The Selkies

The story

There is an island, north of Scotland, where the sea is so close that you can hear it breathing from the front door.

A young fisherman lived there, alone, in a stone house with a thatched roof tied down with ropes. By day he went out in his boat. In the evening he came home, ate barley bread and fish, and watched from the window as the moon rose over the water.

One summer night he couldn't sleep. He got up, walked along the shore to a bay the old folk called “the bay of the seals”, and stopped behind a rock.

On the sand, under the full moon, someone was dancing.

They were young women and young men, with long wet hair and shining skin. They laughed softly and held hands, turning in a ring, and the white sand under their feet kept no footprints. On the rocks, folded carefully like cloaks, lay a great many sealskins, grey and glossy, the fur still dripping.

The fisherman understood at once. He had been told that story as a child. Every so often, on a certain night, the people of the sea come out of the water and take off their skins. But without that skin, they cannot go back.

He didn't know why he did it. Perhaps out of loneliness, perhaps out of a longing that had no name. He reached out, took one skin from the rocks, hid it under his jacket and stood very still, his heart pounding.

Towards dawn the dancing ended. The dancers ran to the rocks, slipped into their skins one after another, and became seals that slid into the water. All of them, except one.

A girl was left standing on the sand, searching among the rocks. She walked up and down. She knelt, moved the seaweed aside, looked under the stones. Then she raised her head and saw the fisherman.

She didn't scream. She only said, “You have my skin.”

He didn't answer straight away. Then, in a low voice, he said, “I won't hurt you. I'll give you a home, and food, and a fire. Stay with me.”

She looked out at the sea, where the dark heads of the seals were moving away one by one, and she wept without a sound. There was nothing else she could do. She followed him.

The first winter was the longest. She hardly spoke, and he, so as not to hear the silence, talked enough for two: about the boat, about the weather, about an old cow that wouldn't give any milk. Sometimes he would find her with her hand pressed against the wall, as if feeling whether the sea was there, far away, on the other side. Then he would tell himself it would pass in time, and go and check that the skin was still where he had left it.

The years went by. She learned to spin, to bake bread, to salt fish. She had three children, and she loved them with a strength her husband could never measure. She was kind, and she never complained. But in the evening, when the sunset turned the water red, she would go out onto the doorstep and stand watching the waves without a word. Every now and then a grey seal would surface not far from the shore and gaze at her with great dark eyes. She would gaze back, and in those moments her eyes became the same as the seal's.

“What are you looking at?” her husband would ask.

“Nothing,” she would answer. “The sea.”

He never asked anything more. He had hidden the skin somewhere safe, in a hole in the roof, behind a beam, wrapped in a cloth. He thought nobody would ever find it there.

Seven years later, on a windy day, the fisherman went out in the boat with the two older children. The woman stayed at home with the youngest, who was playing on the floor with two smooth pebbles.

Suddenly the child looked up and pointed at the beams.

“Mummy. There's something up there that smells of the sea.”

The woman stopped breathing.

“What is it?”

“Something grey. It's soft. You told me I mustn't touch things that belong to grown-ups, but it smells of the sea.”

She climbed onto the bench, her hands trembling. She moved the beam. Behind the cloth, folded like a blanket, was her skin.

For a long time she stood with the skin in her arms. Her fingers felt the fur, and the fur still held the salt. Then she knelt in front of the child, took his face in her hands and kissed him on the forehead.

“Tell your father I care for him,” she whispered. “Tell your brothers I love them. But the sea has been calling me for too long, and I can't pretend any more that I don't hear it.”

She ran down to the shore without looking back, the skin held tight against her chest. She walked into the water up to her knees, her waist, her shoulders. She pulled the skin on like a cloak, and where a woman had been there was now a seal, which dived and was gone.

When the fisherman came back with the boat, the house was silent. The youngest child ran to meet him and repeated, word for word, what his mother had said.

The man said nothing. He walked down to the shore, where the sea was lapping at the sand, and stayed there until it was dark.

The fisherman did not get angry. That, perhaps, was the hardest thing of all. He understood in that moment that for seven years he had kept a person in his house and called her his wife, and that a locked door is never a family.

He never saw her up close again. But in the years that followed, his children would say something strange. Sometimes, on misty mornings, a grey seal came to swim near the jetty, stayed watching them for a while with its dark eyes, and then went away. And on the doorstep, after the worst storms, they always found a fresh fish, left there by someone who never let themselves be seen.

The people who live on those islands know. When a seal looks at you from the water and doesn't dive straight away, it may be just a seal.

But then again, it may not.