I had no sooner recovered from the shock of losing my boat when I was embarrassed to realise that I had also abandoned Nial with his mended baler, and with several hundred bales that would need to be collected before the next storm of rain. Of course any hired engineer would have done exactly the same - left as I had, as soon as his repairs were finished, but there was clearly now no reason why I should not now go back to help. The sky was darkening and under it a darker sea was bursting on the reefs in great white explosions. Short of swimming across the channel there was nothing more that I could do to return that day. There was instead a need for Zen-like calm.
     Using the old Army surplus hand-cranked telephone that in those days was hidden under a couple of mouldy sacks at the bottom of an old feed-bin at the back of the garage, I made a brief report to Sandra to explain my predicament, and drove back to the MacFadyen's farm rather more soberly than I had left it.
     Collecting the bales turned out not to be such a problem. Several of Nial's neighbours had turned up to help, and they were already collecting the tumbled bales in man-high stacks whilst another tractor and its trailer was trundling them away to the barn. Until the day's work was finished, I helped as best I could, finding that even lifting the warm scented bales, first waist-, then chest-, and then head-high, used unexpected skills and strength.
     After a cheerful supper in the warm, bright kitchen, with as always, as I was soon to learn, a couple of heat-drunk cats sprawled beside the Aga and with its shiny sticky fly-papers spiralling from the ceiling and speckled with flies, a quiet word with Marie brought me a neat small bedroom high up in the back corner of the house "where the children'll not wake you in the morning."
     The next day I was not awake until long after the milking. The wind was still blowing steadily from the south, but it was no longer gusting as strongly as before, and after I had first refused all kinds of offers of help from Nial, who had clearly a hundred other things to do, I went down again to the garage and examined the frayed remnant of the dinghy's painter, still trembling in the wind, but, it had now occurred to me, also still pointing out the direction in which my bloody transport had disappeared.
     Overnight I had recovered from my gloom. It was based on my assessment that if it had averaged only a mere thirty miles an hour, in the previous afternoon the boat must have blown across the Highlands, during the night it would have crossed the North Sea, and would now be heading towards Murmansk. Now, it appeared, it might be a little closer to home.
     The reason was that I had been wrong to think of it simply as behaving like a released balloon. Even if like Icarus it had tried at once to soar heavenwards, the weight of the stern would make this difficult. The board that formed the stern was designed to carry outboard motors far more powerful than the Seagull's dainty horsepower. Made of marine ply two inches thick, together with the outboard's mountings, it weighed almost as much as the rest of the boat. With this mass dragging down, it was unlikely that my errant bag of air could have got further than the first headland, to which it could now be stuck like a bug on a windshield.
     So I hoped. Squinting along the stump of rope at the distant coast of the loch, I marked on a mental map where it might have crashed against the cliff. At this distance, there was still too much spray to see anything clearly, but since any case seeing a wreck of grey rubber amidst that jumble of rocks and heather would have been impossible with even the most powerful binoculars. I reckoned that just to go there and come back would be a twenty mile round trip. Even if I found nothing, this would take a couple of hours.
     But the more I thought about it, the more sure I was that it might not be a wasted effort. If it had stayed intact in the air - and unless some trigger-happy idiot had taken a shot at it, it must have stayed intact until it hit the land - it could not have deviated more than a fraction from the direction of the wind; and since the wind had blown steadily and hard all yesterday afternoon, I ought to find it somewhere within a fairly narrow arc on that jagged coastline. Unless, of course - and now my rising hopes sank again - within that arc it had also risen vertically. Then it could have flown anywhere from sea level to as high as the crest of the mountains - and if it had gone over that crest, it might indeed be approaching Russian air-space by now. And they would know what to do,
     Just over an hour later I found it. Almost exactly where I had plotted its likely landfall on my mental map, thirty feet down from the road, and about the same height above the sea, the limp wreck of the dinghy was plastered to the rocks. It had obviously a rip in it somewhere, but was still not completely deflated. Halfway down the cliff was not a good place to be, and so I deflated it completely, rolled it into a bundle, hefted it onto my shoulder, and clawed my way back up the cliff to the car.
     Another hour later I was back at the garage, where I grubbed about in cob-webbed corners to find an old Dunlop Rubber Company Repair Kit. Another hour later I had inflated the dinghy again (the bellows inflator that was usually tied to the middle cell of the boat to form the seat amazingly had survived the trip), attached my Lady Seagull, and bounced back across the channel to my dinner.
