A farrier knows a hoof by what it cuts, and the farrier at Saint Fenwick's Ford, Jorund Halvar, knows Fenrir by the stones. Where the wolf has crossed a shingle bank, the pebbles lie pressed flat in rows, each print wider than a shovel blade and sunk to the depth of a man's wrist. Halvar shoes draft horses for a living and says no animal alive loads a ground like that. He has never seen it stand. He has only seen what it leaves.
The earliest record is a stone-cutter's tally of fines at Saint Fenwick's, which lists a flock of forty sheep as lost to a gray beast the size of a threshing barn. Three generations later a salt-carrier's diary places the wolf on the island of Nicholmas, chained at the ankle to a boulder split by frost. The chain is real. It is a flat, pale ribbon of braided metal, thin as a bootlace, and it does not rust, does not sag, and does not sound when the wolf shifts its weight. By the time the county surveyors arrived, the animal had worn a bare circle in the heather forty yards across. They mapped it as a pond.
The naturalist measured the jaw by lying beside it on a slab of basalt in full sun while it slept, and laying a surveyor's rod along the lower tooth row from corner to corner. The span was just over five feet. The wolf's coat is the color of wet slate with a streak of rust along the spine, and its eyes are a hard, clear yellow that take in light like river amber. When it wakes it does what it does every day without fail: it drinks from the same cold seep at the foot of the boulder, laps for a quarter hour, and scratches its neck against the stone until the surface shines. There is nothing in it of menace then. It is a large animal tending to itself.
People on the shore keep one rule. Nobody carries a loose rope or a length of cord onto Nicholmas, not even to tie a boat, and anyone landing there uses a wedge and a mallet to stake the hull. The wolf lifts its head at the sight of any cord, and the shore families will not say what follows. Jorund Halvar says only that he would sooner shoe a mule in a thunderstorm. The seep has been dipped for a measure of the water each spring since the surveyors' time, and the most recent reading puts the bare circle at sixty-one yards across.
- Classification
- Chained giant wolf, divine offspring
- Habitat
- Frost-split island heath, northern coast
- Danger
- Extreme
- Size
- 5 ft jaw span; taller than a barn
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Northern coast and Nicholmas Island
- Binomial
- Lupus catenifer
- Diet
- Sheep, seals, whatever washes ashore
- Temperament
- Patient, watchful, quietly furious