Trawler Read Online Free

Marine Accident Investigation Branchof the Department of the Environment, Transport and Regions. There were 388 accidents involving United Kingdom fishing vessels. There were twenty-six fatalities. There were twenty-six vessels lost.”
    We drove north over the bridge at Inverness, north across the Black Isle, north into the Highlands proper, in silence. The snowflakes no longer seemed so benign: they were smaller, manic, and they flew at us horizontally. “This,” said Luke, “is a blizzard. I think we may now, officially, call this a blizzard.” Up the long, twisting slopes of road, the little car’s wheels spun, but, to my surprise, gained a constant purchase: because, I supposed, it was carrying the heaviest load of its life. There were no tracks of any kind in front of us, and no tracks to our right. Everyone was staying at home.
    “So that’s it!” I said, as a weak dawn filtered down to us, and the blizzard became less personal. “Trawlermen protect themselves—mentally—because they must; they need it. So it
is
like the animism of the Congo. And for the same reason—the
immediate
press of death. So you surround yourself with a hundred little irrational fears, because you have to, because that’s all there is to protect you against the big one. Your friend drowns? Sure. But someone was wearing a green sweater, or someone said pig or rabbit or salmon. So, in large thought, that’s OK. Because it means there really
is
a force out there that cares about you—it even cares about your speech, your dress-sense! So why worry? We did the wrong thing, we offended, that’s all. So please, don’t even
mention
the real fear—the ocean that covers two-thirds of the earth and couldn’t possibly give a damn about anyone.”
    “Redmond!
Please—
try and drive straight. Calm down. We’re in good time. We’re nearly there. We’ll make it.”
    (Drive straight? Well you can’t, can you? Not in a car with an engine no bigger than a decent motorbike, not on fresh snow. And especially not when full dawn has arrived, when there’s so much to look at, when the air is suddenly clear of snow—and those really huge, black-and-purple clouds to the north, with their eerie white underbellies: have I ever seen anything like it? No, excuse me, certainly not. Is that just reflected light from thesnow-white landscape? Or a warning that every sailor would recognize? And besides, the fields here are bounded not with hedges or barbed wire, but with wide, thin, upright, interleaved slabs of sandstone. We are now passing through a world of irregular rectangles, of cemetery headstones that mark no grave, of monoliths that stretch away for ever to all the far horizons …)
    “Hey Redmond!” said Luke, doing a quarter-roll in the passenger-seat, pulling out his tobacco pouch. “Hello? Are you there? Look—if you have offended, if you’ve said any of the words that may kill everybody—you simply touch cold iron, pronto. And there’s plenty of cold iron on deck.”
    “But that’s great, too! Late prehistory,” I said, as we drove gently through Thurso, the most northerly resort on the mainland (a town that is part hotels-and-pleasure, part wind-raked desperation). “The early iron age—I’ll have to check—3,000 years ago? And Luke, I know, I really do, it’s not the same—our own history in these islands is so short term, so
parochial.
That’s what you were going to say, isn’t it? Ten thousand years of settlement, no more than that; we’ve only been here from the end of the last ice age. Whereas in central or east Africa we first mutated into
Homo sapiens sapiens—
when? OK—it depends on which timing on the molecular clock you believe—certainly 200,000, maybe 250,000 years ago. But you see, I have a mad hunch: I’m sure that some of us were here
right through the last ice age:
on St. Kilda. Because if an animal as absurdly fragile as the St. Kilda wren could survive, then so could an isolated group of our