"It whistles flat," says Folke Brandt, thumping a capstone back into its bed with a wooden mallet on the wall road above Nesvarden. "A man whistles up at the end. The devil whistles down, like it's disappointed in you." He does not look up. He has mended this wall since he was nine.
The valley calls the animal simply the Devil. It stands six and a half feet, built like a rake leaned against a barn, with long shins, a narrow chest and arms that hang past the knee. The hide is the gray-black of a lamp chimney, hairless and faintly greasy. The hooves are cloven and print nine inches long in frozen mud. It has three horns, two swept back and the left snapped to a stub. The mouth is a flat seam that never moves when it whistles.
The argument is whether there is only one. Brandt says one, and that the snapped horn proves it. Frida Haug, who keeps the inn at Oksfjell and has watched it twice from her cellar window, says three at least: last autumn's had two horns, the year before's had four. The valley splits by which end it was born in. Meanwhile the Devil works on stone. Along the field walls it drags its horns over the capstones at night, leaving a black, waxy polish and a hairline split. Frost gets into a split cap, and a wall with frost in it is down by spring, so Nesvarden supports three cap-menders, a trade found nowhere else in the district, who read the polish each morning the way other men read weather. Nobody whistles on the wall road after dark. If a flat whistle answers, the traveler sets his hat on the nearest wall and walks on bareheaded; the hat is gone by morning. The grievance heard most is a petty one: it takes only left mittens and hangs them on gateposts, so every house keeps a drawer of useless rights.
I spent three nights on the road with a lantern and a ruler. Across eleven stones the polish shows one pattern, two scrapes a thumb apart and a short, blunt smear to their left. Two horns or four would mark differently. I side with Brandt and put Haug's counts down to dusk fog and her cider. Brandt adds that the Devil is older than the walls, and that the first walls were piled up to give it something to rub besides the barns. No record in either parish predates them, so I report it as told. I leave on the fourth morning by the lower road. At the last gate my left mitten hangs from the post. The right is still in my pocket.
- Classification
- Horned fiend, cloven-hoofed biped
- Habitat
- Stone-walled upland pastures
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 6.5 ft, thin as a rake
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Walled uplands above Nesvarden
- Binomial
- Cornipes sibilans
- Diet
- Lamp oil and cold tallow
- Temperament
- Sullen, patient, petty