I fail to see a difference between the devil and a goat
Okay, story time of when my grandfather and his brother met and outran the devil!
Back in the 1930s out on the countryside in southern Sweden in aĀ small village outside of Kristianstad where my grandfather grew up, there was a rich gentleman farmer -and who may or may not have led a mob my great-granddad partook in to break in and ruin another farmerās legal distillery out of sheer pettiness but thatās the countryside for you- who had a lot of men working on his lands, some of them permanent throughout the year and some that took temporary employment, most of them sailors or travelers wherever there was work. After a long day of hard labor they liked to kick back and socialize in their overnight accommodations.
Not so surprisingly, like bees to honey when told not to go there, the villageĀ children loved to sneak out, to their mothers chagrin, to come and hang around the workers, for the fascination with two things:
And especially with a young attentive audience the workers began to one up each other of who could tell the scariest visceral tales of ghosts, spirits, monsters and demons.
You already see where this is going.Ā
One particular late autumn evening my grandfather and one of his younger brothers had snuck out to have a taste of the forbidden excitement and were now on their way back home, walking the distance between the farm and their own small earthen floor cottage.Ā Ā
The evenings on the countryside in the south can be described in a two word sentence: Pitch Black.Ā
Imagination already running wild withĀ the blood curling stories the older men had filled their heads with, they had made the journey on foot back home in the dark and surrounded by the tall impenetrable foliage of junipers hedging the dirt road, they heard a close by rustling.Ā
Startled, they had stopped to listen. Nothing. They continued, and heard the rustling again. Keeping pace with them. They stopped once again. Holding their breath, listening intently. On the other side of the junipers, no more than a meter from them, something snorted. Fear rising, they made haste, all while accompanied by the sound of being pursued.Ā
Coming out back on the main road and lighted by the moon breaking through the clouds, they saw itĀ standing on an elevation by the road.Ā
Facing a nightmarish creature taken straight out of the stories. With red eyes glinting in the dim light belonging to a long gaunt face behind a dirty black beard, and large sinister curled horns.
They did the most logical thing coming to them when standing eye to eye with the Devil himself.
The expression āRunning like they had the Devil at their heelsā had never been more befitting.
Shaking and frightened they arrived back home, happy to have escaped by the skin of their teeth and still be alive, only to receive a severe whooping for sneaking out to the farm in the first place.
They may have outrun the Devil, but there was no outrunning their own mother.
The following morning a laborer working for another neighboring farmer came knocking on the door of their home.Ā
Asking if they had seen his employerās goat that had run away last night.Ā
