Story 16

— The Cat-sìth of Glen Orchy —

c. 1897

M

ist clung to the glen like a funeral shroud. Between the black waters of Loch Awe and the endless peat-dark expanse of Rannoch Moor, the air tasted of wet stone and dying heather. In the winter of 1897 the cold came early and stayed late, frosting the birch twigs into brittle lace and silencing the burn until it whispered beneath ice.

Widow MacNab’s croft stood at the glen’s head, a low whitewashed shape half-swallowed by rowans whose red berries looked like drops of blood against the snow. She had died quietly one frost-bitten morning while scattering grain for hens that no longer came. Her heart simply stopped; the birds fluttered away, leaving only the echo of their wings.

Neighbours gathered that night for the wake, drawn by duty and the old fear that a soul left unwatched might wander and be lost. They filed in under a sky pricked with stars sharp as pins. Inside, the single room smelled of peat smoke, wax, and the faint sweet rot of rowan. A fire burned low in the hearth, throwing long shadows across the lime-washed walls. Candles stood at the four corners of the deal table where the widow lay, their flames trembling as though the room itself breathed unevenly.

A clean linen sheet covered her to the chin; her face, waxen and calm, seemed younger in death than in the last years of life. Between her folded hands someone had tied a sprig of rowan with red thread — protection against things that walked after dark. Four saucers of milk stood at the table’s corners, their surfaces still and silver in the candle-glow. No one spoke of why the milk was there. It was simply done, the way the old people had always done it.

The watchers sat on the settle and three-legged stools: old Donald with his clay pipe unlit, Iain the shepherd cradling his crook like a talisman, Miss Fraser the schoolmistress clutching a damp handkerchief, and a handful of others whose faces the firelight turned to bronze masks. The whisky bottle passed hand to hand; the shortbread

crumbled untouched on the plate. Around midnight the wind fell silent. The world outside seemed to hold its breath.


The collie lying by Iain’s boots lifted its head, ears pricked, then lowered it with a soft whine. A moment later they heard it: pad… pad… pad… deliberate footfalls on the frozen path, soft as snowfall yet unmistakable. No crunch of boots, no scrape of claws — only the measured tread of something that knew exactly where it was going.

The door was latched. Yet it eased open an inch, then two, moved by no hand. Cold air poured in, carrying the scent of wet moss and something older, wilder — fox musk mingled with ozone, as though lightning had struck far off in the hills. A shape flowed across the threshold: blacker than the night outside, large as a full-grown dog yet low and sinuous. Its coat drank the candlelight; no gleam of fur, only a velvet void. It moved with liquid certainty, tail held straight and high like a banner of darkness. When it turned its head, two great eyes burned pale cream, luminous as new moons, unblinking.

The cat-sìth. It ignored the living. It padded straight to the table, rose on hind legs until its forepaws rested lightly on the sheet, and regarded the dead woman’s face. The watchers froze. Miss Fraser’s breath caught in a tiny sob. Iain’s knuckles whitened on his crook. Donald’s pipe slipped from his fingers and clattered to the flags; no one moved to retrieve it.

The creature lowered its head and sniffed once at the rowan sprig. Then it began to circle — sunwise, slow and deliberate. Once around the table. Twice. Three times. At each corner it paused, bent, and lapped at the milk with a pink tongue that seemed too delicate for so large a beast. Not a drop spilled; the saucers were left empty and gleaming.

When the third circuit was complete, the cat-sìth sat beside the widow’s head, wrapped its thick tail around its paws, and opened its mouth. The sound that came was not a yowl, not a purr. It was a keening — low and liquid, rising and falling like bagpipes played beneath deep water. No words, yet every listener understood. The lament carried the widow’s life entire: the girl who twirled at Lammas fires until her skirts flared like flame; the young wife standing on the shore watching her man’s boat vanish into haar that never lifted again; the old woman who left oatcakes on the doorstep for tinkers and never asked their names.

It sang her small cruelties — sharp words to a careless child — and her larger mercies — the nights she sat up with fevered neighbours when no one else would. It sang

her death: a quiet closing, like a book finished at the last page. The notes wrapped the room in sorrow and strange comfort. The candles burned straighter. The fire steadied. Even the collie’s hackles settled.


When the final note faded into silence, the cat-sìth bent forward and touched its nose to the widow’s brow. A faint shimmer passed between them — heatless light, like moonlight on frost. Then the great black creature turned, flowed across the flags, and slipped out through the door that had never truly opened. It closed behind with a soft, final click.

For a long minute no one spoke. The candles guttered once. Outside, the wind remembered itself and began to moan through the rowans.

Iain broke the silence. “That was no stray.” Donald nodded, voice rough. “Cat-sìth. Come to sing her over.” Miss Fraser wiped her eyes. “It knew her. Every step. I heard my own name — when I used to read to her after her sight failed. It remembered.”

They looked at the saucers. All empty, licked to mirror brightness.

The wake held until cock-crow. When the grey light seeped under the door they lifted the sheet to prepare her. The rowan sprig was gone. In its place lay a single black hair, fine as spider silk, curled into a perfect ring. They buried her three days later in the kirkyard above the loch, the black hair wrapped in linen and laid on her breast.

After that winter, every wake in Glen Orchy kept four saucers of milk. Even those who had laughed at “fairy nonsense” set them out without comment. The cat-sìth never returned in plain sight, but on the stillest nights — when snow muffled the world and the burn lay frozen under glass — those keeping watch sometimes heard it: a distant keening among the birches, too far to locate, too near to dismiss. A single low note that raised the fine hairs on every neck.

And in spring, when the rowans opened their white flowers like small promises, the oldest women would murmur that the cat-sìth had not come to steal, but to guard. A life quietly well-lived earned a quiet crossing. The dark things stayed back, listening to a song they could not answer.

Years later, Iain’s granddaughter asked why the milk was always left. He told her the story by the fire, voice low against the wind outside. “The cat-sìth does not sing for every soul,” he said. “Only for those whose lives were worth remembering. And when it sings, even the shadows listen.” She nodded, solemn, and carried an extra saucer to the

doorstep that night. Beyond the window, the rowans stirred. Somewhere in the dark, something purred once — soft, satisfied, eternal — then let the silence swallow it whole.