"Confusion on thee and skaith! surely thou knowest not that; and now although that stag be far away from me I shall go to see him, to find if I may get any knowledge from him!"
Therewith Léithin went off lightly, yet was she scarcely able to rise up on high with the strength of the bad weather, and no more could she go low with the cold of the ...? and with the great abundance of the water, and, though it was difficult for her, she progressed lightly and low-flying, and no one living could reveal or make known all that she met of evil and of misery going to Ben Gulban looking for the Blackfoot. And she found the small-headed swift-footed stag scratching himself against a bare oak rampike. And Léithin descended on a corner of the rampike beside him. And she saluted the stag in his own language and asks him was he the Blackfoot. The stag said that he was, and Léithin spoke the lay:
Well for you O Blackfoot,
On Ben Gulban high,
Many moors and marshes,
Leap you lightly by.
Hounds no more shall hunt you
Since the Fenians fell,
Feeding now untroubled
On from glen to glen.
Tell me stag high-headed,
Saw you ever fall
Such a night and morning?
You remember all.
[The Stag Answers.]
I will give you answer
Léithin wise and gray,
Such a night and morning
Never came my way.
"Tell me, Blackfoot," said Léithin, "what is thy age?"
"I shall tell thee," said the Blackfoot. "I remember this oak here when it was a little sapling, and I was born at the foot of the oak sapling, and I was reared upon that couch [of moss at its foot] until I was a mighty-great stag, and I loved this abode [ever], through my having been reared here. And the oak grew after that till it was a giant oak (?) and I used to come and constantly scratch myself against it every evening after my journeyings and goings [during the day] and I used [always] to remain beside it in such wise till the next morning, and if I had to make a journey or were hotly hunted I used to reach the same tree, so that we grew up with one another, until I became a mighty-great stag, and this tree became the bare withered rampike which you see, so that it is now only a big ruined shapeless-stump without blossom or fruit or foliage to-day, its period and life being spent. Now I have let a long period of years[31] go by me, yet I never saw and never heard tell-of, in all that time, the like of last night."
Léithin departs [to return] to his birds after that, and on his reaching home the other[32] bird spoke to him, "have you found out what you went to inquire about?"