Powder River Read Online Free PDF

yarns were almost as good as Biwi’s.
    Mrs. MacGill plumped her pillow and lowered the lamplight so they could barely make out her white hair and dark, shining eyes. “So,” she said, “there once was a young man, a hunter of seals, who lived alone on the tiny island of Suleskerry. He was a proud young man, bonnie and strong, and he made good”—“guid” as she pronounced it—“money as well. There was no shortage of lassies on the mainland who had an eye out for him, but he would have none of ’em.
    â€œâ€˜What’s wrong wi’ ye then?’ a friend asked of him, and the proud young man said he simply had no use for females.
    â€œâ€˜Wimmen was put on earth to try us men,’ he said. ‘Adam was an owld fool, who would be living in Paradise still today if he haddna been led astray by Eve.’
    â€œWell, time went by and one day the Suleskerry seal hunter was workin’ on the beach when he spied a group of bonnie young people sunning themselves on a rock by the sea, and they was nekkid as the day they was born.”
    â€œNaked?” Lorna said, her eyes widening. “Out in the wide open?”
    â€œAye,” the widow said. “As the day they was born. One was a lovely woman with hair yellow as gold, kinda like yours, my loves, and skin white as the finest Italian marble with nary a bump nor blemish on it. Well, the proud young man had never seen a vision like that before, and he was smitten. He started toward her, but the folk saw him comin’ and grabbed up the sealskins that was lyin’ beside them on the rock and dove into the sea. But the lovely woman’s skin had fallen to the beach and the seal hunter got to it first. She fell to her knees, sobbin’ most pitiful she was, and begged him to return it. ‘Please, please, kind sir,’ she said, ‘I kinna live with my folk withoot it.’ The man looked out to sea and saw a pack of selkie—seals is what you English call ’em—bobbing in the water, watchin’ with sad, mournful eyes.”
    â€œThe young people turned into seals when they put their skins back on?” Cal said.
    â€œAye, and the beautiful maiden wanted to be with ’em but couldna without her skin, which the hunter wouldna surrender. Instead, he made her go back to his hut with him and be his wife. She had no choice, for he hid the skin from her and she couldna find it, no matter how she tried.
    â€œThey lived together for many years, and the seal-maiden bore the hunter four bairns, three lads and one lassie. They were a bonnie family, but there was a stone in the seal-maiden’s heart. She pretended to be happy, but niver did she stop searchin’ for her skin. One day, the lassie asked her, ‘Mam, watcha lookin’ fur?’ and the seal-maiden said, ‘Oh, peedie, I’m lookin’ for a pretty skin to make you slippers wit.’ The girl said she had seen her father take a very pretty skin from the rafters in the barn.
    â€œWell, that was all the seal-maiden needed. She ran to the barn, found the skin, and fled to the sea where she slipped it on and dove into the waves, aswimmin’ out to her seal-man husband who had been waitin’ for her all these years. The proud man and his children never saw her again, though for the rest of his long life the Suleskerry seal hunter walked along the beach, asearchin’. He died a sad and broken owld man.”
    Her story was met with shocked silence. Lorna spoke first. “But what about her children? Didn’t she love them?”
    â€œAye, she loved them well enough, but she loved her seal-folk more.”
    â€œShe was a bad woman,” Cal said flatly.
    â€œNo,” Mrs. MacGill said, shaking her head. “The Selkie maiden was not bad, she was just bein’ true to her natural self. That’s the way the world is. No matter how much you love a person, ye canna change him or her, no