The Lowlands and the wider world know the Kelpie , and have made it almost friendly with statues and storybooks. The Gaelic Highlands, who lived beside the actual waters, kept a sharper taxonomy — and reserved their real dread for the kelpie's greater cousin, whom no one has ever made friendly: the each-uisge (roughly "ach-ooshkya"), the water-horse of the sea. The distinction was precise and the old people insisted on it: the kelpie haunts running water — rivers, fords, streams; the each-uisge rules the standing and the salt — the sea lochs, the deep inland lochs, the black arms of the Atlantic that reach miles into the mountains — and of the two, the Highland verdict was unanimous: the each-uisge is by far the more dangerous; the most dangerous water-dweller, the folklorists of the region concluded, in all the British Isles. The kelpie drowns. The each-uisge eats .

When a black storm came over the mountains of Asturias — the kind that turns the afternoon green-dark and sends the cattle bawling for the barn — the old farmers of that steep northern country did not curse the sky. They looked up into the boiling underside of the cloud and addressed a person. Somewhere up there, they knew, riding the thunderhead the way a herdsman rides a half-broken horse, was a small, ugly, irritable man in a wide black hat and a cloak of skins, with a beard like wet smoke and a temper like the hail he carried in his saddlebags. The Asturians called him the Nuberu — the cloud-man, the storm master — and their neighbors in Galicia knew him as the Nubeiro, and everyone from the Bay of Biscay to the mountain passes agreed on the essentials: the weather was not a thing. The weather was somebody . And somebody, with the right mixture of church bells, prayers, and country hospitality, can be dealt with.