The Curse of the Wise Woman

by Lord Dunsany

  But this is only a trifle, for one has only to get one’s rabbit first shot, and the ejector is then a convenience. A far more necessary precaution, and one without which one cannot hit any animal without the probability of wounding him, was the removal of the shiny line on the back-sight. No part of a back-sight should be shiny, but if the very centre of it shines, just where the bright foresight rests, it is impossible to tell in the sunlight, away from the gun-maker’s shop, whether you are taking a fine sight or a coarse sight; whether, that is to say, you are seeing the tip of the foresight through the glare, or the whole of it, or even perhaps none at all. Yet nearly all makers of rifles put then, and still put to-day, that little silver line just where it does most harm. That it is on account of some ancient ritual of the gun-maker’s I know, because none of them have ever told me the reason for it; it is more sacred to them than reason; and because one gun-maker told me once that it was in order to show if the sights were upright, an answer obviously made to conceal the ancient ritual. Or perhaps they only put it to brighten the rifle, so stimulating its price. I blotted the bright line out with some paint that I got from a carpenter, and then I could see the very tip of the foresight shining in the back-sight’s black valley and could take as fine a sight as I needed, seeing more and more of it up to seventy-five yards, at which range I took the whole of the little bead; and further than that I aimed a bit over the rabbit. Another detail, for such as care to know it, is that I used hollow-pointed bullets, which by expanding do the work of a much larger bullet and are more merciful, if one can use such a word of any of the means whereby man procures meat for himself, than a solid bullet; and the ricochet does not travel so far. There was a green bank sloping up to a long wood, and along the edge of the wood ran a line of hawthorn, already powdered with whitening buds on those branches that saw most of the sun. There when the fields were quiet and the grasses cool, and the rabbits stole out of the wood, I used to go with my rifle. The old hedge waved in and out, even as it had been planted; but with some of the bushes prospering in the sunlight and others shadowed by trees, with some leaning one way and some another, and with trees from the wood behind here and there thrusting right through, I could get fresh cover every hundred yards. It was along this slope as much as anywhere that I learned to shoot with a rifle, and grew to know something about stalking, although I used to ignore one of the most important things about it; the direction of the wind; and for years I used to notice, without connecting it with the wind, that there were days on which all wild things seemed haunted by such a feeling of danger that, if I only showed the top of my head, every rabbit for over a hundred and fifty yards would run at once for the wood, while on other days they would hesitate, even at fifty yards, when the whole of my head and shoulders had come into view, so long as I kept still. To use the word stalking of this tiny sport seems almost ridiculous, and yet I know no other word for the approach of a man with a rifle to any animal whose meat he desires; one must put one’s wits against the little animal’s wits, humbler but much sharper, and one must learn to shoot straight, not to make noise, and to do as well as one can without the cloak of invisibility. I learned in those days too how to cock a rifle without making a click, for the hammerless weapon was not yet invented: one did this by keeping one’s forefinger pressing the trigger while one lifted the hammer with one’s thumb. A click just before aiming would have been, if not a warning, at least a hint, to the long listening ears. Sometimes crawling flat, and sometimes on hands and knees, I used often to get within fifteen yards of a rabbit before firing a shot, or in a lazier mood I would take the shot at seventy-five yards. The knuckles of my left hand, the three furthest away from the thumb, got rough and hard, because, carrying the rifle in that hand, it was the back of it that one walked on when on all fours. I never knew till those days, what the deer-stalker knows in Scotland, that birds can speak to the other animals. So hard is it for man to speak with man when separated by no more than a frontier, that it surprised me the first time that I saw twenty rabbits sent hurrying to safety by no more than a single remark from a passing rook, who had seen me stalking them, though I was out of sight of the rabbits. And I learned that a rook does not merely say Caw, having, at least, one note of warning that probably means Man, and another that certainly means “Man with a gun.” I learned too that a small bird among trees would go on and on repeating a warning note until hundreds of hidden ears must have been thrilled with the menace; and, however quietly I went after that through the wood, I would see fewer rabbits, and those that I saw would be at once away. And so by pitting myself against the rabbits I came to know a little about them, and about their other enemies; and I know no other way in which I could have learned as much. Nobody standing behind a chess-player and watching him play can learn half as much of chess as the man that is playing against him, for rivalry is the essence of the game, as it is of the woods. And in learning something of rabbits and those that prey on them I learned nothing of men, but a good deal about nations; for it seems to me that the law of the woods is the law of life, a law from which every man escapes under the shelter of the laws of his country, that protect his life and property, more or less; but where is the nation that can leave any property unprotected, or trust its life unguarded? Seeing so much more of our own affairs than of the affairs of nations, we get the idea that slaughter and rapine are only the methods of such as the fox and the tiger, but undefended land in Europe or in any other continent survives no better than meat that cannot escape in the wood; and wherever a little weak country thrives it is not in spite of this law, but because of the interests of some powerful neighbour, as the mice in a lion’s den are safe from the panther. And lest any that follow a simple tale be irked by a touch of philosophy, I close this chapter.

