The Wee Free Men

And... then she fed the dogs, who were waiting patiently for their breakfast. It would have helped if they'd done something soppy, like whine or lick Granny's face, but they hadn't. And still Tiffany heard the voice in her mind: No tears, don't cry. Don't cry for Granny Aching.

Now, in her head, she watched the slightly smaller Tiffany move around the hut like a little puppet...

She'd tidied up the shed. Besides the bed and the stove there really wasn't much there. There was the clothes sack and the big water barrel and the food box, and that was it. Oh, stuff to do with sheep was all over the place—pots and bottles and sacks and knives and shears—but there was nothing there that said a person lived here, unless you counted the hundreds of blue and yellow Jolly Sailor wrappers pinned on one wall.

She'd taken one of them down—it was still underneath her mattress at home—and she remembered the Story.

It was very unusual for Granny Aching to say more than a sentence. She used words as if they cost money. But there'd been one day when she'd taken food up to the hut, and Granny had told her a story. A sort of a story. She'd unwrapped the tobacco, and looked at the wrapper, and then looked at Tiffany with that slightly puzzled look she used, and said: 'I must've looked at a thousand o' these things, and I never once saw his bo-ut.' That was how she pronounced 'boat'.

Of course Tiffany had rushed to have a look at this label, but she couldn't see any boat, any more than she could see the naked lady.

'That's 'cos the bo-ut is just where you can't see it,' Granny had said. 'He's got a bo-ut for chasin' the great white whale fish on the salt sea. He's always chasing it, all round the world. It's called Mopey. It's a beast like a big cliff of chalk, I heard tell In a book.' 'Why's he chasing it?' Tiffany had asked. 'To catch it,' Granny had said. 'But he never will, the reason being, the world is round like a big plate and so is the sea and so they 're chasing one another, so it is almost like he is chasing hisself. Ye never want to go to sea, jiggit. That's where worse things happen. Everyone says that. You stop along here, where's the hills is in yer bones.'