Wilderness Child: When a Child is Abandoned on her Family's Farm During the Great Plague of 1350, an Old-time Storyteller, a Raven, a Cat and a Dog Tell Her Archetypal Irish Tale. - Softcover

Hite, Barbara Allan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1490720154 ISBN 13: 9781490720159

Publisher: Trafford, 2013

Synopsis

Throughout the ages, histories and folk tales pop up to tell us about children, even infants, who grow up without the care and supervision of human adults. These lost ones, so it goes, must have been nurtured by wolves or other miraculous caregivers, and whether actual or fabricated, these stories with their possibilities of totally fantastical outcomes, intrigue us deeply. We wonder: Exactly how did such children survive? What conditions or circumstances might be required? What would they do if their humans found them? Could or would they eventually grow up to lead "normal" lives? WILDERNESS CHILD is an imagined story inspired by a true incident from the Bubonic Plague of 1350.

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

WILDERNESS CHILD

When a child is abandoned on her family's farm during the Great Plague of 1350, an old-time storyteller, a raven, a cat and a dog tell her archetypal Irish tale

By Barbara Allan Hite

Trafford Publishing

Copyright © 2013 Barbara Allan Hite
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4907-2015-9

CHAPTER 1

RAVEN

The raven sees them leave. He rises to the height of his two legs, up from a branch, wings lifting, spreading out and down, settling back, stretching again, his reaction to some strange uneasiness, some burden he wants to be rid of. He shakes his head. He turns his good eye to watch the cart lumber in dust down the house road, clunking, a far way, then turning onto the town road, leaving him and the girl child by the gate, leaving a few rising drifts of dust and the sounds of wheels, as well as a flutter of anticipation, in the distance.

Testing the wind's pull again, after a moment, he flies from the pine to a tree that is trying to survive beside a rock at the end of the house road, to the very top, lowers down, looks back with a cock of head and can see the child standing full height where she reaches only to the gate latch, can see her hand, up and down, in a curled, stiff position, waving. Turning himself around once more, he can see the cart, the woman's shape inside, the two boys outside, one by each large wheel, on each side, and the man in front, with the ox-rope. "Gee, gee!" the man says. "Gee, gee!" says the bird. He sees dust waving back and forth against the tiny wagon wheels and frame, gray on gray.

Turning again to her, he sees the girl leaving, slipping off into the woods in the direction of the pond where the water falls.

What does he know, this bird? Seer into the land ahead. And if it's danger, can he not call out? Give the usual warning?

When he does cry out, a single call, the note hangs in the air like a dragonfly at mid-day, moving just enough to float, then gone without notice. When no one or thing responds, no bird or animal, he stands still. Then, after a look forward and to the side, he flies back to the croft, where he lands himself on the edge of the hanging barley basket, where he flips up grains and catches some on the fall, forward and sideways, his good side. He lifts his beak and scrapes his jaw along the uneven basket rim, back and forth, and hears a similar scratching, a scuttling or gnawing by something, a mouse or chipmunk, at the bottom of the butter churn below the window. He speaks with excitement, just reporting what was new on the road: "Cark. Cark, cark!" He notices some lobs of butter or maybe cheese at the churn's bottom edge; those would be fine. He throws another barley grain into the air and picks it out coming down. Then he himself sails down to scoop up what turns out to be clotted milk treats. Proud-headed, he swaggers as he and the mouse circled the churn, one shiny black form, one shiny gray form, set off against the old dull wood. They both gather treats, though small treats they are. The raven wants to eat the mouse as much as the milk treats. But this feeding situation often confounds him because he cannot choose to admit that the mouse frightens him or that sometimes he is lazy, but that mostly he is still unpracticed in various hunting skills. These handicaps stem from his having been fed almost entirely by the girl when a nestling in a bowl for his nest and from his not having been pushed enough, or at all, to make the killing efforts he needed as a fledgling. For a moment he recalls the time when his wings hung low and jiggled when he was ready to eat: the girl and the two boys pointed and laughed and fed him more and more bits of egg just to see him humbled.