  CHAPTER XXVII

  I had absolute freedom, all those holidays, to do whatever I wanted. An uncle, my father’s younger brother, had now become my guardian. He was a man of charming manner, and let me do what I liked; in return for which I naturally gave my consent to whatever he recommended in the affairs of the estate that my father had left me. He often consulted me, always giving me two courses to choose from. Of some rents that were to be invested he would say: “If you would like the money invested at 3½ per cent in what are called trust funds, I will do it for you; but if you would sooner have it invested at twelve per cent in a company that I can put it into, which is equally good, you only have to tell me.” And I told him.

  He never spoke of finance without smiling.

  Well, one evening I was enjoying this care-free life as usual; and yet it was not care-free, and perhaps a boy’s life seldom is: day-dreams of Laura took up two-thirds of my time, and anxiety for the fate of Lisronagh took up half of it. And that is not correct mathematically? Mathematics never came into it, nor any other branch of human reason, which was quite incompetent to control my day-dreams, or to allay my anxieties. But one evening I was out with my rifle, on the long slope under the trees, and had come to the end with half a dozen young rabbits, and was coming back on the other side, where one got more light late in the evening, for it was the western side of the wood. I had stalked some rabbits to within fifty yards, and was kneeling behind a bramble that had run out from the wood. The sun was setting, but brightly, so that I had ample light on my foresight, and there was a row of rabbits feeding a few yards out from the trees. I had chosen my rabbit, rejecting the easier shots that stood out large and clear, for they are usually the old does. I was perfectly covered by the bramble and was just aiming through the top of it, when suddenly all the rabbits ran. I remained hidden and silent, and waited to see what it was that had frightened the rabbits, and saw nothing. And then I looked behind me; and there was the man standing of whom I have told you before, the man in the long black coat.

  “Begob, Master Char-les,” said he, “sure I’ve spoiled your shot.”

  “Never mind,” I said.

  “Sure I wouldn’t do that,” he answered, “for the wealth that
there is in the world. But it’s the way it is that I wanted to see you.”

  “What about?” I asked; for there seemed a certain divergence between the interests of him and me.

  “Weren’t you asking a lot of men,” he replied, “how long that English company was going to stay at Lisronagh?”

  “I was,” I said, knowing that my words had had ample time to travel over the bog and up into the hills beyond Gurraghoo, which they would do at about the pace of a man running, and not making the mistake of supposing that such news could not travel, merely because I did not know how.

  “Well then,” said he, “we could have them out of it in a week.”

  Never had I known a greater temptation. I loved the bog; I have not the right to say that I loved the dwellers therein, for I shot one in every fifty thousand of them, but it grieved me to think of them driven away, by all that comes with machinery, from the nesting-grounds that were theirs for ages and ages. I should have shouted “No,” and left him. “But at least,” said Satan in the deeps of my mind, “know what the temptation is before you do anything hastily.”

  “How would you do it?” I asked.

  “Begob,” said he, “if one of them met with an accident one night, and another the next night, and then another, and if nobody quite knew what happened them; and then one more, four in all. Sure, four would be enough. Begob they’d all go.”

  For one moment I dared to think of Tir-nan-Og, if I lost Heaven.

  Then I said “No.”

  “It’s a pity,” said he; “and sure no one would know. And you’d not know yourself, Master Char-les. You might come to me and say, ‘How did those men die?’ and you might ask any man in the world, and there’d be no one to tell you, no man living in the world.”

