A Stranger Came Ashore Read Online Free PDF

held. The sun made the grass look greener than green, the sky bluer than blue, and the two of them chose the rest of these fine days to get their bag of eggs and young seabirds. Not that they were intent simply on getting the best of the weather on these occasions, mind you, for it was on the ledges of the high cliffs above the voe that the seabirds nested, and Robbie could easily have been blown into the sea if he tried scrambling down there on windy days.
    With Old Da to guide him, however, Robbie never made any such mistake. He always climbed barefoot, too, which helped to give his toes a grip on the steep rockface; and since he had a good head for heights, he enjoyed all this scrambling about the cliffs. As for Old Da, he had done the very same climbs in his own young days; and so he was in his glory now, leaning over the clifftop to shout advice and encouragement on any one that Robbie attempted.
    Gathering moss for dyes was another ploy for the finest weather,for then Old Da would take Robbie and Tam on a whole day of wandering footloose among the hills where such moss was to be found. To Robbie’s great pleasure too, as they wandered like this, Old Da told him one story after another, and there was only one thing that could cast a gloom on such a day.
    It was always Tam who gave warning of such a gloom, too, and it always happened in the same way. Tam would start to whine, and then the other two would realise they were approaching a sort of long, shadowy hollow where no flowers grew; and here and there, in such hollows they would see a green mound with a doorhole that was screened by ferns,
    “Aye, the dog has a sixth sense about such places,” Old Da would interrupt himself to say then, and they would all hurry past the hollow; for these green mounds were said to be the homes of a small people called
trows
. And trows are creatures of the Otherworld which is not human.
    Once they were clear of such places, however, the feeling of gloom lifted from them, and Old Da would go on with his storytelling. Yet still he kept his voice low, for now his stories would be about the trows themselves, and these are creatures which are quick to take offence at anything that is said about them. Moreover, trows can make themselves invisible at will, and trowie ears are sharp ears!
    “Have you ever seen a trow?” Robbie sometimes asked. But Old Da would not answer yes or no to this, and so Robbie had to be content with listening, and wondering, and keeping a sharp lookout on his own account.
    Mornings and evenings of every day were the times when the two of them went fishing, sometimes casting their lines from the clifftop, and sometimes rowing out in the small boat that was kept for this purpose; but it was the boat trips Robbie preferred, for there were always seals swimming in the voe, and this gave him the chance to follow his liking for watching these creatures at closequarters.
    The interest in seals was something else he had learned from Old Da, of course; for Old Da had long ago taught him the trick of holding the boat so steady in one place that they lost all fear of it. Little, feathery strokes of the oars were the secret of this trick, and as soon as Robbie mastered this way of “feathering” with the oars, he found the seals swimming quite close to the boat and surfacing on all sides of it.
    “They like music,” Old Da told him then; and to prove this, he began to sing. Immediately the seals reared chest-high out of the water to stare towards the sound of his voice, and Old Da laughed to see this.
    “I told you,” he remarked. “And now I’ll tell you something else about the Selkie Folk and music. They have a great envy of the way people like ourselves can dance to it; and so they gather sometimes on a lonely beach where they can cast off their skins and take human form. And there they sing, and dance to the music of this singing.”
    Robbie stared at this, for neither he nor anyone else could ever be sure how