As the dog pointed herself at a clump of scutch grass, Father Conroy moved forward, raising his gun. Suddenly, out of the clump of grass, broke a hare – so big that it seemed impossible it could have fit into so small a “form,” but had risen somehow out of the ground.

“Go on, Tom!”

Father Conroy took aim. The hare’s great, elastic bounds were taking it out of range.

“Damnation, man, why don’t you fire?”

Father Conroy lowered his gun.

“You’re not superstitious, surely to God?”

Father Conroy made no reply. As they moved out of the field, though, he looked back and reluctantly, as if he had to make some explanation, he said, “Strange how that strip was never plowed.”

“Waste of good land,” grunted Father O’Hara.

“Hungry grass.”

“Ah, nonsense! In this day and age!”

“I helped harvest barley once in this field when I was a lad. The old man who owned the place told me why the strip was never plowed.”

“Those old pishogues!” Father O’Hara growled down in his throat, “They’re died out now, those yarns, and no harm.”

“I saw...” Father Conroy began, then decided not to go on. A wind among the barley shocks! It had risen suddenly in the air, a cone of black seed and whirling straw. Slowly it moved around the field among the watching harvesters, then, as if guided by some force within it, made its way in the direction of the rath. It left the ash and the hawthorn bushes dusted with straw and seeds. We laughed at it, thought Father Conroy, but we didn’t go into the rath after it. What were we afraid of? The still, small voice that never came?

“I don’t go for them at all,” Father O’Hara said vehemently. “The electric light put a stop to that sort of oul’ talk.”

“It meant a great deal to the old people. It answered something for them.”

“You’ll always get an answer, Tom, from superstition. The easy answer.”

“There may be a good basis for it, though.” The hungry grass, for instance. The phrase brought him all the way back to early childhood. Who had told him about it? Or had he made it up himself – how the grass where a famine victim fell was infected for all time with his hunger, how anyone crossing it began to die, denied nourishment from the food he ate. “Only a people who know what famine means would have thought up hungry grass.”

“Come on,” said Father O’Hara. “The light is going, and we’ve a lot of ground to cover yet.”