Where Dragons Soar: And Other Animal Folk Tales of the British Isles

by Castle, Pete;

  THE SEAL WIFE

  One evening a fisherman was walking home along the beach. It was a beautiful ending to the day, with the sun casting its long rays over the sea and making dark shadows on the white sand. Here and there large outcrops of rock stood up from the flat sand and in some places there were rock pools and crops of seaweed. It was a quiet, lonely place and the fisherman did not expect to meet anyone else on the beach. He lived alone in the little house in which his father and grandfather had also lived and where he had been born.

  He was surprised then, when he became aware of voices. It sounded like a laugh and a giggle and a scream of merriment and it was coming from the next cove, just behind another outcrop of rocks. Not knowing what to expect, he crouched behind the rocks and carefully peeped out into the cove. There he saw two beautiful young women playing in the evening light. They were skipping and leaping and chasing each other and all the while laughing. They were both stark naked. He was bewitched by their beauty and for a moment could do nothing but look.

  Then the fisherman guessed who or what the young women were, and this was borne out when he saw two seal skins lying carefully folded on the sand quite near to his hiding place. They were silkies – seal women. In the sea they looked and behaved like ordinary seals, but they were able to come out of the sea and take off their seal skins to reveal a human form. He knew from all the old stories he’d heard ever since he was a boy that if he could take her seal skin the silkie would be trapped in her human form and he could have her for his wife.

  The fisherman crept out from his hiding place and sneaked towards the skins, but the women saw him, screamed and raced to retrieve them. One of them did so, but the other, who had been slightly further away, was unable to get to the skin before the fisherman had it in his hand. The first woman scrambled into her skin and flopped into the water where she watched from a safe distance with tears falling from her huge seal eyes. The other woman fell on her knees and cried. She grasped the fisherman round the ankles and begged for her skin to be returned. But the fisherman wanted a wife so he ignored her pleas, took her arm, and dragged her off to his house. There, he gave her some clothes to wear and went to hide the seal skin away in a shed.

  The couple lived together for many years and she bore him two sons. They were reasonably happy in their different ways – at least as happy as many couples who are far more similar to each other. The only thing that showed that the seal wife might not be entirely reconciled to her life was the fact that she would sometimes steal away to walk by the sea. Sometimes she sat on the rocks and sang in a strange tongue, but only when there was no chance of anyone hearing her, and her song was sometimes answered by a particularly large bull seal who was often seen swimming off the beach where the fisherman had found his seal wife.

  One day, when her eldest son was about ten years old, the boys were playing in the old sheds and outhouses because it was raining and blowing a gale. In their play they moved some old chests and boxes and one of them fell down and split open to reveal a seal skin. The boys wondered what it was doing hidden away in a box, but they also thought it was beautiful and took it to show their mother. They knew she would like it, but she was overcome with emotion and alternated between joy and sorrow. She skipped around the room laughing with joy but all the while tears ran down her cheeks. Then she hugged her children and wished them goodbye and raced off to the shore with the folded seal skin under her arm.

  When the fisherman came home he found the house empty and no supper waiting for him. He found his sons and asked where his wife was. When the boys told him what had happened he raced down to the beach just in time to see a female seal sliding into the water where a large bull seal was waiting to greet her. The two creatures swam and leapt and embraced in a welter of joy, and when they had exhausted themselves they swam slowly into the shallows. The seal wife then addressed her earthbound husband and said, ‘Farewell, and may all good attend you. I loved you well enough when I was your wife but I always loved my first husband so much better. Now I have returned to him. Look after our children and wish them well from me. I promise that neither you nor they will ever come to harm on the sea.’

  Then the two seals turned and dived beneath the waves and were never seen again.

  The fisherman lived to a ripe old age and his sons took over his boat and made a good living at fishing. When the time came, their sons took their turn and throughout all those years all the men in that family seemed to have an uncanny gift for knowing where the fish would be. They never returned to shore with empty holds and none of them ever perished in the stormy seas. They had a reputation for being ‘lucky’.

  Tales of silkies are well known all around the coasts of Scotland and Ireland.

  11

  EXOTIC ANIMALS

  THE WOMAN WHO MARRIED A BEAR

  As I mentioned in the introduction, the canon of stories is always in need of topping up and renewal. This is not truly a ‘British’ folk tale, although I’d love it to become one. It’s a story I’ve been telling for at least two decades and it is always a ‘hit’. When I first came across it, I wasn’t sure where it came from; I guessed it wasn’t British but thought it might be European, possibly Scandinavian. I was correct about the latitude, but way out on the longitude, for it is actually Native American. It sits very well in a British context though, and I tell it as if it is happening in the North of England or southern Scotland – apart from the bears!

