The field at Gwenlloc Rhyd has a hole in it the width of a wash tub, and the hole has no mound. Every pit-digger knows what that means. The soil around the rim is glazed, dark and slick as a spoon, and a line of tilled earth runs away from it in a long sunken ribbon where the roots of the barley have simply let go. Wheat on either side stands green. Wheat along the ribbon lies yellow and flat, as though something had pulled the ground out from under it and left the surface to settle.
I come to the field with Fflur Madoc, who works the strip beside it and who has lost two goats and most of a hedge. She carries a long iron probe with a hooked tip and pushes it into the sunken line every ten paces. At the fourth push it meets nothing, and the probe drops a foot farther than it should. She stops. We both stop. Under our boots the ground ticks, a dry, spaced clicking like a beetle in a jar, and a smell rises that is sour and a little like vinegar. The glaze on the rim is its spit, which eats through root and leather alike.
The ankheg comes up where the barley is thickest. First the antennae, two jointed whips the length of a rake handle, feeling the air. Then a head like a split chestnut shell, with mandibles that open sideways and hold a dozen paler teeth behind them. The body is a long brown-green wedge, twelve feet or more by Fflur's reckoning, with six legs that fold under it like a cart's frame. It does not look at us. It turns the whole forequarter toward Fflur's goat, which is tethered thirty feet off and has gone silent, and it spits once. The tether parts. The goat is gone from the grass, and so is the stake. Afterward the ankheg eats a mouthful of barley, root and all, chewing slowly, the way a cow does at the end of a day. Fflur says it does this every morning at the same row.
The trade here is the probers, who walk the sunken lines in spring for a share of the saved crop, and the custom at Rhosgarreg Fach is that no one plants a field on the third year after a ribbon appears. Fflur swears, and I cannot confirm it, that a female ankheg will dig a new nursery chamber each year exactly one furrow's width farther from the last. The pit-diggers dig where she tells them. We leave the probe standing in the ground. By evening it has been pulled under. Nobody at either village can say what the ankheg wants with iron.
- Classification
- Burrowing chitinous predator
- Habitat
- Loam fields, hedgerows, and root-rich soil
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 12 ft long, 3 ft at the shoulder
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Farmland and old pasture
- Binomial
- Terrivorax chelatus
- Diet
- Livestock, roots, and grain
- Temperament
- Wary, territorial, and patient