Laurens Vey shears four hundred ewes a season above Alnage Yard, and what he notices first is not the bat but the scab: a clean nick the size of a lentil, always where the wool runs thin, on an ear rim or just above the dewclaw. Ewes that carry one stand a little apart in the morning. Their fleece is dry. The ground under them is not. Vey says the cut is too tidy for a thorn and too small for a dog, and that it bleeds for an hour after the animal has stopped minding. He has found the mark on ewes from the middle of the flock, which means the bat walked in among them on foot.
Lorcan Dree sweeps flues in Drover's Rood and meets the animal from the other direction. A frightened bat goes up. This one comes down. Dree has felt it ride the brush, heard its claws working the brick, and once watched one climb out of a hearth and cross the kitchen flags on its knuckles like a rat in a borrowed cloak. He finds the roost by the droppings, black and glossy as tar, drying to red-brown, with the smell of a rusted pump. He shovels them into a sack and burns the sack unopened.
Lenka Ostry keeps nine goats and one rule. Nobody on her lane whistles after dusk, because a whistle, she says, sets the colony counting heads. Her habit against the bat is plainer: each evening she binds the goats' hocks in flannel soaked in whey and crushed garlic, since the animal dislikes a cold, wet landing. Her goats show no nicks. She also holds that the bat passes over a sleeper who hums in his sleep, and that her husband, a hummer, was never once touched. I have no way to test the humming claim. He is no longer in a position to confirm it.
The three accounts agree on the wound and the hour and little else. In Vey's flock the bat is a visitor among sleepers, in Dree's chimney a tenant, in Ostry's goat shed an audience for whistling. Her flannel and Vey's bare ewes give the only comparison on offer: scabs on one ewe in nine against none on nine goats. The bat Dree carried out of the Rood flue in a sack measured seventeen inches from wing tip to wing tip and weighed under two ounces.
- Classification
- Walking, blood-lapping cave bat
- Habitat
- Chimneys, barn rafters, hollow oaks
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- 17 in wingspan, body the size of a plum
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Sheep country and farm lanes
- Binomial
- Haemovespa ambulans
- Diet
- Blood from sleeping livestock
- Temperament
- Patient, wary, unhurried








