By this time we had been alone on the island for several months, and I had already come to think of owning it. I never could, of course. I would always be a tenant, and must be content with this fact. But imagine a miniature kingdom, a mile long and half broad, rich enough with its pasture and high grazing, its sweet water, pond and spring, its fishery and garden producing any kind of vegetable from its dark soil, its acres of bent grass, succulent and tender despite, or even because of, the sea spray, the dark plunging cliffs and gentle shell-rich harbours, the call of its birds and the cough of seals, the otters loping along the shore. Who would not, at least from time to time, dream of owning such a joyful place as this?
     We had been grateful that morning that old Mrs Thatcher had not woken us up again by butting her head against the bedroom back door. I could see her on the far edge of the home field discussing her arthritis with the other elderly ewes, whilst her two grudgingly adopted lambs bounced around in attendance. From the farm window I looked south out from the harbour to a sea sparkling with bright sunshine, but with waves truncated and flattened by a strong south-westerly breeze. Down in the bottom corner of the field I was just in time to see the great white Aylesbury duck dip neatly under the bottom of the gate and come on up the track followed by her dapper little consort, the wild mallard that she had seduced with her great white bottom. I had not finished the slipway before they had found it to be a more convenient route to their breakfast than the tumbled boulders of the bay below the chapel.
     Their reappearance must mean the tide was now coming in. As it ebbed they would go down to the shore and paddle around in the shallows dabbling for shrimps and little crabs. I always wondered that they always walked with that curiously awkward twisting waddle that looked so painful to achieve. I know they could both fly perfectly well, as I had discovered one day when I dropped a hammer behind them on a metal sheet, and they had both exploded upwards in a quacking flurry of alarm leaving floating feathers behind like drifting and indignant sparks, and had flown high over the chicken house and the garden to light safely in the wide meadow behind.
     Now I could also see Sandra coming up from the big house, she had just crossed the front of the cottage and was looking worried. Neal had phoned from to ask if I could help. What he really needed was an agricultural engineer, but the only one on the main island would not be available for days.
     Like most of his neighbours, Neal had always one or two fields growing grass. Cut towards the end of the summer, dried by sun and wind, it was now ready to be bailed. Given the uncertainty of the Hebridean weather, a few dry and sunny days made an opportunity that he could not afford to miss. But instead of making bales his old Massey Ferguson was just pushing out an endless mass of hay tangled with twine which fell apart again on hitting the ground. The mechanism that should separate the bales and tie twine around each one had failed. He sounded a little desperate, Sandra said. Every baler that he might borrow from another farmer was being used.
     It seemed that my repair of the old generator – although I had really only taken it to bits, and put it together again, being as equally surprised and delighted that it had burst obediently into thumping life – had by now become a legend. Keenly observant eyes had no doubt also seen me working on the barge. I had gained an undeserved reputation as a mechanical wonder-worker. Even so, it did seem that I was his best hope. I had no idea at all how a baler might perform, and a quick search through all the maintenance manuals that I could find drew a blank. I would just have to try with whatever wit I could muster.
     I went over to the workshop, attracting the sudden fervent attention of Mrs Thatcher as I went, so that I had to bash her on the nose at the door, or she and her even more undisciplined urchins would have followed me inside, and filled the biggest toolbox I could find with every variety of tool that I thought might be useful. As an afterthought I added a pressure grease-gun and a can of grease, for I had already discovered that so many farmyards are littered with rusting machinery and vehicles simply because many farmers believe that once any machine is bought it never needs to be serviced again.
     Since I would be crossing alone, I had then to decide which boat to take. It would have to be the smaller rubber dinghy with a Seagull. I had by now cleaned and repainted the lighter of the two heavier boats, the one whose broken strake I had replaced, but I did not know how long my mercy mission would last, and even if I took one of the wooden dinghies it would be high water before I reached the other side and I would need to tow the rubber boat as well to be able to moor in deep water and transfer myself and my tools to the shore.
     Before all else Mrs T had first to be milked; a bad-tempered business at the best of times, this time made more fretful for us both by my haste to finish which seemed to rouse her to diabolical stratagems to frustrate. She managed twice to kick the cup aside, once put her foot in the cup and caught me a shrewd blow on the jaw with a hind leg. I wondered as I had frequently before who really benefited the most from this exercise. It would test the patience of a saint to milk a thoroughly bad-tempered old bitch of a ewe twice a day; but finally I was able deliver half a muddy cup of warm surrogate mother’s milk to Sandra for her to pass on to the lambs, the idea being apparently to increase the bond between them and Thatcher. Personally I doubted that this was having any effect at all.
     The trip across was just as bumpy as I expected, as it always is in a rubber boat of any size, but otherwise it was uneventful. I got moderately damp, but was soon dried again in the strong wind. Despite the weight of me and the tools the wind kept lifting the front of the dinghy and bouncing the whole lot sideways so that much of the time I only made progress crab-wise to the wind, but as soon as I found some shelter from the land, that problem eased and I could turn directly into the wind to run into the shore.
