Where the forest murmurs

by William Sharp

THE TRIBE OF THE PLOVER

In the preceding paper I alluded to a Galloway rhyme—

“Whaup, Whimbrel, an’ Plover,
Whan these whustle the worst o’t ’s over.”

By this time the neatherd by Loch Ken and the shepherd among the wilds of Kirkcudbright, like their kin from the Sussex downs, to the last sliabh or maol in Sutherland, may repeat the rhyme with safety. ‘The worst o’t ’s over.’ For to-day the curlews cry above the moors, the whimbrel’s warning note echoes down the long sands o’ Solway, and everywhere, from the salt bent by the coasts to the loneliest inlands, the lapwing wails. The Tribe of the Plover is in the land once more, and so Spring is with us. Not, perhaps, the Spring of the poets, who look (as Ailil in the old Celtic tale) under boughs of white blossom to where the sunlight moves like a fawn of gold in a windless land, where the songs of birds turn to flowers, and where flowers change in the twilights of dawn into singing birds. Not thus does Spring come to us in the north. The black-headed gull screaming on the east wind, restless before his long flight to the wilderness and the grassy homes of the mating season: the hoodie-crow, weary of the south, heard on grey mornings when sleet whips the uplands: the troubled fieldfares, eager for lands oversea: the curlews crying along the Anglian fens and lamenting over Solway Moss: the mallard calling to his mate in the chill waters: the shadow of harrier and peregrine from Surrey upland to the long braes of Lammermuir—these, rather, are the signals of our bleak northern Spring. What though the song-thrush and the skylark have long sung, though the wheatear and chiff-chaff have been late in coming, though the first swallows have not had the word passed on by the woodpecker, and somewhere in the glens of Greece and Sicily the cuckoo lingers? How often the first have called Spring to us, and, while we have listened, the wind has passed from the south to the north and the rains have become sleet or snow: how often the missel-thrush has rung-in the tides of blossom, and the woods have but grown darker with gloom of the east while the first yellow clans along the hedgerows have been swept by hail. How often, again, the wind of the west has been fragrant with cowslip and ox-eye, with daffodil and wallflower, with the pungent growing-odours of barberry and butcher’s-broom and the unloosening larch, when, indeed, the sallow-blooms have put on their gold, and the green woodpecker is calling his love-notes in the copses, and yet the delaying swallow has not been seen north of the Loire or where the Loiny winds between Moret and the woods of Fontainebleau? How often the wild-rose has moved in first-flame along the skirts of hornbeam-hedge or beech-thicket, or the honeysuckle begun to unwind her pale horns of ivory and moongold, and yet across the furthest elm-tops to the south the magic summons of the cuckoo has been still unheard in the windless amber dawn, or when, as in the poet’s tale, the myriad little hands of Twilight pull the shadows out of the leaves and weave the evening dark. But when the cry of the plover is abroad we know that our less ideal yet hardly less lovely and welcome Spring is come at last: that Winter is old and broken and shuffling north, clinging to the bleak uplands and windygates: and this, even though Summer tarries still among the fields of France.

Because of their association with solitary and waste places it is not strange that these harbingers of Swallow-time should everywhere have an evil repute. Even amid the unimaginative Sussex or Wilts peasants, the cry of the curlew, the wail of the lapwing, forebode sorrow, cover a vague menace: heard, at least, at dusk or at night, or in the grey gloaming at the edge of day.

