Milk goes to chalk in the crocks at Orzhany whenever the basilisk has crossed the lower pasture, and the dairy women treat it the way they treat a late frost. They pour it out and say little. Before each evening milking they wipe every crock rim with a sprig of rue, and nobody whistles below the churchyard wall, because a whistle is believed to turn the animal's head toward the village. Dry rue on a windowsill marks a house that has lost milk before.
I went up in the dry month with Bohdan Rusek, who digs wells for the district and knows where the animal has denned. He says it lives on voles and the odd hen. The first hint was a strip of pasture grass gone gray and brittle, as if scorched, though nothing had burned. The strip was fourteen inches wide. I measured it at five points with a carpenter's folding rule, and it varied by less than a finger. Dead beetles lay along its edges, dusted pale. It ran uphill and ended at the old well above Ustrobor, a ring of fitted stone capped with a slab.
Bohdan would not go within fifty paces. He sat against the whitewashed wall of a sheepfold and pointed with his chin. The basilisk lay across the slab in full noon sun, and I watched only its shadow on the whitewash, which showed a body thick as a barrel and a crest of splayed spines. Against the courses of the wall I put it near eleven feet. Its sides rose and fell once a minute. The lichen on the slab had curled and browned in a ring around it. Bohdan says its stare works only when the eyes meet. I have no way to check this and did not try. A starling landed on the far end of the wall, folded its wings, and stayed exactly where it landed.
When the shadow of the sheepfold reached the slab, the basilisk poured itself into the shaft, scales rasping like a sack of gravel dragged over a floor. Bohdan waited a full hour before he stood. The starling had gone gray to the beak and still gripped the stone. On the slab lay one scale the size of a thumbnail, and Bohdan set a sprig of rue beside it.
- Classification
- Petrifying serpent, solitary reptile
- Habitat
- Dry wells, scorched pastures, hillside dens
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 11 ft long, thick as a barrel
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Borderland pastures and abandoned wells
- Binomial
- Serpens cinereus
- Diet
- Voles, marmots, stray hens
- Temperament
- Sluggish, territorial, indifferent to noise