Otis Felpas fell in love at 8:37 p.m. on the 23rd of January. The snow lay crisp and unblemished from the afternoon but the clouds had cleared and a three quarter moon hung low in the sky casting dark shadows from the frosty trees. Otis Felpas saw the light in the forest from a long way off.

He was not what you would call warm blooded. He may not even have had blood at all, in the normal sense of the word. If Otis Felpas had lived in Scandinavia, he would probably have been classified as a troll. He was short and barrel chested. His face was covered in a thick red beard and he wore a close fitting woollen suit which resembled most closely the classic all-in-one combination red flannel pyjamas. He was, above all, a romantic.

He had always been a creature of the forests and deserted places. He could not read - there are no schools in the wild - and his education had been a thing of chance encounters and lurkings in the dark outside the circle of camp fires. He overheard conversations between benighted strangers, travellers in the wilderness. He heard the tales of chivalry from the lips of troubadours and, when he heard a song that pleased him, Otis Felpas would follow the bard to hear it again, outside the circle of his campfire in the wastes, as he travelled from castle to castle.

He had survived many generations of minstrels and he carried in his head the complete texts (and tunes) of more tales of love and romance than any human could learn in a lifetime. He knew of Camelot and Guinevere, of Troilas and Cressida and Anthony and Cleopatra. He knew that somewhere, in a different world from the crude farmers, hunters and petty warlords he saw, there was a place where love was the rule; where knight would sacrifice all for beautiful maiden; where the course of true love never did run smooth.

In short, Otis Felpas was ready to fall in love. As he came through the forrest, he smelt far off on the winter wind the faint aroma of wood smoke. He looked up wind and, distant through the trees, he saw a faint flicker of light. Idly curious - he had not much better to do that night - he set off towards the light. He had no idea of the importance of what seemed to him an idle impulse.

Where he passed an isolated cottage in his travels he would look in at a window, listen at a knothole and stop only if he heard a story or a song. He would never molest any human. He avoided contact with them as they seemed, in general, too extroverted, hale fellow well met, loud and noisy for his solitary tastes. He generally hunted at night. His large eyes, reflective like a cat's to catch the faintest gleam, his ears set wide on his head to locate a rustle in the dark, enabled him to locate as many hedgehogs, rats and mice as he could comfortably roast and eat.

As he approached the light, Felpas saw in the moonlight, the outline of a large cottage. It stood on a slight rise, so that the barn under the house was set partly into the ground. The roof slope was covered in snow, and the light came from a gap in the curtain the width of a hand. Inside, the room was lit by a modern paraffin lamp with a mantle. The wooden floor was covered with a mat woven of rushes into a pattern of squares.

The heating came from an enamel stove in the centre of the room. On the rush mat was a large tin bath. Steam rose from it and a large kettle and two pots of water stood on the stove as an indication that water for the bath was still being heated. Through the gap in the curtain no one could be seen in the room. Otis Felpas turned away. He would not waste time here. Suddenly, from the house came a clear woman's voice singing so beautifully that he stood transfixed.

Otis Felpas turned to look again through the window. The singer came into view and moved over to the stove. She was a girl of about eighteen or nineteen years. Her hair was dark, caught with a ribbon at the nape of her neck so that it hung half way down her back. She was tall, with a broad forehead and dark eyes. Her feet were bare and she wore a plain black dress buttoned at the front. It was a working dress, to her mid calves. It would not get into the mud.

As she picked up one of the pots of water and poured it into the bath, it was clear that carrying a bucket of milk would cause her no trouble. She continued singing as she filled the bath, completely unaware of the impression she made on Otis Felpas.

His breath caught in his chest. To him she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. She walked out of his line of vision and he felt as if something had been physically taken from him. She dragged a chair near to the bath and placed a towel on the seat. He dared not think what might happen next.

Smoothly she undid the buttons of her blouse and slid the dress up over her head. Suddenly she was naked.

