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The Dingo That Found Me at the Edge of the World
Newly immigrated to Ireland I made two luck-spangled connections — with a girlfriend, and a kelpie
Kasha the kelpie just turned up one day, at my house in the middle of a field in a bog, at the tip of a peninsula at the very end of Europe.
She was young, thin, and her coat was matted. There was a short length of broken rope around her neck.
As Scottish legend has it, a kelpie is a dangerous shape-shifting water creature that can appear on land as a horse. They will tempt you to ride on their back, then carry you down to your grave at the bottom of the ocean.
A kelpie is not to be confused with an Irish selkie, a creature half fish, half human, otherwise known as a mermaid.
But of course, Kasha was the other kind of kelpie, a breed of dog half Scottish collie, half Australian dingo. I’m originally Australian-born myself, and often wondered if somehow she sensed that. How did a dingo come to be in Ireland? Perhaps that’s a tale as long and strange as my own.
I woke up one morning and there she was, stretched out on the path to the shed, for all the world like she lived here.