  Once upon a time, on a bright summer’s morning, a young noblewoman went out picking blackberries. She’d found and collected a lot of them and had a big basketful ready to take home, when she found another blackberry bush which had the biggest, juiciest berries she’d yet found, so she just had to top her basket up with those. When she was almost finished she saw a bramble at the very top of the bush with even larger, juicier berries on and she had to have some of those as well. They were possibly the best-looking blackberries she’d ever seen, but they were almost out of reach. She stood on tiptoe and she reached up … and she stretched … and she could just about touch the berries, but couldn’t quite get hold of them … so she stretched just a little more … and her feet slipped from under her and she fell down on to her back and spilled blackberries everywhere.

  She sat up and looked around and swore to herself. Then she saw why she’d slipped. She had put her foot in some bear dung and now it was on her shoe and up her leg and on the hem of her dress. To make matters worse, the bears responsible had obviously been gorging on blackberries too for the bear dung was full of sticky, purple juice. She cursed the bears and their forebears for as far back in history as she could imagine, and then scrambled to her feet and began to retrieve her spilled blackberries.

  Unfortunately for the young woman the two bears responsible for her mishap happened to be on the other side of the bush, sleeping off their blackberry feast. The crash of her falling down woke them up and they heard her cursing them and they were angry. They got up, went round the bush, grabbed the young woman by the arms and took her back to the village where the bears lived. There they took her before the chief bear and reported what she’d said. The bears were angry and wanted her punished.

  The chief bear ordered that she should be taken and shut up in a cave until he made up his mind what to do with her. She was put in the cave and a big rock was rolled across the entrance. She found herself in utter darkness. It did not bode well! ‘Oh, this is a real mess you’ve got yourself into,’ she said to herself. ‘I don’t know how you are going to get out of this.’

  Then from the darkness a voice answered her, ‘If you want to escape with your life you’d better do everything I tell you.’ In the gloom she saw that it was a tiny mouse. The mouse told her to take off the necklace she was wearing and smash it up with a stone until it was just little bits, like gravel.

  ‘I couldn’t do that,’ she said in a shocked voice, ‘it’s a family heirloom; it’s gold, it’s been in my family for generations.’

  ‘If
you want to escape with your life you’d better do exactly what I tell you,’ repeated the mouse.

  With tears trickling down her cheeks the young woman took off the necklace, laid it on a flat rock and then, with a large stone, pounded it to pieces. Then the mouse told her the rest of the plan.

  She waited for an hour or two and then began to put it into operation. First she called out to the bears, ‘Hello, bears! Is anybody there? Can you hear me?’ When she was eventually answered she explained that she needed to answer a ‘call of nature’. (She said it very politely and primly as befitted a noblewoman!) She said that she didn’t know how long she was going to be shut up there in the cave so she didn’t want to do anything smelly and unpleasant there. She asked whether the bears would take her down into the forest so that she could go there, behind a tree. She promised that she wouldn’t try to run away.

  She heard the bears grunt and go away, but soon they came back and the stone was rolled away from the entrance. Three bears took her down into the forest and waited while she went behind a tree. There she scraped a small hole in the ground and crouched down and did what she needed to do. Then she reached into her apron pocket and took out some of the broken pieces of gold necklace and sprinkled them over what she’d done. Then she covered it all over with pine needles and leaves and went back to the bears looking satisfied. Two of them took her back to the cave while the third had a good sniff around. He scraped open the hole she’d so carefully covered and …

  He didn’t believe it! What’s this? This woman shits gold!

  As fast as he could he ran back to the chief bear and told him what he’d found. The chief bear was puzzled, and interested, and fascinated. He didn’t know what it meant, so he ordered that the woman was not to be harmed, but that she was to be fed and kept in the cave until further notice.

  The next day the woman repeated the trick and, sure enough, the bears really did seem to have discovered a woman who shits gold! Now you don’t harm someone like that, so they looked after her. They treated her well. They gave her increasing amounts of freedom. Every now and again she repeated the ritual, just to make sure they didn’t change their minds.

  As the summer passed she was allowed to wander around the village of the bears as she wished. As long as she did not go too far away she was able to go where she pleased. She found that she was accepted by the bears and she began to think of some of them as friends. She gossiped with the female bears and played with their cubs. Most of the male bears had little to do with her, but there was one good-looking young bear with whom she got on very well. When the days grew shorter and there began to be frosts at night he brought her a gift, a pure white bearskin to wrap herself in. By midwinter they had moved in together and he had become her husband.

  The couple lived happily in the village of the bears all through the long winter and when spring came she gave birth to two beautiful baby bear cubs. She loved her family and they were all happy and carefree until, one morning, two bears who had been out foraging came back and said they’d heard the sounds of hounds and hunters. She knew instantly who it was. It was her human family, her father and her brothers, seeking her. And she knew what would happen if they found her with the bears – they would all be slaughtered and the village burned to the ground.

  The young woman and her little family took their leave of the bears and set out to escape from the hunters. Every day they travelled as far and as fast as they could, and when night fell they slept in a cave or a hollow tree or under some bushes. But although they travelled as fast as they could, every morning when they awoke, the belling of the hounds was nearer, and the shouting of the hunters was louder.

