Once there was a family with a Highland name who lived beside the sea.
The opening line of this story exemplifies the way that MacLeod sticks a recurring pattern throughout his stories. They tend to be set in the same sort of places, people with the same sort of characters and examine the same sort of themes. Likewise, though the details of the opening sentence differs from that of other stories, it shares with many of them a sense of the familiar and traditional. Conventions are engaged by MacLeod for the purposes of unity not due to any inherent lack of creativity or imagination.
"Once you start, it takes a hold of you, once you drink underground water, you will always come back to drink some more. The water gets in your blood. We have been working the mines here since 1873.”
That setting to which MacLeod returns to explore its various effects and myriad impacts on those who live there is usually a coal-mining town. The coal might be mined from beneath Cape Breton or Kentucky, but the difference aboveground is as slight as that below. When mines have exhausted their finite supply, life moves on except for those left behind. The economics of coal mining is sometimes place forward and sometimes exist as an undercurrent in the background, but it is almost always a much more significant element than the actual job of mining itself.
For a long time, Archibald did not know what to do. He felt somehow betrayed by forces he could not control.
Archibald is nearly 80 years old and he just discovered something about the modern world that all those decades of living still could not prepare him for: that the mare he just sold for breeding would instead be constantly kept pregnant in order to exploit equine urine for the production of birth control pills. The world is changing for the characters in MacLeod’s fiction and whether they are ready to meet the challenges or not is of no consequence. When the reader meets them it is usually at a crossing point in their lives where the future must be met head-on.
He persists in my memory and in my life and he persists physically as well.
The closing lines of this story is dedicated to the dog that the narrator was forced by circumstances beyond his control to sacrifice to the will of the majority. Deemed dangerous and threatening, the dog was led into an ambush and gunned down by an obliging neighbor. Though relentlessly downbeat as the climax, the story goes on a little beyond that scene to close the curtain on wistful and upbeat memory of the impact on human lives that animals can have. Animals and their owners are persistently being cut off from each other in the works of MacLeod—though not usually to the extreme state of finality as in this story—and with each new addition to menagerie, the central animal character adds more muscle to the themes exploring these symbiotic relationships between man and beast, often blurring the distinction between what constitutes a beast.
