Six hours up the Jaskevar scree, the pines begin to show a pattern. Every trunk beside the track has a patch of bark rubbed down to pale wood, broad as a door, with coarse rust-colored hair stuck in the resin. My drover stepped around each tree without looking at it, the way a person steps around a sleeping dog. The patches climb as the track climbs. Whatever made them is not hiding. It is scratching its back.
The prints start in the mud below Wethanoq, eleven stone houses on a shelf above the gorge. Rain had filled each heel hollow with water the color of tea. I measured one print with a folding carpenter's rule, then laid an ash pole cut to six feet beside the trail and leapfrogged it to take the stride. The foot is fourteen inches long, broad across the ball, with toes that splay wide. The stride runs five feet three inches. The pole had to be moved eleven times before the trail dissolved into bracken.
The animal itself stands a little over seven feet, hunched, with arms that hang past the knee and a pelt of rust-brown hair thickest across the shoulders. The nose is flat and wide, the ears tall and round, the eyes small and amber. Two springs after that first measuring, the muzzle and collarbone had gone gray and it favored its left knee on the scree. No new patch had appeared above the old ones on the pines, and the lowest were crusted over with old resin.
Each afternoon it does one small chore. It carries a spruce bough from the gorge edge to its den, a cleft under a fallen larch, sweeps out the needles that drifted in overnight, and props the bough against the rock to dry. It does this whether or not it has eaten. Spent boughs are stacked behind the den, nine deep. It eats goat, wild leek and whatever is left in a trap, and it leaves flattened bracken beds and hair at seven feet to say where it has been. The people of Wethanoq follow one rule: the top rail of every sheep fence lies in the grass, so the fence is a step and not a wall. Marisol Quenn, who keeps the highest flock, checks hers each dusk. "A fence with a gap is a door," she says. "He respects doors."
- Classification
- Large goblinoid, hunched and hairy
- Habitat
- Pine slopes and scree above villages
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- a little over 7 ft, hunched
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- High mountain pine country
- Binomial
- Ursagnathus rufipilus
- Diet
- Goat, wild leek, trapped game
- Temperament
- Wary, territorial, orderly