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fire hung round us like a thin curtain. Tim Maconochie’s Airedale lifted his head from the floor and laid it back down again.
    The bird woman clenched her teeth, set her shoulders. “Well, isn’t anybody going to do anything?”
    Magnus was the one to break the silence. He’d slipped back in behindthe bar, unmindful of the chaff and bits of this and that that the wind had deposited in his hair. “The man saved your life, that’s about all.”
    Robbie ducked his head out of modesty. His ears went crimson.
    “Saved—?” A species of comprehension settled into her eyes. “I was…something hit me, something the wind blew…”
    Tim Maconochie, though he wasn’t any less tightfisted than the rest of us, cleared his throat and offered to buy the girl a drop of whisky to clear her head, and her face opened up then like the sun coming through the clouds so that we all had a good look at the beauty of her, and it was a beauty that made us glad to be alive in that moment to witness it. Whiskies went round. A blast of wind rattled the panes till we thought they would burst. Someone led Duncan in and sat him down in the corner with his pipe and a pint of ale. And then there was another round, and another, and all the while Junie Ooley was perched on a stool at the bar talking Robbie Baikie’s big glowing ears right off him.
    T HAT WAS THE BEGINNING of a romance that stood the whole island on its head. Nobody had seen anything like it, at least since the two maundering teens from Cullivoe had drowned themselves in a suicide pact in the Ness of Houlland, and it was the more surprising because no one had ever suspected such depths of passion in a poor slug like Robbie Baikie. Robbie wasn’t past thirty, but it was lassitude and the brick wall of introspection that made him sit at the bar till he carried the weight of a man twice his age, and none of us could remember him in the company of a woman, not since his mother died, anyway. He was the sort to let his sheep feed on the blighted tops of the heather and the wrack that blew up out of the sea and he kept his heart closed up like a lockbox. And now, all of a sudden, right before our eyes, he was a man transformed. That first night he led Junie Ooley up the street to her lodgings like a gallant out of the picture films, the two of them holding hands and leaning into the wind while cats and flowerpots and small children flew past them, and it seemed he was never away from her for five minutes consecutive after that.
    He drove her all the wind-blasted way out to the bird sanctuary at Herma Ness and helped her set up her equipment in an abandoned crofter’s cottage of such ancient provenance that not even Duncan Stout could say who the landlord might once have been. The cottage had a thatched roof, and though it was rotted through in half a dozen places and perfervid with the little lives of crawling things and rodents, she didn’t seem particular. It was in the right place, on a broad barren moor that fell off into the sea amongst the cliffs where the birds made their nests, and that was all that mattered.
    There was no fuss about Junie Ooley. She was her own woman, and no doubt about it. She’d come to see and study the flocks that gathered there in the spring—the kittiwakes, the puffins, terns and northern fulmars nesting the high ledges and spreading wide their wings to cruise out over the sea—and she had her array of cameras and telephoto lenses with her to take her photographs for the pricey high-grade magazines. If she had to rough it, she was prepared. There were the cynical amongst us who thought she was just making use of Robbie Baikie for the convenience of his Toyota minivan and the all-purpose, wraparound warmth of him, and there was no end to the gossip of the biddies and the potboilers and the kind who wouldn’t know a good thing if it fell down out of Heaven and conked them on the head, but there were those who saw it for what it was: love, pure and