The Man Who Sold Us The Land Told Us Not To Whistle At Night

We bought eleven acres and a barn from an old man who wanted out. Nice deal. Fair price. He had lived there fifty-one years.

At the signing, in a solicitor's office with a plate of biscuits, he told us where the stopcock was, which fuse trips in a storm, and that we should not whistle outside after dark.

The solicitor laughed. The old man did not.

My wife, who is braver than me, asked why.

He said: "Because something out there will whistle back, and when it gets it right, it will come and see who has been calling it."

Then he took a biscuit, and the meeting continued, and that was that.

We moved in. We are not stupid people; we have degrees and a stupid coffee machine. We laughed about it for about four months.

In August my brother came to stay, and he is loud and he is a whistler, and he stood on the deck at eleven at night and whistled the theme from something, badly.

Something whistled back.

It came from the far treeline. It was the same tune, but wrong in the middle — like someone who has heard music but has never made any, getting the intervals almost right. It was too loud for a person that far away. That is the thing I keep circling. To be that loud, at that distance, it would have had to be enormous, or it would have had to be closer than the treeline, and I do not want to think about the second one.

My brother went inside and did not go outside again, and he cut his visit short by two days, and he has never once teased me about it, which for him is like a public confession.

We do not whistle. My children do not whistle. When the plumber whistled last summer I nearly took his head off, and I had to apologise, and I gave him a beer and a very edited explanation.

Fifty-one years that man lived there. He did not warn us about the septic tank, which cost us four thousand.

He warned us about the whistling.