In the days before electric light and oil lamps, the night imposed its own abysmal tyranny, and daylight’s surrender was measured out in strict division. Sunset gave way to Twilight, just as Evening preceded Candle-Time. Bedtime was hope’s last bastion. Beyond that, there was nothing but Dead of Night.
Dead of Night was like an entombment – a heavy stone slowly lowered onto every home. It eclipsed the past and obscured the future. Hope and reason crept away. And in their absence the world was altered. The night’s actions were a mystery.
Filled to the brim with every sort of ignorance and superstition, no Englishman would dare venture out at Dead of Night, for fear of being swallowed up by it. Every door was locked and bolted, and remained so right through those awful hours, until deliverance finally arrived at first cock-crow. Prior to that, every scratch and scrape, every rattle of leaf was thought to be the work of some demon, some twisted malevolence out among the trees. And in the villagers’ imagination that evil found its most common incarnation in the form of Spirit Bears.
These night-time bears would come by in ones and twos, clawing at doors and windows, and on stormy nights run riot in great gangs and turn the whole place upside down. Then, just before dawn they would slip away, back down the secret paths to their own wild world.
Whenever a villager sensed the presence of a Spirit Bear it was traditional to blow on an old goat’s horn, to warn the neighbours. But, as anyone who’s had the misfortune to hear such a thing will testify, a goat’s horn produces the most mournful sound imaginable, capable of inducing a mood of utter wretchedness in even the sunniest soul. What’s worse, as each neighbour was alerted they would take up their own goat’s horn and do their own bit of blowing. So that in no time at all the night would be awash with a goat’s horn chorus and any prospect of sleep would be well and truly dashed.
‘Bears abroad,’ the horns insisted. ‘Bears abroad.’
At that time, most of England was bedevilled, to some degree or other, by bear-spirits, but one village in particular had managed to drive itself to the very verge of distraction – a small hamlet of no more than twenty dwellings, which clung to the edge of one of the larger woods.
The inhabitants were of the opinion that they had long been under siege by an especially wicked gang of Spirit Bears and had done everything in their power to ward them off. They had tied old rags to the branches of trees along the wood’s perimeter and cast quantities of salt, in a variety of significant shapes and patterns, across the woodland floor. But the bears persisted. Until, in the end, the villagers decided that the only way to resolve the situation was to send one of their number out into the woods to try and inveigle their way among them and, if possible, to negotiate.
After much discussion and casting of votes it was unanimously decided that the villager best suited to such a task was Awd Tom, his candidacy based in no small part on the fact that he was old (as his name suggested), somewhat slow on the uptake, and without a wife or children, so that if, heaven forbid, he should go off into the woods and not come back his absence might not be too keenly felt.
Tom was informed of the decision when he returned from a kindling-gathering expedition. He rather had a hunch that something was afoot. The entire village had lined the lane, and were cheering and applauding him, which, as far as he could remember, had not happened after any previous kindling-gathering trip.
When he heard the news he was momentarily flattered – proud, even – to be trusted with such a responsibility. But the daunting nature of his little mission soon began to make itself known to him, and continued to make itself known, in ever more vivid detail, for all the hours leading up to him being sent out into the dark.
Soon after sunset, two of the older women led him round to one of the barns and set about dressing him in such a manner that he might move among the bears without drawing too much attention. The bears were woodland creatures, the women reasoned, and would in all likelihood, be made up of such stuff to be found in such a place. So with lengths of twine they bound twigs and moss about him, then wove leaves and kindling in between, adorning Awd Tom so comprehensively with foliage, that by the time they were done and he took a walk up and down the barn, the weight and hindrance of all those bits of twig and branch quite transformed him. And this so unsettled the women that they made their excuses and headed home to take strong drink to calm their nerves.
The arrival of Twilight filled Awd Tom with even more anxiety than usual, and round about Candle-Time, Young Peter, a man who had high hopes of one day being the village’s leader (and prime mover behind Tom’s nomination earlier in the day), came by to offer a little encouragement.
‘The way I see it,’ he told the man in the suit of moss and twigs, ‘to be able to move among the bears without being too conspicuous, you must do your utmost to think like a bear.’
He stopped, to see if his words had penetrated the bark and bracken. Two eyes blinked, deep amid the twigs.
‘One might almost say …’ Peter paused, to try and find the right way of putting it, ‘… that you must become a bear,’ he said.
Awd Tom remained quite silent, but his eyes darted to left and right, which Young Peter took as a sign of cognition. Then Peter wished him well and went off to barricade himself in his cottage, like everyone else.
