Inishbream Read Online Free PDF

not take long, once we left Alberta, to make our way to the coast. We camped in the Rockies, thinking only of grizzlies. In our dreams they flattened our tent and ate our dog. Then the road, stretching itself like a rattlesnake . . .
    â€“ Ye won’t find a snake in all the counties! Saint Patrick himself banished them all from the face of Ireland a very long time ago, and they’re afraid to this day of returning.
    â€“ through the Okanagan, passing stalls of peaches, early apples, jugs of cider and cherry wine. Finally through the tunnels, Devil’s Elbow and Hell’s Gate, along the highway to the ferry terminal at the mainland’s edge. The ride across took one hundred minutes . . .
    â€“ That long? Is that a fact? We can row on a fine day from the island to Eyrephort in just twenty minutes. In a currach yet.
    â€“ and we walked the decks, pretending the boat was our own, pretending we had never been away. We flung the images gathered on the journey to the Strait, where they sank down to the sea’s bleak heart. We lived, after that, in a great house of distance. My mother wept in the night for snow, wept like a rain that would not stop. My grandmother rocked all night in her dreams. My father fished the rivers for trout and steelhead. He would not fish in the Sturgeon River, I remember, but stared down from the bridge to its depths. We lived near the sea in the house with the captain’s bunk and telescope, and I took my secret vial of Atlantic Ocean there, flung it into Gonzales Bay and waited: for the explosion, for Poseidon, for a goddess to rise from the waves. Stepped back in disappointment, and as I left I looked once behind me to see the ghost of a girl coming home across the ocean, her hands resting on the weedy mane of her pony.
    â€“ Ah, I understand yer meaning, though ye’d be best off to simplify in the odd instance. But yer telling a better story now all right. Will ye have the poteen?
    â€“ I will.
    And someone piles more turf on the fire, the knitters race each other through the rough wool of their days, dogs twitch, Miceal extracts a tin whistle from his pocket and summons a reel from its heart.

    I am walking the island’s circumference, past the megaliths and cottages. The sea is alive with currachs, the current and her lover undertow. What I have found: blue mussels, hooked mussels, barnacles, the skeletons of sand dollars, sea snails, tube-building bristle worms, sponges, starfish, mermaid’s hair and rockweed, bladder wrack, the crystallized salt around the edges of rock. I have found curious marks on the sand. I think they must be hieroglyphs, the whole intertidal zone literal with their message. Figures, rituals, wildlife. I think I have found the language of the universe.
    â€“ Sean, who would have done this and what does it say? (trusting his knowledge of the island’s strange events and visitors).
    â€“ What are ye meaning?
    â€“ This (pointing to the intricate narrative).
    â€“ Oh, that. Well, it is only the feet of the top-shell, that spiralled lad ye may see there (pointing to a conical shell just beyond). It is that they feed upon the algae, grazing from bit to bit like a cow may.
    I look. The figures decipher themselves, and I see their meaning, not as symbol or the unfolding of allegory, but as the passage of sea animals, quiet, determined and possessing no urgent need for language.
    Sean goes back to the picking of carrageen, the queer gelatinous moss which he dries, then sells to the Breton at Cleggan. I follow, though not in his footsteps that imprinted themselves like fossils in the sand.
    â€“ But these, Sean? (pointing to the circular carvings on the exposed stone). We might call these petroglyphs in Canada.
    â€“ And what is a petroglyph?
    â€“ Well, the original people carved pictures directly into rock . . . daemons, monsters, gods, events, the turning of the seasons . . . and it was, I guess, their record of the