Peigeen slipped out toward the field, peering along the ditch to see what had grown in the night. If there were a dandelion newly up it would go into the pot, with grasses or dock leaves or the roots of fern. Bog cress came up quick and she could add that. More when spring comes, she thought, it’ll grow, greening the hills, weeds and wildflowers, nettles, pennywort in the walls. Blossoms would be back, then berries. But maybe not the animals.

There had been hares in the rushes, when the first crop failed. And frogs and foxes. Stoats. And badgers near the wet bog, where Conal would wait at twilight by the mouth of the burrow, with a stick and a stone edge sharp as a hatchet. The wild prey was slick and fast, but the pot got the odd bit of meat. Not all the time, but some.

There’d been enough then for neighbors.

Before. Before the foxes ate the frogs and wild dogs ate the foxes and the trapping men ate every running thing left in the countryside.

Before that. Before Pat-O had lodged in the ditch. Before that, even. Before Da fell through the roof and never got up, back when he smoldered through the winters, through the rambling months after the late crop, him sitting there, all fume and thunder and late-night fiddle, propped upright in the corner atop his tipping stool, full of stories he mostly didn’t tell. 

At every wedding and wake and horse fair, everywhere he went to fiddle, Da heard a new tale, or an old one told anew, and when he got filled up, he’d come home late and on a good night he’d let the story out. Once. Then he’d let it go, to leave room for a new one, he said. Tell it again, his children clamored, but Da was not one to repeat himself. Tell it yourself, he told them. And Peigeen listened closely so she could. She’d watch him through the peaty haze as a story surged like the seventh wave, rising in his eyes from far away, coming in slow and pause-pitted, like water wheeling round a reed-tangle, finding its way to his lips. 

So, he said, and they all sat still so as not to scare the words away. So, he said, and it started. Every story started and ended the same. So….    

His stories were strange and sad and solitary, told in a quiet voice, without a smile to see. But sometimes, just as he wound toward the ending, Peigeen could hear a bit of a grin and she would smile along with him then, at all the wondrous things he told – giant boars rampaging, cattle warring, great swarms of black bees blocking out the sun. But she was most drawn to his closer creatures, not magical so much, but peculiar, things he saw on his way to somewhere, like Moriarty’s donkey up the rise a piece off the road to the smithy, the grey-tailed asal with the toppled crest, orphaned at birth and raised by sheep. Its legs had stopped growing a bit past sheep height, and it never left the pasture, always on guard, chasing the foxes from the flock.  Da reserved judgement about the oddness of the asal but showed no such restraint about Moriarty himself who was the landlord’s man. He sits up there in a stone house, said Da, but what kind of man feeds a donkey that won’t drag a plough or haul a cart or set a blessed hoof on the road? Da spat onto the coals. That’s an ass, he said, that lives like a master. So…

Next day, Peigeen set out first thing, climbing the hill with Pat-O in hand to search for Moriarty’s asal, take a peek at the thing, see if it was real.  Small still then, the both of them, Pat-O’s legs barely making the climb, Peigeen pulled her along by the arm, c’mon c’mon, past the reed stream and the road to the smithy, through a broad field of grass and clover with a stunted beech tree at the center. 

And there it was.

It looked like a donkey alright, but it was short-legged and crooked-headed, with a spray of white wool at the neck. Its bray quavered bleat-like at the low-end, and it did a dog’s work, pacing the edge of the pasture and ducking in among the sheep, herding them back, forth, keeping busy, then lying down among them.

And even after Da died and the land mouldered and the hunger spread, and after Moriarty’s sheep began to disappear in the night, carried off one by one until he sold off the rest to pay the rent, and even after the last of the sheep was gone, even then, the donkey would not leave the pasture.  It stayed on alone, its hooves curling in the mud.  Peigeen had snuck out at night then, climbed up to Moriarty’s land, Conal’s knife wrapped in her skirt, and she’d bled the dwarfish animal in its pasture, patting and soothing and nicking the neck a bit below the tipping crest, near a vein, tapping, just a touch, just enough to color the pot. Then she’d staunched the wound with a bit of cobweb and left the donkey there beneath the stunted beech, snuffling among the stones, with blood enough for another night. 

