Before she knew it, the tide had turned and Solanna had lost her sealskin.
And not only that, now she had arms and legs and feet like a girl.
She looked around frantically for her sealskin,
couldn't see it anywhere for an age,
and then, looking out to sea, she saw it, bobbing on a big breaker
before it went under and disappeared.
She tried to swim after it, but not being a seal anymore,
she couldn't get past the waves and was thrown back on the sand.
She started to cry loud pitiful wails for her mother,
hitting her new legs and stamping her new feet
and waving her long, terrible human arms
and then she saw her mother skim across the waves
with four salmon between her teeth.
"Mummy!"
Solanna roared into the wind and the tide, but it was useless.
It was as her mother had told her.
Now, she was a seal maiden.
Alone and naked in a terrible body that her mother would never recognise.
Even her voice didn't sound like her own.
She watched her mother disappear around the edge of the cliff
and wondered, would she ever see her again?
It was dark when the fisherman found the sealmaiden.
She lay on the sand asleep with seaweed in her hair
and the sea in her dreams.
He gathered her up and carried her to his house along the shore
and dressed her and fed her and tried to make her talk.
The seal maiden wept and sang and slept through days
and nights that seemed to go on forever.
The fisherman watched and waited.
He had heard of creatures like her before,
creatures that come up out of the sea
and are stranded here among us, lost and miserable.
He was kind to the creature and taught her all he could about the earth.
At night, he could hear waves crash and roll in her heart,
louder than the waves down at the shore.
The sound of the tide in her made him sad
for he knew that this little seal maiden ached to be among her own kind.
But he was powerless to help her,
not knowing where her sealskin was or how he might find it.
He noticed the only thing that brought her out of herself was music
so he played his fiddle for her
and sometimes she would sing for him all the songs she had learned under the waves.