Dorrit Kask has laid slate on the farms under Kovac Ridge for most of her life, and she knew the giant was back before anyone saw it, because the rime on her roofs grew on the wrong side. Frost builds on the north face of a roof. This October it built on the south face too, in a band fourteen feet off the ground, level as a pulled string, where something very large had breathed out while passing. The frost giant stands eleven feet tall, with blue-white skin and a beard the color of old pewter, and every autumn it comes down from the glaciers to see which lakes will freeze first.
By midwinter it stays. It beds in a hollow on the lee side of Sorley Fell, packed with snow and stood in rather than lain in. Each morning, before anything else, it sits on the same boulder and combs the rime out of its beard with a rake of elk antler, one slow stroke after another, then knocks the comb against its knee. It does this in clear weather and in blizzards, and nothing comes of it. The comb is simply what it does first. Afterward it walks to the lake, breaks a hole with one fist, and hauls out pike by the tail. It eats them frozen and leaves the heads in a row on the ice. The heads are still hard in March and show where it has been. So do its tracks, each ringed with a collar of ice that does not soften at noon.
People here keep one rule above the others. Between the first snow and the first running creek, nobody sells the giant fire, lends it a lit lamp, or says the word thaw. The phrase is the soft days, and children are cuffed for forgetting it. A man who says thaw in his own yard wakes to a door frozen shut. A trade has grown up around the giant's breath: the rime-sweepers of Sorley Fell go house to house at dawn with long wooden scrapers, clearing the white fur from doorframes and chimney caps for a measure of barley a month. Breath left alone will seal a house by February.
In late March the beard begins to drip, and the giant climbs back toward the ice, slower each day and sullen about it. I leave the week the first creek runs. Going down the ridge road, I pass Dorrit's roof, where the south-side band has shrunk to one line of dry, dark slate. Beside every door on the way stands a scraper, and each one is worn to a different shape by the hand that uses it.
- Classification
- Giant of the cold highlands
- Habitat
- Glaciers, frozen lakes, high fells
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 11 ft tall
- Activity
- Seasonal
- Realm
- Glacier and high lake country
- Binomial
- Gigas glacialis
- Diet
- Frozen pike, elk, lake ice-fish
- Temperament
- Sullen, territorial, slow to anger