IV
The walk to the village was long, lined with and occasionally barred by tangles of newly exposed roots and hoary boulders shouldering aside mantles of moss and lichen. Nora named them for the gnomes that were fabled to live just below the summit of the mountain – Nipingr, Hornbori, Finnr, Eitri, Brökk – and began to form the rudiments of a song, a walking tune, a roundelay of the gnomes, to pass the time. So engrossed was she in trying to find a way to rhyme the names of a one eyed thane and his fearsome son, that Nora nearly collided with a mournful roan cow whose near hind foot was caught between a knobby beech root and a burly warrior of stone. The cow lowed piteously, fixed a liquid eye on Nora, and struggled vainly against her captors.
“Hi! Hi! cow. Quit now!” chided Nora, and started in with the buzzing hum she used when she wanted to get her feisty but woolly-brained charges to attend to her. Once the cow had calmed a bit, Nora gave her an absent-minded pat and resting her head on the cow’s flank examined the trapped hoof. Cradling the hoof with both hands, Nora shoved against the cow’s flank with her head, and levered the hoof gingerly out from among the roots. In an explosion of flailing limbs, tossing horns, and swaying udder, the cow knocked Nora flat and floundered through the tangles until she had regained the path. Tossing her head and twisting her tail like a frolicsome calf, she bolted.
Nora sat a moment catching her breath and wondering how a roan cow should come to be wearing her kerchief tied about one horn, the kerchief she’d left to dry on a bush a twisty half mile up the path.
more to follow …
© Magdalen Jago 2008
