He wasn't Handsome at All

　　Ostra felt she had snapped like a willow stem. She turned from the village and lay on the clifftop on the warm breast of the earth, weeping, weeping. The day waned and the sky changed colour and still she wept. There Wolvas found her and pulled her roughly to her feet.

　　"Ostra," he said, "you have no family and no protection. Now surely you must take me as your husband."

　　Ostra wiped her eyes and looked at him. For the first time she saw that he wasn't handsome at all: that he had a nasty, hard mouth; that his eyes were like a dead fish's, and his muscly body was rather stringy and cold. So when a beautiful brown hare popped his head out of the undergrowth and started to say,

　　"He's wi..."

　　Ostra interrupted the creature,

　　"I know, I know!" she told the hare. "But I've got no more excuses!"

　　... ...

The White Hare, P24-26
by Nicola Davis
Illustration Anastasia Izlesou
ISBN 978-1-9108-6248-3

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The Big Silence of the Stars

　　Weaving pots was a winter job. In spring and summer willow stems loose their bendiness and become snappy and brittle. So, on winter evenings, after it was dark and her father was back from the sea, Ostra walked up the cliff to the marshy willow bed on the edge of the woods to cut the willow stems and weave them. She worked by the light of the moon or of a little rush lantern, yellow flamed and trailing the stink of animal fat. In the cold, in the wind, in the rain.

　　Ostra liked the work, because it was peaceful and solitary and gave her time to be quiet.

　　The rhythm of bending and binding the stems to make the big, open shape of the crab pt pleased her. Sometimes she sang quietly to herself, but more often she sat quietly listening to the sounds of the winter night, the screaming vixens, the owl hooting, the wolves howling and, above all the sound of Earth, to the big silence of the stars. Listening in the cold, winter silence is how she came to hear animals speaking to her.

The White Hare, P7-9
by Nicola Davis
Illustration Anastasia Izlesou
ISBN 978-1-9108-6248-3

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