When Christ, says one, was a bairn, He took a walk one day and came to an old crone who was busy baking. She said she would give Him a new cake for His trouble, if He would go and split her a little wood for the oven. Christ did as she wanted, and the old wife put aside a small bit of dough for the promised cake. When the batch was drawn from the oven, however, she saw to her surprise and chagrin that the wee bit cake was equally large with the rest. So again she broke off a small bit of dough; but again the same thing happened. Hereupon she broke out with, ‘That’s a vast oure-muckle cake for the likes o’ you; thee’s get thy cake anither time.’ At this injustice Christ was angered, so He said to the old crone, ‘I split your wood as you asked me, and you would not give me the little cake you promised. Now you in turn shall go and cleave wood, and that, too, as long as the world shall last!’ And with that Our Lord turned her into a vipa (a weep). ‘So the weep fares betwixt heaven and earth as long as the world lasts; and fare where she will she says no other words than Klyf ved! Klyf ved!’ (i.e., Cleave wood! Cleave wood!).
The other Danish plover-tale given by Thiel is one of the familiar Crucifixion legends. While Christ still hung upon the Cross, three birds came flying towards Calvary, the Styrkham (the Stork), the Svalham (the Swallow), and the Pün-ham (Pee-weet). As they flew overhead each cried a cry. The stork cried, Styrk ham! Styrk ham! (i.e., Strengthen Him!), and so has this bird called ever since, and been under God’s blessing and man’s care. The swallow cried, Sval ham! Sval ham! (i.e., Cool or refresh Him!), and so is evermore known by that name, and likewise is loved by man and guided by God. But the weep wheeled about the Cross, shrieking derisively, Pün ham! Pün ham! (i.e., Pine Him, make Him suffer!), and so is not only accursed by men from then till now, but is under God’s ban till the Last Day, after which the lapwing’s wail will never be heard again.
Although Guilbinn, or Wailing Music, is, as I have said, the common Gaelic name for the Curlew, as the Whaup in the lowlands, it is also often called the Crann-toch, the long-beaked one, or Coulter-neb, as they say in Dumfries and Galloway. Of the mythical origin of the name Crann-toch (a very obvious designation, and needing no mythical legend one would think) I remember hearing a year or so ago from a boatman of Lismore a wild and romantic legend, but it is too long to quote now. Few Gaelic tales, few poems, in which are not to be heard the voices of the wind or the sea or the wailing curlew. We have perhaps no bird more wild and solitary: a Highland saying places it with the herons and wild-geese. ‘When a man has shot six herons, six wild-geese, and six curlews, he may call himself a sportsman.’
When the Golden Plover, or Grey Plover as he is sometimes called, wheels in Spring above the fallowlands of the North the ploughman hears in his cry Plough weel! Sow weel! Harrow weel! This beautiful bird—of whom no poet has written a finer line than Burns in
“The deep-toned plover grey, wild whistling on the hill”—
is not exempt from the common tradition of uncanniness. He, too, is classed with the dreaded ‘Seven Whistlers’: and from Cornwall to Iceland he is often vituperated as one of these, or as of the spectral pack called Gabriel’s Hounds, or as of Odin’s Phantom Chase. I spoke of a name I had heard in Iona and Mull for the whimbrel, but applicable also to any plover or curlew ... the Guilchaismeachd or Wail of Warning, the Alarm Bird so to say: and this repute is held by the plover in many mining parts of England, where it is said that the miners will not descend a pit if the ‘Whistlers’ be heard lamenting overhead. To this day there are many regions not only in our own country but abroad where the plovers are called the Wandering Jews, from an old legend that the first of the clan were the transmuted souls of those Jews who assisted at the Crucifixion. An old woman who gave me some plovers’ eggs told me in all good faith that the feadag (the Gaelic name, equivalent to flute-note or mellow whistle) neither ate nor drank but fed upon the wind ... a superstition said to have been almost universal in the Middle Ages.
As for many of us, surely they are birds of our love. The cry of the curlew on the hill, the wail of the lapwing in waste places, have not these something of the same enthralling spell, the same entrancing call—the summons to the wilderness, whether that be only to solitude, or to wild loneliness, or to the lonelier solitudes, the dim limitless wilderness of the imagination—that the wind has, at night, coming with rain through woods, or that the sea has, heard in inland hollows, or when athwart a long shore or among fallen rocks the tide rises on the breast-swell of coming storm? They call us to the wild.
THE AWAKENER OF THE WOODS
The Spirit of Spring is abroad. There is no one of our island coasts so lone and forlorn that the cries of the winged newcomers have not lamented down the wind. There is not an inland valley where small brown birds from the South have not penetrated, some from Mediterranean sunlands, some from the Desert, some from the hidden homes on unknown isles, some from beyond the foam of unfamiliar shores. Not a backwater surely but has heard the flute of the ouzel, or the loud call of the mallard. The wren, that sweet forerunner of ‘the little clan of the bushes’ as we say in Gaelic, clann bheag’ nam preas, the robin, the mavis, the merle, have been heard in every coppice and wildgrowth from the red combes of the winding Dart to the granite-ledges by the rushing Spey. From the last Cornish upland to the last brown moor on the Ord of Sutherland the curlew and the lapwing have wheeled with wailing cry or long melancholy flutelike whistle. The gorse, whose golden fires have been lit, has everywhere heard the prolonged sweet plaintive note of the yellow-hammer. From the greening boughs the woodpeckers call.
The tides of Blossom have begun to flow. The land soon will be inundated. Already a far and wide forethrow of foam is flung along the blackthorn hedges. Listen ... that chaffinch’s blithe song comes from the flowering almond!... that pipit’s brief lay fell past yonder wild-pear! In the meadows the titlarks are running about looking in the faces of the daisies, as children love to be told. On the fenlands and mosses the windy whimper of the redshank is heard like the cry of a phantom: and like a ‘bogle,’ too, is the perturbing drumming of the snipe falling swiftly on sloping wings back to the marsh.