He felt that he should turn away and leave, but she hung her dress over the back of the chair and turned to step into the bath. He saw her breasts as she bent over swelling miraculously, delicately pink in the warm room. Her legs were long and she was as graceful and natural as a young deer. He had the same sense of perfection as when he watched a young tree in the first light of the dawn, or when a flight of ducks took to the air over a solitary lake.

The water was too hot for comfort and so she eased herself gradually down into the bath. She first washed her hair, so that it hung, a dark waterfall, down her back. Then she carefully soaped herself, her back, her arms, her neck and breasts. She rinsed off and then washed the lower part of her body, her legs and her loins, hidden within the bath.

The steam from the bath clouded the window so that all that Felpas saw now was a dim outline. Instead of just his feeling for pure beauty, he realized that physical desire, aroused by the misty shape as the girl dried herself and dressed, was intermingled with the pure love he had felt for her. He stood transfixed at the window until she had dressed and turned out the lamp and then he walked away, flushed with emotion and shivering with shock.

Unless he did something drastic, the violence of his emotions were such that he was quite likely to knock on the door of the cottage simply in order to speak to the girl. He ran as fast as he could into the forest. He stripped off his suit and threw himself into the deepest snow drift he could find until his temperature returned to normal and he felt relatively calm. Instinct told him that he should set off at once and never return. The effect of what he had seen was so great as to make him doubt his powers of self control.

He dressed hastily. Yes, he would have to leave as soon as possible. He walked back to the cottage, all in darkness now with no sign of life bar the stamping of the cattle in the barn. Perhaps he could wait until the morning, hidden where he could take a last look at the girl before leaving. He settled in the lea of a clump of pine trees to wait.

The cold from the snow seeped through him and he huddled like a bird, the force of his life concentrating in his red centre which was so strangely agitated that he did not even doze. What harm, he asked himself, would there be if he were to stay for a day or two. He could help with the farm work which would not be heavy at this time of the year.

So it was that when dawn came he strode into the farmyard openly from the opposite direction and knocked on the door. The farmer opened the door in surprise. It was not the season for visitors.

"I was passing through on my way to the south," said Otis Felpas, "but the weather is so severe that I wondered if I might rest here a day or two. I am handy with the animals, I will chop wood or carry hay."

The farmer looked at the strange creature on his door step. The wild unkempt hair and the bulbous nose protruding from a face all beard gave very little confidence but he was a kind man and there was something in the eyes that led him to respond a little against his better judgement.

"Well yes, a day or two you may remain. You will sleep down in the barn and you will need to bring in your own fresh straw."

Felpas cleared himself a corner in the stable and brought in some straw from the bottom of stack where it was yellow and dry. He spent the day taking the night soil out to the muck heap so that by the afternoon the barn was quite habitable. Then he went out and cleared snow off the paths

He did not see the girl until the evening when he ate inside with the family. The farm was obviously quite prosperous. The farmer explained that they had four clear pastures for the spring, near the house and they grazed the upland valleys in the summer months.

At dinner they were ten. The farmer and his wife, their son and his wife, who was heavily pregnant. Annalise, who did not know that he had already seen her, was the eldest daughter and four younger children, another girl of about thirteen and three more boys.

During the meal Otis Felpas did not say more than an absolute minimum. The girl, Annalise, looked down and ate conscientiously. He had no idea how to engage her in conversation. It emerged that she had prepared the stew - rich with turnips and bacon - and the only time she looked up was when he told her how much it was more wonderful than his normal fare.

That night he slept in the warm straw of the stable convinced that he would leave in the morning. He did not. He was awakened early as the girl, Annalise came into the barn to milk the cows. Getting out of bed he helped her with the milking, forking straw down as she milked. Then he helped her to carry the steaming buckets of milk into the dairy, letting her go ahead of him so that he could watch her walk, gracefully bracing against the weight.

During the day he chopped logs and rebuilt the woodpile in the back of the barn. The next day he hunted and brought back a mallard drake for the evening meal.

"You may not look like much, Otis," said the farmers wife, "but you earn your keep."

So the winter turned to spring. Felpas worked through the change of the seasons. He decided each evening that the next day would be the last, but each morning he would help the girl with the cows and then he would begin the work of the day and he would stay for the evening meal. Some part of him was corrupted by her; he felt perverted.

