Ailsa and the Night of the Highest Tide

About this story

The spring tide is due to climb higher than any this year, and the island prepares calmly, creels lifted, boats double tied, kettles set. Ailsa and her grandmother watch from the doorstep as the water touches the third stone step, rests there like a held breath, and begins its long quiet going back.

Awe without fear, trusting the limit of a vast thing.

Even the greatest rising knows the stone where it will stop.

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"Quick, Tangle, quick!" laughed Ailsa, racing the white edge of the sea up the sand with a creel of cork floats bumping on her back, while Tangle the otter loped and humped along beside her, rolling the last runaway float home with his nose. For tonight was the night of the highest tide of the whole year, when the sea climbs higher than on any other night, and takes for keeps whatever is left behind. And then, from the Black Geo below the point, where the rocks stand up like a broken doorway, there came a small and frightened cry. Ailsa stopped dead. Tangle stood up tall on his back legs, dripping, listening. The cry came again.

High above the crofts and the peat smoke and the one rust-red door, a glossy black raven crossed the silver evening sky. It turned one slow, wide circle over the shore, and then it glided out toward the Black Geo, the way it does just before a story begins.

Up at the croft, Granny was lighting the little storm lantern that always hung on the nail by the rust-red door. "The moon and the sun are pulling on the same rope tonight," she said, "and the sea will climb higher than it has climbed all year." Then she went down the lane to the harbor, where all the grown-ups of the island were tying the boats with two ropes instead of one. "Stay near the house, and keep Tangle with you," she called back. "And Ailsa. Even the oldest fishermen are afraid of the dark water. Being brave is another thing altogether." And she was gone into the mist before Ailsa could ask what she meant.

But the cry came again, thinner now, and Ailsa's quick feet were already running. At the mouth of the Black Geo, where the sea runs in through a narrow crack between two black walls of stone, she found it: a little grey seal pup, stranded high on a shelf of rock deep inside, where some wave had thrown it and no wave could fetch it down. The tide was pouring in below it, black and rising, and out in the grey swell its mother rose and called and called, for a seal can swim to the end of the sea, but she cannot climb a wall of stone.

Ailsa looked down the long dark throat of the geo, and her tummy went cold. She had never once gone in past the light, not even at low tide, not even at noon. But the grown-ups were far away at the harbor, and the sea on this island never hurries and never, ever stops. "Then it has to be us, Tangle," she said, and her voice only wobbled a little. She ran up for Granny's storm lantern, and came back with its small gold flame, and stepped into the dark between the stone walls, and Tangle poured himself into the black water beside her like a ribbon of brown silk.

She tried the quick way first, the low way, splashing along the bottom of the geo where the water still came only to her boots. But the sea breathed in behind her, one long cold surge, and it swallowed her boots and shoved her hard against the wet wall, and the lantern hissed once and went out. Black dark, all at once, everywhere. Ailsa scrambled back to the mouth of the geo with her heart banging like a door in a storm, and stood shaking in the last silver of evening, soaked to the middle.

The story goes on in the video.