Donald Livingstone and the Battle of Culloden

Culloden Battlefield
Photo by Citril

Adapted from "Incidents of the Jacobite Risings", by Alexander Carmichael, LL.D., The Celtic Review, Vol. VI, July 1909.

Chapter 1 – Silky Smooth, Hard as a Rock

At eighteen years of age, Donald Livingstone of Bun-a-mhuilinn, Morvern, member of the Livingstones of Achnacree, Benderloch, a stout, strong and hairy fighter, known as Dombull Mollach, Hairy Donald, and later simply as Hairy D, dealt death at Culloden for Scotland under the command of Prince Charlie Stuart, Laird of Ardsheal, beside the Livingstones and Carmichaels of Lismore.

Before the battle at Culloden, a sibyl predicted nine Donalds would fall carrying the blue banner of the Stuarts. At Culloden, Donald Carmichael fell first, followed by seven obscure Carmichael Donalds. After the last, Donald Livingstone leapt from his duties of anonymous slaughter and groin spearing into legend. He picked up the blue silk banner, ripped it from its pole and wrapped it around his body. Just as he realized he couldn’t swing his sword with his arms pinned to his sides, he took a musketball in the chest. Down went the ninth Donald, jamming his knee on a pointy rock. The silken banner had stopped the ball, but the force of the shot left him dazed. That is, until something deep in his brain stem picked up the Vibration of Impending Doom. His eyes popped open and he saw a riderless horse, out of control, trampling the bodies and charging straight for him. He rallied his sense of touch and managed to grip the bridle sprang as the horse roared by. Pulling himself atop the empty saddle, he hauled off from the redcoats, cursing them as a bunch of high-caliber idiots with low-caliber guns.

Two English troopers saw his mount and exit, and though they should have known better after so virile a display, set after him. The first caught him rather easily, as Donald’s horse had started to sweat blood from exhaustion. The trooper swung his sword, which Donald, deflected and countered with a downward slam that clove the trooper’s skull to the chin. The delivery of such a slice is enough to make any man feel supremely mannish, let alone a man who’s just wrapped himself in silk so fine it can stop a bullet, and indeed, Donald at once secreted an oil of mangrease from the secret Livingstone man-glands in his quadriceps. A second later it hit the nostrils of the second trooper, who turned and fled.

Donald now had to deal with the what-to-do-with-the-dead-guy’s-horse issue. He could easily have hopped on it (it stood about the same height as the bloodsweater) and let the exhausted steed wander until it had a heart attack, but Donald was a man’s man. He considered that he might encounter a bloodied-up brother-in-arms who would want a ride, and because in those days two real men never shared the same horse, Donald had to have a second horse ready. He led it along and sure enough, right around the first knoll, a familiar voice called out. Donald hopped down and found a neighbor, cut up and pouring blood. He jammed a handful of leaves in his friend's wound to stop the bleeding, sealed it with a ring of birch bark, then boosted the patient onto the tired horse. Donald probably interlaced his fingers and had his friend step first on his knee, then into his linked palms, and then raised the man to the saddle with a pop of his biceps (a maneuver akin to the volleyball bump). Palms to buttocks assistance didn't come into vogue for another 15 years. They rode on.

At the first stream, the duo dismounted, tied the horses to a tree using vines, and let the animals have a drink. Donald and the wounded neighbor (we’ll call him Randy) climbed up into a rock outcropping to hide.

Soon, a troop of cavalry rode into a clearing below the horses, far below Donald and Randy, searching for the last scraps of the Stuart and Livingstone forces. The two horses began neighing like Puritans, hoping to make a horsey friend. The British soldiers heard the neighs and concluded “Ambush!” They turned and fled, and soon Donald and Randy were on the road again.

Like standard-issue fugitives, they traveled at night and slept by day. There were some close calls with the soldiery, and only the daring courage and resourceful actions of Donald Livingstone prevented the pair’s capture and execution. The specifics of what he did, exactly, have been lost since Donny Livingstone XIV fell asleep in his castle bed with a cigarette, but we know whatever Donald did, it was courageously daring and actively resourceful. So resourceful, in fact, that he inspired the idea of the television and a TV show about a Scotsman named MacGyver, an idea that survived for centuries until humanity developed the technical capacity to realize the dream once and for all.

Chapter 2 – Donald Gets Wet

The planet Earth continued its orbit around the sun, and soon enough the leaves fell from the trees and the days shortened. Donald’s patience withered and shortened as well, though physically his body parts remained the same size or lengthened due to a process of ongoing improvement involving vines and choice stones from streambeds. Donald went everywhere seeking news of the fate of Prince Charlie. (Here the Livingstone family will note the persistence of genes. As any friend of a Livingstone will vouch, they’re all insufferable Prince fans). Donald found no news, however, only baby-killing English soldiers, and friends and family reduced to eating flannel to survive the winter. As the first snow fell, Donald sprouted a new coat of nose fur.

Hairy D set his mind to swim from Morvern to Mull to dig up news of the elusive Prince. Some say at least one of these places is a sea island, and others that the two settlements are on opposite shores of a great lake, but not so great that Donald couldn’t have just walked around the edge. None yet has claimed the “two islands in a lake” hypothesis. At any rate, a study of Donald’s exhumed remains states with near certainty that salt water was involved, so let us accept the sea island theory. On several occasions, people on passing ships saw his thick, oily coat and mistook the flapping Donald for a seal, and shot at him. A bullet even grazed his ear, whereupon he raised his entire body out of the water, kicking only with his toes, and presented himself, a man living in the era before swim trunks, to the shocked passengers. (And if they had shot him, his pelt would have put a seal to shame as well as yielded a fine umbrella sleeve.)