Sometimes Annalise would sing after supper. Once or twice Otis Felpas sang too, lays he had learned that had been sung in the courts of kings. His voice was low and hoarse but he kept the tune and the rhythm and the family sat spellbound. He asked for nothing beyond a bed and soon the family began to take him for granted, even his slightly wild, gamey smell.

Annalise knew that there was more to this. "You are looking at me, Otis" she would say, and he would carefully look away, only to be caught staring again the next time. The boys teased her about him. Her shadow. Anything she did, he wanted to help her but she sensed, beneath his quiet obligingness, something of the force of emotion that held him to the farm.

She began to speak to him very roughly. She would order him to do things, she would humiliate him before the rest of the family, forcing him to do the most menial chores, turning him into her personal slave. She seemed to sense his weakness, knowing that in some way she was untouchable, she kept him always on the go. With the children at the lake, the first warm day, she dived into the water and came up, her shift clinging transparently to her body. "Stop Looking at me, Otis!"

As the roads cleared, young men would ride over, ostensibly to ask for advice regarding a sick calf or to borrow or return a trowel or axe. Then she would flirt with them and he would see them kiss in the thicket of pines where he had waited the first night. He could not bear to see her like this. He knew he had no chance of anything other than to watch her marry and leave. He should go, but that would mean cutting off something that kept him tied to her.

A fox began to raid the hen house, and the farmer set a snare. The next morning the fox was caught. All through the night he had struggled to get free. The sharp wire had cut through the skin, and he had tried to gnaw his way to freedom so that he had almost eaten through his foreleg. And so they killed him; but Otis Felpas wished that the fox had had the time to eat through his leg and be gone back into the wilds.

He could feel himself trapped like the fox: degraded by the luxury of the farm, unable to resist the temptation to plague the girl, unable to control his own thoughts. As a romantic, he knew that his motives were completely disgusting and yet, for all his resolution to return to the purity of the wild, he stayed.

So he followed her stealthily, observing. He saw her bathe in the river. He saw her make love in a field to a neighbouring farm lad; but the skills which allowed him to sneak up and catch a rabbit meant that she never knew he was there, spying. Yet always, when they worked together, she felt his eyes on her, so that she could not escape.

She reacted by taunting him, so that he would blush above his eyebrows. She called him a dwarf. She made him empty the chamber pots from the bedrooms.

In his misery, he worked harder than ever. The animals trusted him and he could keep them healthy. He fed them a diet which made them gain weight and he could heal swellings and, with infusions and simples, he could cure the effects of eating the wrong plant. He became almost indispensable on the farm and by his hunting he made a supplement of small game for the pot.

One day, he had nothing to do on the farm and, seeing her walk away into the woods, he followed quietly at his usual discreet distance. He heard her laugh, just off the path. He could not resist the temptation to see her and he looked through the hedgerow. She sat with her back against the trunk of a tree. Her shift was folded down over her shoulders and the neighbour's son kissed her breasts. As he moved, a twig snapped and she opened her eyes and saw him.

The terrified boy looked around and took to his heels. Calmly she buttoned up her blouse.

"Otis," she said, "it is time for you to go. I cannot live my life with you continually watching me. I do not know what you want from me, but I cannot give it to you."

"I cannot, I cannot leave here." he stammered, " Some part of me cannot bear to be separated from you. I want to be a friend, more than just a friend, to you. "

"This can never be," she said "so if, tomorrow morning you are not gone, I shall have to tell my father that you have tried to molest me. He will believe me and he will have you beaten, or worse."

Felpas knew that her threat meant little. There was nothing her father could do to harm him. He could not bear the thought of leaving her, but the next morning his place in the stable was empty.

"Strange," said the farmer, "that he did not even say goodbye."

At first they thought he might have stolen something, but nothing seemed to have been taken away. On the contrary, in the midden, breaking down by the process of decomposition which returns everything to nature, were left behind the genital organs of a troll, the final gesture of a romantic.

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