‘Moss!’ Donald gazed up the sodden hillside behind the house. ‘The damned dog’s slipped his leash again.’
We squelched up past the outbuildings to the lean-to corrugated iron shed and looked inside. Its only contents were an upturned bowl. Donald was already pushing his way through the tangle of rotting fence stubs, old wire and chicken netting. We congregated at the back of the rusting post office van, slowly slipping off the blocks which had been substituted for wheels.
‘He often hides in here,’ Donald was saying, wrenching at the door and yelling something incomprehensible, ‘and he’s taken to only answering to the Gaelic.’
There was a flurry around Donald’s feet, a flash of black and white streaking off round the backyard debris towards the kitchen door.
‘Ach, no,’ Donald sighed, ‘he’s away, in to badger the Cailleach again.’
We tramped back across the muddy grass and obediently removed our wellies outside Mrs Robertson’s door. Moss had not been so careful; a line of brown paw marks trailed across the polished linoleum and through a door at the end of the passageway. As Donald opened this door, a wave of damp heat assailed us. The Esse was turned up to maximum, to dry the towels which were draped around it. One of the main difficulties with running a guest house on Skye was getting the washing dry on the wet days. The room went quiet as we entered, the human inhabitants mentally switching languages to accommodate Donald’s guests. The dog just stuck to the Gaelic.
‘It’s yourselves!’ Mrs Robertson called from her place by the stove. ‘I was just telling Mrs Anderson that Donald’s friends from the university were here. I thought you were away down the croft, Donald?’
‘We were, but you’ve let the dog back in the kitchen. And you’ve got to stop feeding him, Mother.’
Mrs Robertson sighed. ‘Oh, I know. But he’s just such a canny dog, Donald, so like that one your father had. The odd treat won’t do any harm.’
‘I don’t recollect Dad letting the dogs in the kitchen. And look at the state of him. What if that hygiene woman came round again?’
‘That woman knows nothing. Environmental Health indeed! I’ve run this B and B since she was a bairn, and I don’t recollect any of the guests complaining.’
In the short silence that followed, we all contemplated the temerity of any tourist voicing a concern of any sort.
The quiet was broken by a munching noise from in front of the stove. Moss had surreptitiously finished a biscuit. Mrs Robertson spoke to him in Gaelic and he trotted obediently towards the door. ‘I think he’s ready now,’ she said.
Donald looked heavenwards. Above him, the Bri-Nylon sheets on the pulley slowly shed their moisture. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘we’ll get going and sort out these sheep.’
‘So we’ll not expect you back for quite a while, then,’ Mrs Robertson said. ‘Time for another cup, Betty?’
We could hear the language switching back as we went out the door, but we knew what was being said: Donald, for all his enthusiasm, was not the man his father was when it came to handling the dog.
We had experienced Donald’s enthusiasms before. Freshly returned from university, he realised that his father’s death had affected his mother more than she would ever admit, and she could not run the guest house and croft on her own. He developed skills in many jobs, but the croft was always there, and he worked at it with a dedication which was not equalled by his agricultural abilities. We remembered the encounter with an Allen scythe, borrowed to cut the many rushes which sprang up in the long narrow strip of croft land between the house and the sea. The machine in Donald’s hands had developed a life of its own and was barely dragged to a halt before it charged across the main road.
Now we were walking down the track from the house, Moss bounding ahead, oblivious to the dangers of the road as we crossed it and completely impervious to shouted warnings from behind. ‘Bit of a mind of his own, the dog,’ Donald muttered, and added, with his usual optimism: ‘But he’s still young. He’ll learn.’ He strode on down the long strip of the croft.
By this time, Moss had thundered straight through the sheep and was just able to stop on the shore, before he plunged into the sea. Very loud Gaelic instructions were floating back on the breeze. The sheep had scattered towards the rickety fences. Moss, returning, realised he had made a fundamental error and, with a collie’s instinct, decided he had better round up any sheep in the vicinity. He leapt the fence and disappeared across the neighbouring croft and the one beyond that, causing shaggy stampedes as he went. The Robertson sheep, released, had gone back to munching what grass remained between the unscythed rushes.
Donald could also be seen leaping croft fences, now engaged in a battle to round up the dog rather than the sheep. Moss, running out of neighbouring sheep, now bounded back over the fences and flopped at our feet. ‘Ach, well,’ Donald said, ‘that didn’t go quite to plan. Will we have another go? Maybe without the dog?’
Moss sat back, watching us blunder through the boggy grass until the sheep eventually galloped in the right direction and into the waiting pen. He sauntered over, standing by the gate, as if it had all been his own work, and looked at them, a mass of heaving, exhausted wet wool. He looked at us, our muddy legs, sodden jackets, hair plastered to our foreheads. He shook his head slightly and it almost seemed like a smirk showed in his expression. We watched him wander back up the croft towards the warmth of the kitchen.
‘Aye,’ said Donald, ‘maybe he needs a bit more training.’