Bruach Blend Read Online Free PDF

to roost at night. The beams of the thatched byre offered a plethora of roosting places to many small birds who poked their way in through the tiny spaces between the walls and the roof, but a pigeon is not a small bird and for Charlie One there was no access to the byre unless the door was left open – and in Bruach a door left open was an invitation to the wind to come in and lift off the roof. Likewise the barn was similarly snug, its drystone walls affording apertures where only wind and rain and mice could penetrate. And again because of the strength of the wind one could not simply rig up a temporary shelter, since even the smallest Bruach structure had to be solid indeed if it was to stand at all. One way out of the difficulty was for Charlie One to share the hen house, but as some of the hens resented his presence and attacked him fiercely on sight it was an impossible solution. The remaining structure on my croft was my own ‘wee hoosie’, but fond as I was of Charlie One I rebelled at the notion of sharing my privy with a pigeon.
    I mentioned the problem of Charlie One’s accommodation to Erchy.
    â€˜Ach, you’ll not need to trouble yourself,’ he told me. ‘I doubt he’ll not be with you much longer.’
    I felt a twinge of indignation. ‘He’s been here for nearly three weeks now,’ I pointed out. ‘Surely if a bird stays that long he must have adopted it as a new home.’ I was careful because of the Bruachites’ contempt for sentimentality not to disclose to Erchy that I had already given the pigeon a pet name.
    â€˜Indeed you might think that,’ Erchy allowed.
    â€˜But what I’m sayin’ is he’ll stay until he’s ready to fly away, just.’
    I hoped to prove him wrong. Surely, I reasoned, a pigeon’s homing instinct would reassert itself as soon as the bird felt fit enough to fly and as to Charlie One’s fitness I had no doubts at all. In fact it had taken only a few days of rest and good feeding for Charlie One to recover from his weak, half-starved condition and for nearly two weeks now, sturdy and alert, he had been strutting self-confidently about the croft, his head bobbing perkily; his neck feathers polished to gleaming iridescence by the clean Hebridean rain and wind. Admittedly each day after his recovery he would go missing for a time after his morning feed, but I accepted that birds must fly, and since more often than not when I glanced up at the roof of the cottage Charlie One would be there preening his fluffed-out feathers I was reassured as to his faithfulness. But it continued to distress me that Charlie One had as yet no ‘home’ where he could be safe from weather and from predators. Casting around for a suitable roosting place which would be within my powers of contrivance, I at last hit upon the idea of making a cavity high up in the peat stack at the end of the cottage. My peat stack was built in the traditional Hebridean way like a buttress against the more sheltered gable of the cottage and I reckoned that if I could remove a section of the stack and then rebuild it with spars of driftwood wedged among the dry peats to discourage them from collapsing, and at the same time provide a perch for Charlie One, I might very well solve the problem. Full of confidence, I set to work the next day, but to build a cavity into a stack composed of brittle odd-shaped peats is no easy task and before long my confidence crumbled as quickly as many of the peats. Even as I stepped back to survey my first attempt the peats collapsed, but with Kiplingesque courage I ‘stooped and built again’ and yet again and again and the ‘worn-out tools’ were my hands, which by the end of the day were rasped as if I had been cleaning them on sandpaper. But at last the task was accomplished. Charlie One had his own ‘Cosy Cote’ complete with perch and droppings board and a ‘door’ which I