The Cone-Gatherers. Robin Jenkins

Once, when Neil slid down quicker than he meant and stamped on Calum’s fingers, the latter uttered no complaint but smiled in the dark and sucked the bruise.

      It was different as soon as they were on the ground. Neil immediately strode out, and Calum, hurrying to keep close behind, often stumbled. Gone were the balance and sureness he had shown in the tree. If there was a hollow or a stone or a stick, he would trip over it. He never grumbled at such mishaps, but scrambled up at once, anxious only not to be a hindrance to his brother.

      When they reached the beginning of the ride that divided a cluster of Norway spruces, Neil threw over his shoulder the usual warning: to leave the snares alone, whether there were rabbits in them half throttled or hungry or frantic; and Calum gave the usual sad guilty promise.

      During their very first day in the wood they had got into trouble with the gamekeeper. Calum had released two rabbits from snares. Neil had been angry and had prophesied trouble. It had come next evening when Duror, the big keeper, had been waiting for them outside their hut. His rage had been quiet but intimidating. Neil had said little in reply, but had faced up to the gun raised once or twice to emphasise threats. Calum, demoralised as always by hatred, had cowered against the hut, hiding his face.

      Duror had sworn that he would seize the first chance to hound them out of the wood; they were in it, he said, sore against his wish. Neil therefore had made Calum swear by an oath which he didn’t understand but which to Neil was the most sacred on earth: by their dead mother, he had to swear never again to interfere with the snares. He could not remember his mother, who had died soon after he was born.

      Now this evening, as he trotted down the ride, he prayed by a bright star above that there would be no rabbits squealing in pain. If there were, he could not help them; he would have to rush past, tears in his eyes, fingers in his ears.

      Several rabbits were caught, all dead except one; it pounded on the grass and made choking noises. Neil had passed it without noticing. Calum moaned in dismay at this dilemma of either displeasing his brother or forsaking a hurt creature. He remembered his solemn promise; he remembered too the cold hatred of the gamekeeper; he knew that the penalty for interfering might be expulsion from this wood where he loved to work; but above all he shared the suffering of the rabbit.

      When he bent down to rescue it, he had not decided in terms of right and wrong, humanity and cruelty; he had merely yielded to instinct. Accordingly he was baffled when, with one hand firmly but tenderly gripping its ears, he felt with the other to find where the wire noose held it, and discovered that both front paws were not only caught but were also broken. If he freed it, it would not be able to run; it would have to push itself along on its belly, at the mercy of its many enemies. No creature on earth would help it; other rabbits would attack it because it was crippled.

      As he knelt, sobbing in his quandary, the rabbit’s squeals brought Neil rushing back.

      ‘Are you daft right enough?’ shouted Neil, dragging him to his feet. His voice, with its anger, sounded forlorn amidst the tall dark trees. ‘Didn’t you promise to leave them alone?’

      ‘It’s just one, Neil. Its legs are broken.’

      ‘And what if they are? Are you such a child you’re going to cry because a rabbit’s legs are broken in a snare? Will you never grow up, Calum? You’re a man of thirty-one, not a child of ten.’

      ‘It’s in pain, Neil.’

      ‘Haven’t I told you, hundreds of times, there’s a war? Men and women and children too, at this very minute, are having their legs blown away and their faces burnt off them.’

      Calum whimpered.

      ‘I ken you don’t like to hear about such things, Calum. Nobody does, but they are happening, and surely they’re more to worry about than a rabbit.’

      ‘Put it out of its pain, Neil.’

      ‘Am I to kill it?’ In spite of him, his question was a gibe.

      Calum had not the subtlety to explain why death, dealt in pity, was preferable to suffering and loneliness and ultimately death from fox’s teeth or keeper’s boot.

      ‘Why don’t you kill it yourself?’ persisted Neil.

      ‘I couldn’t, Neil.’

      Not only love for his brother silenced Neil then: he knew that what Calum represented, pity so meek as to be paralysed by the suffering that provoked it, ought to be regretted perhaps, but never despised.

      Nevertheless he remained thrawn.

      ‘I don’t like to do it any more than you do, Calum,’ he said. ‘It’s not my nature to seek to hurt any creature alive.’

      ‘I ken that fine, Neil.’

      ‘We’ll just have to leave it for the keeper. He’ll kill it soon enough. It’s not our business anyway. If he finds we’ve been interfering again he’ll tell the lady on us and she’ll have us sent out of the wood. Not that that would worry me much. I don’t like it here as much as you seem to. I’d far rather be back at Ardmore, cutting the bracken or clearing the drains.’

      ‘But Mr Tulloch wants us to work here, Neil. He says the cones are needed.’

      ‘The cones!’ In anger Neil snatched from his bag a fistful of cones and flung them viciously into the trees. They rattled against the branches and fell to the ground. He hated these cones, which kept them prisoners in this wood just as the snare held the rabbit. Mr Tulloch, the forester at Ardmore, where they worked, had asked them as the men most easily spared to take on this six or seven weeks’ spell of gathering larch and pine and spruce cones. The seed was necessary, as the usual imports were cut off by the war. Lady Runcie-Campbell had given permission as a patriotic duty. She managed the estate in the absence of Sir Colin, who was in the army. If they offended her so that she insisted on their being removed, Mr Tulloch, for all his kindness, might be so annoyed he would sack them altogether, and they would have to set out again in search of work, shelter, and friendliness. For five years they had been happy at Ardmore, planting trees on remote hills, living in their own cosy bothy, and bothering no one.

      Defeated by the cones, Neil took another handful and flung them, this time feebly.

      ‘It’s not the cones’ fault,’ he muttered. ‘I’m daft to blame them. I don’t ken whose fault it is. Come on, we’d better get to the hut.’

      Calum clutched him.

      ‘What about the rabbit, Neil?’ he wailed.

      Neil shook off the beseeching grasp.

      ‘Never mind it,’ he cried, as he strode away. ‘Leave it. It’ll die soon enough. Do you want to ruin us just because of a rabbit? Haven’t I told you a thousand times there’s a war in the world? Where will the likes of us ever find anybody as good and fair as Mr Tulloch’s been? He’ll not want to sack us, but there are men above him who’ll be furious if they hear we’ve offended the lady who belongs to this wood.’

      While his brother was moving away shouting, Calum was kneeling by the rabbit. He had seen it done before: grip the ears firmly, stretch the neck, and strike with the side of the hand: so simple was death. But as he touched the long ears, and felt them warm and pulsating with a life not his own, he realised he could not do the rabbit this peculiar kindness; he must leave it to the callous hand or boot of the gamekeeper.

      He rose and ran stumbling and whimpering after his brother.

      Hidden among the spruces at the edge of the ride, near enough to catch the smell of larch off the cones and to be struck by some of those thrown, stood Duror the gamekeeper, in an icy sweat of hatred, with his gun aimed all the time at the feebleminded hunchback grovelling over the rabbit. To pull the trigger, requiring far less force than to break a rabbit’s neck, and then to hear simultaneously the clean report of the gun and the last obscene squeal of the killed dwarf would have been for him, he thought, release too, from the noose of disgust and despair drawn, these past few days, so much tighter.

      He had waited for over