The Acquaintance of a True Dustie-Fute

David Kinloch was born, raised and educated in Glasgow. He is a graduate of the universities of Glasgow and Oxford and was for many years a teacher of French studies. He currently teaches creative writing and Scottish literature at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. His first collection of poems, entitled Paris-Forfar, was praised by Edwin Morgan in the Scotsman: 'The book is notable for three things: successes in the impossible genre of the prose-poem, ... a trio of lively flytings... and a series of moving elegies for a gay lover dead from AIDS.' Kinloch is the author of four previous collections including Un Tour d’Ecosse (2001) and In My Father’s House (2005), both published by Carcanet, and of many critical works in the fields of French, Translation and Scottish studies. In 2004 he was a winner of the Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial Award and in 2006 held a Scottish Writers’ Bursary from the Scottish Arts Council. He was a founder editor of the poetry magazine Verse and has been instrumental in setting up the first Scottish Writers’ Centre.

We are on holiday on Vancouver Island. We've made it in our hired 'compact' car to the far north and have just found the entrance to our B and B which is called 'Secret Creek'. We feel like the intrepid and slightly comic 'dustie-futes' of Scots antiquity or just two of the remaining five Find-Outers. The winding potholed gravel strewn dirt track before us will determine which. The challenge is doubly grave because we fear not only chips to the paintwork of our hired car but the numerous black bears purported to inhabit the dense forest on either side of the track. Not purported, in fact, but very real, as we have just encountered a teenage bear crossing the highway not a mile or so ago. The drive is painfully slow and lasts all of 15 minutes. We lose pints of sweat, and every growl of the struggling car may not be the struggling car. But we arrive nonetheless. The B and B, a large conglomeration of wooden lodges, is silent. It gives on to a view of astonishing beauty. A silver inlet, a jetty, tall Douglas firs, a bald eagle perched on the topmost branch. We enter, cough loudly and about ten minutes later a girl responds to our noise by emerging from a room where she has evidently been taking a nap. She informs us it's the chef's day off. We blanch at the thought of having to drive back up that path tonight and return in the dark. But there is soup and dessert. If we are so inclined. We are. And sit down a bit later to reheated carrot and ginger soup followed by remicrowaved blueberry pie. It doesn't matter: the silver inlet is still there in the pink and orange sunset, as is the remarkably calm bald eagle.

A little later however, we make the acquaintance of a true dustie-fute. His name is Kwaday Dan Ts'inchi or 'Long Ago Person Found' in the Athapaskan language of the southern Tutchone. We discover him in a fascinating article by Heather Pringle in a 2008 issue of National Geographic which lies on one of the coffee tables in our lodge. Kwaday is some 200 plus years old, his perfectly preserved corpse unearthed from the ice by hunters tracking mountain sheep in northwestern British Columbia. Meticulous scientific research and that of oral historians enables Pringle to build up a remarkably detailed portrait of this young eighteen-year-old who met his end while travelling rapidly on foot from the coast into the interior. Analysis of stomach contents and the remains of a squirrel fur travelling robe give us the details of his last few days. We find out that he dined on crabmeat, berries and beach asparagus. He carried a small knife and a beaver-skin pouch lined with soft healing mosses. Even more extraordinary, laboratory research reveals that he had grown up on the Pacific coast in one of the First Nation villages that once existed on the shores of the Alaska Panhandle; that he was 5ft 7 inches tall with long black hair reaching his shoulders. He was in great physical shape, able to cover some 30 kilometres a day on foot. Elders of his Nation speculate that he may have been one of a special group of young people trained from an early age as a messenger, trusted with carrying important news from one part of the country to another. But luck was not on his side. At some point Kwaday lay down on his right side, his head resting on his wrist and drew his knees up a little towards his stomach. This was the position in which his body was found. For some reason the young man could not go on. The country takes him before he has even reached his maturity, takes his strength and vigour and snuffs it out. Such is often the fate of dustie-futes, the true dustie-futes among us.

David Kinloch

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Daivd Kinloch's new collection, In Search of Dustie-Fute, is avialble to pre-order here.