Mabyn Teague has walled the high pastures above Dunsy Edge for thirty years, and she notices the ettin's work long before the ettin. A coping stone she set on Tuesday lies in the heather on Thursday, turned lichen side down. A creature fourteen feet tall, with forearms thick as fence posts, could flatten a wall by accident. What it does instead is take the stones out and put them back wrong, on purpose, and she holds that only one of its heads has the patience for such work. She says it is the left one, the bald one, which sulks even when it is asleep.
Merrit Hale, who runs sheep on the same slope, says the right head is to blame. His reasoning is that the right head has the voice. It boasts, loudly, at nothing, and he has lost a ewe's worth of raw mutton to a creature that announced the theft from two fields away. The argument has gone on since lambing and has split the parish of Ostle Pass into left-headers and right-headers. The two camps no longer share a pew at the harvest supper.
The naturalist watched the ettin for three days from a cairn above the ridge, and can settle it only partly. Both heads turn to the same target every time, left scowling, right shouting, and the right arm does the throwing. A turnip leaves the hand while the right head is still mid-sentence. But the wall-work is slow and silent, and it happens while the right head is busy with grouse eggs, which it eats shell and all and wears afterward in its ginger beard. The left head has no beard, and it stays clean. The ruling is that the left head sets the stones wrong and the right head takes the credit, and neither of them will agree to this. Since the last visit the ettin has also acquired a cobalt wool scarf, wound twice around the left neck. The left head wears it like an apology it has no intention of making. Nobody in Ostle Pass will say who knitted it.
The custom there is to leave two turnips on the toppled standing stone above Dunsy Edge, never one, and never of equal size. The right head takes offense at the smaller one, the left head at being offered the larger, and the quarrel that follows keeps both busy for the better part of an afternoon. Trackers read the rest from the ground: split turnip rind, pale eggshell scattered on the heather in a line, and bare footprints a yard long pressed deep on the downhill side, where the ettin leans when it argues. Mabyn has already started resetting the coping stones. "Let them have the big one," she says. "I'd sooner hear them fight over it than over my wall."
- Classification
- Two-headed hill giant
- Habitat
- High moorland and boulder cairns
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 14 ft tall
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Northern moors and mountain passes
- Binomial
- Gigas bicipitis
- Diet
- Turnips, raw mutton, grouse eggs
- Temperament
- Quarrelsome, slow to rage