     The lesson was elementary: in a strong wind never trust your life to a rubber boat. Within a few short weeks, however, this important lesson would be forgotten.
     The harbour was beginning to look nearly finished. The new slipway now allowed me to drive the tractor directly onto the beach. On the front it had a bucket like a small bulldozer, and on the back an equally strong device called a hay rake. Looking like a massive toasting fork it was intended to slide under quarter ton stacks of hay bales and lift them to chest-height. It was an immensely versatile tool, and could be operated whilst being stood on. The most important thing was not to let it descend on anyone's foot, especially one's own..
     To stop the slipway being undermined again in the coming winter storms, I had begun collecting the biggest boulders that I could reach along the whole length of the beach, picking them up with the bucket or the rake, and carrying them back to build a protective wall on either side. In the good old bad days this would have been done by a team of two or three men with a strong wooden sledge and probably a horse or two to pull it. The tractor allowed me to do the work alone
     It was slow, methodical, and rather mindless work; but to anyone who as a child has constructed barriers with a bucket and a spade against the sea it was infinitely pleasant to trundle to and fro under a pure blue sky with the oyster-catchers flashing black and white along the shore making their curious piping cry from their bright orange beaks. Truth to tell, it was almost as enjoyable in the rain, although with a full load the tractor tyres would grate and spin and slide alarmingly on the wet rocks. Here I was with a whole beach to myself and a bucket and spade that could move whole fractions of a ton; and there was also, I suppose, a real and conscious sense of the privilege of it all. I do not mean any proto-Marxist idea concerning the dignity of the labouring man. I mean the knowledge that this is one of the most remote corners of the Western world, and when I moved one of my half-ton pebbles from here and put it there, there is where it would stay, almost certainly, exactly where I put it, until the end of time. This is why all those graves were up there too, along the spine of the island, each one mounded like the keel and sides of an upturned boat. They were also waiting for the end of time.
     The boulders themselves were astonishingly varied. They were scattered at random all over the wide sandy shelf of the harbour bottom and since they were all also covered with barnacles and weed, one could often not tell how much they would weigh before attempting to pick them up. All around me was a circle of mountains and islands that millions of years before had been the caldera of a local volcano, and as it had repeatedly exploded through the earlier strata, it had blasted their fragments around for dozens of miles. One of the geological features it left on the island is the black basalt sills rising vertically out of the sandy bottom of the channels between the reefs like ancient walls. Across the reefs themselves, where the surf breaks most heavily, the walls have been broken and through the layers of sedimentary rocks run deep channels the same width as the walls and with the same vertical sides.
     Some of the boulders were therefore sedimentary, and they weighed as much as one might expect. Some were the horrible gabbro, grabbo, as I kept transforming it like Mrs Malaprop, for that almost perfectly describes it. It is a dense dark brown concretion of fragments of earlier rocks smashed to pieces then glued back together by terrific heat and pressure. Massive boulders of this stuff, some as big as bungalows, composed the whole southern end of the island, and even walking on it, let alone handling it, was dangerous, for it was so aggressive one might think it alive. After the first time of lacerating my palm and fingers, I always wore a pair of thick leather gloves in case I came across it. But heaviest of all were the lumps of basalt that had been broken off the sills and which a few thousand years of rolling around the bottom of the sea and the same camouflage of weeds and shells had rendered indistinguishable from their mates.
     Half a ton was about the most the tractor could lift at the front. The rake could lift half of this. If I could drive up to a boulder, my usual system was to wedge the edge of the bucket or the points of the rack under a corner, and then use a great six foot crow bar to move it sufficiently for the hydraulic rams to do their bit to pick it up. Sometimes I would be warned that the load was too heavy when, instead of the bucket or rake lifting from the ground, the front or rear of the tractor itself would start to rise instead with a low hydraulic groan. Almost always I would find that it was trying to lift one of those black lumps of basalt camouflaged with weed.
     When the breakwaters were almost finished, stretching out like wings on either side of the slipway, I began to collect tons of sand and gravel in my bucket, together with loads of rotted seaweed that lay in drifts along the beach, in some places a foot and more thick, and these I dumped in layers behind the boulders, knowing that if protected from the waves this would soon be colonised by weeds and grass, and then even by shrubs - and in a year or two it would form a strong grassy bank which, together with its embedded boulders like protective teeth, would stop the sea making any further inroads inland.
