"Does it eat the horses?" a boy asked me at the foot of Ubrenne Crag in the first week of autumn. I said I would find out. By month's end I could say it does not, or not often. In autumn the griffin takes marmots, diving from above and folding its wings at the last moment, so the strike ends in a thump and a cloud of scree dust. Under its roost I found a shed primary feather and laid it along my walking pole, which I had marked in hand-spans: forty-one inches. The body is lion, tawny and heavy through the haunch. The head is an eagle's, and the upper beak carries a crescent notch that I could see from sixty yards through the glass.
Winter confines it. Snow closes the high ledges, and the griffin sits out storms with its wings half open over its back, shedding snow in slabs. It hunts on clear nights, when the crag glows faintly green with lichen and a hare shows black against it. Under the roost it leaves gray pellets of fur and small bones, packed in rings as wide as a cartwheel. Herders read the rings like almanacs: damp means keep the flock low. They wrap white lambs in walnut-dyed cloth, since the griffin strikes at pale shapes first. Ioan Treddle, who winters forty ewes below the crag, says it ignores a hobbled horse and takes only the ones that bolt.
Spring turns it short-tempered. The female builds on a shelf above Vaskelo Tarn, lining a bowl of gorse stems with her own down, and for six weeks she screams at anything crossing the ridgeline, goats and hawks and me. The male stands guard on the next spur with wings spread against the wind. Valley people do not whistle between thaw and the first hay cutting, because a whistle draws her down.
Summer should be quiet, and mostly it is. Both birds climb to the snowfields, molt, and sleep through the heat with beaks tucked under a wing. The exception came on my last day. At noon, in full sun, the female walked down to the tarn shore with no cover and no lookout, and drank for a quarter hour while I stood twenty paces off. She looked at me once. She did not scream, and she did not hunt. Then she climbed back to the shelf, and nothing I had written in six months explained it.
- Classification
- Winged hybrid predator, eagle and lion
- Habitat
- High crags and mountain pastures
- Danger
- High
- Size
- Lion-sized, wingspan near 14 ft
- Activity
- Seasonal
- Realm
- Mountain highlands
- Binomial
- Aquileo notatus
- Diet
- Marmots, hares, lambs, carrion
- Temperament
- Territorial, fierce near the nest