scs Fairy Tales

By Authors Unknown

A Zetland Tale

The wind was an icy razor on Tulya's E'en, seven murky nights before Yule Day. This was the evening of the year when the trows were released from their subterranean dwellings in the knowes, free to work all manner of mischief upon Zetlanders high and low. Any gudeman that didn't sain his farm could expect trouble. So Tammas took two straws and made a cross of them, carefully placing it on the stiggie at the entrance to the corn-yard. Pulling hairs from each cow, Minnie plaited them together and fastened this talisman above the byre door. She then went into the house and whispered the traditional blessing over all the bairns as they lay asleep in their cots and cradles. All ? Not quite. Unbeknownst to her, Peerie Tam had left his bed to relieve himself, and Minnie ended up saining a phantom wean aneath an empty eiderdown.

On the evening of Yule Day, when the board had been cleared of all the reeked trout and sillocks, all the brunies and brose, the folk of the house sat with the visiting kin and laughed as Tammas swapped impromptu rhymes with his cousin. An untholesome bairn keeping watch at the window was finally able to cry, "Da Grülacks! Da Grülacks!" In trooped the mummers to the music of a fiddle, tall straw hats on their heads, linen handkerchiefs concealing their faces. As the newcomers danced the Foula Reel with the women and girls, Peerie Tam tried to work out the identities of the men behind the guises. That man leaning badly to the right must be Jaimie, he thought. The lush white hair of that spry old one gives him away as Mikkel. The one with the humph must be WhatJayMacCallum. Yon doddery yin is Gammelbaub. That poor dancer who can't punctuate the rhythm of his steps is bound to be Allan. Him with the lang neb must be Jim.

But there was one Grülack he couldn't tell from Adam. Not even the other guisers knew they had a stranger amongst them, although they ought to have noticed that one of their number was a good head shorter than all the others. It was a trow! Hardiman by name, fiddler by trade and nature. Now trows have senses more numerous and more perspicacious than any mortal, and these shrewd senses told Hardiman that some body in the house wasn't right sained. As the ring of dancers brought him round to where Peerie Tam was leaning by the hearth, he let go of Minnie's hand and grabbed the boy firmly by the wrist. Before an eyelid had been batted, Hardiman had wheeked Peerie Tam out through the door, never to be seen again.

And the moracle of the story is: He that is sained doesn't let the trows get to him.