“Aye, to keep her in and some intruders out.”
“Intruders? Is there much crime on Jura?”
She laughed. “Crime on Jura? Never, not unless you consider driving whilst intoxicated a crime, but then there would be no getting anywhere. We have some sort of predator on the loose these days, not that I can tell you how it got here. Mr. Pitcairn wants to suggest it’s a wolf, but I find that difficult to believe.”
“I saw it in my garden the night I arrived, and there have been dead animals at my door.”
“Well that is peculiar, isn’t it?”
“I talked to Farkas about it.”
“He wants you to believe he’s a werewolf, I suppose?”
“It’s the fact that he believes it that interests me.”
“He’s mad, of course,” Miriam said, “but there’s little accounting for the beliefs of others.” She lifted the spool again and waited for him to do the same. They arrived at the far end and spun the line around the post a few times at the spot she had marked, a few inches off the ground, then continued along the final open side of the enclosure. When they got to the last post, she cut the wire and the end jumped, biting into her sweater. “Almost got me that time,” she said. She pulled a hammer from her waistband and used the claw side to pull in the slack, wrapped the loose end around the pole, and then twisted the end around the wire she had already connected. “There’s another one down. If you won’t take a cup, how about a wee dram?”
That was not something Ray was about to refuse. “I would love that,” he said. “Then we’ll finish this off.”
The notches on the wooden pole and the two completed sections indicated that they had four more lines to run. It would be an all-day job, and the rain showed no signs of letting up. The dog watched them go into the house.
Pelts and furs and unidentifiable animal skulls decorated the walls and covered the chairs and sofa. A chandelier made from deer antlers hung from the low ceiling. The smell of simmering stew wafted from the kitchen, where Miriam went and then returned with a tray on which she balanced a plate of scones, a bottle of the local whisky, and two empty jelly jars. “Oh do sit down,” she said. She poured two large drams. “Welcome to the Isle of Jura,” she said.
“Slàinte,” Ray said.
“Well, well,” she said. She sounded impressed. “Slàinte.” She took a long drink and he did the same. It tasted like French kissing a leather-clad supermodel, and felt like someone had turned the thermometer in his stomach back up to a reasonable temperature. He couldn’t get a good look at the bottle. “If you don’t mind me asking, Mr. Welter, I—”
“Please call me Ray.”
“If you don’t mind me asking, Ray, what fair wind has cast you upon our humble shore?”
“Excuse me?
“What in the name of our Heavenly Father are you doing on Jura?”
“You’re the third person to ask me that and I’m still not sure I have a good answer. I guess I needed to get away from civilization and think.”
She laughed a little bit. “You guess? It’s quite a drastic step to take based upon a guess. You may find yet that we Diurachs are quite civilized,” she said. “Most of us are, at any rate, our Mr. Pitcairn respectfully excluded.”
“No, I don’t mean it that way. Back in Chicago I felt like Big Brother had come true, and that if I didn’t get away from it I was going to lose my mind. I guess … I mean, I’m trying to figure out how to live my life in a way that doesn’t adversely affect others.” He gulped down some more scotch. “I always wondered why Orwell went to the least populated place he could find in order to write about living with an omnipresent government that watches our every move. It seems like a contradiction.”
“Yet it’s difficult to argue with his results, is it not? One thing you’ll need to know is that there was no George Orwell here.”
“What do you mean?”
“My auntie knew him quite well, and he visited this very house on many occasions, but he was always Eric Blair on Jura. No one called him George Orwell. It seems a bit daft that a man who took so many others to task for the slightest offense to his rigid sense of British integrity would spend his career hiding behind a pseudonym.”
“I never thought of it like that.” Ray finished his scotch and felt like a better person because of it.
“Why would you? There was none of that here, I’ll tell you: no, he was Eric Blair and when people such as yourself begin poking around looking for George Orwell, I tell them there was no one here by that name.”
“Do you know what I’d like to do?” he asked.
“What’s that?”
“I’d like to finish that fence. I feel like I’ve spent the past decade trapped indoors and now I’m dying to be outside. Thank you so much for the whisky.”
“Well take a scone with you,” Miriam said. She pulled her gloves on again and they got back to work. The rain felt pretty good, actually. “Like this — now pull this bit along, that’s it,” she said, and showed him how to better manage the unspooling line with his free hand. “You need to remember to give yourself enough slack to work with, but too much and you’ll soon find yourself entangled and bleeding.”
Ray stopped. That was so true — she was right.
“That’s very well put,” he said. Over the past few years, had he given himself too much slack or not enough? It was something he would have to think more about.
“I once heard someone say that on the radio.”
“To answer your question, what I want to do is leave the earth a slightly better place when I die. In the meantime, I want to be able to sleep at night. That’s all. If I can’t do that here, away from the world, it may never happen.”
“Your problem is, and I hope that you don’t mind me saying so, is that our little isle is just as much a part of the world as London or Paris or your Chicago, maybe more so because — and Mr. Pitcairn is right about this point — although we may be remote, and that’s by choice, particularly up here in Kinuachdrachd, God bless us, we still like being connected on our own terms.”
“And what terms are those?”
“It’s true that God’s green earth provides us with but one path to Craighouse and beyond, but I might ask you to consider other avenues. The seas also contain roads, there are paths over the water and even highways that sailors have traveled for millennia. If Jura is indeed remote, and I’m not so sure that it is, that’s only because the relatively recent invention of the automobile has made us forget our traditional travel routes, and that’s the only thing keeping us at arm’s length from what you call civilization. You seem like a decent young man, Ray. Troubled, to be sure, and I do hope you find whatever it is you’ve come looking for, but you don’t yet seem to see the full grace and glory of the world that exists before your eyes.”
“Maybe not,” he said.
Finishing the pen took the rest of the afternoon, until the setting sun turned the westerly sky a pinkish shade of grey. The breeze picked up and the birds in the trees and shrubs sang their plaintive goodnights. Ray’s body still thought it was on Central Time and it should be the early afternoon. He stifled a yawn. “It has been very nice to meet you, Miriam, but I suppose I’ll be heading back.”
“Can I tempt you with one more wee dram?”
“No thanks, I can’t keep my eyes open as it is.”
“Suit yourself. I suppose I’ll be seeing you around now that we’re neighbors.” She whistled for the dog and let her into the new pen, where she would be safe from the wolf or Farkas or whatever it was that wanted to slice her open and eat her for a late-night snack. Speaking of which — Ray needed to hurry home. What little brightness the clouds contained had all but faded and it wasn’t like there were streetlights to guide him back.