If Martha failed to inspire any respect in the young Penhales they stood in certain awe of her daughter Wany on account of her connection with the supernatural. In the first place she was a changeling herself. In the second, Providence having denied her wits, had bequeathed her an odd sense. She was weather-wise; she felt heat, frost, rain or wind days in advance; her veins might have run with mercury. In the third place, and which was far more attractive to the boys, she knew the movements of all the “small people” in the valley—the cows told her.
The cows were Wany’s special province. She could not be trusted with any housework however simple, because she could not bring her mind to it for a minute. She had no control over her mind at all; it was forever wandering over the hills and far away in dark, enchanted places.
But cows she could manage, and every morning the cows told her what had passed in the half-world the night before.
There were two tribes of “small people” in the Keigwin Valley, Buccas and Pixies. In the Buccas there was no harm; they were poor foreigners, the souls of the first Jew miners, condemned for their malpractices to perpetual slavery underground. They inhabited a round knoll formed of rocks and rubble thrown up by the original Penhale and were seldom seen, even by the cows, for they had no leisure and their work lay out of sight in the earth’s dark, dripping tunnels. Once or twice the cows had glimpsed a swarthy, hook-nosed old face, caked in red ore and seamed with sweat, gazing wistfully through a crack in the rocks—but that was all. Sometimes, if, under Wany’s direction, you set your ear to the knoll and listened intently, you could hear a faint thump and scrape far underground—the Buccas’ picks at work. Bohenna declared these sounds emanated from badgers, but Bohenna was of the earth earthy, a clod of clods.
The Pixies lived by day among the tree roots at the north end of Bosula woods, a sprightly but vindictive people. At night they issued from a hollow oak stump, danced in their green ball rooms, paid visits to distant kinsfolk or made expeditions against offending mortals. The cows, lying out all night in the marshes, saw them going and coming. There were hundreds of them, the cows said; they wore green jerkins and red caps and rode rabbits, all but the king and queen, who were mounted on white hares. They blew on horns as they galloped, and the noise of them was like a flock of small birds singing. On moonless nights a cloud of fireflies sped above them to light the way. The cows heard them making their plans as they rode afield, laughing and boasting as they returned, and reported to Wany, who passed it on to the spellbound brothers.
But this did not exhaust the night life in the valley. According to Wany, other supernaturals haunted the neighborhood, specters, ghosts, men who had sold their souls to the devil, folk who had died with curses on them, or been murdered and could not rest. There was a demon huntsman who rode a great black stallion behind baying hellhounds; a woman who sat by Red Pool trying to wash the blood off her fingers; a baby who was heard crying but never seen. Even the gray druid stones she invested with periodic life. On such and such a night the tall Pipers stalked across the fields and played to the Merry Maidens who danced round thrice; the Men-an-Tol whistled; the Logan rocked; up on misty hills barrows opened and old Cornish giants stepped out and dined hugely, with the cromlechs for tables and the stars for tapers.
The stories had one virtue, namely that they brought the young Penhales home punctually at set of sun. The wild valley they roamed so fearlessly by day assumed a different aspect when the enchanted hours of night drew on; inanimate objects stirred and drew breath, rocks took on the look of old men’s faces, thorn bushes changed into witches, shadows harbored nameless, crouching things. The creak of a bough sent chills down their spines, the hoot of an owl made them jump, a patch of moonlight on a tree trunk sent them huddling together, thinking of the ghost lady; the bark of a fox and a cow crashing through undergrowth set their hearts thumping for fear of the demon huntsman. If caught by dusk they turned their coats inside out and religiously observed all the rites recommended by Wany as charms against evil spirits. If they were not brought up in the love of God they were at least taught to respect the devil.
With the exception of this spiritual concession the Penhale brothers knew no restraint; they ran as wild as stoats. They arose with the sun, stuffed odds and ends of food in their pockets and were seen no more while daylight lasted.
In spring there was plenty of bird’s-nesting to be done up the valley. Every other tree held a nest of some sort, if you only knew where to look, up in the forks of the ashes and elms, in hollow boles and rock crevices, cunningly hidden in dense ivy-clumps or snug behind barbed entanglements of thorn. Bohenna, a predatory naturalist, marked down special nests for them, taught them to set bird and rabbit snares and how to tickle trout.
In spring they hunted gulls’ eggs as well round the Luddra Head, swarming perpendicular cliffs with prehensile toes and fingers hooked into cracks, wriggling on their stomachs along dizzy foot-wide shelves, leaping black crevices with the assurance of chamois. It was an exciting pursuit with the sheer drop of two hundred feet or so below one, a sheer drop to jagged rock ledges over which the green rollers poured with the thunder of heavy artillery and then poured back, a boil of white water and seething foam. An exciting pursuit with the back draught of a southwesterly gale doing its utmost to scoop you off the cliffside, and gull mothers diving and shrieking in your face, a clamorous snowstorm, trying to shock you off your balance by the whir of their wings and the piercing suddenness of their cries.