  At last, one morning, they awoke to find the hounds snuffling around the edges of the clearing in which they had slept. She knew the chase was over. Escape was impossible. But she also knew that she would be alright. They would not harm her, and she thought that she could probably plead for the lives of her two baby bears, but she could think of no way of saving her husband bear. The anger of her human family would be too great.

  In the end they agreed on a compromise. A truce was announced in which husband bear would teach his wife and the two baby bears and all the members of her family how to do the Bear Dance. When they had all learned it to his satisfaction then he would allow them to kill him.

  This was done and the young noblewoman took her two baby bears and returned to her human family’s home. She went through the usual processes of grieving that everyone goes through after a death, or at the end of a love affair, but time passed and healed, and after a while she fell in love with a young man and later gave birth to two baby boys who were just as perfect as the two baby bear cubs had been. In turn the baby bears grew up and decided they wanted to return to their own kind in the forest, which they did.

  The boys grew up happily and, when they were old enough, they were taught the Bear Dance. Since then it has been passed down through that family to every succeeding generation and at last it was my turn to learn it. Although you are not a member of the family I could teach you how to do it – it’s a great dance and great fun to do, but we can’t do it on the pages of a book so you’ll have to wait until we meet at a live gig! Meanwhile the picture will give you some idea of it.

  ALLIGATORS

  Most of the stories in this collection are ‘traditional’, which usually means ‘old’. But all traditional stories must have been new at some time. I am proud to say that I was responsible for, if not the creation of this story, at least its transmission. Many years ago I came across a tiny (four lines?) joke in a magazine. I liked it and grew it into a story. It proved popular, and with input from audiences – and witty hecklers, etc. – it grew even more.

  I’ve told it many times and included it in the Facts & Fiction storytelling magazine. It was also included in a collection put together about twenty years ago by Birmingham Libraries. Other people have obviously picked it up and told it because, quite recently, it came back to me in an Australian version! It was not a very good telling and was rather racist, but the ‘hero’ – the boy who swims – was ‘Colin, the Aborigine’, and instead of a lake it was an urban swimming pool!

  There was once a king who had a daughter who was just coming to marriageable age. In those days and in that place girls had to be married, even princesses – or especially princesses. They did not usually have much of a say as to who their marriage partner would be, their parents just arranged it and then announced it, and that was the end of it.

  Now this king loved his daughter very much and wanted the best for her. He wanted to find her a husband who would make her happy, someone about her own age who would be kind to her and treat her well. It didn’t matter whether the young man was rich or not because, eventually, he and the princess would inherit all the king’s wealth, along with the kingdom. It was more important that he was healthy and strong and, if possible, good-looking. In other words, that he was someone the princess could live happily with.

  How was he to find this young man? The king and his advisors put their heads together and came up with a plan. They would hold a competition – an athletic competition. If he was good at sport he was probably healthy and that often goes with good looks … but what kind of sport?

  In their kingdom was a popular beauty spot called the Long Lake, which was just that, a long lake, so what better than a swimming competition? Now anyone (almost) could swim across the lake, but swimming all the way down the whole length of it would make a suitable task. So they decided that there would be a swimming competition at the Long Lake and the winner would get the princess’s hand in marriage.

  But then someone raised the point that there might be a really good swimmer who didn’t want to marry the princess. He wouldn’t enter the competition and they really did need all the best swimmers in the race. They didn’t want to devalue it. So they decided there should be a choice of prizes: they were certain that the winner would want to marry the princess, but just so that no one was pu
t off, if they didn’t want to marry the princess then they could have half the kingdom; and if, by any chance they didn’t want half the kingdom, then they could have as much gold as they could carry away in two carrier bags. That would solve the problem, they were sure.

  So the king sent out his messengers and heralds all around the kingdom and into all the neighbouring kingdoms to announce that at midday on 1 August there would be a swimming competition at the Long Lake, the prize for the winner being the princess’s hand in marriage (and in the unlikely case that he didn’t want that, half the kingdom or as much gold as he could carry away in two carrier bags).

  When 1 August came the shores of the Long Lake were thronged with people. There had never been such crowds before. There were all the young men who were going to swim, and all their friends and families coming to cheer them on; there were local people just coming to watch and see what happened; and there were people out to make a bit of money – jugglers and fire-eaters, poets and storytellers, women reading fortunes, bookmakers taking bets, and men selling hot dogs and hamburgers. It was a whole big festival which you could hear and smell a mile off.

  At noon a hush fell over the crowd and the royal party made their way on to the dais. Trumpets blared and the prime minister gave a little speech and announced what was going to happen. The signal for the race to start, he said, was when the king said, ‘On your marks, get set, GO!’ and dropped his handkerchief. All the while he was speaking young men were getting ready – taking off their shoes, unbuttoning their jackets, stretching their limbs and taking deep breaths.

  Just then the king himself interrupted. ‘To make this all a bit more interesting,’ he said, ‘I have recently stocked the lake with alligators!’