On the second night of his swim, the current of the sound of Mull carried him beneath a British warship, and he had to frogkick for all he was worth to avoid getting entangled in the mess of iron chains and junk another daring Scot had secured to the bottom of the vessel to slow it down. Donald managed to pop out on the port side of the ship, where two Englishmen stood wishing on Orion’s belt. If he hadn’t coordinated his swim with the moon’s holiday, he would have certainly been spotted, as at the very moment he rose, the pair tossed a coin into the water which landed a pig’s length in front of him. He would have been seized with a large hook and made to perform tricks invented during the plague years, then shot in the shoulder as soon as his central nervous system began to fold.

Donald landed in Mull, shimmied up a tree and darted from treetop to treetop until plopping down in the center of Drum-Fionn, in the neighborhood of Tobermory. He promptly delivered the news that from above, high in the trees, he had spotted two British warships towing two defeated British warships, and from there extrapolated that a French war vessel had stuck it to the Brits on Loch-nan-uamh, then sailed away into the black night (employing a hit and run tactic that only works on a big Loch). Clearly, this meant the Prince had escaped. This set off a great excitement, of either celebration or rage, and everyone drenched themselves to a falling-down stupor. Donald was first to hoist a glass and last to fall face-down, which he did on the fifth day of song into a mudpuddle of his own design.

When he woke up three days later, Donald decided to nurse his hangover by swimming back to Malvern. This time, on the third night of the crossing, Donald found himself between a fleet of herring and an angry whale, which tooted its mean horn and smacked its tail on the water and displayed an air of macrofrumpiness. The whale opened its mouth and made its final approach on the herring, and Donald concluded it would be final for him as well if he didn’t do something straight away, having sense enough to know that Jonah lied and whale stomach acid can cut a cow in half in a few seconds, let alone a hairy yet human Donald. As the whale’s baleen began to suck up Donald’s heel like a gas station car wash, he corkscrewed his body with all of his rugged rippled musculature and rolled out of the mammal’s esophagatic fury.

Raisined but not too tired, Donald crawled ashore in Malvern the next morning and found the situation worse than he could imagine, with bad music to boot.

Chapter Three – A One-Man Silk-Wrapped Army

British troops had taken over the village, all the way to the water line, their only directive being to create misery for the Livingstones. For this, the British wits employed tickle torture and a forced diet of jelly and shellfish. Donald’s only option was to remain hidden to all, even his own clansmen, and wage a personal guerilla war from out of sight. And as British troops began dropping by the pubful from poisoned beer, V.D., or simply doors bolted from the outside and flames, everyone knew Donald had made it home.

It was then arranged through a series of stick-scratchings in wet sand that Donald would slip through the woods on the next moonless night, as per superstition, and retrieve the banner of the Stuarts from the British Troopers’ latrine. Hairy Donald, ever the amphibian, elected the water route. He crawled up a sewer pipe, knowing that the pipe would be invisible in the total blackness that surrounds anything buried underground, especially on a moonless night, and he thanked the Romans all the way. Although his only report of the search and retrieve mission was that his timing could have been better, Donald returned with the blue silk banner wrapped around his body as it had been when it saved his soul at Culloden. He concealed the banner in a well-ventilated safe house for a week, then set off for Appin after horsejacking a British trooper (stabbing him in the liver just to watch him die). Of course, Donald repeated the flag wrapping on the ride, for aerodynamics mostly, and the persistent legend of his swift ride has yielded supersonic flight and a man on the moon.

Chapter Four – Donald Raises Himself to Chief Beef Supplier

In Appin, Donald delivered the reeking flag directly to the Stuarts’ point man, a grizzled old saltbag who had long since lost the ability to raise his knobby head. His muscles had simply given up, especially the upper deltoids that had once inspired comparisons to dock ropes and fodder for Prankster chronicles. With his lost capacity up top, the top Stuart gave off the reek of a broken man. He was by no means broken, however, and delivered a handshake as firm as the day he sold his first cartload of crossbows to his future wife.

Next, Donald gave his hot horse to James Stuart (Seumas a-Ghlinne). In this way, he hit James back for the bag of barley James Sr. had sent to Donald’s father the year before. Not only was it the right thing to do, it introduced Donald to the world of barter exchange.

Donald liked swapping goods so much that he became a supplier to the Scottish resistance, herding together scrappy cattle that had wandered through broken fences, putting them through a rigorous training regimen, and selling them to local officers to feed their men and move heavy objects. His training methods eventually were exported to America and became the NFL. Donald conducted all his business with a daredevil courage and honesty that boosted the morale of the cows, then the officers, then the men, leading to a saying that preempted Napoleon’s “An army marches on its stomach”: “Whoever eats my meat wins” (later spruced up as “Happy cows make bloodthirsty warriors”).

He continued this trade for many years, always in a kilt. This is no small matter, as Donald eventually made a name for himself as an innovator in ways to evade and circumvent the law against the kilt and tartan. Most of his methodology has recently been adapted into the Valentine 1 radar detector.

Donald died peacefully on his own front porch, legs splayed wide, seated on a stool wearing only the kilt, at the age of 88. He will forever be remembered as a man of humble nature. Indeed, until they washed his body, no one had ever seen the mark left by the bullet which the Stuart banner slowed to sub-mortal speed on the plain of Culloden. His name will forever be remembered as Donald Livingstone of Bun-a-Mhuilinn, Domhull Mollach, Hairy D.