The Last Call
by Frank Rennie
Domhnall Alasdair was perplexed. Three times in the last fifteen minutes he had heard a car alarm go off nearby, when he knew absolutely for a fact that there was not a car of any sort, moving, or stationary, or wrecked, within five hundred metres of his croft. The single road leading from the main island wound sinuously down from the slightly upland area of the great moor, and sometimes inquisitive tourists drove down looking for a beach, but he had a clear view into the far distance, and he had not seen visitors for several days. He looked in towards the moor and out to the coast, but the source of the sound remained a mystery.
Later in the day, as he went out to bring inside a few buckets of peats to refill the bunker in the porch, he discovered the culprit. He could hardly believe his own eyes and ears, but there on top of the cruach mhonach [peatstack] was a dark Starling, its collar scruffy beyond description, but its iridescent feathers glinting in the soft light. It stood facing him, boldly unmoving, the cold eyes unflinching and alert. Almost as a challenge, the pointed yellow beak opened, and a car alarm call was broadcast loud and clear. Domhnall Alasdair stopped in his tracks, dumbfounded, but to compound his bewilderment the Starling looked straight at him and gave the car alarm again. Now Domhnall Alasdair was aware that Starlings are known to be wonderful mimics, for he had heard the stories about Starlings imitating the calls of other birds, Curlews, Blackbirds, Wrens, but he never for a second thought that they would mimic inanimate objects. With a wariness on both parts, the Starling, and the old crofter, Domhnall Alasdair filled his bucket with peats and under the watchful eye of the bird he went back into the house.
Later in the evening he looked out of his kitchen window towards the peatstack but there was no sign of the Starling or any other bird. He could almost believe that he had imagined the whole incident, but he still had most of his faculties, so he parked his opinions and remained quietly contemplative until bedtime.
The following morning, while he was preparing to feed the dog in the byre, he caught sight of the Starling in the corner of his eye, watching him acutely from the top of the cruach. He told himself that it was unlikely to be the same Starling, although the scruffy plumage seemed distinctive, and he had almost convinced himself of this when the bird gave a slight cough followed by an ear-splitting car alarm call. In the flash of clarity that we sometimes have thrust upon us for no conceivable reason, Domhnall Alasdair became convinced that the bird was calling to him, directly and personally. He fed the dog then went back into the house.
When he re-emerged, he had a fistful of peanuts which he laid carefully on top of a large peat at the near end of the peatstack, the furthest away corner from the Starling. Then he back-tracked to the house and watched casually from the kitchen window. After a credible hesitation the Starling fluttered over and began to peck at the peanuts. Satisfied with his good deed, Domhnall Alasdair put the kettle on for tea and began to prepare for the tasks of his day.
When he went out the back door the following morning the Starling was again waiting to greet him. Domhnall Alasdair said grumpily ‘Mach à seo, a bhodaich’! [Get out of here, old man!] for in his local dialect of vernacular Gaelic any male over school age was an ‘old man’. The Starling screeched a string of high-pitched vocables at him and Domhnall Alasdair repeated himself more loudly, ‘Mach à seo, a bhodaich’, and continued into the byre. When he came out again the Starling was still watching and Domhnall Alasdair regretted his bad temper, so he went into the house, came back with a sprinkling of peanuts, and laid them on the path. ‘Mach à seo, a bhodaich’ he said again, and shut the door firmly.
Over the next few days this ritual was repeated twice a day, and by the third day Domhnall Alasdair was convinced that the Starling was waiting for him to appear out of the door. Each time, he laid the peanuts a few metres closer to the house, and by the end of the week the Starling was feeding comfortably on the kitchen windowsill. When he was late to get out of bed one morning, he was washing his hands in the kitchen sink when he distinctly heard the scruffy Starling calling ‘Mach à seo, a bhodaich’.
At first, he could not believe his own ears. Could he be imagining this? Domhnall Alasdair went out of the back door and the precocious Starling fluttered to meet him. ‘Mach à seo, a bhodaich’. He could hardly believe his senses, but a few peanuts encouraged the talkative bird to repeat the phrase.
That whole morning Domhnall Alasdair puzzled over this revelation. A talking Starling, whatever next?
In the early afternoon the mobile shop arrived. The village lay at the end of a long, quiet road on a small island just off the main island of Lewis. The weekly visit by the mobile grocery shop, and occasionally the mobile library, were a vital source of information for Domhnall Alasdair. The driver of the mobile shop, Iain Bàn, was, like Domhnall Alasdair himself, a lifelong bachelor, and an enthusiastic and eclectic reader. They had gone to school together when the Earth was still young. Casually, without laying any obvious emphasis on his discovery, Domhnall Alasdair circuitously brought up the subject of the talking Starling and waited to be disillusioned or mocked.
On the contrary, exclaimed Iain Bàn, who was well acquainted with many strange phenomena, did Domhnall Alasdair not know about the German scientist in the mid nineteenth century who taught a Starling to recite verses of poetry? Domhnall Alasdair did not, but he was perfectly willing to believe the story. By the time the mobile shop had disappeared over the horizon for another week the seed of an idea was starting to germinate.
