When he stalks and kills the men who had killed Terry, Hugh is acting in a very human way but he is also going against everything she had tried to teach him. In ‘savouring’ this revenge he seems simply to be continuing the violence which Terry had so wanted to end. Aiming at the last man, Hugh is stopped by a vision of Terry which appears in front of him: ‘Her eyes gazed at me, her outstretched arms pleaded’. He cannot shoot and, as he throws down his rifle, he is shot and fatally wounded. It seems that at the end he passes the test and affirms his love for Terry by dying for her and what she believes in. His faith was harder-won but perhaps because of that it is even stronger. The book thus ends with an affirmation of the human spirit and a refusal to demean it by the use of violence against others. It is a lesson mankind still has to learn.

Wild Harbour is very different from Macpherson’s other novels, 2 but with its marvellous and moving evocation of light and landscape, its detailed descriptions of the process of stalking, and the accuracy and realism of its picture of a life lived out of doors and in direct contact with the elements, it is still a very Scottish novel. Writers like Stevenson in Kidnapped, and Crockett in The Raiders had explored similar territory before Macpherson and it is a territory in which the Scottish novelist seems particularly at home, with novels like Buchan’s Sick Heart River and Neil Gunn’s Bloodhunt being part of the same tradition. That alone, of course, does not make Wild Harbour a classic. That comes from the way Macpherson has created, out of an essentially very simple central situation, a novel imbued with a deep and haunting apprehension of man’s precarious position in the universe. Sadly that insight was underlined by Macpherson’s own early death in a motorcycle accident in 1944 which surely robbed Scottish literature of a writer of great promise and originality of vision.

John Burns

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

1. Donald Campbell, introduction to 1981 reprint of Wild Harbour, p. vi.

2. For short accounts of Macpherson’s other works see John R. Allan, The North-East Lowlands of Scotland (1952), pp. 180–182, and Cuthbert Graham, ‘Ian Macpherson: a neglected pastoral novelist’, The Weekend Scotsman, January 19, 1980, p. 4.

15 MAY 1944

THIS MORNING I said to Terry, ‘I thought I heard guns through the night.’

‘Were you awake too?’ she asked.

Even before she spoke, as soon as the words were out of my mouth I was sorry I spoke, and hastened to say:

‘That was funny, both of us lying quiet not to disturb the other.’ I knew by the way she looked at me that she was not deceived.

They sounded very near, ‘she said;’ in the direction of Inverness.’