The Hulder Girl's Cow-Bell

📜 The whole story (transcript)

Now this last one — this one is a gentle fright. Almost a friendly fright. From the high summer pastures of Sweden, where the cows go up the mountain in June and come down again, fatter and wiser, in September. Up there among the wildflowers lives a Hulder-girl. She looks exactly like a mortal shepherdess — braided hair, red skirt, apron full of bilberries — but if you catch her from behind, you will see she has the tail of a small brown cow, tucked in beneath her petticoat. She is not wicked. She is only lonely. Terribly, terribly lonely, up there with the goats and the wind. One summer, a boy named Sven was sent up the mountain to fetch his family's cows. He found them, all seven, standing in a neat little half-circle around a girl he did not know, who was singing to them. And the cows — I swear this on my last silver tooth — were singing back. In their fashion. A low, mooing hum, three-part harmony, quite beautiful. The Hulder-girl saw Sven and smiled. 'Will you sit with me?' she asked. 'Only for one small song?' Sven remembered his own mother's warning — that if you sat with a Hulder for one song, you would rise and find a hundred years had passed, and everyone you loved had turned to dust and dandelions. So he said, 'I would be honoured, miss, but I have only enough time for half a song. May we sing half?' The Hulder laughed. Oh, such a laugh! Like a brook running over spoons. 'Half a song it is, then, careful boy.' And they sang half — a little Swedish lullaby about a bear who could not find his mittens — and then Sven stood up, and bowed, and led his seven cows down the mountain. But in his pocket, when he got home, he found a tiny brass cow-bell. Warm as if just held. And whenever he rang it — even years and years later, when he was a grandfather himself, telling this very story — a small voice, far away up the mountain, would sing back exactly half of a lullaby about a bear. And Sven would smile, and pour himself a little something, and go to sleep quite content. So you see, my darling: even the loneliest, oldest, strangest things in the world are, most of the time, only asking for a little company. And it is perfectly alright to give them half a song. Just — never, ever the whole one.