The Kelpie's Pearls

by Mollie Hunter

  'Say no more,' said Morag gently. 'If you wish to think I am a witch, that is your affair. But I am glad you came, you are glad to be here, and that is all that matters.'

  'Very well then,' the kelpie said. 'Let us talk of other matters.'

  Morag smiled at him and laid her bucket down. 'Yes, let us talk of other things,' she agreed. She sat down on the bank and began to talk and so, in the end, the evening passed as pleasantly for the two of them as any other had done.

  It was in this way that Morag and the kelpie mended their quarrel and he never said to her again that she was a witch (at least, not until a great deal later). Morag herself put the whole business out of her mind and it never occurred to her that Alasdair the Trapper had put the story of her spell on the kelpie round the whole of Abriachan.

  The talk was of nothing else among the crofters on the next weekly bus to Inverness. The older folk recalled stories of Morag's grandmother. 'Blood will tell,' they said, shaking their heads. 'Fancy her being a witch and nobody ever suspected.' But the driver of the bus was a young man, and moreover, he was a modern man that did not believe in kelpies and he laughed to himself to hear them talking like this.

  Now Inverness is a small town and you would not think that anything that was talked of there would be of interest anywhere else. But the truth of the matter is that thousands of people spend their holidays in the Highlands of Scotland every year and a great many of them come to Inverness. You can meet people from all parts of the world there any day in the summer time, and of course they all come there thinking the Highlands is a strange and wonderful place and naturally they are looking for the strange and wonderful things that are supposed to happen there.

  So it was, as the weeks went by, that in the shops and hotels and in the office of the Tourist Board people from all over the world began to hear the story of Morag and Alasdair and the kelpie. Not that one of them believed it, mind you. They were all too clever and modern to believe such nonsense! But it stuck in their minds all the same, 'It is only in the Highlands of Scotland you would hear such a thing,' they wrote proudly to their friends at home, and when all the other things happened later that the newspapers made such a fuss about, they all remembered the story and some of them claimed to have known from the beginning that Morag was a witch.

  The one thing that nobody knew about, and that because Alasdair never mentioned it, was the kelpie’s pearls. When people asked him how he had come to be in the water in the first place he said he had tripped and fallen in, and like it or not they had to believe him for he would give them no further information. And so Alasdair kept the secret of the pearls, and many a time he thought about them and wondered how he could outwit the kelpie and get them for himself.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Monster

  THE children had got their summer holidays from the school by this time and so, as Torquil was not going into town every day, he had no chance to hear all the gossip about Morag. He heard nothing of it from the people on the hill either, for all his time was taken up with the work the Woman gave him to do on her croft, with visits to Morag herself and with a new ploy that had begun with his study of a wild-cat's lair—the same one he had discovered the previous summer.

  Most people would have called it a daft ploy because the wild-cat of the Scottish Highlands is one of the fiercest animals in the world and Torquil's idea was to try to tame one of the kittens of the litter that had just been born in the lair. Daft or not, however, he went about it in a sensible way.

  First of all he went over the hill to the village of Kiltarlity where the man people called the Naturalist had his house. He was a famous man, the Naturalist. He wrote books about animals and made films of them and at first he was inclined to laugh at Torquil's plan, for even he had never succeeded in taming a wild-cat kitten. However, when he had had a taste of Torquil's skill in handling some of his own collection of animals he agreed to help him bag a kitten and pen it in one of the big wire cages at the back of his house.

  Three weeks after its capture, Torquil was able to touch the kitten without the fierce little creature snarling and striking out at him and the Naturalist had to admit that he had a fair chance of success with his scheme.

  'And if you can do it,' he said, 'there's nothing I wouldn't put past you where animals are concerned.'

  He stroked his thick brown beard and looked down from his great height at Torquil crouching beside the wild-cat kitten. 'This collection of mine is getting a bit big for one man to handle,' he remarked. 'I've been thinking I'll need to be training up a lad to help me with it.'

  'I’ll help you,' Torquil said eagerly. 'I'll come every day after school.'

  The Naturalist shook his head. 'I'm sorry, boy,' said he. 'I would need someone who would live here with me and take this sort of work up as a career. Now, if the Woman would let you do that...?'

  This time it was Torquil's turn to shake his head for he knew well that the Woman meant him to be a crofter like the rest of the people on the hill.

  'Oh well, I'll maybe persuade her different,' the Naturalist said when Torquil told him this. 'It's a pity talent like yours should be wasted. We'll give it to the end of the holidays—then I'll have a word with her.'

  Torquil ran back to the Woman's house with wings on his heels that day, thinking of what the Naturalist had said, but he was brought back to earth with a thud when he got there. The Woman had been away shopping in the town and there she had heard all the talk about Morag. She could talk of nothing else but what a terrible business it was and such a shame on the people of the hill to have such goings-on in their midst.

  'And you that's always wandering the hill by yourself,' she finished, 'you be wise and do not go near the cailleach's house. She is a witch, mind, and dear knows the harm she could do you.'

  'She is not a witch!' Torquil protested.

  'Her grannie was one,' the Woman said. 'Everybody on the hill knows that.'

