Pwca

The Pwca is the Welsh puck — a shape-shifting prankster, willing farm drudge, and misleading light, paid in milk and dangerous to cheat.

The pwca is the Welsh member of the puck family — the same being, the folklorists note, as the Irish puca, and so like Shakespeare's Puck in actions and character that Welsh tradition claimed the playwright borrowed him outright, from stories told him by a friend of Brecon who lived near Cwm Pwca, the Pwca's Glen, one of the creature's favorite haunts. His one contemporary portrait is a famous curiosity: a drawing done with a piece of coal by a Welsh peasant, showing a silhouette with a head like a fledgling bird's and a figure like a tadpole's, with no arms at all.

His offices run the puck's full range: a willing drudge who will work about a farm, a mischievous poltergeist when the mood takes him, and a misleading light on the night hills — the will-o'-the- wisp role in which he draws travelers astray. The farm relationship ran on tribute, possibly wages for his services as a cowherd: at one farm near Abergwyddon the milkmaid carried a bowl of milk and a piece of white bread to a lonely place on the pastures every day. The day she drank the milk and ate the bread herself out of mischief, leaving him cold water and a crust, she was seized on the next day's errand by sharp invisible hands and soundly whipped, while the Pwca's voice warned her that a second offense would be treated worse.

The pwca's career in this census has its own small history: he stood in the batch's original draw, was displaced when the selection was re-measured under a corrected vocabulary, and returns here by the selector's own arithmetic after a rejection opened a fairy seat. The tradition, which shows him slipping through farmhouse walls and out of every debt but his own, would surely approve of the route — no door stays closed to a puck for long, and the seat he lost to a corrected dictionary he regains from a corrected census.

[Generated Content] The pwca reads as reciprocity with a temper. He gives real labor for modest, exactly specified pay, and his recorded violence is confined to enforcement of that contract — one whipping, one warning, proportionate and explained. The misleading-light trade shows the other face: to strangers who owe him nothing he is pure caprice. The temperament is quick, contractual, humorous, and touchy — a small law unto himself, fairly administered. This is inference from his recorded dealings, and it is offered as such.