Edric Plumb, who runs the mill at Fordkettle, holds that halflings are farmers and nothing more, and that their height deserves no more remark than his own crooked shoulder. Eudora Vane, who drives sheep along the same river, holds that they are a hedge people, nearer to hares than to men, and says she has never once seen one tired. Across a year on the Loam Rise I could settle neither claim. Both are partly right.
March. The thaw turns the lanes to paste, and the halflings go out into it barefoot. Arrivals notice the feet at once: broad as shovel blades, the soles tanned to saddle leather, the tops covered in curling russet hair that mats with mud and dries in plates. An adult stands about three feet high. They clear ditches and reset fence rails, and they talk the entire time, mostly about the state of other halflings' ditches. A track is a fan of five splayed toes with no heel mark. It runs from the field to the nearest kitchen and stops there.
June is haying, and they eat six times a day: bacon, bread with dripping, boiled eggs, cheese, cold pie, and whatever the neighbors have on the table. At Marshwren, Ebbe Hartwick has kept her sister-in-law's colander for eleven years because the sister-in-law once called it the dented one. By August the heat drives them under the hedgerows at noon, where they lie on their backs with hats over their faces. I crossed a bean field outside Marshwren and learned there were nine of them in it only when I stepped on a hat. That is Eudora's hare.
October closes them up. The same people who passed pie across a fence in June now weigh a sack of apples twice and shut the cellar door behind them. Edric's side of the argument gains ground here. They keep accounts, vote on dike repairs, and fine a neighbor whose goat has wandered. By December they are underground in round-doored houses with turf roofs, and the only sign from the lane is a chimney pipe poking out of a hillside, smoking. They do not come out until the ditches run. Nobody in Fordkettle will sell a halfling a pair of boots, though the shop will sell one nearly anything else. The belief is that a halfling in boots is a halfling about to leave, and the village would sooner lose a cow. On a nail inside the Marshwren granary hangs a pair of boots no bigger than a loaf, the laces knotted together, the soles clean.
- Classification
- Small humanoid hill-farming folk
- Habitat
- Hill farms, river meadows, hedged lanes
- Danger
- Minimal
- Size
- 3 ft tall, stout and broad-footed
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Pastoral hill country and river farms
- Binomial
- Pedalis collinus
- Diet
- Bacon, bread, cheese, root vegetables, apples
- Temperament
- Sociable, stubborn, quietly sly