  'I don't care what her grannie was!' Torquil shouted, quite forgetting his manners in his anger. 'Mistress Morag is a good woman!'

  'Is that a way to talk to your elders?' the Woman snapped. 'And what do you know about it anyway, pray?'

  Torquil’s heart jumped into his mouth for he saw that by defending Morag he had nearly betrayed his own secret to the Woman.

  'I am sorry,' he said meekly, and was greatly relieved when all she said was, 'Do not crow so loud then, my young cockerel, or I will clip your wings for you.'

  Still, it grieved him that Morag should be talked of in this way and many times after that he was on the point of telling her about it and begging her to be careful not to give people like Alasdair any more chance to spread tales about her. Day after day he climbed up the hill meaning to speak words of warning to her, but every time he came in sight of the bright burn purling down the hill and smelt the piercing sweet scent of the white rose-bushes round her house he felt himself being drawn through the secret door of the dreamworld at the top of the hill.

  Everything changed places then. It was the dreamworld that was real and the town below became like a dream—a dark dream that would cast a shadow over Morag's happiness if he let the chatter of evil words about her break through the secret door.

  'What shall I do?' he asked the Naturalist one day. 'Should I tell her?'

  'Ach, let the old woman be at peace,' said he. 'What good would it do to disturb her with something that will only be a nine-days wonder when all is said and done?'

  And so Torquil said nothing, and all unaware that Alasdair had sown the seed of the trouble that was to grow so thick and fast about her, Morag was left in peace to enjoy her evenings with the kelpie beside the pool.

  It happened to be a very fine summer that year, and with the long, light evenings you get up north in the summer-time they had plenty of time to sit and talk. The kelpie was very curious about Morag's witch-grandmother, and he being in quite a different case from Torquil in this respect, she was quite willing to tell him all she could reme
mber about the old woman; how she used to tie red thread round the horns of her cow and hang a branch of the rowan-tree over the byre door to protect it from the fairies, and how she used to light the great bonfires that were burned every year on the hill at Beltane in May and Hallowe'en in October naming all the different kinds of wood that were used for the fire as she built it up.

  'There were nine kinds of wood,' said Morag. 'willow, hazel, alder, birch, ash, yew, elm, holly and oak, and every wood had a secret meaning and purpose. But only my grandmother knew what they were. And four times a year she baked a cake that was called a quarter-cake for it was made each quarter-day at Candlemas, Beltane, Lammas and Hallowe'en. Then she would go out on to the hill-side and break the cake into pieces. She threw the pieces away as far as she could throw them, one by one, and as she threw then she cried,

  'Here to thee, wolf, spare my sheep. Here to thee, fox, spare my lambs. Here to thee, eagle, spare my goats. Here to thee, harrier, spare my chickens.'

  'And so she would keep all safe about her till the next quarter-day for there was a magic in that cake only herself knew the secret of making.'

  'She sounds to me like a very wise woman,' said the kelpie.

  'She was what they called a white witch,' Morag told him. 'She never used her power to harm anyone that I ever heard of.'

  'Whatever she was,' said the kelpie, 'she had sense enough to see that there is more in the world around her than meets the eye, and that is more than you can say for most people.'

  'True enough,' agreed Morag. 'There are not many people nowadays who can see further than the end of their nose. I doubt if there are many people who would even believe there is such a thing as a kelpie.'

  'That is their loss!' the kelpie growled.

  'Indeed and it is,' said Morag, taking her pail of water and getting ready to go back to the house.

  She stood for a minute looking down at Loch Ness sparkling in the valley between the Abriachan hill-side and the Monadhliath Mountains. It is a big loch, Loch Ness, and deep—so deep that they say there are parts of it where no diver could touch the bottom. Morag stood thinking of this as she looked to right and left along the loch and suddenly she said,

  'But you know, kelpie, some of these people that would not believe the evidence of their own eyes if they saw you, will swear that they have seen the monster that is supposed to live in the loch. Yet here am I who have lived for seventy-three years within sight of the loch and I have never once seen the monster. I think maybe it is their own imagination these people are seeing!'

  'Then you are an old fool!' snapped the kelpie. 'The monster, as you call the creature, was living in the loch before my time and that is long enough as I have told you.'

  Now when the kelpie talked like this Morag pretended to be offended, but she was secretly delighted, for this was what she had been leading up to the whole time. She had always been disappointed that she had never been able to get a sight of the monster that se many other people claimed to have seen, and so now she led the kelpie on by arguing that it was all a lot of nonsense.

  'How can you prove it is there?' she asked.

  'I'll show you!' the kelpie shouted, jumping up in a rage. 'You be there by the boat-pier at the loch-side tomorrow, and if you do not take back what you have just said you will be as stupid as Alasdair the Trapper.'

  'I'll be there, kelpie,' Morag said meekly, but she had a job to keep her face straight after the way she had tricked him into saying just what she had wanted him to say. The little man was not so clever as he thought he was!