Finally he lifts off toward the woods where the girl will be, rising, gliding, swooping a mile and a half or more into the trees to land on the rowan that overhangs the pond and waterfall.

Below him she sits with the wooden bucket between her legs and the small cat inside it. Just the day before she had found this creature, not fully a cat, and found it just as the bird was about to practice killing moves on its head. Or maybe its upper neck. The practice involved figuring out how far the prey's claws might reach, before its teeth could go into the flesh. And the method of telling involved gentle touches with a paw, on different places of the body, quickly removed.

Meanwhile, he calls a greeting from the air and rises up, this time flapping noisily; circling, with one eye on the kitten, he comes to sit on the child's shoulder to complain.

"Oh, hush your tongue, you loud, black bird," she says. "Don't be the unfriendly one!" She reaches out a finger and pushes forward the pin-feathers on his head. She rubs together a finger and thumb to loosen the shafts at their base and moves, back and forth, massaging down his neck to reach the extra warm place between his shoulders. He closes his eye.

"You can find other things to eat and play with. I want this one, little lost kitten one"

He tastes her hair and ear. He makes some low crackles.

He lifts to make a circle around the pond. In the distance to the west, the red sun's glow travels along the far hills and slides in among the treetops. By the water, it lights up the raven's wing tips as he lowers himself to drink from the pond, as he chooses some shiny pebbles to flip onto the bank. He checks the shallow water for the curled shells that often have bits of meat inside. Grass shadows stretch double long, at the water's edge, the grass stiff, but swaying.

At the far end the edge of the pond rises into a cliff, rises up, and the white water at the top churns with crisp reddish waves, then falls and blasts fragments of itself, like glass, to break the surface of the clear water below, throwing out drops so golden, pink, and purple by now that they speak more of the morning to come than of the night that draws closer.

When the bird flies back and down the house road at nightfall, he cannot possibly see the soft, faint frame of a traveling cart far, far down along the cliffs and passing through dark woods, almost gliding now and without the sounds of wheels, moving so silently now that even were he to see it, he might mistake it for some ghostly shadow, and he would not hear any but his own cries returning to him from the distance.

CAT

Hidden, dark as myself now, I open my eyes to the sides of what they call a bucket. There's a softness under my pads and a sound I never heard before outside, falling outside, somewhere around me. I make some little sounds myself but who will hear them with the other so loud? I make them anyway. I mew, mew, and mew. At least I can hear myself and gain a little comfort from having any sounds at all, from having any life at all.

I suppose. Though not much of it in the past time, not in the past I've been aware of, not much comfort in watching the teeth and tongues of whatever it was took the rest of them away, hearing those sounds of fear and pain crash into the whole rest of the world, and I crawling back under our cave rock, waiting for, waiting for the ... not knowing enough to know what to wait for. But something different ... Silence? All quiet then finally, all quiet and, pretty soon, wishing for some sounds again, even of fear, maybe just any sounds then to come close again.

That's the main story: of sounds. When I crawled to the opening again, when I looked out, every kitten and my mother all were gone. Then I cried loud enough for five kittens, loud enough for five kittens and a mother, when I was still there, when they were not.

"Shhhhh. Shuuuu." A soft voice.

She kneeled in front of me, that which they called Brigid, sweet sounding, and her hands like paws lifted me up, and down into her lap, very warm. And she rubbed sweet milk around my mouth, inside and over my teeth, onto my tongue until I swallowed it down, and swallowed more down, down, down, down until my belly rounded out for good. Went to sleep.

All sweet. Some moments. Then ... woke up in this thing, where I am now. This bucket.

BRIGID

In the telling of our story, I cannot help but to think of the power and pleasure we uncover in all the old tales, all the old stories we know, slipping down though the years, lives and deeds of many who were known to have actually walked upon this true earth, or many of whom were at least said or imagined to have done so, for better or worse. Now the story of this Brigid is that of a real person, both goddess and saint, aye, she herself is verified in history, on and on. And I'd wager my next pipe that in Ireland there's a girlie called Brigid or something kin to it in every cottage where there are daughters, and a story to go with each. But, as is so in history, though the person is real, many of the stories surrounding her name are shaded by mist and magic, slipping out as they have from under waterfalls and mossy rocks as well as tree roots or even leaves, not to mention crosses. And though I wish I could tell you, in good faith that this story is a true one, I simply cannot do that. You must decide for yourself.

