In that moment I had seen the profound difference between the real sea-fisherman and the crofter, and understood how it came about that the fisherman left the working of ‘the bit croft’ to the woman as her responsibility—for which so many casual observers have so readily condemned him. The sort of testy niggling business of attending to animals, cleaning and milking them, of hoeing up stolid rows of potatoes, or trying to deal with refractory beasts, was hardly enough to hold the real attention of a man. Give him the winter fishing in Loch Hourn, in a seven-foot fo’castle, amid incredible discomfort and continual danger, with days of labour that have no set beginning or end, governed by tides and storms, and he is all alert and alive, finding occasionally a high exultation in beating death to the nearest headland. After that, thinning turnips or feeding a calf may not claim his full interest, so he is inclined to leave these curious pastimes to the women.

It was fine and friendly there, talking and having a quiet draw at the pipe, about one o’clock in the morning, for at the height of summer, midnight in the Isles is no more than a deep shadow in which sea and sky take on some permanent aspect and the hills assume their abiding lines.

When we had drawn the net again (and if a net is left for an hour or so one may find many things in it—like the two half-grown lobsters we got), we pulled for the Thistle, whose porthole lights welcomed us in a way that made me feel ownership and hospitality. With the grey of the morning on the hills, my companion pushed off for home. I listened to him tying up his boat in the black shadows of the pier. He would certainly see that everything was ship-shape. By the time I heard the nails of his boots on the iron rungs of the ladder, I had a half-dozen fish gutted and cleaned in salt water. Then I put the two glasses away and turned in.

The following afternoon I set off for Carbost for our letters. Under Carbost, the Sailing Directions show: ‘WATER. —At Talisker Distillery.’ I had a memory of the water being particularly good there. Whisky cannot be bought in the ordinary way at a distillery, and Talisker certainly cannot be bought at Carbost (though a good dram of it is sold at Sligachan, some miles away). But I had an island friend who welcomed me hospitably, after I had got a lift from a commercial traveller, who stayed with us for a time and discussed these western seas on which he had travelled for the last thirty years. He had, he said, a sure cure for sea-sickness and he reckoned—and we agreed—that if it worked on the S.S. Hebrides or Dunara Castle it would work the seven oceans over. It was very simple and consisted in regulating the breathing thus: as the vessel rises you draw in your breath and as it descends you let it out. That is all. And he assured us out of a wide experience that it never fails. But wasn’t this a very difficult exercise? we asked. Apparently not, for after a time you did it quite automatically. As the Crew and I had not been afflicted by sea-sickness, we were unable to put the matter to a test; which was perhaps as well, for in such weather as we experienced in our small boat we should have had to breathe very quickly out and in, and sideways as well.