I. Ivan Goes East to Find Work

In the parish of Llanlavan, in the upland country of Wales where the fields run thin over limestone and the wind comes in off the hills with a particular directness, there lived a man and his wife in the place called Hwrdh. They were not wealthy and they were not starving, but work had grown scarce — scarcity of that slow, grinding kind that does not arrive as a single blow but as a steady diminishment, month by month, until one morning you reckon up what you have against what you owe and find the numbers do not balance.

“I will go east to search for work,” the man — Ivan — told his wife. “You may live here till I return.” He took fair leave of her, kissed her, and set out walking eastward through Wales, through the country of the March, until he came at last to a farm in the lower country where a farmer stood at his gate watching the road with an expression of calculated evaluation.

“What work can you do?” said the farmer.

“I can do any work that needs doing,” said Ivan, which was the standard answer a man gave when he needed a position badly enough to be flexible about its content.

The farmer hired him on the spot, at wages that were fair by the standards of that district, on one condition: that either party who left the employment before the year was out would lose the right to complain about anything the other had done. This was an unusual clause, and Ivan noticed it, and hired on anyway, because men who have walked far from home for work are not in a strong negotiating position.

II. The Farmer’s Strange Conditions

The work itself was not unusual — the ordinary labour of a working farm, the feeding and herding and fencing and mucking that fills a working day from first light to last. What was unusual was the farmer himself, and the things he did not explain.

He was a man of certain rules that he announced rather than justified. Ivan was not to go into the barn after dark. He was not to draw water from the well in the eastern field on Fridays. He was not to follow the farmer when the farmer went, once a month, to the far meadow alone at midnight. He was not to ask what the large iron chest in the kitchen contained. Ivan, who had signed a contract that prevented him from complaining, observed all of these prohibitions with the patience of a man who has made a practical decision and intends to honour it.

“Araf deg mae dal iâr.”

“Gently, gently, one catches a hen.”

— Welsh proverb on the virtue of patience and observation, north Wales oral tradition

He did not ask. He watched. And what he observed, in the course of a year’s close attention, was that the farm ran on principles that had nothing to do with good farming practice and everything to do with some older arrangement between the farmer and the powers that inhabited the land around him. The crops grew too evenly. The animals never died of ordinary causes. The rain fell when it was needed and stopped when it was not. The farmer knew things before they happened — not by prediction but by a particular quality of attention, as if he were in continuous quiet conversation with something Ivan could not see or hear.

III. The Test at Year’s End

At the end of the year the farmer called Ivan to account, and what he required was not money or goods but a task — a specific, impossible-seeming task of the kind that in Welsh and Irish tradition signals that a mortal has come to the attention of beings who operate by different rules. He was to go to the high lake before dawn and bring back water from its exact centre in a vessel that had no bottom. He was to do this before the cock crew at the farm, or the contract would be forfeit.

This was, by any rational measure, impossible. Ivan took the bottomless vessel and walked up to the lake in the last dark before dawn, and he stood at the water’s edge and thought about it, and he was not by nature a man given to despair, so he thought practically: what could he use? What did he have? What did the lake offer that might plug a bottomless vessel long enough to carry water to the farmhouse?

The answer came from the lake itself — or from something in the lake, a voice barely louder than the water moving against the shore, that told him the clay from the eastern bank, packed firm against the vessel’s base, would hold long enough if he moved quickly. Ivan packed the clay. He moved quickly. He arrived at the farm gate as the cock took its first breath to crow, and he tipped the water into the farmer’s hand, and the contract was honoured.

IV. What Ivan Learned

The farmer paid Ivan his year’s wages and added something that money could not buy: the knowledge of where the voice in the lake had come from, and what the farm’s arrangement with the local tylwyth teg was, and how a man could live in that country in right relationship with the powers that inhabited it. He gave Ivan a specific piece of land near his own farm — the eastern meadow that Ivan had been forbidden to enter — and told him to settle there and farm it by the principles he now understood.

Ivan walked back west to Llanlavan, to the house at Hwrdh, and he brought his wife east with him to the new land. They farmed it as the farmer had taught — with attention, with patience, with respect for the prohibitions that the previous tenant had observed, and with the understanding that certain things could not be explained but had to be trusted. They prospered, after the fashion of people who ask the right questions and wait for the answers.

The lake where Ivan had drawn water from its centre is still there in the Welsh uplands. On still mornings, before the cattle are brought down, you can sometimes hear a sound from its surface that is almost a voice. Those who know what it is are careful not to mention it. Those who don’t know can listen all they like and never be quite sure whether it is the water or the wind or something older than either.