  The next day was a Tuesday which was very convenient, as that was the day the weekly bus ran from Abriachan to Inverness, and it would not only take her to the loch-side, it would also save her legs the steep climb back up the hill. At four o'clock the next day then, she got up to milk the cow and collect the eggs from the hens. She had her breakfast, tidied the house and dressed herself in her good black dress. Then she put some oatcakes, butter, cheese and milk into a basket, collected her knitting and set off to walk the half-mile across the heather to the road that ran down the hill.

  There were two or three people waiting at the side of the road for the bus. They gave her a pleasant good morning and began to talk about the dry summer that was in it and how it was good for the hay and bad for the root-crops and such-like farming talk. Then one of them said,

  'It is a strange thing to be seeing you go down to the big town, Mistress MacLeod. I cannot mind the last time you did that.'

  'Och, it's so long ago, neither can I,' said Morag, 'but I am not going to Inverness at all this time. I am just going down to the loch to see the monster.'

  Everybody smiled, thinking she was making a joke, and somebody said, 'It is a pity you cannot be sure of seeing it and you taking all the bother of going down to the loch.'

  'Oh, I am sure to see it,' said Morag, who never saw any use in a lie where the truth would serve, 'for I spoke to a kelpie who promised me it would be there today.'

  A strange look came over their faces when she said that and it was plain to see they thought she was out of her mind. When the bus came they went aboard whispering to one another, and as it went down the hill collecting more passengers at every stop, the whisper went round the newcomers as well.

  'Did you hear what the cailleach said? She’s going down to the loch to see the monster. A kelpie told her it would be there, she said. Aye, poor soul, she’s out of her wits.’

  So they all agreed among themselves, and when she got off the bus where it turned left into the main road to Inverness they watched her curiously as she went down the grassy bank to the pier at the loch-side. Morag knew fine they were watching her and maybe talking about her too, but she was not in the least disturbed.

  'What I do and how I do it is my own business,' she said.

  And had no idea how wrong she would be proved before the day was out!

  The bus went on to Inverness. It stopped at the bus station, the passengers scattered to the shops and the market, and soon the whisper was going round the town.

  'A cailleach that has lived on the hill-side all her life…says the monster will be seen today ... a witch, they say … the old woman that set the horse on to Alasdair the Trapper... said it was a kelpie..’

  The whisper went round the shops and hotels and cafés. They heard it in the office of the Tourist Board and in the bus-station where holiday visitors to the town were waiting to buy tickets for bus tours. And soon the visitors began to ask questions, and more and more of them bought tickets for a circular tour of Loch Ness until the bus company had no more buses left to spare for the trip and had to refuse the bookings of those who came last.

  The disappointed ones hired cars and bicycles and some even decided to go on foot in the hope of getting a lift, for there is not a single visitor to that part of the Highlands who does not hope to get a sight of the monster that is supposed to live in Loch Ness and those who were there that day were determined not to miss the chance.

  Now it happened—as you might have seen in the newspapers at that time—that a great scientific expedition to find the monster had been got up that summer, and the whisper about Morag even reached the hotel room where all the scientists were working on their charts and instruments.

  'Do you think, professor,' said one of them, 'that there is any truth in this rumour that is going round the town?'

  The leader of the expedition was a very sensible modern man, and being a professor, of course, he had no time for such nonsense as kelpies.

  'The Highlanders are a very superstitious people,' said he, 'always talking about ghosts and spirits and second-sight and suchlike nonsense. I think the old woman's monster-hunt will turn out to be a wild-goose chase!'

  Everybody laughed at the professor's little joke and they all went back to their charts and instruments and thought no more about the whisper.

  Morag, meanwhile, was enjoying herself by the edge of the loch. She had found a comfortable hummock to rest her back
on and the sun was shining on her face like a blessing. 'I'm a lazy old woman,' she said to herself with a smile, and brought out her knitting. She had no need to look at the stocking she was making. Her hands flew along the needles with the skill of a lifetime and so she could watch the loch as she worked. When she got hungry she had some oatcakes and milk and then went back to her knitting.

  A passenger steamer went up the loch, a canoe, and then a speedboat. Morag waved to the people on the steamer and they waved back to her. The boy in the canoe and the man in the speedboat never looked at her and Morag thought what a waste of a fine day it was to sail on deep blue water between high green mountains with never an eye for the glory around you.

  She watched the gulls dipping and gliding into the eye of the sun so that they looked like silver arrows flashing across the sky, and felt very content with life and with herself. She was not in the least worried that the monster had not appeared as yet. The kelpie had promised her it would come and she was sure it would.

  It was getting well along into the afternoon when she noticed that there seemed to be a great number of cars and buses and bicycles passing along the road, even for that time of the year, but she had no idea that the people in them were looking for her till she stood up to stretch her legs and saw people waving and shouting and pointing cameras at her.

  'The very idea!' she said indignantly, sitting down again and wondering what they were all up to.

  A young man in a bus-driver's uniform came down the bank from the road and said to her. 'Are you the lady that is waiting to see the monster?'

  'That is what I am here for,' Morag said, very dignified. 'Why else should I spend a day idle at the loch-side when I have work to do on my croft?'

  'Very true, mistress,' agreed the bus driver who was a Highlander himself and recognized the sense of her remark 'I hope you'll not be minding all these people coming along to have a look at it too.'