The cabbages on the low side of Maelgwyn Fen come up gray, and every household replants them in May. Nobody treats this as news. What they argue about is why. Idris Vaughan, who grows more cabbages than anyone in the parish, says the cause is the animal's breath. Iolo Madoc, who keeps the plot next to his, says it is the eyes: a cabbage looked at is a cabbage finished. They have held these positions across the same chapel-hall table for eleven winters.
The animal in question is a catoblepas, a hog-backed, shaggy-flanked beast about the size of a drover's ox, with a neck as thin as a fence rail and a skull too heavy for it. The head hangs. Its chin rests in the mud of Kinnerlach Bank for most of the day, and a mane of matted gray-green hair falls forward over the whole face, so the eyes show only when the wind parts it. The hair on its muzzle is gone in a pale band, as if scorched. It eats water-flag and horsetail, pulling them up with its lips without lifting its head, and it travels by shoving its chin ahead of it through the sedge.
I walked Vaughan's rows and Madoc's rows with a length of cord. The gray does not follow the animal's line of sight, which runs straight down into the Bank. It follows the wind. The windward leaf of each cabbage is green and the leeward leaf is ash, and the damage stops about thirty feet from the mud. That favors Vaughan. Madoc answers that wind carries a look as easily as a smell. I cannot settle that. Nor can I check the claim the whole parish repeats as fact, that one full look from under the mane kills a grown man where he stands. Nobody I could ask has met the eyes, and I have not offered to.
On the Bank itself there is one rule. Anyone crossing it keeps their eyes on their boots and recites their own garden rows aloud, in order, so they always know where their eyes are supposed to be. A crossing that reaches the beans without a stumble counts as safe. The petty part of the quarrel sits underneath. The animal has never once put its chin to Vaughan's fence, and he takes this as an insult. It has visited Madoc's fence every autumn, and Madoc calls these visits an honor. The trench its chin cut last October runs 212 paces from the water-flag to the Madoc gate, and it does not bend once toward Vaughan's.
- Classification
- Marsh-dwelling hoofed monstrosity
- Habitat
- Fens, reed beds, flooded pasture
- Danger
- High
- Size
- the size of a drover's ox
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Fenlands and drowned meadows
- Binomial
- Catoblepas paludis
- Diet
- Water-flag, horsetail, sedge
- Temperament
- Sluggish, indifferent, lethal when startled