Scorched hay is the usual complaint at Dolgarrow. Nobody loses a barn. The windward corner of a rick goes black and brittle, four inches deep, and the grass under it stays green. Gethin Morlais, hayward for the upper farms, has sixteen ricks to walk before dark and finds the corner on three of them. He trims each with a sickle and packs the char into a sack for the pigs, who eat it without complaint. He does not mention the cause to the farmers. They know it, and they would only ask him again what he is going to do.
The cause is a chimera, and it keeps to the Trefelyn Ridge above the fields. It stands about as high at the shoulder as a cart pony, tawny and heavy, with a lion's head in a mane the color of wet rust. A second head, a goat's, grows from the spine behind the mane, and a snake, thin as a wrist and as long as the body, serves as the tail. The goat head breathes the fire, in short irritable puffs. I measured a forepaw print by pressing a pie tin from Gethin's kitchen into the dust beside it: nine inches across, a little wider than the tin. Beside each print a thin groove is dragged through the dust by the tail.
At noon Gethin eats his bread in the lee of the last rick and sees it, as he does perhaps one noon in nine: the lion head asleep on a flat rock above the sheepfold, chin on its paws, the goat head awake and chewing, watching him the way a clerk watches a late man. He does not whistle. No one on the Trefelyn side whistles, not for dogs, not for tunes. The goat head whistles back through its teeth, a thin copy, and the lion head wakes to find what made the first sound. Dogs at Dolgarrow are called by clapping. No one at the fair will buy a tin whistle, and the pedlar who tried left with a full box. The goat head has also eaten the lining out of Gethin's hat, twice. It has never touched another hat. The parish assessor's hung on the same fence post for a week and was left alone.
By dusk he has walked all sixteen ricks and carries a sack of char down the track. Behind him on the ridge a thin whistle goes up through teeth. No one has whistled. He keeps walking. At the harvest supper he asks it every year, between the soup and the pie: when the goat head whistles on its own, is it calling the lion, or something else on the ridge? Nobody at Dolgarrow has answered.
- Classification
- Three-headed composite predator
- Habitat
- High moor, scree and hay country
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 4.5 ft at the shoulder
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Highland moors and pass country
- Binomial
- Pyrocapra tricephala
- Diet
- Sheep, red deer, scorched hay
- Temperament
- Territorial, sulky, sudden