Nora of the Mountain*
I
The day was dark; the sun an hour or so behind Nora’s rising.
Crumbs of fire nestling among the cinders burst into life as she threw a handful of kindling on them. A log or two of seasoned hickory wood followed. She slipped the kettle onto it’s hook with practiced ease. Tucking her skirts into her belt, and throwing a fleece about her shoulders, she thrust her feet into her boots, and taking the pail from the nail by the door lifted the latch to winter.
Stillness and then a crunching step, she let the latch click back into place. Little clouds of her breath hung in the air, baby brothers to the setting moon’s entourage. They crystallized and fell, tiny snowstorms at her feet. Crunch, puff, crunch, tinkle, crunch, puff, crunch, tinkle, she made her way to the goat shed.
They heard her coming, bleating softly to one another in anticipation. Another latch lifted let her back into the musty autumn of sheep and goat and hay and nut brown horns and leaf brown fleece. She pushed against their warm bodies, petted their black up-turned faces, and threw down some hay, making her way to the back of the shed where Berli would have bedded down with her kid.
Berli rose in greeting still chewing her cud, her kid drowsing at her feet. Nora offered her a dried apple from her pocket which was politely mouthed and then gleefully crunched and swallowed. Positioning the pail and resting her head against Berli’s flank, Nora patted Berli in thanks as the first streams of milk tinged against the bottom of the pail.
Berli drowsed, her kid drowsed, and Nora drowsed to the ting and bleat and munch of morning milking in the goatshed, while there in the straw, a winking eye peeped shyly up at her, first one, then two, and then a third. Nora blinked herself, stopped her milking, and rubbed her eyes in disbelief. “Oh, my!” she whispered and reached out her hand.
more to follow …
© Magdalen Jago 2008
*”Nora of the Mountain” is a fairy tale in 10 parts.
