Molly Whuppie 3

Father and daughters worked hard together all day. He selected saplings to fell, ash mainly, and then cut the fallen wood into logs. The girls trimmed and corded the brushwood into bundles for carrying and stacked them tightly to keep them as dry as possible. Near the end of the afternoon, to hold back the gathering cold for a while, their father made a fire and sat them around it under cover of a tarpaulin. In their damp clothes, the girls huddled close to rub their aching, white fingers back to life. They whispered together and listened to the sounds of the forest in the half-light, and laid their heads on one another’s arms in the fire’s delicious warmth as new snow began to drift out of the darkening clouds. 

And all the while their father worked on. The sound of his axe, biting wood, echoed among the trees. Thwack! Thwack! and always, it seemed, a little farther away. By the time it had faded quite out of earshot, the girls were already asleep, tricked by the stuffy warmth of their smoky den.

For a time the fire kept the night away, but outside the slowly shrinking ring of brightness and heat, the darkness edged closer and eased the sisters deeper into sleep . As they will, searching for the last scraps of wood, the flames eventually lost their strength and, long before the morning, the fire had died. But the snow continued to fall, covering the sleeping bundles that were Molly and her sisters and softly wiping away all trace of paths and tracks and signs.   

Not all of the children asleep under the clouds that night shared such a cold bed as Molly and her sisters. An ogre lived in the forest, with his wife and his own three daughters, in a wooden mansion on a great rock in a loop of the river, where the forest was deepest. Now, although they are monsters, ogres are not creatures that are born stupid, like trolls or giants. Just like people, some ogres are cunning and clever, some rough and dangerous and others are good and helpful. This ogre was both cunning and dangerous and not good or helpful at all, but his daughters were all his treasure and his delight, and they knew it well. Because of this, and because of his own weakness, they ruled their father, asking him for all sorts of treats and gifts, and this night it was gold that they asked for.

“ Pa, will you bring a gold necklace for each of us?” the youngest asked.

“Yes, do, Pa” said the middle daughter, and clapped her hands like shovels.

“You know how we love gold, and how happy it will make us,” finished the eldest, and winked at her sisters.

The ogre smiled a broad smile and kissed each of his daughters wetly on her greasy cheek.

“ Go up to bed now Sowthistle, Henbit and Marestail, my darlings, and tomorrow I’ll bring back treasure enough for you all,” he said.

The ogre's wife, busy in the kitchen, snarled as she listened to him, and hacked a chop from the spine of a long-dead lost traveller.

“Treasure indeed!  Your time's better spent hunting, mooncalf. The meat-safe’s near empty and even this one smells like it’s past its best.”