Living Silver 



shimmer in a grey light ; and small spots of rain drizzle down to 

 collide in circles on the salt gloss of their surface. Saint Magnus 

 replaced Saint Stanislav. The long low shore, continually but 

 unexpectedly interrupted by another encroachment of the North 

 Sea or the Atlantic, substituted for the curving yellow sky-line 

 of the Mazury Lakes where the crosses of obscure but sanctified 

 figures broke in remote disorder like inarticulate squiggles. Now, 

 though, it would be the mast of a ship that would serve as a sign ; 

 the St. Clair^Sj perhaps, signifying a cargo of holiday-makers, 

 brandy, laughter, and spew over the side ; or a trawler, slow on 

 the horizon so that when he looked at it through Frank's bino- 

 culars he could observe the dot of a fish-basket near the masthead 

 and he would know that its nets were down and would wonder 

 what it was catching; or, when he went round to the south west 

 on a clear day, it would be the rotting masts of two wrecks, 

 sticking up like aerials above the grey rocks of the Skerries - but 

 he needed the high ground then, so as to overlook Flotta, and he 

 still wasn't strong enough to do much climbing. 



Nevertheless, when the weather was calm and the forecast 

 good, Frank would sometimes take him out to have a look at the 

 creels. Frank was not a fisherman. There aren't many fishermen 

 on the Orkneys nowadays, but there aren't many Orcadians who 

 can't handle a small boat in the fiercest shallows. They are 

 farmers who treat their coastal waters as though they were so 

 many acres of extra pasture. But it is not sheep that graze there, 

 not milk-laden cows that can be fetched home in the winter and 

 kept in a byre to calf. It is the lobster. 



Frank had a rowing boat, one of those long narrow ones that 

 the Faroese delight in, painted white, with a trim neat look. It 

 was not an ideal fishing vessel, far too liable to tilt when a man 

 strained over the side in an effort to disentangle a rope that had 

 fankled with the rocks on the seabed. He kept the craft because 

 he had picked her up for a song, because a new and better boat 

 would be expensive and because, in spite of all her disadvantages, 

 his seamanship and sense of balance could always get the better 



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