Free A Scots Quair by Lewis Grassic Gibbon Page A

ran so fast after her meeting with the daftie she found herself down two stone in weight. The coarse creature chased her nearly in sight of the Mains and then scrabbled away into the rough ground beyond the turnpike. She’d been out fell early for her, Mistress Ellison, and was just holding along the road a bit walk to Fordoun when out of some bushes Andy jumped, his ramshackle face all swithering and his eyes all hot and wet. She thought at first he was hurted and then she saw he was trying to laugh, he tore at her frock and cried You come! She nearly fainted, but didn’t, her umbrella was in her hand, she broke it over the daftie’s head and then turned and ran, he went louping after her along the road, like a great monkey he leapt, crying terrible things to her. When sight of the Mains put an end to that chase he must have hung back in the hills for an hour or so and seen Mistress Munro, the futret, go sleeking down the paths to the Mains and Peesie’s Knapp and Blawearie, asking sharp as you like, as though she blamed every soul but herself, Have you seen that crea ture Andy!
    While she was up Blawearie way he must have made his road back across the hills, high up above the Cuddiestoun, till Upperhill came in sight. For later one of the ploughmen thought he’d seen the creature, shambling up against the skyline, picking a great bunch of sourocks and eating them. Then he got into the Upperhill wood and waited there, and it was through that wood at nine o’clock that Maggie Jean Gordon would hold her way to the station–close and thick larch wood with a path through it, where the light fell hardly at all and the cones crunched and rotted underfoot and sometimes a green barrier of whin crept up a wood ditch and looked out at you, and in the winter days the deer came down from the Grampians and sheltered there. But in the April weather there were no deer to fright Maggie Jean, even the daftie didn’t frighten her. He’d been waiting high in the wood before he took her, but maybe before that he ran alongside the path she was taking, keeping hidden from view of the lass, for she heard a little crackle rise now and then, she was to remember, and wondered that the squirrels were out so early. Gordon she was, none the better for that it might be, but a blithe little thing, thin body and bonny brown hair, straight to walk and straight to look, and you liked the laugh of her.
    So through the wood and right into the hands of the daftie she went, and when he lifted her in his hands she was frightened not even then, not even when he bore her far back into the wood, the broom-branches whipped their faces and the wet of the dew sprayed on them, coming into a little space, broom-surrounded, where the sun reached down a long finger into the dimness. She stood up and shook herself when he set her down, and told him she couldn’t play any longer, she must really hurry else she’d miss her train. But he paid no heed, crouching on one knee he turned his head this way and that, jerking round and about, listening and listening, so that Maggie Jean listened as well and heard the ploughmen cry to their horses and her mother at that moment calling the hens to feed— Tickie - ae! Tickie - ae! — Well, I must go , she told him and caught her bag in her hand and hadn’t moved a stepwhen he had her in his hands again; and after a minute or so, though she wasn’t frightened even then, she didn’t like him, telling him mother only was allowed to touch her there, not anyone else, and please she’d have to go. And she looked up at him, pushing him away, his mad, awful head, he began to purr like a great, wild cat, awful it must have been to see him and hear him. And God alone knows the next thing he’d have done but that then, for it was never such a morning before for that bright clearness, far away down and across the fields a man began to sing, distant but very clear, with a blithe