by Andrew McCallum

A rustle in the undergrowth... I freeze mid-stride, my infant heart suddenly pounding in my ears, my breath coming in shallow, fluttering gasps... Then I see a hedgehog clambering up the bank, through the crazy scribbles of a naked raspberry bush, its tiny hands scrabbling blindly for purchase among the yellowing tufts of autumn grass. And the cold hand relaxes its grip on the nape of my neck and withdraws back through the interstices of Nature, drawing a shiver of relief down my spine with its departing finger...

That was my first encounter with the great god Pan, that merry, ugly deity with the horns and the ears and the legs of a goat, whose brutal whisper I still catch frequently in the eerie piping of the wind in the reeds, in the brush of an invisible cobweb against my face, in the scent of the oestrous sap in the vernal grasses, and in the shadow flitting just beyond the corner of my eye as he skips through the utter otherness of the non-human world.

And no matter how often I meet him, always unexpectedly, on my eternally recurrent walks along the crumbling path through Station Wood, the feeling is always the same. Always, the paralysing fear, the rooting of my feet to the earth, the buckling in my knees as the wilderness tries to fold me back into itself like a wad of clay; always the waking nightmare of wanting beyond all else to run away and finding that my legs no longer exist, that my legs have become part of the ground on which I'd been standing. We've never become familiar, Pan and I; and Pan has been stalking my footsteps through Station Wood for nigh-on forty years.

He is, of course, a Greek invention. By giving the mystery a name, the grotesqueness a form, the Ancient Greeks had sought to tame the sheer numinosity of what was not them, to bring it at least some way within their ken, and to prevent their panic in the face of such strangeness from running away with their very sense of self. Such, I suppose, is the source of all religion: to bring the unimaginable to the edge of imagination; to humanise the uncanny.

My walk takes me from the road at the foot of the village along a path which leads to the village's derelict railway station. To the right of the path, the Red Moss fills a shallow valley with its treacherous bog and tortured birks, from which higher purple moorland distantly rises towards the broad eastern sky. To the left, mixed woodland stumbles up a steeper slope to the crown of a round-backed hill, beyond which a railway line carves a deep scar through the sand and gravel of its western breast.

The station itself consists of a fragment of platform, pitted and crumbled by wind and rain and frosts and sun, along the rear of which the splintering remnants of a wooden fence protrude from the earth and lean against one another for support like a line of drunken men. In the summer, amid the rankness of the weeds and nettles which have invaded and are slowly but inexorably dismantling this monument to human industry, I can still detect a faint smell of hot oil and creosote. Here and there, on the platform's fragmented metalled surface and in the encroaching scrub, the charred remains of tinkers' fires blister the ground like black sores, and the detritus of village life rusts and spills from burst plastic sacks.

My father used to bring me here when I was a child. About a mile along the track from the station, where the railway leaves its long, curved cutting and shoots its arrow diagonally across the flat expanse of the Red Moss, the platelayers had built a small, brick bothy in which to shelter at 'piece-time'.

My grandfather was one of those platelayers who worked indefatigably to prevent the bog from swallowing up the line; and, on his 'spiv-days', when the weather was fair, my father would hoist me onto his shoulders and carry me through Station Wood and along the sleepered path to have lunch and some craic with the men in the bothy.

"And whit huv ye got in yer piece the day, wee man?" the Black Doc would always ask, as I pushed my way through a turnstile of knees and squeezed myself into a crevice between the men who crammed the makeshift benches. I remember them mainly as redolences of stale sweat and damp clothing and tobacco. The men were dark from their labour and the sun, and the only light in the bothy came from the doorless aperture let into the gable of its lee side and from the gleaming whites of their eyes.

I'd peep into the brown paper poke my gran had given me. "Jam," I'd reply invariably, trying to make my voice sound as deep and sonorous as the next man's.

"Damson or raspberry?"

I'd tear a bite from one of the sandwiches. "Damson," I'd decide.

"Uh-huh?" The Black Doc would weigh the significance of this information carefully for a moment. Then: "Hame-made or shop?"

"Hame-made, of course!" I'd flare. "Ma granny widnae hae shop-bought in the hoose!"

Then there would be laughter, and the Black Doc would reach across the semi-darkness of the windowless room and buffet my head with his massive, callused paw.

"Aye, yer a guid lad, Andra! Now... wid ye swap wan o yer granny's hame-made damson for wan o ma cheese?"

Much later, squatting at the foot of each tree, the Station Wood would watch me rutting furiously on an alter of soft turf, in a temple formed by the leaf-stained columns of evening sunlight which filtered through the high, woodland canopy; watch me solemnly, approvingly, like a ring of village elders paused in their passing to monitor the observance of a timeless, necessary rite, before moving on to resume their daily business at the conclusion of our cry... as if nothing had happened.

"Were ye no feart?" Kate's dark eyes were deep and round with awe and knowing, like a deep, dark pool of water which had lost its surface film. "I wis feart!"

