So first she swooped on brave MacDuff and picked him up and flew with him to the nest by the loch and dropped him down in front of Chick Number One. Then she flew back and swooped down on the skinny MacGregor sheep and dropped him down in front of Chick Number Two. And lastly she went back for the MacCallum sheep which was a very quiet sheep because the fat Scotsman was still in a faint.
After this the Boobrie felt very pleased with herself and waited for the chicks to start eating the sheep she had so kindly brought them.
But they didn’t. The chicks looked down with their goofy pop-eyes at the sheep. They bent their scraggy necks. They pecked at the sheep with their yellow beaks and turned them over with their webbed feet. And then they looked reproachfully at their mother.
“Not nice,” said Chick Number One.
“Smells nasty,” said Chick Number Two.
And Chick Number Three, who was the youngest, just said gloomily: “Legs.”
“Hairy,” explained the first chick to its mother. “Hairy legs.”
“And wooden,” said Chick Number Two, picking at the MacDuff sheep.
“Pink faces,” said the youngest chick, who was taking it hard. It turned over the top end of the MacCallum sheep with its beak. “Horrid,” it said, choking a little.
An anxious look spread over the mother Boobrie’s face. She peered down at the nest, turned over MacDuff and lifted the sheepskin off MacCallum who had come out of his faint and was making a lot of noises, none of which were “Baa!”
The chicks were right. These were not proper sheep. A mistake had been made. And when you have made a mistake there is only one thing to do: put it right.
So the mother Boobrie picked up MacDuff in his sheepskin, carried him high in her beak and dropped him with a splash into the loch.
Next she picked up the MacGregor sheep, carried him high and dropped him into the loch.
Then she went back for the MacCallum sheep and dropped him into the loch too.
And then she went flapping away on her enormous wings to go and look for some proper sheep because a mother’s work is never done.
As for the Scotsmen, they managed to swim ashore and to hobble home, one in his underpants, one in his vest to which a frozen frog had stuck, and one in nothing but a large leaf, and for the rest of the year they had chilblains in places it would not be polite to mention. MacDuff’s wooden leg was lost in the water and so were all the rest of their things, which serves them right for trying to trick a Boobrie bird. Boobries may be a little silly, but if you give them time they can always tell a Scotsman from a sheep.
The Brollachan Who Kept Mum
This is a story about a Brollachan.
You will now want to know what a Brollachan is and I will tell you. A Brollachan is a dark, splodgy, shapeless thing. It has two red eyes, an enormous mouth and absolutely nothing else whatsoever. A Brollachan has no bones and no stomach and no nose. It has no arms and no legs and no feet and no toes and therefore no toenails. And it has no hair. There is probably nothing with less hair than a Brollachan.
A Brollachan, then, is just a squashy and quite frightening blob which rolls about the place. But though it has no shape of its own a Brollachan can take on the shape of things that it meets. A Brollachan lying on a table, for example, might become table-shaped or a Brollachan looking at a round Dutch cheese could become cheese-shaped if it wished. And though it cannot really think it can hear a little through its bulges and it can certainly feel.
The Brollachan that this story is about lived in a house beside a swampy pond with his mother, who was a Fuath. Fuaths are evil and bad-tempered fairies who live near water, so they are often dripping wet. They look almost like ordinary ladies but if you look at them carefully you will find that there is something odd about them. Sometimes they are hollow from behind, and sometimes they have only one nostril.
The Brollachan’s mother had a long nose with a black wart on it, whiskery ears, one frightful long tooth and webbed feet. She was a worrier and she was a nagger. She wanted the Brollachan to be more scary and more shapeless than he was. She wanted him to lure people into the swamp by terrifying them with his vile red eyes. She wanted him to bubble disgustingly in the mud at the bottom of the pond and she wanted him to speak.
“Say ‘Mummy’,” she would yell at him. “Go on, say it. Say ‘Mummy’.”
But the Brollachan couldn’t say “Mummy”. He couldn’t say anything. His mouth was big but he used it for eating, not for talking. So he would roll away sadly and suck in a large turnip or a dead rat or a ham-bone and you would see them — the turnip or the rat or the ham-bone — lying inside him sort of glowing a little until they gradually became part of the Brollachan because that is what happens to the things that Brollachans eat.
All day long the Brollachan’s mother followed him about, flapping a wet cloth at the furniture and dripping water on him.
“I don’t know what will become of you, Brollachan. Why aren’t you outside drowning someone? Why are you sitting in that bucket? Why don’t you do something with your life? And why don’t you say ‘Mummy’?”
The Brollachan tried hard to please her. But however wide he opened his mouth, all that came out was a kind of gulp or a sort of glucking noise.
Sometimes the Brollachan’s mother invited her friends round; ladies like Black Annis who was a cannibal witch with a blue face or the Hag of the Dribble who was covered all over in grey slime, and then she would start.
“You don’t know how I worry about him,” she would say to these ladies, prodding the Brollachan with her webbed foot as he lay politely on the floor. “I can’t sleep for worrying about him. He’s so backward; he doesn’t even try to frighten people into fits. And he won’t say ‘Mummy’!”
“You should punish him,” said the cannibal witch, burping rudely because she always swallowed people whole and this gave her wind. “Make him kneel on dried peas — nothing more painful than that!”
Which was not only a cruel but a silly thing to say since the Brollachan did not have any knees.
One day the Brollachan and his mother went for a walk in the forest. The Brollachan liked the forest very much. It was not wet like the swamp where he lived and the leaves felt pleasantly tickly under his body. He stretched himself out more and more and became bush-shaped, then tree-shaped, and then just Brollachan-shaped but extra large. He felt happy and he felt free.
But the Brollachan’s mother was still talking. “Why don’t you learn the names of the trees, Brollachan?” she said. “Why don’t you at least try to give off an evil mist? There’s a Brollachan in the next valley who has a whole village gibbering with fright every time he shows himself. And he can say ‘Mummy’!”
After a while the Brollachan rolled away between the trees and he rolled and he rolled and he rolled until he was quite a way from his mother.
The Brollachan’s mother did not notice this at first because she was so busy talking. “It’s all right for you,” she said. “You can’t have a stomach ache from worrying because you haven’t got a stomach. You can’t have a headache from worrying because you haven’t got a head. You can’t — Brollachan, where are you? Brollachan, come here at once, I’m talking to you. How dare you hide from your mother! I can see your vile red eyes behind that tree. I know you’re just pretending to be that smelly toadstool. Now come to your mummy, Brollachan; come at once!”