The Cuegle: The Three-Eyed Cradle Thief of Cantabria
The green mountain country of Cantabria, which gave this chronicle the one-eyed Ojáncanu and his child-eating mate, kept in its bestiary a smaller and in some ways stranger horror — a creature that the herding families of the high valleys, the people of the scattered stone cabañas , feared with a particular domestic intensity, because its hunting ground was the cradle. He is the Cuegle, and his anatomy, recited by generations who needed children to remember it, sounds like something assembled from spare parts on a dark afternoon: a small being, no taller than a low man, walking upright on two legs, with skin black as a hearth-back; a single stubby horn on his forehead; a mouth crowded with five rows of teeth ; three arms — with no hands , ending in blunt stumps; and, crowning the whole impossible inventory, three eyes set in a row across his face — one green, one red, one blue — that never blink together. He is hideous, he is strong far beyond his size despite the handless arms, he ...