I
Last summer, whenever I had finished my day’s work, I used to go
wandering in certain roomy woods, and there I would often meet an old
countryman, and talk to him about his work and about the woods, and
once or twice a friend came with me to whom he would open his heart
more readily than to me, He had spent all his life lopping away the
witch elm and the hazel and the privet and the hornbeam from the paths,
and had thought much about the natural and supernatural creatures of
the wood. He has heard the hedgehog--“grainne oge,” he calls him--
“grunting like a Christian,” and is certain that he steals apples by
rolling about under an apple tree until there is an apple sticking to
every quill. He is certain too that the cats, of whom there are many in
the woods, have a language of their own--some kind of old Irish. He
says, “Cats were serpents, and they were made into cats at the time of
some great change in the world. That is why they are hard to kill, and
why it is dangerous to meddle with them. If you annoy a cat it might
claw or bite you in a way that would put poison in you, and that would
be the serpent’s tooth.” Sometimes he thinks they change into wild
cats, and then a nail grows on the end of their tails; but these wild
cats are not the same as the marten cats, who have been always in the
woods. The foxes were once tame, as the cats are now, but they ran away
and became wild. He talks of all wild creatures except squirrels--whom
he hates--with what seems an affectionate interest, though at times his
eyes will twinkle with pleasure as he remembers how he made hedgehogs
unroll themselves when he was a boy, by putting a wisp of burning straw
under them.
I am not certain that he distinguishes between the natural and
supernatural very clearly. He told me the other day that foxes and cats
like, above all, to be in the “forths” and lisses after nightfall; and
he will certainly pass from some story about a fox to a story about a
spirit with less change of voice than when he is going to speak about a
marten cat--a rare beast now-a-days. Many years ago he used to work in
the garden, and once they put him to sleep in a garden-house where
there was a loft full of apples, and all night he could hear people
rattling plates and knives and forks over his head in the loft. Once,
at any rate, be has seen an unearthly sight in the woods. He says, “One
time I was out cutting timber over in Inchy, and about eight o’clock
one morning when I got there I saw a girl picking nuts, with her hair
hanging down over her shoulders, brown hair, and she had a good, clean
face, and she was tall and nothing on her head, and her dress no way
gaudy but simple, and when she felt me coming she gathered herself up
and was gone as if the earth had swallowed her up. And I followed her
and looked for her, but I never could see her again from that day to
this, never again.” He used the word clean as we would use words like
fresh or comely.
Others too have seen spirits in the Enchanted Woods. A labourer told
us of what a friend of his had seen in a part of the woods that is
called Shanwalla, from some old village that was before the weed. He
said, “One evening I parted from Lawrence Mangan in the yard, and he
went away through the path in Shanwalla, an’ bid me goodnight. And two
hours after, there he was back again in the yard, an’ bid me light a
candle that was in the stable. An’ he told me that when he got into
Shanwalla, a little fellow about as high as his knee, but having a head
as big as a man’s body, came beside him and led him out of the path an’
round about, and at last it brought him to the lime-kiln, and then it
vanished and left him.”
A woman told me of a sight that she and others had seen by a certain
deep pool in the river. She said, “I came over the stile from the
chapel, and others along with me; and a great blast of wind came and
two trees were bent and broken and fell into the river, and the splash
of water out of it went up to the skies. And those that were with me
saw many figures, but myself I only saw one, sitting there by the bank
where the trees fell. Dark clothes he had on, and he was headless.”
A man told me that one day, when he was a boy, he and another boy went
to catch a horse in a certain field, full of boulders and bushes of
hazel and creeping juniper and rock-roses, that is where the lake side
is for a little clear of the woods. He said to the boy that was with
him, “I bet a button that if I fling a pebble on to that bush it will
stay on it,” meaning that the bush was so matted the pebble would not
be able to go through it. So he took up “a pebble of cow-dung, and as
soon as it hit the bush there came out of it the most beautiful music
that ever was heard.” They ran away, and when they had gone about two
hundred yards they looked back and saw a woman dressed in white,
walking round and round the bush. “First it had the form of a woman,
and then of a man, and it was going round the bush.”