None of the villagers witnessed Tom’s final preparations. In fact, as time passed Awd Tom himself had an ever-weakening grasp of what went on in that old barn. For, as instructed, he did his utmost to assume a bear-like physicality and an ursine state of mind, which culminated in a series of ritualistic movements that so possessed him he slowly became aware how he left behind his Awd Tom-ness and began to inhabit a much wilder, more primitive place.
Through the shuffled steps of his own strange invocation and the gradual abandonment of his civilised mind he induced in himself something almost trance-like. Awd Tom’s eyes became a bear’s eyes. And the only thoughts in that tight briar of twig and bramble became those of a Spirit Bear.
By the time Dead of Night finally arrived every villager stood by their window, secretly sickened by their own part in the conspiracy, yet undeniably excited about what might come to pass. If they were hoping that Awd Tom might stage some grand departure, however, they were disappointed. All they caught was a fleeting glimpse of a leafy shadow as it hurried past them and disappeared into the trees.
As the night wore on the villagers kept their stations. The moon was down. There were the usual eerie bustles and scuffles, normally attributed to the agitations of the Spirit Bears, but among them now were unfamiliar yelps and screeches, and at one point a sustained period of whinnying, which fairly made the villagers’ blood run cold.
The winter nights were always long but this was by far the longest. It seemed to last an eternity. After that initial flurry there was nothing but silence. The village had never known a stillness of such intensity and it terrified them almost as much as all the comings and goings of the Spirit Bears, until at last the first cock’s crow broke the spell, the doors were thrown open and everyone raced out, to see if they could find any trace of dear Awd Tom.
A low mist covered the ground and the villagers stepped nervously into it. Their task wasn’t helped by the fact that Tom’s suit of leaf and twig created such a convincing camouflage. It was one of the children who finally found him, a fair way into the woods, slumped against a fallen tree. His eyes were open – wide open – but utterly vacant, as if the mind behind them still operated, but on a quite different plane.
The villagers bore him home, still decked out in all his foliage. Then the same women who’d so meticulously arranged the leaves and twigs around him now began to carefully pick those same leaves and twigs apart. It was several hours before Awd Tom was able to string a sentence together – long hours in which the women did their best to revive him by rubbing boiled hyssop into his shoulders and mopping his brow with tansy and valerian.
Before he had uttered a single word, the entire village gathered in the barn to see what sort of shape the old man had been reduced to and hoping for news regarding the bears. And after a while they managed to establish from his various grunts and nods in response to their many questions that he had indeed made contact with them, had moved among them and, most significantly, had struck some sort of deal.
‘You mean, the bears are willing to settle?’ said one of the villagers.
Awd Tom nodded.
‘And they’re willing to leave us in peace?’ said another.
Tom nodded again.
This provoked a great deal of hugging and cheering, and quite a few tears of sheer, blessed relief. In the silence that followed, someone dared to ask, ‘And do they want for anything in return?’
Awd Tom nodded his tired old head again, and lifted a finger – a finger still covered with the forest’s own filth and dirt. His outstretched arm swung around the assembled company until it pointed squarely at Young Peter.
According to Tom’s instructions, when he was finally able to articulate them (and which were, after all, nothing but the instructions passed on to him by the Spirit Bears), Young Peter was bound and left out in the woods in a rough sort of cage for three nights running, so that the Bears could get a closer look at him. Apparently, they were intrigued by the incredible self-confidence in one of such tender years.
The first night was probably the worst for poor Peter. By the end of it his hair had turned quite white. But by the third night he had calmed down a fair bit, which is to say that he had stopped screaming and shouting and banging his head against the bars of his cage. And from that point forward Peter – or Quiet Peter as he came to be known – was much less prone to scheming and speechifying, and more likely to sit alone in a corner, fussing with an old scrap of leather or a piece of wood.
It is quite remarkable how much an individual’s status can shift in such a short period. While Quiet Peter withdrew to the shadows, Tom came to the fore, assuming the role of something like a local shaman, which is quite a step up from kindling-gatherer. He lived a leisurely life, consulted on any matter which required a little wisdom, as befitted a man of his age. But once a year he would have the women dress him up in his suit of twigs and at Dead of Night go out into the woods, which only added to his reputation and, by all accounts, seemed to do him the world of good.
It is harder to say what became of the Spirit Bears. Depending on one’s perspective, they either followed those secret paths and byways back to their own dark world or retreated into the deeper recesses of the villagers’ imagination. But it would be a brave man who could say for certain which is the safer place for them.