Then, sometime on into winter, as she approached the field just past sundown, she’d seen a small band of men, four at most, outlined against the scant-leafed halo of the low-slung beech. They were circling the donkey. The sky held little light, night falling quick that time of year, and it was silent in the field, in the county, in the whole world over it seemed.  There’d been snow late midday and even in the near-dark the ground had a faint sheen. The men were tall as cornstalks in blowy rags, their arms tight to their sides.  Shapes in the dark, no faces. Atop one rose a tall hat, from another hung a sack. Peigeen had seen their like before. Passers-through, the widows called them.  Strangers. And Peigeen backed away, hunkered at the field edge, still as a stone in the fence, while the pale stars quivered and the moon rose, thin as a knife-slice. 

She watched as the men moved slowly, eyeing the beast, holding their distance at first, then closing in, around, circling like a snare loop, their shadows all black against the winter sky – man, man, donkey, man – the man-shapes moving, the donkey-shape fixed. Then the surrounding shapes merged into a single shadow from which three arms raised, in each a stave, no, a stick, no. A spade. Three. And in the fourth arm, a sickle.

The arms fell, one, two, three, and then came the sound.

Peigeen felt the inhale, high-pitched through the cold, the long heeeeee shuddering down into the waters underground and back up through the pasture stones and haaawing out through her own throat.  Her hand flew to her mouth to muzzle, as she saw the shadows separate, then merge again as the three spades hacked into the braying throat. She watched as the shadow-spades rose and fell, digger-end slashing once and again at the eelish voice until the curve of sickle blade descended, quick-severing the brassing wheeze, and all sound stopped. 

Back when there were animals around.

In the abrupt silence, the men froze for a moment. Then their shadows separated as they stepped apart, stooped, and between them grabbed the hind legs and tail and began the dragging. The animal was smallish to begin, gaunt with the hunger and lighter still with the blood-letting, but the dragging was heavy work for the weakened men. They dragged, stopped, dragged more, shifting the reaping tools shoulder to shoulder as they rough-hauled the beast, jarring it across the pasture until it caught on the root-rise beneath the stunted beech, and came to a sudden stop, stuck, it seemed. The men tugged at it, working at the hoof of the left hind leg, wedged in the cleft of an ancient rock. One by one, the men tried to loose it, twisting at the leg, hauling at the torso, this way, that, but the field held tight to the asal and would not let it go. Then one of the men, less patient than the others, or more attuned to the stones, hoisted his spade and, unh, brought it down, hammered the blade edge hard against the narrow stem above the fetlock, splintering the bone. The men tugged again, but the land was unmoved, and the beast was stretched to a new length by the pulling: its one hoof stone-shackled, its white neck yawning red from ear to gullet, its eye stunned wide in the light of the thin moon.  There’d not been much flesh left to bind the donkey together in life, and there was now less still to bind the carcass. The one man hunched above the fracture, booting a spade through the spongy bog of donkey hide and sinew and bone-shatter, the man-foot striking down on the metal rim, unh, pedaling the shovelhead, unh, unh, severing the lower leg from the haunch. The sickle man hooked and sliced, and the remaining men heaved again, stumbling backward as the leg detached. Then they re-arrayed around the now three-and-a-half-legged carcass and resumed the dragging, their boots slipping on the gore-slick stones, and they left the riven limb behind to feed the field. 

Peigeen waited, silent, as the shadowed men, all grunts and whispers, lugged the asal to the edge of the pasture and on, beyond. She closed her eyes. Spots of light pulsed. Thief, thief, thief, thief. The word beat inside her head.  She held herself still as the sound of them receded in the distance – the voices, the struggle, the grating of the carcass across the land – faint now, then fainter, then gone.

