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Authors: Julia L. Sauer

Fog Magic

BOOK: Fog Magic
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Table of Contents
 
 
In every generation of Aldingtons a child was born who understood the fog
.
It was just as they turned out of the path to the cove and into the Old Road that Greta happened to look off to the south.
“Rosie, wait,” she called sharply.
She caught her breath and stared. If only stupid old Rosie could see it, too. Surely there was the outline of a building. It was blurred and indistinct, but those straight upright lines, that steep angle—no spruces could look
that
way. Greta's heart almost stopped beating, but she had no silly feeling of fear. Fog had always seemed to her like the magic spell in the old fairy tales—a spell that caught you up and kept you as safe, once you were inside it, as you would have been within a sap bubble. But this was stranger than anything she had ever seen before. Here was a house—a house where no house stood! Indistinct though it was, she could follow every line of it. A high sharp roof, a peaked gable, a little lean-to at the side. It was all there. Just such a house as those she saw every day in the village.
“So this,” she said to herself, “
this
is what can happen to you in a fog. I always knew that there must be something hidden.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
TO OUR FRIENDS IN LITTLE RIVER
 
 
You have made us welcome to the intimate friendliness of your kitchens. As you kneaded your oat bread or as you baited your trawls for the next day's work at sea you have dipped far down into your memories for us and the tales you have told are in themselves like an old road into the past. You have been patient with our endless questions. Always you have made us feel that you knew they sprang from genuine interest rather than curiosity. Some of you have listened to the reading of parts of this story in the lamplit cabin while a silent fog kept guard outside, and your help has been boundless. For all this and much more we are grateful.
You will not find yourselves in these pages but you will find your names. Your Christian names and your surnames both seem so peculiarly Nova Scotian that we have borrowed them to help us hold, during these war years, the illusion at least of being less far apart.
PUFFIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Young Readers Group,
345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
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(a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
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Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin Inc., 1943
Published by Puffin Books, 1986
Reissued simultaneously by Puffin Books and Viking,
divisions of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2005
Copyright © Julia L. Sauer, 1943
Copyright renewed Julia L. Sauer, 1971
All rights reserved
Frontispiece by Lynd Ward
S.A.
Set in Baskerville
 
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE VIKING EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Sauer, Julia L. (Julia L. 1891-1983)
Fog magic.
Reprint. Originally published: New York: Viking Press, 1943.
p. cm.
Summary: A child of Nova Scotia who loves the fog
is transported by it to a secret world of her own.
eISBN : 978-1-101-04341-7
 

