Donald and His Seven Cows by Angus Peter Campbell review: 'remarkable'
The wise old hermit at the centre of Angus Peter Campbell’s novella has much to teach us about the kind of change we need, and about the foundations on which we should build it, writes Joyce McMillan
The landscape of the Western Isles has always been striking; but in our time, it has begun to acquire a slowly emerging double aspect. On one hand, it is clearly marked by the traces of an old society - Gaelic speaking, full of its own rich culture, living by fishing and crofting - that still just exists within living memory, but now lies largely abandoned, or in visible ruins.
Yet on the other hand, its deserted villages and seashores, its groves of wind turbines and visible strips of once-cultivated land, begin also to look like a template; a quiet map of a new and more self-reliant world into which we may all need to be moving, if we are to survive the current planetary crisis. And it’s in this strange, suspended space between past and present, future and eternity, that we find Donald Michael MacDonald, the hero of Angus Peter Campbell’s beautiful new novella-length story, Donald and His Seven Cows; a tale told by Donald in the first person, like a meditative diary.
Donald is a man in his early Seventies who lives alone in the old croft house where he grew up with his widowed mother and his grandfather. Donald understands the modern world pretty well; he once even travelled across and around it, as a young merchant seaman.
He chooses, though, not to be part of it, except where he must. Instead, he stubbornly keeps a small herd of seven cows; a herd that is always changing after each year’s cattle sale, yet always with the same names, and always led by a cow called Maisie. And every day except Sunday, when he goes to church, he and his dog Rover accompany the cows on a circular tour of a mile or so around his croft, mostly across common land, and marked out by ten stopping-places which he himself - in this Catholic community - likens to the stations of the cross.
Donald knows that the cows could easily make the journey on their own, hefted as they are into this ground; but he chooses to accompany them and care for them, across every stone and tuft of grass in the infinitely familiar landscape. His life is therefore one of profound solitary meditation and memory, immersed in thoughts - and sometimes powerful sensory memories - of his grandfather, his mother, childhood friends, or the girl he once loved, Mary Ann; in the stories they told, and also in speculation about God, the universe an the wider world.
Nor is Donald’s landscape empty, to his eyes and ears. Apart from the cows - to whom he talks as he walks, to the growing concern of his neighbours - the stations of his journey are full of beings and presences, from Mac Talla nan Creag, the echo that lives in the big rock at his first port of call, and the fairies he hears dancing and singing beneath the earth at the Fairy Knoll, to the ghost of a girl called Catriona waiting for her long-lost lover at the ruined croft, and the frightening visions of the future Donald experiences, on the moor where there are plans to build a space port.
Donald remembers and names all these presences in Gaelic, of course; but he always kindly translates for English speakers, both the place-names and the songs, flowing easily between the two languages. And although some in the community call him an idiot or a fool, his friend Nurse McLeish begins to recognise that he is more like a contemplative hermit or sage, a storehouse of old knowledge and wisdom that is - or could be - of infinite use in imagining a viable future.
The story ends with a rush of change that seems to emerge suddenly, as change often does. For a brief season, Donald even accepts an improbable offer from the absentee American owner of the local big house to become its caretaker and occasional tour guide, dressing up as the tourist vision of a Highland Chief for the role; although he soon recovers his dignity, and returns to his herd, his croft, and his steadily warming relationship with Nurse McLeish.
If Angus Peter Campbell understands change, though, he also understands perfectly what Donald’s old ways have to tell us about the kind of change we need, and about the foundations on which we should build it. When Donald and his cows reach the shoreline, the sixth stop on their way, Donald meditates on the dividing-line between the small number of things that are truly his, and the rest of the universe. “I think the danger is... when one place becomes like another,” he says, “and everything becomes yours to possess, and not to admire. It has to have a life of its own, which you can desire, but not claim. And if that’s the way it is, it often opens the gate, and welcomes you in.”
In three short sentences, in other words, Donald’s almost silent wisdom - won in years of lonely solitude and sometimes passionate regret - demolishes the whole colonialist and exploitative world-view that wrecks our beautiful planet, and makes countless thousands mourn. And it’s a measure of the immense, quiet importance of this beautiful book, and of the culture in which it is rooted, that this is only a tiny fragment of the insight this remarkable, timeless character has to offer, once he breaks his outward silence, and begins to write.
Donald and His Seven Cows, by Angus Peter Campbell, Luath Press, £8.99
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