Meanwhile let us pick up the beginnings of her adventure right in the place we left off.

Here we see, at long last, the girl child Brigid standing at the gate to her farm, watching her family disappear down the road to a town some many miles away to the east. She stands and she waves up and down, slowly, with a stiff, flat hand, but inside she is almost dancing with the excitement of it all, her stomach in rising folds, rolling back and forth, ever closer to her throat as she watches the figures of her family growing smaller, as one of the boys turns to wave, as she finally believes they are not going to stop and return, and as she watches her mother gradually become one with the two-wheeled cart in the distance.

She stands and waves, thinking what those in the cart might think if she took her eyes away from them at that moment, if she turned and moved away herself too soon, how those who are leaving might think she was too eager to have them gone, that if she took her eyes from them with such disrespect, she would not be able to find them when she looked back. Like a curse in a story, or a punishment, they might disappear, vanish forever. No. She has to stand and wait and wave until she can see nothing left on the road beyond her.

Her thoughts rumble around in the waiting time. Yesterday the crying she had done to keep the cat, then to be allowed to stay at home where she could feed it and keep it alive, the arguments she made of how good she would be, the way she would do the chores, how well she would watch the goats and tend the chickens, even brush Molly. She could do it! She could do it! In between sobs, she was sure and determined.

This child was the youngest one and only girl of what had once been a family of three boys, at that time living in a town near the coast, now just two boys, the one of them, the oldest, having been stolen by the English or pirates, slave traders, or Christians, no one knew, or no one would tell, especially tell her, who might then live in fear. No. No, in fact nothing would be done to hurt this child, this beautiful, most likely last, child. Not a hand or switch laid to, not even a dark word thrown toward. Someone might wonder what unfairness the two valuable, older boys of the family found in this partiality, but the boys seemed to go merrily along to indulge her, to let her climb all over them, pinch noses, pull ears and hair, take the very food from their mouths if she liked. The mother behaved the same as her sons, allowing the baby to be picked up and cuddled at the slightest discontent. Even as time passed, the woman continued to do most of the daily chores, including the ones that normally would have fallen to a girl of six or seven, and, with infinite patience and honey biscuits, bribed her to learn her lessons of housekeeping, animal tending and even the beginnings of more serious schooling, of seeing the alphabet by cutting slices of apple into letters.

As for her father, well, of course, any true story-teller would know, that, to have her way with her father, she had only to take his hands, pull him down to her level and look into his eyes with her own bluish-green ones, bright-set in skin like new cream, with cheeks and lips the color of the spring rose, with hair in curls of sunshine, with all of her showing the same glory as the goddesses of old were praised for, and, well, after that, then, sweetly, to say, "Oh, please, let me stay, Da!"

Many times he would anticipate her desires even before she knew them, would carve a doll, a dog, a bird and use cast off pieces of cloth and feathers to costume them. She and her Da traveled the woods together collecting plants and other living things. When necessary, they brought home injured creatures to heal. She and her Ma practiced the ancient cures, the herb leaves and roots, and though they were not always successful, they continued daily discoveries. Behind the sheds, her Ma stacked shelves full of dishes and nets. They could hardly count all the fish, grasshoppers, tree frogs, chipmunks, all the sorts of things they found stashed about the yard. The loud raven had been one who survived, despite its ruined eye, and one who would not return to the woods on any regular basis.

Yesterday morning the first thing their daughter pleaded for was the little orphaned cat, and the second was, in order to care for this same cat, the privilege of staying at home to watch the house and animals while the rest of the family went to market, some six or seven days travel away and back. After she had cried a good bit, she got help from her brothers to make her case. Since the boys were older, and the younger had been slated to stay with the house, they made a good case for themselves: they both needed to take a look at a town. They could hardly remember having been in a town, and they needed to know what one consisted of, to be ready to help, well, later, to help with the sales of farm goods, of the cheeses, the weavings, the carvings, and so on.