     The tide that day was very high, also because of the wind. The edge of it was lifting the line of tide-wrack above the sand and onto the grass, and beside the garage I could see our little car rocking gently with the force of the wind. Over anxious for the propeller I cut the Seagull too soon to lift the prop clear of the rocks on the shelving bottom, and then had to shove hard with one of the stubby oars to reach the grass at all. Holding on to the painter I lifted out the tools and pulled the dinghy sideways so that I could take off the Seagull, then I carried both motor and toolbox up to the car, locked the Seagull away in the garage and then went back and dragged the dinghy far up onto the grass and tied its painter to a sturdy iron fence post that must have been set in its concrete base thirty or forty years before, possibly before the war.
     It took me another twenty minutes to drive the farm. Marie met me in the yard and after a cheerful greeting pointed out the track to the field. There in the field sat Neal's tractor and behind it its impotent baler, and behind both there should have been a more or less evenly spaced line of tumbled but neatly tied bales. Instead there was a trail of wreckage as from a foundering ship: here were a few bales whole, more of them half-made rickety things, and the most, a sad scattered wake already being blown apart again by the wind, not made at all, and all through it all a horrible tangle of cut and knotted but entirely wasted orange baler twine.
     And there on the seat, staring glumly out to sea as if his salvation might come from there sat Neal, the usual half-smoked cigarette cupped in one hand, a big broad man, in his forties, greasy cap on his black hair, with huge square hands strong enough, as I had seen, to lift a swimming ewe with its sodden fleece that alone would weigh another thirty pounds beside her body's weight clean out of the sea and into the boat, and to do that again and again. At the sound of the car he swung stiffly from his seat and came across, pinching out his cigarette and holding out his hand, His tanned and red face from the perpetual wind was now wearing a rueful smile and frown.
     "I should never 'a thought to call you, Captain," he began, but his embarrassment was already embarrassing to me.
"Maybe you could make a start by trying to tell me how it ought to work," I proposed. "Because I don't think I know." It would be best, I thought, in this atmosphere of high hopes and expectation not to suggest, even in the most light-hearted fashion, that it might be too difficult ever to understand, even for the mechanical genius he thought me to be.
     And so we stood for a while, shoulder to shoulder, our backs to the wind but with that wonderful clear bright sunlight shining over our shoulders and deep into the machine's mysterious innards, and what it very soon helped to illuminate was that Neal's explanation of how it ought to work was not going to help at all. If anything would help, it must come from the baler itself. I could not be so unkind to tell him this all at once, of course, for he was a tremendously shy man, and so I let him jerkily continue to tie himself in verbal knots, whilst I tried to puzzle it out from first principles how the real knots were tied. His dog, who had been made lie by the gate whilst the tractor was moving, now decided that by now her exile must be ended, and she circled round behind us to take up a new station where it could watch its master better, watch out for sheep - and keep a watchful eye on me as well.
     Clearly the whole bloomin’ shebang was both towed and powered by the tractor, the power being supplied by a shaft just as I had already used on the island to mix concrete in the harbour, and this could be engaged and disengaged by leaning down backwards from the tractor seat and pushing the same kind of lever this way or that. But right now looking up the bale chute from the rear – I was inventing terms as I went - there was nothing to be seen but a sorry mess of hay and tangled twine. It was clearly pointless to ask Neal to power it up, for this would surely only make things worse. Lying on the ground where it had been cut the hay obviously lay at every angle, but then I could see how it was swept up by dozens of wire prongs rotating across the front of the baler and inside a cylindrical housing. They must pick up the hay and dragged inside this housing and thus ensured that it was delivered into the guts of the machine lying across the chute. Then it must be compressed against some kind of gate back here, packed in by successive thrusts of some piston like thing from up there; until, presumably, enough had been collected to make a bale. And then something must be triggered by the bale to – .
     And suddenly I realized that I could not do any of this even with Neal now silent, but still hovering anxiously but reverently at my shoulder. He had in fact a wonderful smell, composed in about equal parts of dog, sheep, wood, or possibly also peat, smoke, hay, tobacco, of course, diesel, and sweat, a heady mixture that normally I could have inhaled with pleasure, but his anxiety – no, rather his certainty, that all I needed to do was reach in with a spanner, twiddle it a bit, and he could be cracking on again toot-sweet. As gently as I could I banished him with his Woodbines and the dog to the headland on the other side of the field, and then I returned to my studies.
     Remember that all this time this great lump of machinery is completely inert. If it had been moving when I arrived, even if all it did was toss out these horrible wrecked bales, I would at least have some insight into the way it was all connected. As it was it just sat there, much bigger but not more complicated essentially than a knitting machine – but absolutely static.
     I cleared away all the hay from the tunnel or chute that I could reach, and in the metal floor of this square tunnel, or the chute, or the tube, into which the newly gathered hay would normally be rammed by the thrust of the piston – and that would indeed be this part coming in from over there - was revealed a rectangular recess, or niche, or notch, and in this niche or notch was what looked like the eye of an enormous needle, its blunt tip gleaming bright, and through this eye I could see was threaded the end of the baler twine.
     Suddenly I knew that this was it, the mysterium magister, hoke of the poke, the pocus of the hocus – as usual I was muttering to myself – this was the part that did the business, and the fact that it was not doing the business was what I was here to cure. Hokay.
