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the island, the stone house blended into the landscape. The figure, too, merged in with the landscape, discernible only through its movement. Once up against the skyline, its silhouette merged with the standing stones and was gone. I wondered what kind of man would retreat to the uninhabited harshness of that barren landscape.

    The Red Ridge on the Great Blasket Island
.
    As I ambled back to the village, I wondered if people speculated about the type of woman it was who would choose to live alone in a leaking cowshed on the Great Blasket Island. Whatever our respective reasons, I felt an affinity with that lone figure on the hill.
    It was evening before I got back to the village. Sue had left a note under a stone by the door. ‘
Seascapes
is on the radio at 7 p.m. Come down!’ I could hardly believe that it was Thursday again. A whole week had passed since the day I had found Páidí’s rock. I ate dinner and headed down the path. Tom MacSweeney’s weekly greeting ‘to this island nation’ had never seemed so relevant. Thanks to the north wind and no ferries, our island nation still consisted of two inhabitants, Sue and me. I ran the last few steps and leaped up onto the bank outside her door. Immediately, I heard voices coming from inside. I was stunned. My first instinct was to turn around and get away, but it was too late: Sue had spotted me.
    When I entered, three men greeted me in Irish. I smiled nervously but could not say a word. As the conversation proceeded, my lack of comprehension was painfully obvious. Tactfully, they switched to English. ‘And what country are you from?’ asked one of the men. For the first time in my life I felt utterly ashamed of my lack of Irish. I couldn’t string together even a simple sentence.
    It turned out that each of the three men owned sheep on the island. Although their families had abandoned the island more then a half a century before, they continued to return every year, just like their grandfathers and fathers had done, to rear sheep for sale in the market in Dingle. They also grazed eighty sheep on Inis Tuaisceart. I had read about the difficulties of landing and scaling the cliffs on Inis Tuaisceart, so I could not imagine how eighty sheep would be hauled up onto the island. I wanted to ask them how they managed it, but couldn’t. Acutely aware of having interrupted the flow of their Irish conversation and feeling even more awkward, I seized my opportunity to say goodnight as Sue began to serve up dinner. On the way back home, I had to walk around several large fish boxes piled high with sleeping bags, a stove, gas, sliced bread, batteries, cans of beer and shears. As I looked at the stuff piled high, I wondered anxiously if I was living in the place where the men usually stayed.
    Next morning, the startling sound of barking dogs and the shouting of urgent commands filled the hut. Unlike me, even the dogs understood Irish. I sat up and peered out of my tiny window as an orderly procession of sheep shuffled along the lower path through the ruins. Two young dogs wheeled around them in wide circles, panting and barking. An old dog worried the heels of the last sheep and, with the slightest dip to right or left, he directed the flock into a wooden pen above the beach.
    That evening as I rounded An Gob on my way home, I was greeted by the bawling of sheep. The pen below was a heaving mass of wool. Two of the men were hammering stakes into the ground. The smell of wood smoke from Sue’s chimney carried on the wind: she had lit the fire early. Seeing the men busy at work, I cut straight down the hillside to her house. One of the sheepdogs lay outside her door, its head resting on the worn step. He barely glanced at me, exhausted after his day’s labours. I patted his tired head and stepped into the dimly lit interior. ‘Just in time,’ Sue announced. When the darkness took shape, Sue stood, filling the steaming teapot on the gas stove. The table was laden with wooden