It was the dead fish she noticed first. The silvery skin of ling. A clutch of coalfish tangled among seaweed. Other fish stranded on the sand. Too many to be normal or natural. Jessie had stood there for ages watching them, bemused at their arrival on the shore. And then there was the day a couple of seals were washed up, stretched out on the edge of the tide, their flesh squabbled over by gulls, torn and shredded. She had never seen anything quite like it in all the years she had stepped on either Garry Beach or the Tràigh Mhòr, looking for flotsam the Minch had washed up on the tide.
Things like nets swept from the deck of a fishing boat, a shattered tree trunk that might have floated in their direction from one of the rivers in the Highlands, even once a thick geansaidh, stripped, perhaps, from a fisherman''s back. These gifts from the sea were always useful. A net could be draped over the top of a haystack. Timber might be used for a roof or even to weigh down a stack of oats or hay. A geansaidh could be washed and mended, given to one of the many bachelors in the village. They were always in need of clothes and they sometimes had no women in their lives to help provide them. A few hours and the click of knitting needles at the fireside and a quick repair could be done, clothing provided that would keep them warm in the winter. But the fish and seals were strange: the fact that they had shoaled up dead on the beach in such numbers.
The way, too, there hadn''t been a storm a night or two before, as there so often was on this edge of coastline, bringing all sorts of arrivals to the coast. Yet odder still was what Jessie encountered a day or two later. She saw it from a distance - on the border of sea and sand - shifting back and forth on the tide, as if it was breathing. It looked like a dirty rag of cloud that had been toppled to earth, though more solid and substantial than that. Like the mound of seals and fish the other day, the gulls were sweeping down to feed on it, calling out and tearing at it with their beaks. She made her way towards the heap, tightening her scarf against the chill of the wind, bracing herself against its force, gasping as she came closer to what the sea had left on the beach. She stepped forward tentatively toward the pile, walking past the cattle grazing on the machair''s edge. It looked as if a clutch of small animals were spread out on the sand, all beasts unknown to her.
They weren''t cats and dogs, the creatures that the local crofters often drowned in the sea in these parts - when too many kittens had been born, when a collie had turned on someone or grown too old to round up sheep. Their presence would have no effect on her whatsoever. Far too familiar. No. This was different. Some of these creatures had white fur and small, beady eyes - those that hadn''t had their sight plucked by beaks, that is. They had expressions similar to those of children who had just been born. Others were like rats, but fat and round, as if they had been over-fed.
She had never seen either of them before. She shivered when she saw them, tugging tighter her old tweed coat. There was something that disgusted her about the sight, something that wasn''t real or natural. Jessie wondered how they had reached here, what time or tide had brought them this way. For a moment, she wondered if they had anything to do with the vessel, the Ben Lomond, which had been anchored in the Minch, not far from Tolsta Head, over the last week or so. Some of her neighbours had said there was something strange about it. It was a large grey boat, a converted tank-landing ship, bulky and oppressive, and then there were these motorboats that kept going back and forth to it, sometimes toward Stornoway, at other times towards some kind of platform that was a short distance away, those on board moving boxes to and fro. Sometimes they even hoisted the motorboats up the side of the vessel.
This happened each time the waves grew high and choppy, when the wind rose up. And some neighbours had seen the red warning flag being raised, a veil of white smoke rising from the pontoon''s deck a few moments later. It trailed across its surface like sea-spray but more persistent and long-lasting, misting the crest of waves. Some of the local boats ignored the signal. Pretending not to see the flag, they just carried on fishing. Domhnall Iain, a former fisherman and one of the village''s older men, said it resembled the gas that had cloaked his trench when he fought in the Great War.