03 12 07

I’m woken in the night by squalls of rain syncopating & sloshing on windows & skylights. The sky is black, with rain rushing in on a southwesterly. The morning dawns slowly with no let up in rain; in fact it’s becoming fiercer. Wind birls around the byre battering at every window, not just in the prevailing wind direction. The topography here sends the winds into a flurry of indeterminacy, blowing from every quarter, sometimes seemingly at once. It’s like dusk all morning. Rain eventually falls away in the early afternoon, but I still don’t get too far from the house. Over on the peat bog by Shielbridge, 16 barnacle geese rise reluctantly from the small dug-over sloughs, cackling at my intrusion on their sheltered grazing. They rise as one tattered organism, slowly, peeling heavily into the wind to land a hundred yards away from where I walk, leaning into the wind. Barnacle geese were once believed to come, not from eggs, but from barnacles on the sea shore. Like me, folk learn things through observation; if you’ve never found a goose nest, because they breed in the Arctic, anything is possible. The shellfish & goose connection is an earlier notion of how things relate: ecology.

From here, looking west, the bulk of Eigg is visible, though not the loom of the Sgurr; there’s no sign of Rum behind it. I move back into the wind which the Shipping Forecast had told me is force eight becoming force nine later. I need no forecast to careen into it at a buffeted angle to keep moving forward, just as the geese used the precise & minimal amount of energy to escape my passage. Since the geese are feeding & I’m not, I begin to think of food, (eggs?) with maybe a tot of rum in honour of these two near small islands, surrounded by storms today, & on which doubtless, few geese are moving beyond the next grassy beakful & even fewer people are straying far from the fireplace. A day for a glass of rum in the twilight, window-gazing.