Many tales relating to witchcraft, as has been already remarked, must have had their origin in attempts to ridicule people out of their belief and in an unbridled exercise of imagination. They only furnished a proof that men will believe the incredible.
WITCHES AND MILK.
To the poor a cow is invaluable, and its ailments are naturally a source of anxiety. Hence the poor man has been most frequently the victim of imposture, and his cow has the most frequently lost its milk through the machinations of witches. The folds of the affluent were seldom attacked, or those byres in which regard was paid to cleanliness and tidiness.
The stories of witches assuming the shape of hares and sucking cows are numberless. A boy who saw one described the hare as sitting on its hind legs, with its fore paws resting on the cow’s udder. Some people profess to have come upon the witch through the night while thus engaged, and caught her. The hare then became a woman.
When a witch assumes this shape it is dangerous to fire at her without putting silver, a sixpence or a button of that metal, in the gun. If the hare fired at was, as indeed it often was, a witch in disguise, the gun burst, and the shot came back and killed the party firing, or some mischance followed. Old women used, therefore, to recommend that a sixpence be put in the gun when firing at a hare.
Parties who entered the house of a reputed witch in Cornaig, Tiree, found two churns full of water on the floor and a shallow milk-dish (measair) full of butter on the table.
In olden times the master of a ship, dining with the Laird of Coll, was asked if the butter on the table was not very fine. He said it was for pig’s butter. The dairymaid was called up and questioned. She confessed that seeing a whale (muc-mhara, lit. sea-pig) passing, and hearing its bellow (geumraich), she had taken the substance (toradh) of its milk from it. If the laird believed her, he was an honest, unsuspicious man, who never dreamt of any collusion between her and his guest.
A Tiree witch once took all their milk from the Laird of Coll’s cows, and was on her way home with it in a duitheaman, a black seaweed not unlike a tangle, wrapped round her body. A man met her, cut the black tangle with his knife, and all the milk flowed out on the ground. Witches also carried away milk in needles, dung-forks, etc., and have been detected taking it in a stream from the chimney crook. A sailor, whose ship was on her way through the Kyles of Bute (na caoil Bhòdach), hearing a bull roaring on the Cowal coast, took the milk from the herd of which it was lord by cutting the cable with an axe. The milk came streaming from the cable.
It is related of ‘Mr. Lachlan,’ a former minister of Kintail, that going one day to the house of a reputed witch, without telling who he was, he induced her, as a specimen of her power, to milk the chimney crook.[5] The cow from which the milk was to be taken was the minister’s own. The witch went to work, till all the milk was extracted, and then asked the minister if he was satisfied. He told her to go on, and she milked the iron till blood came. When the minister went home he found his cow dead.