The Hob

 This story was passed down by my father. At the time a great deal of Scottish folklore and heroism was not common knowledge to the outside world, for example when my great-grandmother saw uniformed men being enlisted for war in our town she thought they were “reivers”, land pirates.

In 1940 when Da was a very young lad he came into the house one day to see a short little hob of a man, just three feet tall with a long white beard, sitting on the edge of the supper table conversing with his father. And to his astonishment this little man was dressed exactly as a hob would be, with a little pointed cap that was mustard yellow like a bishop’s miter, a shirt and vest that sewed up the middle like a shoe, and little pointed kelly-colored shoes. He looked exactly like a garden gnome except at the time nobody had those; it was something people didn’t speak about.

The little man had a chubby face with a pointed nose and cheeks and was smoking a clay pipe. As soon as my father saw him the man winked and said the boy’d been stealing apples, something no one could possibly know. The little man then told him he was over one hundred years old. My father was beside himself.

Now a few months later when Da was possibly a few grains smarter he happened to see a newspaper and on the front page was the same little man being arrested for drunkenness. This must have been quite astonishing for him because he went hysterical to his father saying his friend the hob had been arrested, but that is how he got the real story and how it came to be passed on to me.

Of course the reasonable explanation is a man who happens to be a dwarf makes his living at it, dressing up just as certain men are asked to portray Father Christmas. (I’m told this one auditioned for a certain film in 1939 but was too old.) He was also good at talking in rhyme and in his retirement just kept wearing the same garb whenever it pleased him, coming out so seldom and acting so strangely that children and perhaps some adults who saw him talking to sheep or walking the goat paths with a stick thought whatever they wished. But that isn’t to say I have any idea who Ben McDhui was. Even his name McDhui is fictitious, like the mountain. If my grandfather knew him from the festivals he might have already been the town dwarf before cinema existed, in fact as I write this he might have been the inspiration for the folk tales themselves.

So in this same fashion Ben “inherited” a little cottage on an estate where he lived as a garden hermit. It had a front door no higher than a desk, and everything about it was small which people don’t realize was common for hunting cabins back in the day. The landowner was already deceased in my father’s time and the estate overgrown so one could believe he was always there (although it’s more likely he earned it by being short), an answer lost to the sands of time. And so he settled there to enjoy a hob-ish lifestyle, making clay pipes and other miniature things for himself, communed with nature and grew fat.

One night Ben was snoring in his little bed which fit below the window when he awoke with a start to hear, as strange as this sounds, a chorus of high-pitched raspy voices walking and muttering at ground level in single file down the hillside. The language wasn’t Scots but was like Scots. The one in front would chant something and then three or four others repeat it with a hock-spit in the middle of the song. They spoke so rapidly it was like a wax record playing at twice speed; three or four verses had already passed in the few moments since he opened his eye, and were fading into the distance.

Ben bolted upright and went to the cottage door, flinging it open. The black wheatfields outside were utterly silent. He knew the hush of a landscape that has just gone quiet with deer holding their breath, but this was the silence of a woodland painting. A blue mist in the distance gave him a clear view of the hills as he walked to the edge of the field and peered over it. The wheat only came up to his chin, if he was standing out there and wanted to disappear he would have to lie down on his stomach and play dead.

He gave the whistle of the capercaille which is a sign between hunters and then said “As y’were, gents!”, his tinny voice carrying on the wind. He waited for something to breathe or blink for several minutes. Eventually he turned and went back inside, stopping and glancing back to say “Y’know I already saw ye, don’tcha?” with an indifferent wink and a grin and went back to bed.

In the morning it was a different story.

“They were hobs!” he exclaimed in the town pub to anyone who would listen. “Honest-to-God hobs! I wonder where they go?”

No one was interested or understood what he was saying, the town hob dressed in regular clothes talking about other hobs first thing in the morning. I only know what he told my father and other townsfolk, that there must be an undisclosed mine no bigger than a badger hole within walking distance which made them sound like the Seven Dwarves. I don’t know what I would have said to this, but he was no longer interested in being a dwarf but a man. He said nothing about having any kinship or knowledge of them from his own family, his eyes just sparkled like two precious stones.

