Nashi are rarely seen today, far less so than in elder days; although I daresay that if you have ever gone for a walk in the woods, you have been seen by a nashi, even if you did not know it at the time. They are quick of hearing and sharp of vision; and, long before we larger and more clumsy folk could stumble upon them, they have vanished into the greenwoods. Their nimble gait and prehensile feet make them as at home in the forest's canopy as on the ground; and many are the woodsmen and day-campers who have left their goods unwatched for but a moment, only to lose something precious to a nashi's clever fingers.
For the nashi are a childlike and curious people. Nothing attracts them so much as a new, bright thing; and nothing distresses them so much as a locked door or a sealed bag. They love to show off their new things, and nothing delights a nashi so much as wearing a marvelous new treasure. They are fastidious, to the point of dandiness. They are constantly grooming themselves, their ringed tails in especial carefulness; and they do not eat anything until they have washed it first. From this, they have earned one of their more unkind nicknames "washer-rats", sometimes amended to "washer-bears" by the more charitable.
For their mischievous, curious nature, the nashi are often maligned by the folk who live nearby, holding them responsible for stolen chickens and soured milk. Others hold the nashi to be capable of far more nefarious, magical deeds: spoiling harvests, stealing unattended babes-in-arms, and flying across the night skies on steeds of enchanted grain stooks. Of any such deeds by nashi, this writer is unaware. But it remains that the nashi are a mysterious, magical people.
Of the nashi of the Horseshoe Valley, among whose number my tales concern, there is little especial knowledge. Like all nashi, they dressed as well as they might; being particularly fond of browns and greens, the colours of living things. Like all nashi, they scorned the wearing of shoes, as they served no purpose to the nashi other than impeding the grasping ability of their feet. They had little truck or trade with the outside world; for the Horseshoe Valley in which they lived was a hanging valley, hidden from the wider world by a steep escarpment breached only by a waterfall that fed a stream that eventually discharged into the Winding River. Most nashi lived by the sweat of their brows; either tending their flocks and fields, or in the arts of crafting things. A few lived as merchants, traveling from Lakeshead to Riverside to Beaversdam (nashi village names being more functional than decorative) with their wares piled up onto dog-cart in summer or sled in winter. It was a rare few nashi who ventured from this bucolic land into the wild harsher world outside the nashi valley. "Adventures," as Doctor Mok-Mok once told Tuk, "are bad for the digestion."
A nashi village, viewed from a distance, would look like a small cluster of round and oblong mounds. The exterior walls are built of turf, stone, or (occasionally) wood; they are roofed with sod, upon which the family goats often graze. Windows face inwards, towards the village's commons, often graveled and turned into a small market for local wares. Lakeshead, the largest of the three villages and closest to the mouth of the valley, was possessed of a few stone-and-timber buildings -- the Goat's Head, a sprawling log-built turf-roofed inn; the stone-built shops of the smithy and charcoal-maker; and White Hall, the plaster-walled home of the Ek-Ek-Iv family, of whom our Tuk was a distant cousin.
Of how the nashi made their way to the Horseshoe Valley, or from whence they came, no one knows. But around their hearth-fires in Yuletide, the tale is told of a long-ago time, when the nashi lived far away in the east, in a vast cave beneath a lake. From this lake they derived their sustenance. From its waters they harvested fish and cress and waterlilies; from along its shores they found mussels and a hard, black kind of rice from which they made bread. In the cold of winter, they burned the driftwood they gathered from the lake's shores in summer. The smoke from their fires drifted upwards through the cave, and escaped through a small hole in the rock above.
One spring, the root of a vine crawled through the hole in the roof of the cave; and a particularly adventuresome nashi named Nik-na-ek-ek-iv climbed up the root, permanently staining his hands, feet and face with the soot from years of cooking fires built up on the face of the rock. Upon reaching the surface, Nik saw a flowering land verdant in spring promise. He returned to his people below, and told them of the wonders he saw. Following his lead, the nashi left their cave home and climbed the vine root; and thus entered into this world.
...next: where is King's Cross Hanging?
