The Equinox (Volume I, Number I)

AMONGST THE MERMAIDS mother lying on her side with her head on the rock, and the tears were streaming from her eyes. So he stooped down and placed the little selkies near her, and the mother clasped them to her bosom with her megs and then she looked up into Mansie’s face, and all the happiness in the world was in that look: for on that day the selkie did everything but speak. Mansie was a young man then, and some time afterwards he married and settled on the west of Eday. One evening when he was fishing for sillocks on an ebb-rock, which could only be reached dry-shod at low water, the fish took unusually well, so that he stood and filled his basket. Indeed they took so well that he forgot all about the tide, and soon found him- self cut off from the land. Mansie shouted and shouted, but he was far from any house, and nobody heard him. The water rose until it reached his knees, and then his hips, and then his shoulders. He shouted until he was hoarse, and then gave up all hope of life. But just as the sea was encircling his neck and coming now and then in little ripples to his mouth, just as the sea had almost lifted him from his rock, he felt something grip him by the collar of his coat, and in a few moments he found himself in shallow water. Looking round, he saw a big seal swimming to the rock, where she dived, picked up his basket of fish, and then swam back to the land. He took the basket from her mouth and then said with all his heart, “‘Geud bless the selkie that deus no’ forget,” for it was the same seal which he had seen on Hackness forty years before. She was a very old seal now but Mansie would have known her motherly face amongst a thousand. In the folklore of the Hebrides, also, the seal occupies a 343