     The reserves of twine were apparent. There were two great spools on brackets on the outside of the machine, one already feeding into the machine and the other, I realized, attached to it too. There must be miles of the stuff. But the brightness of that tip held the eye. In it dwelt a kind of potency: as indeed there must be, for this is the very purpose of the beast; the reason that it exists at all, is here. Even as the solid mass of hay in the tunnel is pressed again by the piston into an even tighter embrace, this long needle – suddenly it occurred to me to look underneath, and now I could see the whole curved length of it held back ready for the moment when it would spear upwards with tremendous force, pierce through the body of the bale, reach over, over its back, as it were, right down to its heels, and there seize in a flash the end of the twine that – I now saw as well - the preceding bale had left behind, and tie it in a pitilessly tight knot.
     It was all actually intensely – hmm. Sexy beast. Inside the red metal shelter of the tunnel, warmed by the sun and thick with dust, the scent of the hay was nearly intoxicating. I sat back on the tyre of the baler to consider all of this. I was only getting dizzy trying to visualize this mindless thudding motion of the piston arm combined with this darting thrust of the needle, which must move in almost an arc, up, down, almost so quick that one could not follow its work, and yet this work indeed is crucial. Either it does what it is supposed to do, does what it is expected to do, and the result is a succession of fine fat babies – that is, of well-made bales - thudding down behind its waddling red rear, or there is this horrible trail of scattered hay and wasted twine.
     Even now I had really no good idea how this mad device achieved its proper end, but the brightness of exposed thread told of a bolt that had clearly shifted from its intended position, probably it had already been loose at the end of the previous year when Neil, working like most Highland farmers from dawn to dusk to make ends meet, and perpetually short-handed, had probably put this machine away last year and had not thought to test it again. Within half an hour of being put to work again, it had untwisted even further and was now no longer where Misters Massey and Ferguson wanted it to be.
     I reached it with a spanner and, sure enough, its lock nut was loose. I screwed it it back until no bright thread was visible, then I walked over to his tractor, climbed up and waggled the gear stick in neutral, twisted the ignition and as the diesel burst into life (Neil, his coat over his arm, already turning towards me across the field), engaged the baler drive, and began to move the tractor forward in its lowest gear. All that I needed to see had happened before Neil, advancing with a light of wonder on his face, and with the dog trotting eagerly beside him looking upwards at him for instructions, had got his first arm into his sleeve.
     By turning the wheels of the tractor and the prongs of the gathering wossname to straddle a deep winnow of hay, I soon saw the tunnel begin to fill, and fill, and fill – and then, thwang!, that wicked curved lance speared upwards to its duty, through the warm and scented mass as more and more is packed behind, and in due time and decorum a fine fat bale, as tightly tied as any one, I do mean anyone, possibly could wish, dropped off the chute behind.
     Despite my entirely truthful and modest explanations, I could only have improved on my success by walking home across the waters. And if I had been given only a little more whisky, before Neal hastened away to finish baling before the rain, I might have tried to do this too. As it was I packed my tools, patted the dog – now exiled again to the gate, but on distinctly better terms with me – said cheerio to Marie, heartlessly, really, for she had probably less than a visitor a week in that lonely farmhouse looking out at one of the most beautiful sights in the world, and let the car and the toolbox find their way home down the hill and along the road to the garage and the boat.
     I suppose a lot of life’s problems are like that old baler, I mused, as I bounced and rattled home. I mean you have this big puzzling problem that you don’t understand, and maybe even after you have solved it you still don’t really understand how everything is connected. But that turns out to be relatively unimportant. You may never get down to the basic physics, but human problems are very rarely caused by basic physics. Sometimes you may be able to see just one thing that doesn’t look quite right. Then you fix this and see if the situation has improved. I wondered how this deep insight would help me to solve the big puzzling problem of my life. Where would I start? And where indeed was the dear old boat? Where the boat was there was no boat. Not any more. Where was - ?
     Bloody hell! Where the boat had been firmly tied to this old iron fence-post, none other than this iron fence-post – pathetically I looked around to be sure that it was not still tied to another old iron fence-post, perhaps on the other side of the garage. For thirty or forty - or even, for Christ’s sake, who knows, for a thousand years - it had been rusting away in this corner of a foreign field, and nothing could have moved it, certainly not this boisterous bullying buffeting wind. But it had. As soon as I had turned my trusting back it must have lifted up the dinghy like a great fat flabby balloon, and had waggled and tugged and butted and wrestled it, and without the weight of the tools and me it had been helpless, and finally the painter had broken right there - it was still stiffly pointing upwards at thirty degrees as if to show how hard it had tried to resist - and the boat was gone - had, to be absolutely perfectly exact, flown in that direction.
     It must twenty miles away by now; or even more. I imagined it appearing above Fort William, Inverness, the whole of the Great Glen behind it, flying out across the North Sea.
     I had glumly some idea that even a very small rubber boats might be worth my entire virtual monthly income. But this was in the future. In the immediate and practical present what it meant was that I was marooned.

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