The Cornish or Devon moorlander has many wild tales of the whimbrel, whose swift-repeated whistle hurtling suddenly in lonely places has given rise to innumerable legends of the Seven Whistlers, the Demon Huntsmen, the Hunted Souls. In Iona and along the Earraid of Mull, where the whimbrel or ‘little curlew’ is rarely heard till May, though it is generally called Guilbinnach, a diminutive of the Gaelic name of the curlew, Guilbin (pronounced sometimes Kooley-pin or guley-pin and sometimes gwilley-pin), a compound word signifying wailing music, I have heard it called Guilbhròn (Kwillyvrone), Wail of Sorrow, and again ‘Keenyvàs’ or Death-Cry, and once, either in a tale or poem, by the singular name Guilchaismeachd, the Wail of Warning. Any lowland cottar, from west of Lammermuir to east of Ballantrae, will ’ken a wheen strange tales o’ the whaup,’ as the curlew is commonly called north of the Tweed and south of the Highland Line: and in some parts it is not only the children who shudder at its cry in lonely places at dusk, fearing ‘the bogle wi’ the lang neb’ like a pair of tongs, emissary of the Evil One, who gave this bird his long curved beak so that in the dark he might, like tongs lifting a stray coal or a nightjar snatching a wandering moth, carry off wrongdoers, unrepentant sinners, truants, and all naughty children generally. As for the lapwing, though more familiar than the curlew, and for many of us associated only with pastures and pleasant wilds, in the countries of the Gael dark things are whispered of the Adharcan-luachrach, or Little Horn of the Rushes ... thus poetically called from the pretty tuft of the male weep or peaseweep, curving like a horn over the delicately poised head, and from the bird’s fondness for nesting in rushy places or among tangled grasses. Is he not said to be one of the bitter clan who mocked on the day of the Crucifixion, and so was made homeless for ever, with a cry that should be for ever like the cry of wandering sorrow? It is of little avail to say that love among the rushes is as sweet as elsewhere, that the wilderness can be home, and that the wailing of repentant souls may be no more than angry vituperations against the hoodie-crow or laughing-gull or other marauders after lapwing-eggs. Is the weep not a spirit of the waste that was once human, but lost his soul, and so can never reach heaven nor yet dwell on earth, but must night and day be restless as the sea, and wail the long hours away from grey dawn to moonrise, from darkness to the paling of the stars? So they say, they who know: and who know with the unshakable surety of the unlettered peasant? In the Gaelic imagination the lapwing is something stranger and wilder still: a bird of the ancient world, of the dispossessed gods, nameless in truth because in truth a god nameless and homeless. The Gaelic poet hears in its lament the lamentation of what is gone never to come again, of what long since went away upon the wind, of what is going away on the wind: and he has called the weep the Birds of the Sorrowful Past. Is not the lapwing the bird of Dalua, that unknown mysterious god, that terrible Shadow who is the invisible, inaudible, secret, and dread divinity of weariness, separation, gloom, sadness, decay, desolation, madness, despair?

It is not only in our own land that the lapwing and all the tribe of the plover bear so evil a repute. Not always thus, however: for in some parts of Germany this plover, I do not know why, is called the Virgin Mary’s Dove, and is greeted with welcome. Even in Argyll there is a lost or confused kindly legend, for sometimes when children run along the moorland mocking the Pibhinn (pee-veen ... the Gaelic equivalent of the lowland peaseweep and the southern pee-weet) they cry

“Welcome back, welcome back, Pēe-veen, Pee-vēen!
But keep the wind and the rain behind your tail,
Or you’ll never see the fields of heaven again!...”

or words to that effect. In the East the Mohammedan women have a beautiful name for this bird ... the Sister of the Brother: and, says the authority whence in some forgotten reading I took this note, ‘when these women hear the cry in the evening, they run from their houses and throw water in the air, that the bird may use it to assuage the pain of the burn on the top of the head, still marked by some black feathers.’ This is in allusion to an oriental legend that the lapwing was once a princess. This princess had a passionate love for a brother who had long been absent, and when one day she heard that he was on his return and close at hand and weary, she snatched a bowl of hot milk from the fire and hastened to meet him. But an evil-wisher, knowing her great love and how she would not rest till she found her brother, had misinformed her, and for all the pain on her head caused by the heated bowl, she ran now this way and now that, continually crying Brother! O Brother! Hours passed, and then days, and week after week and month after month the girl vainly sought her loved one. At last, feeling her strength ebbing, she cried aloud to Allah. Allah, moved by compassion, gave her wings and changed her into a lapwing or black-plover, the better to accomplish her purpose. Hence, when the little brown children on the desert or on the sun-scorched ways of the East look up and see the lapwings wheeling overhead in long circling flights and sudden dashes, they hear, in the wailing voices, either the long yearning or the sudden eager hope in the cry which to their ears sounds as Brother! O Brother!

Perhaps the German name of the Virgin Mary’s Dove is merely a variant of the Swedish folk-legend concerning the lapwing. The tale goes that this bird was once one of Mary’s handmaidens, but lost place and honour because of her theft of a pair of scissors. The punishment was transformation into a bird with a forked scissor-tail, and to go out across the fjords and above all the meadows and pastures and keep crying incessantly Tyvit-Tyvit-Tyvit (i.e., I stole them! I stole them!). I think, however, I have heard or read the same story in connection with the wagtail. In his interesting book on the Manners and Customs of the Russian People, Mr. Ralston has the following Slavonic plover-legend. When God had created the earth, and wished to supply it with seas and lakes and rivers, He ordered the birds to convey the waters to their appointed places. All obeyed except the lapwing, whose reason for this indolence and impiety was that it had no need of seas, lakes, or rivers, to slake its thirst. At that the Lord waxed wroth, and forbade it and its posterity ever to approach a sea or stream, and that it might quench its thirst only with that water which remains in hollows and among stones after rain. So from that time this sorrowful plover has never ceased its wailing cry of Peet-peet! (i.e., Drink! Drink!). In another northern book (Thiel’s Danish Traditions, vol. ii.) there are two lapwing-legends not less homely than the Russian and the Swedish.