One winter the Cailliach was seen of several women. Her tall figure,
clad in a yellow robe, as she drove her herd of deer to the waterside,
was unmistakable. She was seen again and again. The following summer, as
Torcall Cameron was crossing the Gual, the ridge betwixt Iolair and
Sliabh-Geal, he heard a strange voice singing through the gloaming.
Looking about him, he discerned a woman sitting among the bracken, and
milking a hind, the while she sang a song that brought a mist about his
eyes, and made his heart throb. By her exceeding stature, and the yellow
plaid about her, as well as by the unknown words that were wedded to
that wild song, he knew her to be the Cailliach. He fled, lest she
should turn and ban him. A little later he saw the _beansìth_ again. It
was a long way off, but he recognised her: and even while he watched,
she turned herself into the guise of a grey deer, and went leaping
toward the high remote sheiling where Black Duncan lived. That autumn
Duncan was more than once heard laughing and talking in shadowy places,
and in the forest. On the first day of the equinox his body was found in
the tarn. The face had an awful look upon it. The same afternoon Mr.
Adam Morrison, going to the spot to verify what he had heard, found the
miserable little waif he adopted afterward. No sooner had he taken it in
his arms than a large grey deer sprang from a covert of bracken and
leaped into the forest gloom. Despite its size and haste, its passage
through the undergrowth was absolutely soundless.
The thing was unmistakable. The Cailliach had put her spell upon Black
Duncan. When her hour had come upon her, she had strangled her mortal
lover and thrown his body into the tarn. Then she had borne her doubly
cursed babe.
All who heard of these things averred that the child would be soulless.
Mr. Morrison said no: that he would give it Christian baptism, and rear
it in godly ways: and that God would have pity upon the innocent. The
old people of the strath shook their heads. The minister was wise in the
Scriptures and in the book-lore, but was it not well known that he knew
little of and cared less for their treasured oral traditions and legends
and obscure ancestral runes? Was it likely he could judge, when he
barely knew who or what the Cailliach was? Had he not ever preached from
his pulpit that there were no "other people" at all?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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