He must have spent what little money he had because he spent the day tromping around his own domain in knee-boots with a hunting rifle. If that’s not ridiculous enough that evening he put out a little three-legged stool at the edge of the field in front of the cottage between two silverthorn bushes (which according to legend guard their places), which he must have dug up himself and carried to his great pricklage. On it he placed a bowl of sweetened porridge, a bowl of cooked rice mixed with lard, a tiny loaf of bread and a cup of whiskey from which he’d already taken a sip. Then at dusk he lay down on the little bench beside his front door and waited.

Halfway into the night a midge stung his belly and he opened a glazed eye to see what he described as four little black points sticking up out of the wheat as close together as if a man had put down an armful of them. The food and drink were untouched, but as he laboriously straightened himself upright he perceived a faint snickering.

“Well go’on lads. To it!” he lit his pipe and the coals lit his wary face. “If ye’re a-waitin’ on some tall folks to give ye better, the leavins won’t be… Hey come back, chums!”

While he was speaking the four little points disappeared down the wheatfield in single file. Ben stumbled after them, knocking the meager feast skyward and porridge splashed in his face with an “Argh!” as he struggled to pull his britches back up, looking down to see his shoes had been tied together and waking the entire forest.

There was nothing on two legs he knew of that could walk through a wheatfield without parting the stalks, unless they were stepping between them. Now the reason peasant cottages are built on hillsides (especially ones just for show) is for the view and for places to view it, provided by the open spaces used for farming and the deep wooded burns that separate them. The owner has a path into town they use every day, they don’t walk straight down into the gully and that is exactly what Ben did, marching down the steep slope after them in the direction of the dark wooded hollow that surrounded a plunging brook named simply The Burn. His short legs moved faster to catch up with them until he could no longer stop himself, and they say in town his beard twined in half to catch himself but it’s more likely he tumbled head-over-heels, landing squarely on his nose and was knocked out.

When he awoke again the stars were gone and he was surrounded by glowworm beetles, the air was full of them and he was laying on a wooded path that was unfamiliar to him. There was faint music like the sound of the reed flute but even less substantial like a flute made from a dandelion stem, and the sound was sweeter. He got up and dusted himself off. Down deep in the hollow there was a light (as strange as it sounds) shaped like the stained glass windows of a church no bigger than a haystack.

Ben followed the path which wasn’t any path he knew down to the light source he had never once glimpsed from his own place. A line of shadowy people (if indeed they were people) were passing silently like monks through a tiny building that stood on a curve of the stream, but he did not speak to them nor did they notice him. It was as if the entire population of the town was visiting it in their sleep.

The place was exquisitely mortared out of a thousand little blocks that looked like books; the long ones and shorts ones even alternated at the corners like logs stacked by hand, and that was all he noticed before the gleaming interior beckoned him.

The inside, as best as he could describe it, was a museum-like show of wealth but without exhibits, writing or anything that showed the hand of men, just a room whose walls and central pillar were made entirely of the spines of jeweled books (or perhaps they weren’t books) stacked by the hundreds with no grout, solder, nails or empty space between the settings. He recognized only a few of the gemstones and precious metal as local materials. It was more than a lifetime’s work of an obsessed miner without any care for money or who sees it.

Ben searched his nightclothes for something to pry out a stone with. While reaching up for loose ones his hand found a gold necklace which he draped around his neck, and he was handed a golden cup which he raised to his lips greedily. At that moment everything around him became as black as pitch.

Ben gagged on a mouthful of earthworms and stumbled forward, a string of dung beetles crawling all over him. He danced wildly to be rid of them and fell headlong off of a rock slab into the rushing burn.

The current flushed him down into darkness, rolling him over and over like a ball of dough as his white belly came out for any hob to see. “IEEEEEEEE!!!!” he shouted as he was swept over a small waterfall, some black branches catching him by the shirt and pulling it up over his head as his short legs dangled helplessly under him. Then the branch broke and he plunged down into a little whirlpool that spun him around and sent him further downstream.

In the morning Ben was discovered by some schoolchildren floating on his back wearing only his skivvies in a little pool of green water beside a footbridge that led straight into town. They had stopped to poke at him on their way to class, then he awoke with a start and the oldest one helped him pull himself out, his nose bloodied.

The littlest one asked if he was going to grant them some wishes for catching him.

“FECK YE!!!!” Ben responded, looking down at himself to see his beard had been snipped off with a pair of scissors. “AARRGGGH!!!!!”