     At low tide I was always finding that I was continually manoeuvring around a big mooring post in the middle of the harbour. At high tide this was also the post to which I was always drawn like a magnet whenever I brought in any boat. I had already begun to view it with dislike. Came the day came that I almost reversed into it for the umpteenth time; I decided its time had come. I would move it to the left hand wing of my breakwater, by now almost finished, where it make an excellent finale. Even if it was too heavy to lift I could certainly get the prongs of the rake under it and drag it out of the way across the beach.
     I had always thought it ugly. Useful at times it might be, but it still quite spoilt the little harbour's beauty. It consisted of a rusting iron post ten foot in length set in a ragged cube of concrete several feet square. Sticking out at a drunken angle from the top of the post was a much thinner shaft, which, for some reason, had not rusted at all.
     As I stood on the base to try to rock it onto the points of the rack, I recognised what it was. The iron was a length of scaffolding pole. In its upper end someone had stuck the bronze propeller shaft of the old blue ferry boat whose up-turned and crippled hulk lay rotting under the ash trees in the corner of the harbour.
     Impatiently, I gripped the top of the iron in both hands and began to sway it back and forth to life the edge of the concrete onto the rake. I had managed this only three or four times when there was a sudden movement above me, a shadow moving like a bird across the sky, and I was knocked down from my perch with the sound of a nasty ringing crunch.
It took me a moment to realise what had happened. Where the iron joined the bronze it had rusted almost to nothing. When I disturbed it, it had broken across just above my hand. The round shaft of bronze then hinged down at the break like an eight-foot scissor-blade, and had whistled down onto my gloved left hand. The right hand, below it, was hardly touched.
I pulled off the glove without leaving my fingers behind. The thickness of the leather had saved them from amputation, but they were badly squashed. "Oh, dear, oh dear," I said, "You naughty old lump of concrete", or words to that effect, and I decided I had better find myself a plaster.
Whilst I was working the tractor had been silent, and Tanner had heard the bang as it echoed off the harbour rock. She was already hurrying down to the gate as I drove one-handed up the slipway. "What did you do?" she mouthed as I passed. I held up my hand to show her. It was already dripping blood. Down from the cottage came Sandra too, wearing her official red bandanna, and after her galloped Mrs Thatcher and her lambs; they always took a keen interest in any excitement. I began to feel like Hector before the walls of Troy. I wondered if I shouldn't also walk with a limp.
     Ten minutes later I had all the sympathy I could want. Sitting in the house kitchen I was sipping my second tot of restorative Old Mull - oh-dee-vee, my grandfather used to call it, but he called almost anything that had alcohol in it oh-dee-vee; it was he who also told me, aged ten, of the night-watch draining the torpedoes of the cruisers of the South China Sea Fleet of their anti-freeze (100 proof: not really needed in the tropics; what with the sharks, and the flying fish at dawn, all over the decks; cor!) whilst Sandra wound yards of bandage around my damaged paw and Tanner was in the other front room trying to reach the doctor on the mainland. She came back looking as if she had just been ordered to sink the Bismarck. "We have to go across today," she told us, "to get those fingers x-rayed."
     Sandra and I looked at each other. There wasn't a lot we agreed about these days, but despite the brilliant sunshine the wind was banging against the windows behind me with real ferocity, and we both knew that once we left the harbour and the shelter of the headland its force would triple. It didn't seem at all a Good Idea.
     But Hector, I reminded myself, was always ready for battle, so I merely stood up, drained my glass and nodded. "That's fine by me." Hector never did it better.
     We made elaborate preparations for our journey, and this was our most important mistake. Whilst one can drown, if one is determined to do so, in just a few inches of water, he who travels most safely is not burdened with every conceivable item of kit.
     The truth was, I suppose, that we were both impressed by the state of the sea. It was now in serious uproar. The wind was scything off the tops of the waves and, as the tide was coming in, the waves were impressive. All that was really missing was King Lear standing on the headland and bawling at the storm. For a reason now lost in the depths of memory we decided that we would need to take two rubbers boats: one for ourselves and one to ferry stores. Both were to be attached to the heaviest of the wooden dinghies. This ancient ark was so massively constructed that even I could not lift its prow, let alone its stern with the outboard attached.