Over the following few days Domhnall Alasdair gradually induced the Starling to move in with him. By the strategic placement of a little pinch of crushed peanuts, first on the kitchen windowsill, then on the steps of the open back door. Finally, the bird was enticed into the small porch occupied by a peat-bunker and an assortment of boots and jackets, where it hopped and pecked, and eventually slept there during the night. He left a small window ajar, so that the bird could come and go, but every morning it was inside the porch, waiting to be fed. On each occasion a slightly rasping greeting of ‘Mach a seo, a bhodaich’ encouraged Domhnall Alasdair to dispense a small but regular helping of the desired peanuts. On the next weekly visit of the mobile shop Domhnall Alasdair requested that Iain Bàn should add a bag of wild bird seed from the Crofters Store to his order of groceries.
The rather vague idea of what he might do with a talking Starling gradually began to take a more solid form. Domhnall Alasdair lived alone on his croft, at the end of a single-track road, in a small island community connected by a few hundred metres of narrow causeway to the west coast of the Isle of Lewis. Although he had travelled far when he had been working, he had returned home to care for his frail mother, and since her death several years ago a constant concern had begun to nag at him. The Gaelic vernacular of his island was intriguingly distinctive in its cadence, with a rich vocabulary and phraseology that was quite unique throughout the Gaidhealtachd. Yes, it was similar to the Gaelic of the adjacent islands, but it was different. No native speaker could mistake the provenance of the dialect and very few could imitate it successfully, even the new batch of TV comedians that he sometimes saw appearing on BBC Alba. The problem was that he now had nobody left to converse with in the idiom of his own language. The few neighbouring families were all speakers of English. Very nice people, but Domhnall Alasdair held no hopes that any of them would suddenly desire to learn the Gaelic of Eilean Molach, far less that they might successfully speak it with any level of fluency.
So he turned his attention to the Starling, which by this time was almost a member of the household. The Gaelic for a Starling is Druid, and on the baseless supposition that the bird was female, ‘she’ had been named Druidina. The patience of Domhnall Alasdair was limitless, for this was no longer just a fancy idea, it had become a mission of great personal significance for his heritage. Slowly, although with greater precision than he could possibly have imagined, the scruffy Starling acquired a considerable collection of phrases. It is true that they were not always delivered in response to the appropriate question, and of course it was nothing like a genuine conversation, but that gave Domhnall Alasdair something to work upon. He liked to teach Druidina the names of various places on the moor that he fondly remembered from his youth, and soon they had progressed to some of the more obscure and antiquated local words to describe the nature of the landscape, or the quirks of the changeable weather.
Soon they were having conversations of a sort, although they were really only the repetitions of word associations and Druidina had no clue about the meaning of the games, only that she was rewarded with interesting seeds when he repeated the associations correctly. Domhnall Alasdair would name a place in the island, ‘Am blàr dubh’ he would say, [the black field] and Druidina would respond in perfect idiomatic accuracy, ‘Currach’! [a bog where shrubs grow]. Another time Domhnall Alasdair would prompt, ‘Uchdan Mòr’ [a big, raised, terrace] and the Starling would correctly identify that the place was ‘fineagach’ [full of Crowberries]. So it went on. It was not a serious replacement for the tangled and spontaneous intricacies of human conversation, but to Domhnall Alasdair it was simply wonderful to hear a living being saying those words at all. Steadily the word list that Druidina could intone in perfect imitation of the traditional Gaelic of Eilean Molach grew to include an impressive vocabulary, even capturing the slightly nasal rendition of certain vowels.
As summer turned inevitably into winter, Druidina became a regular accomplice of Domhnall Alasdair, following him to the cruach and back as he took in peats for the fire, or even once or twice accompanied him on short walks around the croft. Frequently Druidina would disappear, but she always returned. Sometimes the random combinations of her learned words in Molach Gaelic suggested a profound insight, or great intellectual awareness, and they would cause Domhnall Alasdair to pause in silent contemplation on the limitless possibilities. He had but one apprehension, niggling but growing more insistent, and whenever he thought of it he became uneasy. Although he had read online that a Starling had once lived over twenty-two years, he knew that the average duration they could be expected to live is about two to three years. The exchanges between himself and Druidina had become the highlight of his day, and he had a silent dread of the relationship ending.
In the final event he needn’t have worried. Domhnall Alasdair had barely reached his biblical allowance of three score and ten years when a winter virus carried him off. The funeral service was large, for he was a well-known and well-liked character, and though the graveside tributes were mainly in English, for the benefit of those who were hard-of-Gaelic, there was one notable contribution of which Domhnall Alasdair would have been proud. As the sandy soil gradually covered the coffin there were several dozen people who clearly heard a scruffy Starling calling strongly, ‘Mach à seo, a bhodaich. Mach à seo, a bhodaich’ in the rich inflections of the island. The irony that Druidina should be the last surviving speaker of richly articulate Molach Gaelic was lost on no-one.
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