Chapter 94: The Hunter at the Border

We went up the north track at eleven in the morning with the wind coming off the sea and the whole village watching us from the shore road.

Declan had his coat on and a length of rope over his shoulder and a knife in his belt, and I had the weight of forty one in my pocket and the ring on my finger and the black book of the woman who took children out of this village inside my coat. Cormac came behind us because Declan would not leave him in the village with the eleven wolves who had walked out of the hall, and Padraig came because he had been on the border once already and knew the ground.

The north track goes up over the shoulder of the headland and down into a cove that has no name and no road and a slip cut into the rock that was put there in 1911 for a coastguard station that was never built. We came over the top of the shoulder and lay down in the furze and looked down at the cove.

There were three boats in it.

The Star of the Sea was there, the old Donegal boat that had taken my sister north in April and come back in the fog with nobody on her. There was a second boat beside her, a dark one with a town man's paint on her, and a third at the slip with a long case on the deck and a coil of rope and a man sitting on the cabin roof with a rifle across his knees.

There were men on the shore. Six of them, and two wolves, and a woman in a grey coat standing at the slip with her back to the water and her hands in her pockets.

And there was a man on the track below us, coming up toward the furze with a lamp in his hand and a paper in the other, and he was not one of the men from the cove.

He was tall and he was thin and he was somewhere in his fifties and he had a grey coat that had been rained on and boots that had been oiled and a cap pulled down. He came up the track at a walk and he did not look like a man who was trying to hide.

Declan put his hand on my arm.

“That is a hunter,” he said. “That is one of the Kelleher men's cousins out of Sligo and I have seen him before. His name is Owen and he has been on this coast since 1994 and he does not come into a village and he does not go to a hall. He sits on a border and he waits.”

The man came up to the top of the track and stopped twenty feet from the furze and put his lamp down on a stone and said, “You can come out. I have been watching you since the shoulder and I could have put a bullet in the three of you at the shoulder and I did not.”

We came out. Declan had his hand on his knife and I put my hand on his arm and we stood on the track with the wind and the sea below us.

“What do you want?” I said.

“I want to give you a thing.” He held up the paper. “I have been carrying it since the fourteenth of June and I have been told to give it to the woman with gold hair who comes to this border. And I have been sitting on this track for three days waiting for her.”

“Who told you?”

“The woman in the photograph.” He held the paper out. “Take it. It is not a trick and it is not a trap and there is not a thing in it that will hurt you.”

I took it. It was a photograph, and it was old and creased and it had been folded and unfolded so many times that the crease had gone soft. It was a woman standing in front of a white wall with a shed behind her that had a red roof, and the woman had gold hair going grey at the temples and a grey coat over her arm and she was looking at the camera with her head a little to one side.

It was my sister. It was my sister in Athlone, in front of the cottage with the white gate and the red shed, and there was a date written on the back in her own hand. The fourteenth of June.

“That is four weeks ago,” I said.

“It is four weeks ago and she gave it to me herself in a pub in Athlone and she said, take this to the border at Dún Aonghasa and wait for the woman with gold hair and give it to her and tell her that I am alive and that I am not in the north and that I have not been in the north since April.” Owen put his hands in his pockets. “She paid me for the waiting and she paid me well and she said, if the woman with gold hair does not come to the border by the end of June then burn the photograph and go home.”

Declan took the photograph out of my hand and looked at it and his face went grey.

“She is alive,” he said. “She has been in Athlone since April and she is alive and she has been four weeks from this village and she did not come.”

“She could not come,” Owen said. “That is the other thing she told me to tell you. She said, tell my sister that I cannot come to the border because there is a wolf in the north who is watching the roads and there is a wolf in Galway who is watching the post and there is a wolf in this village who is watching the shore. And she said, tell my sister that the woman in the grey coat is not me and that she knows it and that she has been standing in my name for two days and that she is not the enemy.”

The wind came up over the shoulder of the headland.

“Who is the woman in the grey coat?” I said.

“Her name is Eileen and she is the daughter of the woman who took the seat in 1961 and she has been in the north for twenty years and she has been running a pack out of wolves this territory has thrown out.” Owen looked down at the cove. “And there is a thing about her that your sister told me and that I am going to tell you because I have been paid to tell you the whole of it. The woman in the grey coat is not a claimant. She has never been a claimant. She has been a thing that a woman in Galway put in a grey coat and sent down this coast to make a noise so that the man in Galway could come down with a letter and put the pack under trusteeship.” He looked at me. “The woman in the grey coat has been used the way your sister was used and she knows it now and she has been sitting in that cove for two days with a pack that does not know what to do with her.”

I stood on the track with the photograph in my hand.

“Then there is a thing I have to ask,” I said. “And I am going to ask it and you are going to answer it and it is going to be the truth. My sister is in Athlone and she has been in Athlone since April and she is four weeks from this village. Why has she not come down that shore road?”

Owen looked at the sea.

“Because there is a wolf in this village who has been writing to her,” he said. “And the letters have been coming to Athlone every week since April and they have been signed with a name that your sister trusted. And the last letter came on the twelfth of June and it said, stay in Athlone, the border is watched, I will come for you when the vote is taken.” He looked at me. “Your sister has been sitting in a cottage in Athlone for four months waiting for a wolf who was never going to come for her.”

Declan was beside me with his hand on my arm.

“Who signed the letters?” he said.

“She would not tell me. She said it was a name she could not say out loud because the wolf who wrote them was a wolf she had loved once and a wolf who had broken her.” Owen put his cap straight. “And there is a thing about the letters that I have to tell you and then I am going to go down that track and get on my boat and go back to Sligo. The last letter came on the twelfth of June and it was posted in Galway. Not in this village. In Galway. And there is a wolf in this village who has been going up to Galway every week since April and who has been posting letters to a woman in Athlone in a hand that she trusted.”

The wind came up. The whole cove below us was quiet.

“Maire,” I said.

“No,” Declan said. “Maire has been in this village all her life and she has not been to Galway since 1981 and she does not have a car.”

“Then who?”

And then Cormac said, from behind us, “My father.”

The whole track went quiet. Declan turned round.

“Cormac.”

“You have been going up to Galway every week since April,” Cormac said. “You told me it was for the harbor dues and the co-op's papers and the boat insurance. And there is a thing I have not told you and that I am going to say now because there is a hunter on this track and a photograph in the woman's hand and the whole of it is going to come out in the hall in the morning. I went into the harbor office in May when you were out and I opened the drawer and there was a bundle of letters in it tied with string and the letters were in your hand and they were addressed to a woman in Athlone.” He looked at his father. “I did not read them. I put them back and I closed the drawer and I have been carrying it since.”

Declan stood on the track with the wind in his auburn hair and his grey eyes on his son.

“I wrote them,” he said.