After the funeral Euan Mackinnon had again been exhorted by Assistant Director to ‘hold the fort’, as had all other area foresters of the Lochaber region. Each received the impression that there would be no appointment to ‘Regional’ in replacement of Munro.
Meanwhile, skies remained blue and hill lochans shrank to reedy pools. Dead grass of the previous year crackled underfoot and heather turned into dust. Targets were met and surpassed. Revised schedules were given out and timber stacked higher than anyone in the sprawling pulp mill could remember.
The planting squad toiled in the spring sunshine. A trio, two pairs, the loner, one local lad and a misplaced Civil Servant; all except the latter earned bonuses that appreciably thickened brown paper wage packets.
Louis had decided to return from the self-imposed forty eight hour rest which he had characterised as gastritis. At full complement, the squad continued to plant the moor, section by section. Men bowed and lifted rhythmically with every second step in their slow walk down the dreels. Spades sliced into dried furrows and were pressed backwards. An open cut of peaty earth received its infant spruce, or junior pine. Roots were tucked in by hand. Pressure from a boot closed the procedure a planter would repeat a thousand times each day.
To a distant onlooker, ten widely scattered figures folded and unfolded regularly on barren undulations of moorland and faint thudding sounds carried in the still air. The sky was a whitened blue and a hot afternoon sun beat down. Hills were dark green to the winter snow line where the forest ended abruptly. Unplanted slopes were mottled leaden brown.
Ruairidh’s boredom sang with Paul Simon, – I’d rather be sparrow than a snail, I’d rather be a hammer than a nail… He reached into the bag slung beside his chest for another plant. His spade opened a cut and he bent to insert a nursery raised Sitka. Smiling, his face had a hawkish cast, strong and well featured, so that expressions of emotion were clearly defined.
He heard “Ruairidh!” and squinted upwards at the approaching George.
“Ruairidh, can you give me a hand with young Louis? He’s in that swale, not talking sense. A suntrap down there. I think it’s really got to him.”
“Christ,” Ruairidh said, immediately unshouldering his planting bag and throwing both it and his spade to the ground.
The swale, a crucible shaped depression, had been avoided by the plough and was overgrown. Louis was sitting upright on an outcrop of rock, his skin peculiarly grey. Hair stuck wetly to his scalp and forehead. Ruairidh scrambled down the steep slope towards him, George close behind. Louis appeared to be preoccupied and paid them no attention. A pair of hoodies flapped overhead and he looked upward, shading his eyes.
“We need to get him out of here…Louis, can you get up?” A plea rather than a question.
Louis regarded the two men, pushed himself up and stood unsteadily. His face ran perspiration. George and Ruairidh supported him, each crooking one of Louis’ arms over their neck. As a triptych they struggled through waist high heather and out of the swale.
From his vantage point on a nearby hill the ganger saw the trio and came to intercept them, calling members of the squad to him as he passed. He reached the three, George and Ruairidh panting with their exertions, and looked closely at Louis suspended wetly between the pair.
“Ok,” he said, “We’ll get him down to the landrover. How many? Six of us here, that’s plenty. Spell each other. Roland, Guy, you take him now,” Robbie was seriously concerned. He pulled out a handset, a military style walkie-talkie, and instructed the Commission office to immediately call Belford Hospital, report a case of heatstroke of unknown severity, and advise of his arrival at Emergency with the casualty in one hour’s time.
It took thirty minutes to reach a landrover parked near the grove of birch, the three pairs taking turns to support their helpless burden over furrows and finally down to the rough track.
Roland and Guy laid Louis on seating lining the sides of the long backed vehicle. They clambered from the rear of the landrover and looked at the ganger. “You’ve done your bit,” Robbie said, turning towards Noel and Alex. “You two go in the back. Make sure he doesn’t roll onto the floor.”
The two men nodded, climbed into the vehicle and sat opposite Louis who appeared to be barely aware of his surroundings. “You’ll be fine,” Alex said to the supine figure, but Louis seemed not to hear.
“Somebody will come for the rest of you around five,” the ganger swung his heavy body into the driver’s seat. “Are you all right in the back?” he called, looking up at the rear mirror and pulling the door handle inwards.
“I had better get back and tell the others what’s happened,” Guy said. His mouth stretched to display white teeth. “Anyone coming with me?”
Ruairidh ignored him. All Guy’s utterances he regarded as white noise. George glanced at Guy in surprise and raised an eyebrow.
“We’ll go together, Guy,” Roland said, “let young Iain and Silas know.”
“Where was Blue planting?” Ruairidh asked George. “We’d better go find him.”
The green landrover moved off, a thin dust rising. Behind it, on the moor, two pairs of men split apart and went off in different directions.
They never saw Louis afterwards. He recovered in hospital, his anxious parents having travelled from Surrey to be with their stricken, and only, offspring. They had received the news of his collapse with incredulity. Heatstroke in early April? In north western Scotland? Rain had been gushing from Home County skies since the first day of spring.
Outstanding wages with brief documentary evidence of employment and due deduction of income tax were delivered to Louis before his discharge from Belford. These proofs accompanied him south, with both parents.
There was a period of convalescence, more to regain his Home Counties senses than to restore physical condition, after which he rejoined his old department in Her Majesties Revenue and Customs.
Louis was to enjoy brief celebrity in the Dog and Duck, viewed there as an adventurer, a brave colonial who would recall them to Noel Coward’s unforgettable sophistication in ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’.
To the inhabitants of Surrey and Middlesex, Kent and Essex, London’s super suburbia, the north west of Scotland was understood to be barren wilderness, badly served by weather, and exploitable mainly as fanciful landscapes on biscuit tins.