  “No,” I said. “No.”

  “They’ll tear the very soul out of the bog,” he said. “And the guts of it.”

  I just found myself able to say “No” again.

  “It’s a pity,” he said once more.

  Then I walked a few steps on my way, slowly and watching for rabbits, and believed he was coming behind me. But when I looked round he was gone.

  I went on with my humble sport; more rabbits came into view, and, though the sun soon set, I was able to get four or five more, for there were great numbers of them at this hour out on the dewy grass, and I had a wide V to my foresight, which obscured as little as possible of the light and the object at which I was aiming. Ten rabbits are more than one can carry in one hand without dropping one every few yards, and it was, as I had already discovered, a very wearisome thing to attempt; so about the time that the sun was gone from the grass, and even from the top of the wood, and only shone now on the breasts of pigeons going late to their homes, I sat down and paunched the rabbits; I then slit the sinew at the back of one of the hocks of each rabbit and slipped the other leg through, and cut a stick from a tree and hung all the rabbits along it by the crossed hind-legs. All I had to do then was to hold the stick at the point of balance, and the burden was more than halved, even without the paunching.

  I have always considered that in those days I learned the secret of rifle-shooting; not some obvious thing such as people often tell you is the secret of doing some simple work, but something rarely practised and either little known or not credited; and that is to shoot with both eyes open. Many believe that it cannot be done, which if true would dispose of it; but, if it can be, a man with two eyes must see double as well as a man with one, and it is seeing that counts; I do not mean seeing the sights accurately aligned; any man with a steady hand and any eyesight at all can do that; but seeing the landscape, of which all animals that are ever hunted by anything seem to form a part, and seeing just where the animal emerges from the ground, and seeing which are his ribs and which the larger portion of him that should never be regarded as part of the target at all, because there a bullet only wounds, and a sportsman who is unable to kill should be well content with the next best thing, which is to miss. And miss I often did in those days, and often since; but I spent my boyhood with a rifle, and gradually came to know a little about it.

  As I got home the Evening Star appeared. I dined early, then sat and thought in the lonely house. Had I said enough to dissuade my strange friend from the project at which he had more than hinted? And the more I thought of it the more awful my responsibility seemed to grow, for the origin of this dreadful plan had been my anxiety to save the bog, often and eagerly expressed, whereas all I had done against it was to utter a few emphatic negatives. Thinking, which makes things so much clearer, builds up the outline of fears, then fills the outline in, till a great dark edifice stands blackening the future. What could I do to make certain that what I feared would not happen? I never had known where this man lived, and knew no way to find him. He appeared when he wished to, but I never knew when that would be. And I knew that it would be useless to warn the men at Lisronagh. Suddenly I thought of Mrs. Marlin. What police could not prevent, or conscience restrain, would not be done against the word of a Wise Woman. I must see Mrs. Marlin before anything had time to be done and get her protection for the men of this syndicate, though they were her enemies and mine.

  Next morning I breakfasted early, and then set off with Ryan along the road to Clonrue. I would not even stop to talk with the doctor, whose advice I had come to rely on, but drove on to the spot at which the cracked white road came nearest to the cottage of Mrs. Marlin, and thence I hurried over the springy soil, jumping the little ditches, and thinking little of the beauty of spring or the ugliness of mean buildings; till I came to that cottage standing amongst the willows, that had now so sad an air that I suddenly pictured the tent of the leader of a lost cause, with his enemies camped around him. And there was Mrs. Marlin flaming in her garden, as far as spirit can flame or eyes burn. Gusts of anger I had seen in others, flashing out into curses, but here was an anger that seemed quietly burning on, as though it never abated; and this was the woman to whom I had come for protection for the very men that she hated. I was terribly uneasy, but could only go on.

  “Good morning to you, Master Char-les,” she said.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Marlin,” said I.

  And then I blurted out the cause of my coming, naming the man that I had met in the twilight. “He is going to kill some of those men,” I said. “And he must not do it. You must stop him.”

  And she burst out laughing.

  “Is that all?” she cried. “They’ve the curse of the north wind against them, and storm and moss and heather, and the curse of the ancient powers of bog and hill. Is it any more that they want?”

