Twelve Great Black Cats by Sorche Nic Leodhas Page B

sighed to see him pass by.
    As he was going along he caught sight of a bonnie wee lass standing in the doorway of her father’s house, and she was the one he had had his mind on, for a year and more. He was ready now to pick out a lass for himself, so he smiled and crooked his finger at her, and she came running to him. She followed him to the minister’s house, and they were wed that day. Then Murdagh took his bonnie wee lass under his arm and they walked together up the long road home to Murdagh’s shieling and to Balach the dog and the sheep on the brae.
    Then there were three of them watching the sheep on the brae. There were Murdagh and Balach the dog, and when she had the shieling in order and her woman’s work done, there was the bonnie wee lass forbye.
    And after a year or so, there were four, because there was a wee bairn in a cradle beside his mother and father where they sat on the stone. Then, as the years went by, there were five, and six, and more, for a new babe lay in the cradle each year. How many bairns there were in the end, I cannot tell you, but there were a sluagh of them, all as healthy as ever you’d want to see. And on mild and fair days Murdagh and his bonnie wee lass would sit on the stone knitting, while Balach the dog kept one eye on the babe in the cradle and the other on the browsing ewes and the bairns racing over the brae with the young lambs.
    It takes a lot of knitting to make all the vests and trews and stockings and things needed to keep a raft of bairns warm and safe from the cold.
    Sometimes, in the early spring, with lambing time over and the young lambs growing strong and frisking about their dams, the March wind would come slipping down from the bens, so secretly, so softly, that the bloom on the heather scarcely bent its head, the leaves scarcely stirred on the trees. He would lean to look at the flying fingers of Murdagh and his bonnie wee lass as they sat knitting, then he would move away to breathe gently on the sleeping face of the babe in the cradle, and to ruffle the curls of the bairns at play. Then stealthily, silently, the March wind would creep away from the brae, up the glen and over the high moor and back to the bens. Nobody ever heard him come, nobody ever heard him go, nobody ever saw him—unless it was Balach the dog, and if he did he paid him no heed at all.
    The March wind never broke his word. The high moor, the glen, the brae with its bairns and its sheep, the croft with its wee shieling were left forever untroubled and at peace.

The Sea Captain’s Wife
    THERE is an ancient castle that stands on a dark crag above the sea on the northwest coast of Scotland. Ages of neglect, and winter’s icy gales and summer’s storms, have had their way with it, but still it rears its ruined walls proudly as ever it did when it was the grand stronghold it was built to be. The name of it has long been forgotten, and fishermen from the isles who use it for a landmark, when on their seal-hunting courses, call it an dun na cuantaiche , the Sea Rover’s Castle. And it is the fishermen who through generations have kept the old tale of the castle alive, passing it down from father to son and from lip to ear.
    At the foot of the crag there is a wide sweep of sand and shingle half enclosing a wee bit of a harbor. The shore is bright and shining— an traigh bhean , they call it—and above the line of high tide, where the road comes down from the castle to the sea, a scattering of fishermen’s shielings once nestled against the cliff. The shielings are long gone, and the fisherfolk who once lived in them are dead and forgotten. Nothing is left now but the white sands below and the old castle on its dark crag above.
    Six hundred years have passed since the castle was built, and for a full half of them it has been abandoned and tenantless. No man’s foot has trod its floors, no man’s voice has echoed from its walls. The fox hunts