Once upon a time, a mother wondered what to do about her baby.
You see, he’d started out the normal way, but one morning, she had picked him up only to come to the conclusion that he had turned into an otter. He was all gray and shiny, with long whiskers, and a laugh that sounded, well, like an otter’s.
However, she couldn’t really be sure. He acted, for the most part, like a regular baby, what with the eating and sleeping and throwing things on the floor so she would have to pick them up. So, not knowing what else to do, she took him to see the wise old woman who lived up the hill and ate shoes (or so people said).
The smell of burning rubber and shoelaces was only faint when she arrived. The old woman took one look at the baby.
“Looks like the otters got to him,” she said.
“That’s what I thought!” the woman replied.
But to be sure the otters had taken her own dear baby away and left her one of their own, the wise woman said, there were very specific actions she would need to perform. The wise woman wrote them out for her, then demanded her left shoe in return.
Back at home, the mother got to work on the instructions. She boiled a pot of water. She built a little ship out of paper. And into the ship, she placed the magical ingredients the wise woman had told her about.
If she had done it right, the paper ship would float along, and not disintegrate.
If she had done it right, the otter-baby would get so excited about the boat that he would jump up and shout out in the language of the otters, and betray himself.
The boat floated, and the baby cooed. The boat floated, and the baby gurgled. The boat floated, and the baby went back to sleep.
What a relief! It seemed he wasn’t an otter after all.
The End
Source: A Brewery of Eggshells, Irish folktale
