No crew in Marnmas Sound empties a deck bucket over the rail. The water goes to the quay steps and is poured out there, in a gale if need be, by boys who think the rule foolish until they are old enough to enforce it. A skipper who tips his bucket overboard is not fined or shouted at. The other boats simply stop mooring beside him. The reason is taste. The octopus that lives under Eppany Rocks tastes with its arms, and a splash of bilge or scrub water tells it which hull is which.
The first complaint against it was written by a chapel steward at Marnmas, back when the chapel still stood on the shingle. A mooring chain had been found at dawn wound around its own post in flat, even coils, as a rope maker would lay it. Two generations on, a grain cutter was hauled off the Rocks with every hatch unlatched and the sacks stacked dry on a ledge, none split, none eaten. Then came the years of the lobster pots, when lids that had held for a century began coming up open and empty, latch pins laid beside them in a row.
Now it is known by what it leaves. Outside its cave on the seaward face of the Rocks lies a heap of crab carapaces and drilled whelk shells, exposed only at the lowest spring tides. The heap is the reason for the midden-walkers, a trade found nowhere else on the coast. The boat owners of Marnmas pay one of them each season to cross the flats at dead low water and measure the heap against a marked pole. A foot of new growth means the animal is feeding near the moorings, and the fleet shifts a cable's length east.
What the walkers see when it is out of the cave, which is seldom, is a mantle the size of an upturned rowboat, mottled oxblood and slate, with arms near thirty feet long. The pupils are flat horizontal bars and do not close. An iron shackle, orange with rust, is clamped around the base of the fourth arm on the right side, and the arm beyond it is a stub half the length of the others, healed smooth and pale. Wilmet Garrow, who has walked the flats longer than anyone living, sets a single crab on the same flat rock before every survey and will not say why. A shackle's pin screws shut, and the pin on this one is seated tight from the outside. Who turned it?
- Classification
- Giant cephalopod
- Habitat
- Rock caves beneath tidal reefs
- Danger
- High
- Size
- Mantle like a rowboat, arms 30 ft
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Cold coastal shallows
- Binomial
- Megapolypus catenarius
- Diet
- Crabs, whelks, lobsters, moored fish
- Temperament
- Patient, curious, tidy, grudge-holding