http://us.penguingroup.com

TO ALICE
 
 
for whom the old road over the mountain has always led to Blue Cove
1.
THE SPELL OF THE FOG
FROM the time she was a baby in her cradle, Greta had loved the fog.
Every soul in the little fishing village at the foot of the mountain had learned to accept the fog. It was part of their life. They knew that for weeks on end they must live within its circle. But they made no pretense of liking it. Those who tilled their little plots of land hated it when it kept their hay from drying. The men who fished dreaded it for it either kept them on shore altogether and cut down their meager earnings, or it made their hours on the sea more dangerous than ever. Only the lobster poachers who robbed honest men's lobster pots, or set their own out of season, liked it—the lobster poachers and small Greta. And with Greta it was more than liking. On days when the gray clouds of fog rolled in from the sea and spread over the village, she would watch it drift past the windows with a look on her small face that almost frightened her mother.
“Goodness, child,” Gertrude Addington would say to the mite in the high chair, “you look as if you were seeing things—and pleasant things at that! I believe you like this beastly fog! Don't you know your father is out there, like as not running on a reef this very minute? And my clean clothes mildewing for want of a bit of proper sun to dry them by?”
But then Greta would gurgle so happily and throw wide her arms with such eagerness to grasp and hold this queer gray smoke that Gertrude's irritability would vanish like the fog itself when the sun comes suddenly through.
As soon as Greta could walk, Gertrude found that she might as well put her housework aside on foggy days and give herself to minding her child. The first thin wraiths of fog in the high pasture were enough to set her small daughter's eyes sparkling. By the time it hid the big rock at the top of the pasture, Greta would be working her way cautiously to the door; and when it drew close enough to blur their own out-buildings, she would be scampering down the pasture lane as fast as her uncertain little feet could carry her.
“I'm at my wits' end minding the child on foggy days,” she said to old Kil. He had stopped on his way home from the smoke house to leave a finnan haddie and he smiled down now at the bedraggled small girl whom Gertrude had just retrieved from beyond the garden. The old man laughed at her.
“Some are moon-struck, they say, and some are sun-struck,” he said. “Maybe this one is fog-struck. Don't worry about her, Gertrude. It's good for a young one to want to know the world she lives in in all kinds of weather.” He ran his big hand lightly over her damp curls. “I can't see that it does this little mess o' sea weed any harm to be well wetted down. But you might try mooring her to the apple tree and save yourself the minding of her.”
So the small girl came to be moored at the end of the clothes line like an idle dory on every day when the gray wisps of fog came drifting in.
Greta was ten when she began to sense that she was looking for something within the fog. Until then it had only given her a happy feeling—just as the first snow-flakes delighted some of the other girls and boys, or the first fall winds that set the birch leaves blowing. But from the day when she had gone alone to find old Rosie, the cow, nothing had been quite the same.
The village of Little Valley lay on a narrow neck of land between two great arms of the sea. Like a lazy giant, North Mountain lay sprawled the full length of the peninsula until, at the very end, it sat up in a startled precipice at the sight of the open sea. Years before, a number of villages had dotted the shore on either side. Now, only a few were left and those were dwindling in size as the men despaired of making a living by fishing. At the foot of the mountain and following the line of its base ran the highway. Here the Royal Mail, the grocery truck, the butcher, and the tourist who had lost his way made his daily or weekly or chance trip down the neck to the sea and back again. But there was another road—a road less direct—filled with convenient curves—the old Post Road. This was the road the first settlers had built in the wilderness. They had come by sea, many of them, and made their little clearings near the shore. Gradually they had extended their clearings inland and in time, and with tremendous effort, they had threaded their holdings together on a narrow uncertain road through the spruce forest. With the new highway, generations later, had come new houses, away from the shore and more sheltered. Only cellar holes remained to mark the earlier homes.
This old Post Road was a joy to Greta. A part of it ran through her father's land. Even though it had fallen so low as to serve as a mere lane to the pastures, there was something grand and romantic about it still. Years of spring freshets had washed away the dirt. The stones were bare that had formed its foundation. To follow it was like walking in the bed of a dry mountain stream. Greta knew every stone, every curve of it for miles, up over the high pastures and then down again toward the sea. This was the road her forefathers had traveled. Surely, she thought, it must lead somewhere worth going.
And then there was the day when old Rosie was particularly stubborn.
“Greta! Greta!” her mother called her from play. “Rosie isn't at the bars with the other cows. Your father's had a hard day getting in the hay. You'd best go and look for her before he does. You'll probably meet her on the way. You'll not need to go far.”
Greta started willingly enough. She had heard the foghorn blowing at Tollerton, down in the Passage, and she knew there was fog on the way.
“Want me to go along?” one of the boys asked.
“You better not, Hazen. I may be late.” She thanked him hastily and hurried away. To be caught in the fog and with the best excuse in the world was something too precious to share.
She found Rosie far off the Old Road and down at the cove. Rosie looked anything but guilty. Greta laughed.
“You darling,” she said to her. “I think you stayed down here on purpose so I could drive you home in the fog. But that's not fair, you know, because Father would have had to come if Mother hadn't noticed.”
She hurried Rosie across the stones of the shore and up through the thick spruce trees to the clearing beyond. The fog was closing in rapidly. You didn't notice it in the woods, but out in the open it was already thick. Even Rosie began to look soft and furry and indistinct, like an imaginary cow that you tried to see in the clouds.
It was just as they turned out of the path to the cove and into the Old Road that Greta happened to look off to the south.
“Rosie, wait,” she called sharply.
She caught her breath and stared. If only stupid old Rosie could see it, too. Surely there was the outline of a building. It was blurred and indistinct, but those straight upright lines, that steep angle—no spruces could look
that
way. Greta's heart almost stopped beating, but she had no silly feeling of fear. Fog had always seemed to her like the magic spell in the old fairy tales—a spell that caught you up and kept you as safe, once you were inside it, as you would have been within a soap bubble. But this was stranger than anything she had ever seen before. Here was a house—a house where no house stood! Indistinct though it was, she could follow every line of it. A high sharp roof, a peaked gable, a little lean-to at the side. It was all there. Just such a house as those she saw every day in the village.
BOOK: Fog Magic
9.15Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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