The Three Mulla-mulgars

by Walter De la Mare

In spite of all his aches and pains, Nod grinned. "Then soon you will have Nod's little bones to fence it in with," he said.

The old hare eyed him angrily. "If you weren't dying, impudent Mulgar, I'd teach you better manners."

Nod wriggled closer into his jacket. "Trouble not, Queen of Munza," he said softly. "I shouldn't have time to use them now." He shut his eyes again, and all his pain seemed to be floating away in sleep.

The old hare sat up in the snow and listened. "What's amiss in Munza-mulgar?" she muttered to herself. "First these galloping Horses of Tishnar, one, two, three; now the angry Zōōts of the Minimuls, and all coming nearer?" But Nod was far away in sleep now, and numb with cold.

She tapped his little shrunken cheek with her foot. "Even in your sleep, Mulgar, you mustn't dream," she said. "None may dream in my forest." But Nod made no answer even to that. She sat stiff up again, twitching her lean, long, hairy ears, now this way, now that way. "Foh, Earth-mulgars!" she said to herself. She stamped in the snow, and stamped again. And in a minute another old Quatta came louping between the trees, and sat down beside her.

"Here's an old sheep's-jacket I've found," said the old Queen Quatta, "with a little Mulgar inside it. Let us carry it home, Sister, or the Minimuls will steal him for their feast."

The other old Quatta raised her lip over her long curved teeth. "Pull out the Mulgar first," she said.

But Mishcha said: "No, it is a strange Mulgar, a Mulla-mulgar, a Nizza-neela, and he smells of magic. Take his legs, Sister, and I will carry his head. There's no time to be lost." So these two old Quatta hares wrapped Nod round tight in his sheep-skin coat, and carried him off between them to their form or house in an enormous hollow Dragon-tree unimaginably old, and very snug and warm inside, with cotton-leaf, feathers, and dry tree-moss. There they laid him down, and pillowed him round. And Mishcha hopped out again to watch and wait for the Minimuls.

Sheer overhead the pygmy moon stood, when with drums beating and waving cudgels, in their silvery girdles, leopard-skin hats, and grass shoes, thirty or forty of the fury Minimuls appeared, hobbling bandily along, following the hoof-prints of the galloping Zevveras in the snow. But little clouds in passing had scattered their snow, and the track had begun to grow faint. The old hare watched these Earth-mulgars draw near without stirring. Like all the other creatures of Munza-mulgar, she hated these groping, gluttonous, cannibal gnomes. When they reached the place where Nod had fallen, the Minimuls stood still and peered and pointed. In a little while they came scuttling on again, and there sat old Mishcha under a great thorn-bush, gaunt in the snow.

They stood round her, waving their darts, and squeaking questions. She watched them without stirring. Their round eyes glittered beneath their spotted leopard-skin hats as they stood in their shimmering grasses in the snow.