Marianne lies in bed awake. She can’t get to sleep. She hears the wind howling. It sweeps over the farm like the Wild Hunt. Grandma’s often told her stories about the Wild Hunt and the Trud, an evil spirit in female form. She always tells them on the long, dark, frosty nights between Christmas and New Year.

“The Wild Hunt races on before the wind, fast as the storm clouds or even faster. The huntsmen are mounted on horses as black as the Devil,” Grandma had told her. “Wrapped in black cloaks. Hoods drawn right down over their faces. Eyes glowing red, they race on. If anyone’s rash enough to go out and about on such a night, the Wild Hunt will pick him up. At the gallop,” said Grandma. “Just like that—got ’im!”

And she made a snatching movement with her hand, as if seizing something to extinguish it.

“Got ’im! And they take the poor fellow high up in the air and sweep him away with them. Up, up, and away to the clouds, they sweep him right up into the sky. He has to go with the stormy wind. The hunt never lets him go again, the hunt howls and laughs with scorn. Ho, ho, ho,” laughed Grandma in a deep voice.

Marianne could almost see the Wild Hunt picking a man up and laughing as it carried him away.

“And what happens then, Grandma?” Marianne asked. “Doesn’t he ever come down again?”

“Oh yes, oh yes,” replied Grandma. “Sometimes he comes down again, sometimes not. The Wild Hunt drags the poor devil on with it as long as it likes. Sometimes it puts him down again quite gently once it’s had its fun. Sometimes. But mostly the poor man’s found somewhere the next morning with all his bones broken. His whole body all scratched and bruised, smashed to pieces. Many a man’s never been seen again. The Wild Hunt has taken him straight to the Devil.”

Marianne keeps thinking about the story of the Wild Hunt. She’d never leave the house in a storm like this. The Wild Hunt isn’t going to get her. Not likely!

She lies awake for a long time. How long she doesn’t know. Her little brother sleeps in the same room. The beds are arranged so that they lie almost side by side. She in her bed; he in his small cot.

She hears his calm, regular breathing, they’re lying so close. He breathes in and out. Sometimes, when she can’t sleep, she listens to that sound in the night, tries to match her own breathing to his, breathes in when he breathes in, breathes out when he breathes out.

That sometimes helps, and then she gets tired, too, and falls asleep herself. But it doesn’t work tonight. She’s lying there awake.

Should she leave her bed? Grandpa will be terribly cross again. He doesn’t like it when she gets up in the night and calls for her mother or her grandmother.

“You’re old enough to sleep alone now,” he says, and sends her back to bed.

There’s a line of light shining under the door. Only faintly, but she sees a narrow strip of light.

So there’s still somebody awake. Her mother, maybe? Or Grandma?

Marianne plucks up all her courage and puts her bare feet out of bed. It’s cold in the room. She pushes the covers aside. Very quietly, so as not to wake her little brother, she tiptoes to the door. Cautiously, in case the floorboards creak.

Slowly, carefully, she pushes the door handle down and quietly opens the door. She steals down the passage and into the kitchen.

There’s still a light on in the kitchen. She sits at the window and looks out into the night. It gives her the creeps, and she starts shivering in her thin nightie.

Then she notices that the door to the next room is ajar.

Her mother must have gone to the cowshed, Marianne thinks. She opens the door to the next room wide. Another door opens out of that room into the passage leading to the cowshed and the barn.

She calls for her mother. For her grandmother. But there is no answer.

The little girl goes down a long, dark feed alley. She hesitates, stops. Calls for her mother again, for her grandmother. Rather louder this time. Still no answer.

She sees the cattle in the shed chained to the iron rings of the feeding trough. The cows’ bodies move calmly. The place is lit only by an oil lamp.

Marianne sees the door to the barn standing open at the end of the feed alley.

Her mother will be in the barn. She calls for her mother again. There’s still no answer.

She goes on along the feed alley toward the barn. She stops again at the door, undecided. She can’t hear a single sound in the darkness. She takes a deep breath and goes in.