And so we drew lots. To my amazement I pulled out the longest stick. Michaél drew the shortest, and had a face like thunder darkening beneath his beard.
We all proceeded then to the starting point of the first parcel, which was to be mine. The minister handed me a short axe and told me to cut a notch with it in the nearest tree. ‘What for?’ I asked. But he just smiled and told me I’d see soon enough.
So I cut a notch in the closest tree, a tall evergreen pine. ‘What now?’
‘When we start singing,’ he said, ‘begin walking in a straight line. When we stop make a notch in the nearest tree, then turn at right angles to it and start to walk when the singing begins again. Another notch when we stop, another turn, and by the time we’ve sung three times you’ll have marked out your parcel.’
‘It should be approximately ten acres,’ the clerk from the British American Land Company said. ‘I’ll accompany you to register your land on the official map.’
Michaél laughed and said, ‘Well, if you folk would sing a bit slower, and I ran as fast as I could through the trees, then I could have a much bigger piece of land.’
Mr Macaulay smiled indulgently. ‘Aye, you could indeed. And you could also break your back trying to clear it of trees and make it arable. Bigger is not necessarily better, Mr O’Connor.’ He turned then to the assembled crowd and raised a hand and the singing began. To my astonishment, I recognised it immediately as the 23rd Psalm. I was going to pace out my land to the accompaniment of The Lord is My Shepherd!
The voices grew distant as I marched through the trees with the clerk right behind me. But it carried across the still of the morning, a strange haunting sound pursuing us into the forest. Until they reached the end of the final verse and I cut a notch in the nearest tree during the silence that followed, turning then to my right and waiting for it to start again.
*
After many stops and starts and a break for lunch, it was nearly dark by the time that Michaél paced out his tract of land. We were almost hoarse with the amount of singing we had done. Never, I was sure, had the 23rd Psalm been sung so often in the course of a single day. As we walked back to the village in the falling dusk Michaél said to me, ‘It’s too far to my bit of land. So I’ll just help you do yours first, and we’ll leave mine till later.’
And I was secretly pleased that I wasn’t going to have to face the task on my own.
*
Last night Michaél and I spent our first night in my new home.
We have been working all the daylight hours of every day for the last two weeks to clear an area of land big enough to build a log cabin. Hard, hand-blistering work with saws and axes loaned to us by folk from the village. Felling the trees was simple enough, once you got the hang of it. But moving them once they were down was another matter, and digging out the roots next to impossible. Someone promised to lend us an ox in the spring to help pull out the worst of them, but the priority has been to get a basic cabin up before winter arrives. Temperatures have been falling, and we’ve been working against nature’s clock. One of the older villagers told me that I might have experienced the odd sprinkling of snow on Lewis and Harris, but nothing would prepare me for the snow that would soon fall here.
The last few days we have been stripping trunks and cutting them to length, and then yesterday the whole village turned up for the raising of the cabin. Certainly, we could never have done it on our own, and would have had no idea how to notch and interlock the logs at the four corners.
The walls are seven feet high – which is as high as men can lift a log. The roof is steeply pitched, laid with hand-split shingles and covered with turf.
I would never have believed it possible, but by the end of the day, the cabin was done. A pretty sorry-looking dwelling, but it was a roof over our heads, with a door to shut against the weather.
Someone brought an old box bed on a wagon and reassembled it for me in my newly finished home. On the same wagon came a kitchen table that someone else was donating, and a couple of rickety chairs that might just about take our weight. A bottle of spirit was opened, and everyone took a slug of it to christen the new house. Then a prayer was said as we all stood around the table. The next priority will be the building of a stone chimney at one gable, which is something I might even be able to do myself. Then we’ll be able to light a fire and heat the place.
The problem is how to keep ourselves warm in the meantime.
When the villagers had finally gone, and Michaél was hauling water up from the river in buckets, I gathered some kindling and split some logs to build a fire in the centre of the cabin. There are no floorboards yet, just beaten earth, so I made a stone circle to contain the burning wood.