     One of the rubber boats was my previous companion, now fully repaired. This was not really needed because we would have to land on rocks. Nor would there be so much surf in the bay where we hoped to arrive. But if the tide went out, as it always did at the most inconvenient times, the two of us could not possibly drag the old behemoth off the sand down to the water. We would need to leave it moored in deeper water and row to shore in the rubber dinghy. For power, of course, we had once again our reliable old Seagull. If the wind was too strong on the other side, we could take it off the stern of the wooden boat and attach to the inflatable.
     I do not now remember exactly why we really needed to take the second rubber boat. Madness suggests itself. It was really more of a hope than a boat. It was a fluorescent orange RAF survival dinghy, complete with its own little sun canopy now flapping in the breeze, and with a thirty foot line to be attached, one imagined, to the sinking aircraft whilst its crew got aboard. It was also large, this thing. At a pinch it might have held two or three survivors.
     Having brought our little armada to the jetty, the difficulty at once arose of how to tie both rubber dinghies to the ark, for there was only one free mooring ring in the stern. With Sandra fighting tears, kneeling on the jetty, I declared impatiently, full of Old Mull as well, that I would simply hold the thirty foot line with my free hand. My injured hand, still swathed in bandages and now about the size of a football, had been enclosed in a plastic bag so that it would not get wet.
     Hahah! To sea! At last we purled away from the jetty. The Seagull roared as sturdily as it was able on full throttle. Tanner was leaning forward to search intently for the breaking surf on the front edge of the first reef. And I was just beginning to enjoy the rolling swell and the brilliant sunshine that shone in fitful rainbows through the flying spray - it was another of those completely paradoxical Hebridean days: brilliant blue sky and sun above, green seas and white death below - when we cleared the shelter of the headland, the wind hit the prow full-on, and three unfortunate things happened almost at once. First the boat staggered and turned away from the wind through ninety degrees towards the reef; then the Seagull stopped with a kind of strangled yawp; and then our fluorescent orange RAF life-raft flew straight up in the air on its thirty foot line like a kite and began to pull us in the same direction.
     Strangely, it almost never occurs to city-folk that they actually may drown. They are usually far more concerned about damaging their boat. We were about three minutes away from both of these events when Tanner asked me, surprisingly calmly, I thought, above the now clear roar of the gale, what I thought we ought to do.
     Very briefly I wondered who had bought this bloody life-raft, and what it might be worth, and whether losing a dinghy almost every day might really become a habit. Lifting up my chin I pointed it out the problem it now represented to Tanner, who only flicked upwards an impatient and even an irritated glance. "First I need to get rid of this" I told her. She nodded; and I let it go; and for just a few glorious seconds we both watched it shoot upwards to even greater height in the wind and then go flying down the loch spinning over and over in the thin wisps of storm cloud like some brightly coloured toy. And then it was gone.
     And only then, I think, did I realize that we might be in deep trouble. Out here beyond the headland the conflicting wind and the tide, racing each other around the deeper channels and steep rock ledges, were creating great gleaming deep green pyramidal waves, superb to see but impossible to predict and challenge as they clashed and broke against each other. Our heavy old boat, together with our remaining dinghy, now pulling and dragging astern like a doggedly unhelpful puppy dog, was bucking and rolling like a frenzied horse. We were in the exact epicentre of a watery maelstrom that could fill the boat and turn us over in a second. Hastily I kicked under my seat and into the prow a couple of herring lines that had lain forgotten on the bottom boards with their rusty hooks and bedraggled lures. They were just the things we did not want tangling our legs if we turned over.
     Yvonne knew the danger better than I. She was already moving to change places with me, pulling out the oars and banging them into the rowlocks with furious speed. In this sea she would know that she had only a small hope of steering us away from the rocks, and could never make any headway against it; but also that only I, the expert engineer, could hope to get the blasted motor working again.
     But it was not the poor old Lady Seagull's fault. That strangled yawp should have told us her story. As the prow pushed round in the wind the painter of the dinghy behind had sagged as the propeller had lifted in the trough of a wave and now there were several tangled turns of thin hard rope tightly wound around the alloy prop, and as the stern plunged up and down in the deep green waves both arms were needed to loosen it.
     My hand didn't hurt much. Possibly the exercise was good for it. Within half a minute my plastic bag was full of pink sea water and I had freed the prop. I remember my grandpa telling me of lying off the Dardanelles whilst his cruiser's guns vainly tried to persuade Johnny Turk to stop hosing the open barges and boats with machine gunfire as the poor bloody infantry tried to get ashore, and how the sea was pink like this for half a mile offshore.