"It wis like ma heid exploded! Yer skin's sae soft and cool and creamy... I could feel it like it wis inside me, inside ma heid! And yer kiss... sweet and cool like a drink fae a well up there on the moor... Then I juist... disappeart, intae a that softness and sweetness and coolness. And, aye - I wis feart! But juist afore it happent, juist as I felt masel slippin away, juist as we cried oot...! Man, that wis grand!"

"Dae ye still luv me?" She drew her knees up to her chin and hugged her legs, a snug, dreamy look dappling her face.

"Luv ye?" I wondered, standing up and hurriedly drawing on my trousers. "Luv ye? Of course I still luv ye! I luved ye before, and I luv ye now!"

But in between? Between the acceleration of my senses and my draining away from her? In the moment of that shout? How could I have said that I loved her in that moment when, in that very moment, the great god Pan had stolen me away?

The Black Doc was a big man. The first time I saw him, I took him for a giant and kept the trunks of my father's legs between us. But the Black Doc, after he had finished his 'piece', drained the dregs of his stewed tea from the bottom of his blackened billycan, and wiped his mouth and nose on the back of his hand... the Black Doc began to sing.

He had a fine baritone voice, as rich and warm as polished walnut, and I felt the vibration of his song tremble in my stomach. And it wasn't long until he was hoisting me up onto the greasy knee of his trousers and asking me to 'oblige the company wi a sang'.

He must have been almost seven feet tall. He had to stoop low to pass through the door and into the bothy; and, even when he was sitting down on the plank bench, the bristle of his hair nearly brushed the corrugated iron ceiling.

And he was as broad as he was long, with shoulders like the boughs of the three massive beech trees which marked the northern extent of the village, and an immense barrel chest which filled the taut white sails of his shirt. His forearms, below his rolled-up shirtsleeves, were the colour and texture of wood, beneath the hardness of which thick ropes of muscle and sinew snaked around hefty levers of bone. The sheer physicality of the man, the solidity of his presence, filled me with an awe which was either joyful or fearful... I still can't tell which.

But it was his feet that impressed me most. Shod in muckle, calf-length boots of black unfinished leather, they were as long as my forearm and as broad as railway sleepers. They were laced with blackened strips of hide, which criss-crossed their way up to the middle of his shins and then looped the girth of his calves before being tied off in a small, neat bow at the front. I was particularly struck by the neatness and precision of this lacing. Each chevron was the mirror-image of its counterpart, each lay snug and straight against the leather tongue, and together they rose in perfectly parallel lines like the rungs of a ladder.

Then, one day, my father hoisted me onto his shoulders and tramped the path through Station Wood; and, as we rounded the bend which brought the derelict platform into view, we saw my grandfather and his workmates gathered in a close knot by the side of the railway line.

I searched in vain for a sight of the Black Doc towering in their midst. The men were conferring in low, conspiratorial voices, their brows darkened, their jaws grimly set. I wondered how their words could escape from behind such barely moving lips. Then one of the men spotted us and tugged at my grandfather's sleeve.

My grandfather glowered across at us, baring his teeth in a sort of snarl, then detached himself from the group and began walking slowly, reluctantly towards us. My father slipped me from his shoulders and placed me carefully by the side of the path.

"You wait here a wee," he murmured, laying a cautionary hand gently on my shoulder. "Don't move. All right?"

He walked towards my grandfather, and they blent momentarily in quiet conference. Then my father turned on his heel and strode purposefully back towards me.

The smile which had frozen on my face melted smoothly away like snow from a dyke. I looked quickly from the grim look on my father's face, to that on the face of my grandfather, to that on the faces of the knot of men. They were all looking at me, and their look was overcast with a louring manhood secret into which I was about to be inducted. A sudden gust of wind set the trees chattering and the dust and debris from the path swirling into my eyes.

"The Black Doc!" I cried. "Where's the Black Doc?"

The great god Pan rose up in my head, stomping his hooves and clapping his hands and chuckling gleefully. A whirr of sparrows tore through the hedgerow, twittering excitedly in the bright summer sunlight. I found myself running towards the platelayers, angling my trajectory to avoid the broadcast net of my father's gathering arms.

"Wheesht, noo! Calm doon!" my father soothed, his voice warm and husky and comforting. He smothered me to his breast. The men looked on, witnessing my passage, curious to see how well my father would accomplish its facilitation.

"The Black Doc's deid," my father informed me. "He was working by himsel on the line, and a train struck him. He couldna hae heard it comin."

"How could he no have heard it?" I complained.

"Who knows?" my father shrugged. "It's just wan o they things. It happens. Onywise," he continued, "he's deid noo and that's an end o it. Come on, we'd better get ye hame."

We turned to trudge our way back along the path to the village. But, just as we turned, I stole a glimpse along the track to the brick bothy, and saw the Black Doc's feet protruding from the doorway, a hap of green tarpaulin skirting the top of his giant boots.

© Andrew McCallum

Andrew McCallum is a member of Biggar Writers Group which meets every other Monday in the Municipal Hall in Biggar.