Thomasina. Paul Gallico

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       CHAPTER THREE

      Outside MacDhui’s surgery, Geordie McNabb went wandering away clutching his box in which the injured frog reposed on a bed of grass and young heather. Occasionally he proceeded with an absent-minded hop, skip and jump, until, brought up by recollection of the more sobering aspects of his situation, he slowed down to a mere trot or saunter.

      He was not aware of going in any particular direction, but was only glad to be away once more from the ken of grown-ups who loomed over one tall, bristly and unsympathetic and hustled about with a pat on the bottom, an indignity unworthy to be bestowed upon a Wolf Cub.

      But ever and anon he paused to look into the box and give the frog a tentative poke reaffirming his diagnosis of a broken leg which prevented it from hopping and carrying on a frog’s business. At such times he regarded the little fellow with a combination of interest, affection and deep concern. He was fully aware that he had a problem on his hands connected with the eventual disposition of his charge, since take it home he could not, owing to house laws on the importation of animals, while at the same time to abandon it as recommended by the veterinarian was unthinkable. It was Geordie’s first encounter with the uncooperative attitude of the world towards one who has taken the fatal step of accepting a responsibility.

      His seemingly unguided wanderings had taken him to the edge of the town, that is, to the back of it where the houses ended abruptly and the several farms and meadows began, beyond which lay the dark and mysterious woods covering the hill of Glen Ardrath, where the Red Witch lived, and he realised that he had thought of this fearful alternative as a possible solution but had quickly rejected it as altogether too frightening and dangerous.

      Yet now that he was there by the bridge crossing the river Ardrath, that peaceful stream flowing into Loch Fyne, but which was fed by the tumbling mountain torrents that came frothing down out of the glen, the prospect of paying her a visit seemed awesomely and repellently attractive and exciting. For it was a fact that the townspeople avoided the lair, or vicinity of the Red Witch who was also known as Daft Lori, or sometimes even Mad Lori, and most certainly small boys fed on old wives’ tales and fairy-book pictures of hook-nosed crones riding on brooms avoided the neighbourhood, except when in considerable force.

      But there were two sides to the estimate of the so-called Red Witch of Glen Ardrath, one in which the picture was supplied by the overheated imagination reacting to the word ‘witch’ and the other was that she was a harmless woman who lived alone in a crofter’s cottage up in the hills where she made a living by weaving on a hand loom, conversed with birds and animals whom she nursed, mothered and fed, and communed with the angels and the Little Folk with which the glen was peopled.

      Geordie was aware of both these tales. If it was true that the roe deer came down from the flanks of Ben Inver to feed out of her hand, the birds settled on her head and shoulders, the trout and salmon rose from the sunny shallows of the burn at her call and that in the stables behind the cottage where she lived there were sick beasties she found in the woods or up the rocky glen, or who came to her driven by instinct to seek human help and whom she tended back to health, why then it might well be worth the risk to deposit his frog with her. At any rate it appeared to be a legitimate excuse for the having of a tremendous adventure, whatever came of it.

      He crossed the humpback bridge over the river and commenced the climb to the forest at the entrance to Glen Ardrath, past the grey bones of Castle Ardrath of which the circular inner keep and part of the stone curtain was all that had remained standing.

      The home of the Red Witch was supposed to be situated a mile or more up the glen where the forest was heaviest and it took considerable courage for a small boy alone, even though panoplied as a Wolf Cub and filled with some of their woods lore, to enter the darkening area of lichened oak, spreading beech and sombre fir, and to push his way through the head-high bracken. He tamed his apprehensions by looking for and identifying the summer wildflowers in full blossom of July that cropped up beside the path he was following, purple thrift and scarlet pimpernel, yellow broom and the pink of the wild dog-rose that grew entangled with the white-flowering bramble, which in the late summer and fall would yield the sweetest blackberries. He recognised purple colum, red campion and the blue harebell, the true bluebell of Scotland, growing in profusion in a glade that seemed made by the traditional fairy ring of trees growing about a circle carpeted with flowers and warmed by shafts of sunlight that penetrated through the branches of the trees.

      From there the hill climbed more steeply and he could hear, though not see, the wild rushing of the burn. He sat down there a moment to rest and took the frog out of the box and laid it on the moss where it palpitated but did not move. Watching it, Geordie felt his heart swell with pity for its plight and helplessness and, putting it back into the box, determined to see the matter through without further delay.

      At last he came in sight of the cottage he sought, and with the guile of the Red Indian, properly instilled into every Wolf Cub, he paused, flattened out to reconnoitre.

      The stone cottage was long and narrow and had chimneys standing up like ears at either end. The lids of green shutters were closed over the windows of its eyes and it seemed to be sleeping, poised on the edge of a clearing of the woods on what seemed to be a small plateau, a broadening of the side of the glen, and where the burn too widened out and moved more sluggishly. Behind it and off to one side was another long, low stone building that had once been a barn, no doubt, or cattle shelter. Geordie hugged his box close to his beating heart and continued to study the surroundings.

      A Coven Oak raised its thick bole a dozen or so yards before the cottage and yet its spreading branches reached to the tiles of the roof, and the topmost ones overshadowed it. The great oak must have been more than two hundred years old and from the lowest of its branches there hung a silvered bell. From the tongue of the bell, a thin rope reached to the ground and trailed there. And now that he was himself quiet, Geordie was becoming aware of movements and sounds. From within the cottage there came a high, clear, sweet singing and a curiously muffled thumping. This, Geordie decided, was the witch, and he trembled now in his cover of fern and bracken and wished he had not come. The singing held him spellbound, but the thumping was sinister and ominous for he had never heard the working of a treadle on a hand loom.

      Overhead, a red squirrel scolded him from the branch of a smooth grey-green beech; a raven and a hooded black crow were having a quarrel and suddenly began to flap and scream and beat one another with great strokes of their wings so that all of the birds in the area took fright and flew up, blue tits, robins, yellow wagtails, thrush and wrens, sparrow and finches. They circled the chimneys, chattering and complaining; two black and white magpies flashed in and out of the trees and from somewhere an owl called.

      The voice from within rose higher in purest song though no melody that Geordie had ever heard, yet it had the strange effect of making him wish suddenly to put СКАЧАТЬ