§365

‘I was riding my bike home from a friend’s house, sometime after 11 pm, in the summer of 1977. (I was almost nineteen years old.) The road I was on ran parallel to some railroad tracks; I rode south, and to my right was the last row of houses in town, and to my left, the tracks and beyond those, the *** River. I was nearly home when ahead of me I noticed movement in the road; at that hour I thought it could have been a cat or raccoon or any number of other things, but as I drew closer (the only lights were streetlights) I was astonished to see a small man, no more than about fifteen or eighteen inches in height, walking across the road with a wooden yoke across his back, with buckets hanging from either side. I was on my bike, and so felt unprotected and a little frightened, and slowed as I approached him. He did not make eye contact with me, but seemed to have noticed me there, and hurried back in the direction he’d come from – up from the tracks and the river. He disappeared off into the overgrowth beside the road, and I kept going, feeling that I must have startled him as much as he startled me. His clothing was plain, a belted tunic of some sort, loose-fitting pants, shoes that, at least in my memory of it, were probably slip-ons. I was completely sober and wide awake, having just ridden my bike about three miles toward home.’ ‘A man of perhaps middle age.’ ‘I have had ghost experiences and this was nothing like those; the appearance and the occupation of the creature were both far too pedestrian and Earth-like to suggest anything alien.’ ‘[Fairies are] creatures living at a slight remove from our ability to see them, as a rule.’ ‘I am of Irish ancestry and have been told that if you have Irish blood, you have fairy/faerie blood (and have twice had Irishmen tell me that, upon meeting me, they saw something of the Tuath De in me. So perhaps I’m temperamentally predisposed to this kind of encounter?’