It was not the death that offended, but the waste. The donkey’s dark blood would not grow back in the night, and would not be there next week, and would never heat the pot again. She knew the pirated donkey was not hers, but neither was it theirs. In truth, the donkey belonged less to her than to Moriarty and less to Moriarty than to the field itself, to the rocks and puddles and boggy stretches in between where there was sometimes green for grazing. 

Peigeen stood, stamped to wake her foot, and walked into the field. It would never have occurred to her to remove the donkey from its land. But a leg was not a donkey, and a mangled half-hock was not even a leg. The hoof might cling, rooted to the field, but the beast above had already been harvested. What remained was a narrow stalk lying unattached, fodder now, the blood pooling between the stones, the bone and gristle of no use to the donkey, or the farmer, or the field. Peigeen had not killed the donkey, and she did not steal outright. But neither did she squander. Like a rook, she scavenged. She took what she found, and she made use.

Peigeen whispered a defiant Ave, twisted the hoof back and forth, unhinging it from the field stones, lifting it into the cradle of her skirt, urging up soothing sounds from her bray-rasped throat to comfort as she passed, head-bowed, beneath the lean-leafed branches of Moriarty’s beech tree, climbing back down the hill in the direction of home. She walked lightly at first, so as not to disturb. Then she ran.

A dun-faced dog, tail matted, scrambled over the fence stones and crossed into the pasture, sniffing, licking up the fresh blood soaking the mud. Peigeen knew all the dogs in the district, but she had never seen this one before. Dogs were mostly gone by now. This was a stranger, angular and weak to look at.

She turned, ran faster. The dog followed, tracking the blood trailing behind her. Get away! Get out! Go! Go! Peigeen kept her voice low, kicking out her hard bare feet when the dog got near.

Gitta, gitta, gitta!  she hissed. The dog raised its bloody muzzle, growling.  It snapped at Peigeen, then growled again, charging, bolder than it looked.  Peigeen pulled the half-hock upward, hefted it onto a hip. The dog stranger sped around in front of her, lunging at the meat.  It caught a piece of the severed end in its mouth and tore at it. Peigeen braced herself, holding tight to the hoof end, blood running down the front of her and, half-tripping, she stooped, picked up a stone big as her hand and pounded it onto the dog’s mud-caked snout. The dog yelped, backed away, lunged again, latching back to the bone. Rock in fist, Peigeen hit again, near to the ear this time, and the dog pulled away, teeth tight into the hide, head tearing side to side then loose, scudding off, a streamer of sinew and gore clenched in its jaws, and Peigeen ran down to the edge of the hilly pasture and home, hugging the mangled leg to her chest.

When she got back to the hut, Peigeen shut the door behind her and licked the sticky blood from her hands, most of it the donkey’s, some of it the dog’s, some of it her own from where the dog had bit her, back near the crook of her carrying arm. 

The fractured remnant of Moriarty’s donkey, mid-cannon to hoof, had gone into the pot.

Back when there were animals around.

This is the story Peigeen told Conal, and he knew there were pieces of truth in it, blood and bone and soup and a donkey gone missing from Moriarty’s field. He knew there were men from outside the village who stole, some who were killed for it even, and he was sure there were starving dogs before there weren’t. It happened, he thought, must’ve done. It was a story that Mamaí never told, that Pat-O never heard down under the headstones in the churchyard, that Nell had no need for, bones with Da’s bones, deep beneath the flowering whitethorn, that Onóra’s tiny fingers worried into her crochet hook at the lacemakers up in Sligo town. It crossed the ocean westward, three times, with variations:  a bigger donkey, a smaller one, more strangers, a full moon, a fox instead of a dog.

And it was the story that Conal told Shealagh, years later, on the Pacific shore, when she asked him about the hunger.