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HULDRA’S

TALE

MY MOTHER USED TO SIT ME ON HER LAP AND tell et even a word of the tale

It is said that once there was a heifer so lovely that her skin was as red and flowing gold, her eyes as polished wood, her swishing, flicking tail brighter than a whip of fire This coas not quite a cow, as all beautiful things are both more and less than their bodies In the folds of bark which enclose us all it is written that once she was a girl, nothing but a girl, with hair so long and shining that it caught the eye of Aukon, the Bull-Star, who put his white-hot hooves to her fore so that he could love her as he wished to

Perhaps this is true, perhaps it is not But as lovers sometimes do, once he had finished with her he wished to keep her all for his own, and the poor thing was left a heifer lowing at the sky—though she was the loveliest of all heifers who ever ate grass and drank water, it was not much consolation, I am sure

“Where will I go? What shall I do?” the heifer cried

And answers cah she knew it not, Aukai, the Heifer-Star, the Milk-Star with her black eyes, had seen what her brother had done, and set upon hie creatures If you have seen bulls battle over a hter than teainst a hillock and chewed from him, with her wide, flat teeth, the flesh whichweakly in the night, light leeching froust, Aukai spit her brother’s silver-dripping testicles away in a broad field, and thought no more of it It is said that ever afterpenance in place of her heavenly brother Perhaps this is true, perhaps not

Yet a Star is a strange thing, and its ways are stranger still In the place where the ruined flesh had fallen, a great alreen fruits And it careat tree in the height of its flowering And the tree, too, being only somewhat less than Aukon hi branches he dragged her, hoarsely braying, into his hollows and his crooks, and there stroked her skin with pale and papery twigs until, after many months, her wide flat teeth, not sharp, but sure, chewed their way free of him

Perhaps this is true, perhaps it is not Love rarely waits for per tree, who reached for her with long, snapping vines and needles—and in her running she gave birth to the first of us who are called huldra, who are girl and cow and tree juether

by sohter with horror—how far she had coirl she was! But ould love this terrible child if she did not? Already her udder swelled and stretched The wretched infant clutched at her olden hair, and the heifer sank to the earth to nurse As the years went by she dropped children like pinecones from her flesh, and occasionally birthed one in the usual way of cows—poor creature, who bled children everywhere she went, and each one reled and mottled as we all are

“My poor girls, my pitied boys,” she said e sat around her like a herd, flicking our tails at flies like buzzing sapphires, “I know in my heart that it will be for you as it was for me, and you will be loved always, yet only by those who do not share your shape, and care nothing for your say-so I have given you nothing but sorrow and a dun tail”

Perhaps this is true, perhaps it is not Perversions are often written over with elaborate stories, and who knohat strange nights’ revels ended in the huldra, who are tree and huether? I would not have liked to have been there

But the story is not wrong about us

I once had a golden ball, you see Arooman tell it better? My mother kne to tell a tale properly Perhaps she would havePerhaps she would not have shown her tail so soon Perhaps a good child would not adolden ball—it has never done a girl any good to have one, in all the history of the world But I arooman, and I loved my ball

My sister was not given one, nor olden ball is that by giving one over into eager hands, parents acknowledge a certain wickedness in their children thatother than flesh or sweets A hter she bathes in ives it to the scraggle-haired, mud-kneed child who plays by herself at the side of the old well It will keep her fro eyelashes, and if she or it or both together should tip over the side of the well, as has been known to happen from time to time, well, at least no daisy asted on her