Forty-one switchbacks climb from the town of Marsvik to Rennefjell Plateau, and the path began describing the creature before I saw it. Above the last birches the snow lay in patches, and each patch was a disc melted clean to bare rock, about the width of a hay wagon. The discs ran toward the summit like stepping stones. The grass between them was combed flat in one direction. Alvdis Brekke, a shepherd who met me at the upper hut with a bowl of cold barley porridge, said this is how the plateau is read: where the discs go, the celestial has gone.
It stands nine feet tall beside a cairn of gray slate, and it does not touch the ground. The bare soles hang a finger's width above the stubble. Under them the grass stays dry and green in a perfect circle while frost grips everything else, so the creature seems to stand on a lit coin. The skin is the color of beeswax, the hair white and cropped close as a lamb's first fleece, the face long, level-browed and still. I watched it for most of an afternoon. It ate nothing. Alvdis says it takes what it needs from the snow, which would explain the discs.
Four wings fold against its back, two long and two short, and the feathers are the reason the plateau has a trade. Each is the length of a man's forearm, translucent as horn, and cold enough to raise a blister on a bare palm. About a dozen drop each week. A ewe that swallows one hiccups for a day, so the feather-gatherers go out at dawn with wool-lined baskets and tongs of green birch, and carry the day's fall down to Marsvik. Alvdis is one of five. The village keeps the feathers in a root cellar dug into the north bank of a stream, where the potatoes stored beside them freeze in July.
The eyes have no pupils. They are plain white, like lamp glass, and they travel over the lambs one at a time, gently. Alvdis says it counts every lamb born on the plateau and has never missed one. I have no way to check this. In Marsvik no one carries a mirror above the last birch, and no one lends one to a climber who asks. A flash of reflected sun, they say, makes the celestial turn and look at the owner with great attention for a whole day, which is thought to be more notice than anyone needs. On the cairn's top stone sits a child's blue wool mitten, with a gray feather laid across the thumb.
- Classification
- Winged celestial humanoid
- Habitat
- Alpine plateaus above the tree line
- Danger
- Minimal
- Size
- 9 ft tall
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Snow pastures and high cairns
- Binomial
- Caelipes nivalis
- Diet
- Light drawn from snow and sun
- Temperament
- Watchful, gentle, unhurried