Fence posts along the Calheira meadow split at the base every spring, and the farmers there replace them the way other people replace roof slates, without complaint and without asking why. The reason stands about seven feet tall, five at the withers, and does not apologize for it. He is a centaur stallion, rust-chestnut with silver dapples and four white stockings, and he scratches his barrel against whatever is nearest.
The earliest record is a land deed from Calheira, written when the lime kiln on the ridge was still burning. It lists the kiln, the meadow, and a "horse-bodied tenant" who paid no rent and was not asked to. A century later a surveyor's field book notes the same tenant at the wood edge, taking a loaf from a fence rail and leaving the cloth. By the time the kiln went cold, the villagers of Lagoa Seca, two miles down the valley, had stopped counting him as a visitor. He is simply there in daylight, grazing clover and windfall fruit, and gone into the trees by dark.
His habits are plain once watched. Each morning he rakes a hollow of dust with his forehooves, rolls in it, and rises with a coat gone matte and gray. He does this at the same spot beside the kiln, and he does it with the flat concentration of a man shaving. His hands are oversized and callused, and a white scar runs across the left forearm. He does not explain it. His black tail is twice the length of any horse's, and he sweeps flies off his flanks with it while he reads the ground for other people's tracks. He is proud, wary, and quick to take offense. A stranger who walks through the raked hollow has insulted him, whether or not the stranger knew it was there. Locals go around, even when the detour costs a quarter hour. They also leave bread on the splintered post at the meadow's edge, and they never leave it on the kiln side.
The naturalist's last visit found one set of hoofprints in the hollow, his own. This season there is a second set, narrower and unshod, cutting straight across the raked dust. The stallion has re-raked the ground twice since, and the post at his feet is newly split. Amadeo, who keeps goats on the lower slope and has mended that fence for thirty years, watches from his gate and does not go up the hill. "Leave the bread," he says. "And don't look at the prints."
- Classification
- Fae, horse-bodied sylvan folk
- Habitat
- Open meadows and wood edges
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 7 ft tall, 5 ft at the withers
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Fae borderlands
- Binomial
- Hippanthropus sylvaticus
- Diet
- Grasses, clover, fruit, bread
- Temperament
- Proud, wary, quick to offense