It’s “to Each his Uisge” for this week’s E letter of the Alphabeasts Project. The Each-Uisge is a form of Scottish water horse that occasionally comes upon land to lure it’s human victims to a gruesome and watery death. While land bound, the creature will appear as a beautiful and mighty steed, sometimes said to be primarily black with a shiny green tint. The Each-Uisge will coax riders to climb aboard him and then thunder through the countryside. A rider will fare well until the beast sights water and then it’s all over. It’s said that the animal’s skin becomes adhesive and the rider will be unable to unseat himself as the horse plunges into the water, drowning the hapless rider and then devouring his entire body save for the liver which will float back to shore.

In a second form, the Each-Uisge might appear as a handsome man with dark black hair. He will seduce and lure female victims back to the water’s edge where he will then transform and devour them. Young ladies can be warned that their suitor may be a shapeshifting water horse should she spy tendrils of seaweed or small shells in his hair. Following is a story of just such an encounter:

Seven ancestors ago, back in the beginning of the land, a young maiden was herding cattle by the sea, the salt in the water burning her cheeks, and the cows’ lowing a repetitive drone on top of the waves.

One day, as she looked out over the sea, a young man rose from its depths and approached her, the sea still in his eyes and the maiden, having heard of a recent disaster, in which a ship from Ireland had gone lost to the west of Lewis greeted him as a lost sailor and offered him something to eat from her own, carefully assembled packed lunch.

Over the coming days, the young maiden would often meet the young ship-wrecked sailor down by the sea and the more time they spent together, the more she fell in love with the man from the sea. One evening, after yet another conversation, the man, as was custom back then, laid his head in the maiden’s lap and soon fell asleep, and the maiden, now being the only one awake, started to examine his dark curls in the moonlight. But something seemed wrong; the man’s hair that had seemed so well kempt from a distance was, to the horror of the maiden, full of sea shells and weed and knowing full well that the man she’d fallen in love with could be no other creature but one of the dreaded each uisge silently slipped out of her skirt and wrapped it around his head, knowing that were she to stay, the each uisge would soon reveal his true form and carry her off into the depths of the sea were she would later be drowned and eaten by one of the sea’s most fearsome monsters.

Having managed to get out of her skirts without waking the monster, the maiden slowly crept away from the beach, only to soon see the each-uisge wake from his slumber in order to tear her skirt into pieces, screaming ‘mas duine a tha an seo, is aotrom e [if this is human flesh, it’s awfully light!]’ before he, in the shape of a dark horse ran back to the sea where he turned into the froth on top of the waves never to be seen by the maiden again.