  “They do not,” said I, “and you must not let that man harm them.”

  “Harm them, is it?” she said. “They need no harm from man.”

  And I stuck to my point. “Then you will forbid him to hurt them?” I asked her.

  “Sure, I will,” she said.

  I thanked her.

  “And let them watch for what’s coming,” she added.

  “When?” asked I.

  And she answered me: “In the time of those that wait.”

  There was a look in Mrs. Marlin’s eyes that seemed so far from here that I never asked her who they were that waited, being sure that the powers she spoke of would be something beyond my ken. Nor could I hope to know when their time would be. So I left Mrs. Marlin, trusting well enough that no danger from men would dare to cross her path to trouble the workmen that had settled down round about her, and wondering what danger there could be from others, and who those others were.

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  I was easy now in my mind about the syndicate’s workmen; for I knew that my guardian demon, as I might term my friend from whom I parted at the edge of the wood in the twilight, would not dare to kill anyone in the face of the curses of a Wise Woman. But the old trouble returned with even greater weight, the doom that was hanging over the bog and the quiet lands lying under the long black cliffs of it where the lovely willows grew. It was
no real solace to me that the workmen were now safe. What were they to me? One could not abet, permit or instigate murder: whatever ages had civilised us in that old house of High Gaut had presumably taught me that much, even without the help of Eton; and mere reason told one the same. But my heart, which did not reason, was with the rushes and heather, and the stooping willows, grim and weird in the winter, like old prophets foretelling storm, and shining now as though a flame were exulting, yellowy-green from their branches. No teaching could make me care for these strangers as I loved this wild land, and all the grief of which a boy is capable was darkening now round my heart, when I thought of the bog about to be partly spoiled and partly to be cut altogether away. I fell to wondering what pools would be spared, and what particular patches of heather or moss that I knew; and then I brooded that, whether spared or not, noise and a crowd and litter would spoil them all. My thoughts turned to Laura: she, they said, would be able to help me. And then old tiresome Reason said: “How could she save the bog?” Thus conflicting thoughts making negations of each other filled my head, their sum amounting, I suppose, to nothing.

  It was the day after I came back from seeing Mrs. Marlin that I drove over again to Cloghnacurrer, in order to enquire when the cub-hunting would start, as I had an idea of buying another horse if I was likely to get hunting enough before the end of the summer holidays. This was early May, and cub-hunting started in August, so that my enquiry may seem to have been curiously early, and so it was, but I was shy about going there without any reason at all; and, the shyer I was the more stupid my subterfuges became. I did not speak of Marlin, indoors at the tea-table. Not till I was walking once more with Laura, in the soft light that seemed to float for ever at Cloghnacurrer amongst a million leaves, did I tell her how Marlin went to Tir-nan-Og. I could not have said that indoors. Someone would have said: “I heard he had fallen into the bog and was drowned.” And I could no more have denied that than a pane of glass can resist a stone; and all Tir-nan-Og would have been shattered by the words. It is right that it should be shattered. Yes, yes; it is right. There is no warrant for it in our religion; it is never mentioned in the Lives of the Saints; not only that, but it is deliberately avoided. It cannot be doubted that there is mortal danger in it. Monsieur Alphonse, here, mocks the idea of any danger from Tir-nan-Og, and he is not the only one to do so when I have mentioned that land; but it is easy for men living in temperate climes to mock perils of ice in the Arctic, or lions in African nights; and any whose fancy has once roved westward from Ireland knows, as I knew, the mortal peril threatening the soul. Under those trees that day at Cloghnacurrer I spoke, perhaps for the last time, perilously of Tir-nan-Og. I spoke of it as though that land, and not Heaven, were the lawful land of our hopes, and as though Marlin were already among those orchards in which his heresy trusted, waiting to welcome Laura and me with a smile of youth on his lips, and a light of youth in his eyes, which would flash still young and smiling as long as the oldest stars. And Laura, dear soul, never checked me, as she should have done, and we talked on together of those blossoms gleaming in spring, and the golden and ruddy apples heavy with autumn, flashing on the same bough; and, shining in and out among blossom and apples, the gliding rainbow that had seen Marlin home.