The Púca and the Blackberries

Aunt Bramble
Wyrdlore Society

Tonight, with the lanterns lit and the leaves all down, I want to tell you about a creature called the Púca, who is said to come out on this very night, or one very like it, the one some call Samhain, which is Halloween's older, wilder cousin.

The Púca is a shape-shifter. Nobody agrees what it looks like, because it never looks the same way twice. Sometimes it is a sleek black horse with eyes like lanterns. Sometimes it is a goat, or a hare, or a great shaggy dog, or even an old man with a long tail he keeps tucked carefully under his coat. Whatever shape it wears, it can talk, in a voice as ordinary as yours or mine.

The Púca loves to run. On this one wild night of the year it goes galloping over hills and through hedges and along the tops of stone walls, faster than any ordinary creature could manage, and if you were out very late and very lucky, you might hear hoofbeats where no horse should be.

But the Púca has one particular errand, and it is this: it visits every blackberry bush in Ireland and spits on the berries. After that, nobody picks blackberries for the rest of the autumn, because the fruit belongs to the Púca now, and everybody simply knows it.

Nobody seems especially cross about this. The blackberry season was ending anyway, the brambles are tired, and the fruit is turning soft. There is something almost comforting in handing the last of the berries over to a creature that has been racing round the hills all night and has, you would think, earned a bit of supper.

So tonight, if you pass a bramble hedge and see the last few berries hanging dark and untouched, you can think of the Púca passing by on its four always-changing legs, leaving them exactly where they are, for whatever comes next.

Aunt Bramble keeps the Society's stories for its smallest members. She has never been anywhere in a hurry, owns a very old coat with very deep pockets, and holds that a story does not have to be tidy to be true.

The rest of the season is gathered in Nights of the Dead.