them.

The only thing to break the silence up here was the cry of an occasional
bird, the plaintive call of the plover, the barking of an eagle, the
note of the curlew, a whinny as of a horse of Lilliput, the strange
noise a pheasant makes and it rising from the heather: _whir-r-r_, like
a piece of elastic snapping. Barring these you'd hear nothing at all.
And barring a mountainy man or woman, and they cutting turf, you'd meet
nothing unless it were the sheep.

You'd never hear the sheep, and you coming; you'd turn a wee bluff in
the hill, and there they were looking, a long, solemn, grayish-white
line, with aloof, cold eyes. You could never faze them. They'd look at
you cool as anything, and "What license have you to be here?" you'd
think they were saying. Very stupid, but unco dignified, the sheep.

But up to the top of the mountain, where wee Shane was going, you'd find
no sheep; too bare and rocky there. There'd be nothing there but a
passing bird. On the top of the mountain was a little dark lake into
which you couldn't see more than a foot, though they said the depth of
it went down to the sea. There were no fish in it, people said, and that
was a queer thing, water without fish in it, wee Shane thought, like a
country without inhabitants. In the sea were a power of fish, and in the
rivers were salmon, long and thick as a man, and pike with snouts and
ominous teeth, and furry otters, about which there was great discussion
as to whether they were fish or animal ... In the lake in the
lowlands--Lochkewn, the Quiet Lake--were trout with red and gold and
black speckles; and perch with spiked fins; and dark roach were easy to
catch with a worm; and big gray bream were tasty as to bait, needing
paste held by sheep's wool; and big eels would put a catch in your
breath.

But in the lake on the mountain-top were no fish at all, and that was a
strange thing ...

There was another eery thing about the mountain, and a thing wee Shane
was slightly afraid of. Oftentimes you'd be sitting by that lake, and
sunlight all around you, and you'd turn to come down, and there'd be a
cloud beneath you, a cloud that rolled in armfuls of wool that bound the
mountain as by a ring; and the lonely call of a bird ... and you'd feel
shut off from the kindly earth, as if you were on another planet maybe,
or caught up into the air by some flying demon, and you knew the world
was spinning like a ball through the treeless fields of space.

A