Mud season at Barrowgoose settles one question and opens another. The question it settles is whether the elemental on the upper pasture has woken: by the second week of thaw a band of crushed gravel runs across the grass, pale and straight and wide as a hay wagon, with a trough at one end where there was none last year. The question it opens is whose wall the thing has been eating. The pasture lies between Barrowgoose and Ridgekettle, three miles east, and each village claims the wall, the grazing and the elemental, though neither can agree which of the three it wants most.
The elemental is nine feet of fieldstone and packed clay, built like a barrel on two short legs, with arms that reach the ground and a coat of turf across its back that greens every April. It does not hunt. It eats limestone and flint, and prefers laid wall stone to bedrock because a drystone wall comes apart easily. What it leaves is sorted gravel, coarse on its left side and fine on its right, and that is how it is tracked: walk the band uphill and the ground begins to ring hollow, like a struck cask, a few yards before the creature itself. Barrowgoose says it rose from their hill. Ridgekettle says it came up through their clay and the hill is only where it stopped. The real quarrel is over eggs. The flat slab it leaves where it lies up warms by noon, and hens from both villages lay on it. Clemmie Rask of Ridgekettle sets a pan of water on the slab every morning and says a stone that warm was plainly made for hens.
I settled what could be measured. I drove two iron pins into bare rock at the pasture's edge and ran a steel tape, borrowed from the Barrowgoose mill, from the near pin to a chalk mark on its shoulder each morning for eleven days. It moved twenty-two feet uphill, a shade over two feet a day, straight toward the limestone outcrop at the boundary stone, which belongs to neither parish. It never turned toward either village. Each side offered the missing wall as proof against the other. The wall was only between it and the outcrop.
I ruled, standing between the two delegations at the boundary stone, that the creature was a thief of neither village and a tenant of neither, and both went home certain they had lost. They do keep one rule in common. A stone that falls from a wall the elemental has chewed is never carried back, only left where it lies, since a returned stone is a stone it comes to fetch. The slab is warm. Clemmie's pan stands on it, full, with two hen feathers floating on the water.
- Classification
- Elemental, stone and clay bodied
- Habitat
- Hill pasture, quarries, deep clay
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 9 ft tall, about six tons
- Activity
- Seasonal
- Realm
- Hill country, just under the topsoil
- Binomial
- Lapidarius glebosus
- Diet
- Limestone, flint, and laid wall stone
- Temperament
- Slow, stubborn, territorial