Finally her Ma and Da sigh a consent, and she is given exact instructions as to the care of the animals and of her own self along with the farm itself. Brigid nods and nods and listens. She already knows these instructions by heart, or so she says over and over again. And during the whole morning's preparations, if we could see inside, we would see that her mind is strongly fixed, but mostly fixed, on the little cat that she has hidden in the pond cave. Bog. She calls it Bog, which means soft. Is it hungry again? Crying so as to attract a fox? Afraid of the dark? Cold? The mists from the waterfall chill the air in the little cave even into late summer.

And so it's to the pond cave she runs that day as soon as the little family wagon is out of sight.

MOLLY

Behind sheep. Beside sheep. In front of. Hours of years of sitting or standing around sheep, around the edges of. But now, around goats, now it's more like standing everywhere at once. Sheep are easier. Goats are everywhere, especially beyond the edges. Outside of everything, over and under some things, up and down the rest.

My job, following that of my ancestors, is protection, the protection the animals of, that is, the keeping of the animals safe at all times. I am that proud to be coming from a long line of herd defenders. You might think, since I used to stand and sit around groups of ordinary sheep or, nowadays, as I say, they be goats instead, well, you might think that I'm one of the rather common dogs always to be seen with the herds along the road, this way and that, one of the herd moving varieties. They're the ones everybody thinks of, but those are the herd herding types. For one thing, those dogs want the animals to leave one spot and go to another. They'll bark and show teeth, in shifts, from the back and sides the herd of. My breed is entirely different from that. For one thing, we stay where we are commanded to, and we don't bark unless there is trouble. Historically speaking, we do no rounding up of or jostling of into pens. No nipping the heels of. Never that. What we do is, strictly, we stand, or sit, and we look off into the distance quite a bit, sniffing the air constantly, our ears up and clean. If and when we do have to rest or nap, when there's no other relief, we make sure to continue to sniff the air and keep our ears up and prepared at regular intervals. So, in a nutshell, one way or another, we proceed to warn of or to ward off what could be an endangerment to our charges, alert and discriminating, until we are sure or not of. The unclear danger is such that we will be trusted to figure out in time, even from the first notice, whether our concern is only a distraction or a true life or death possibility. But maybe never to know for sure. So many sounds and shadow movements are apt to be dangerous to our animals, if we can tell, yes, if not to the rest of us. Of course, the well-known predators, the like of wolves and such, without a doubt, but in reality any intruder who wanders into the vicinity can cause a panic, if not an actual death. And that would include the human unknowns, also ... unless directed to ignore. But, of course, anything can panic a goat and lead to a death. This is our job. We patrol, and as soon as we perceive the necessity, we bark, we fight and we kill. In more or less that same order. As so required.

And we lay down our lives if such is required of.

We will never leave our herd untended.

We will never lay teeth into a herd member or its family.

And so on. There's a plenty long list of "We wills" and "We won'ts" from old years ago, passed down by word of mouth.

That's right, but I won't go into which of such rules might have been forgotten on the way or which that should have been forgotten by now, outdated and useless, that we might still drag along with us, drag along like a rusted piece of chain, getting stuck in brambles, slowing us down. Oh, the past time might seem far behind and harmless to a point, but, in truth, we know 'tis fraught with memory bumps, stuff we can easily stumble over. Well, even things from yesterday's time can find us the next day, hit us straight out like the rocks of a winter-bored young boy.

I am thinking of situations that reoccur and are never to be finally resolved like what to do when the Master or Mistress does not return at the given time to bring the animals in from the fields. Stories of solutions to this problem abound. They do, and while my litter mates and I were still at the teat, our dam told us those and other stories of what had gone before, and we had to listen whether we would ever need them or not.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from WILDERNESS CHILD by Barbara Allan Hite. Copyright © 2013 Barbara Allan Hite. Excerpted by permission of Trafford Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Trafford
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1490720154
• ISBN 13: 9781490720159
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 212