he liked the change to Portnalong. He replied that it was well enough but he himself had nothing much to do. ‘In Harris there was the herring fishing and the white fishing and the lobsters, too; but here there is just the land. You could always be doing something in Harris.’