     Funny how one thinks of things like that at times like this. Panting with the effort, I concentrated now on not over choking the throttle and flooding the spark plug with petrol - but it fired at only the second pull of its starting cord, and began again to push against the sea with its far too modest strength. Tanner had not stopped rowing all the time that I had been working, and although she smiled momentarily with relief as the engine started, even now although it seemed that the immediate danger was over she did not stop rowing,.
     And as I looked around I realized that, as happens often in boats both large and small, in just these few minutes our situation had changed radically and not entirely for the better.
     By keeping our prow into the wind Tanner had pulled us away from the ugly black snout of the first reef, still constantly exploding with heavy thumps of flying spray, but by now the wind had pushed us backwards down the channel between its long humpback and the long ledges of rock that also paralleled the island's shore.
     Even with the outboard smoking hot with effort we were still not making any headway against the wind. It was slowly pushing us into deeper water again. The danger of wrecking the boat, even of drowning, was now far less, but eventually, when the fuel ran out, in about another twenty minutes, maybe much less, we would be back in the same sort of trouble. We would be far out in the deep water running down into the loch. The channel we were in just now was too narrow to tack. In short, we were still as stuck as a pea in a whistle. We might still be crab bait by the morning.
     I was watching the pyramids breaking beside us in solid green water over the ledges beside us and surging onwards as rollers into the lagoon behind them. It was ridiculous to be still in sight of the house - even in sight now of Sandra; I could see her running along the shore, followed: no, yes, by old Mrs Thatcher and her anxious acolytes picking their way on tip-toes across the rocks - and still be possible candidates for the Oban mortuary slab.
     Being in the prow where sheets of spray were bursting regularly over her shoulders Tanner by now was drenched. Her dark hair streaked across her face like paint as she grimaced rhythmically with the effort of pulling on the heavy oars. Without asking further permission, I untied our second life raft and let it go. Within a minute, bumping and rocking, it had blown over the reef and disappeared.
     Still rowing, Tanner was impassive, but was now clearly waiting for me to make a decision. I waved my sodden pink football in the direction of the shore. "Either we go over the rocks, or we stay out here like this until we run out of fuel," I explained.
     Still pulling hard she gave another of those impatient jerks of the head. "All right", she said; and without much science - and even, it must be said, without much hope that we would not now smash our third boat to bits - as it swept by, I turned our boat into the flank of one of those glittering green pyramids.
     With a stomach-clenching lift, it picked us up, spun us about, and bore us sideways across the ledge. There was a final flash of spray on our heads, a jerk on the keel, a single clank from the prop, and suddenly we were beyond ledge, through the reef; all that roaring bedlam was behind us, and the Seagull was already snorting and faltering as now it cut through the tall weed towers anchored on the sandy bottom and spreading on the dying surf like dark flowers.
     Yvonne finally let her oars trail in the water streaked and marbled with foam.
     "Well" she said.
     On the shore, below the boat-house, Sandra was waiting to meet us with prayer and tears; Mrs Thatcher, too, without prayers or tears. When it was obvious that all this drama did not mean another bucket of crushed maize for her, she gave a disgusted grunt and turned away. Her lambs, orphaned once and always fearful of being abandoned again, followed her anxiously.
     My fingers healed without the help of any x-rays. For years the nails grew crooked, but now it is hard to see the damage. They were no longer painful within a week and I was soon working again with both hands.
     The beauty of these Hebridean waters is beguiling. Some years later a tempest as wilful and unexpected as ours brought tragedy to several families on our sister island, Iona, when it killed their sons, strong young men, familiar with these waters since childhood, who were making a crossing just as unimportant. And many of life's other tempests may be stirred into sudden and furious violence by a combination of forces that in themselves might be easily survived. But then if they are combined with just another minor accident: like a tangle of fishing lines ignored in the bottom of the boat; or, even more common and mundanely, just one more minor unpleasantness on top of a burden of care, responsibility and frustration that is already too great, they can kill or cause us to kill.
     Later, of course, one may laugh at one's fears, and to others they may indeed be trifles. To escape from one danger, one may sometimes choose to turn deliberately into another, with never any certainty that this will succeed. Usually one may never know which risk is real, with dangers that are unimportant, and which seems unimportant, but with dangers that are deadly.
     All that matters is that in these moments we find some certainty in ourselves, and that we can use them as well to find companions who trust us as we trust them.
     This helps us to know ourselves. Otherwise we often are blind to our faults and our virtues. As, indeed, are our friends.

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