The ditch frogs around Gruitwater go quiet one canal at a time, starting at the polder edge and working toward the village, so that the silence travels at a walking pace. This is how the werewolf is first noticed there, and it is a better warning than any howl, since a howl can be a dog. The quiet reaches the lane behind the grain store and stops. Then the frogs start again in the wrong order, the small ones first. Fenne Aertsen is the village raker, a post invented for the creature. Each dusk she drags a wooden rake down the sand of Pastoor Lane so the morning shows a clean page, and the village pays her in turnips and dry peat. Asked about the thing itself, she says nothing and hangs the rake with its tines up.
I collected three descriptions, two in Gruitwater and one at Broekdam, a hamlet six miles east, and they do not agree. The dike reeve, who inspects the sluices at all hours, says it is gray, taller than a doorframe, and walks upright with its arms hanging. The eel trapper at Broekdam says it is russet and low, close to the size of a calf, and runs on four legs with a hitch in the stride. The widow who keeps the Gruitwater bakehouse has seen it only from behind, in a long coat the color of wet brick, looking at the shuttered windows one by one. Laid against one another, the accounts share two facts: it travels the dike top and never the roads, and it stops at every window. The trapper's hitch matches Fenne's sand, where the left hind print is always pressed deeper than the right. Her rake also turns up tufts of coarse gray hair, which she burns in the stove with the door shut.
In Broekdam every household sets a saucer of herring brine on the sill when the moon fills, and takes it in before anyone washes their face in the morning. A saucer found full is a bad sign. A saucer found knocked into the street is worse. When I walked the lane two autumns ago, the prints began at the sluice gate. This year they begin forty yards short of it, on the far bank, and nothing has been dredged or moved. The reeve says the creature has learned to start farther out. The widow says the sluice has learned something.
I leave Broekdam by the dike road. Every sill has its saucer. On the last one, with the moon not yet over the willows, the brine is already gone and the rim is dry.
- Classification
- Shapeshifting man-wolf
- Habitat
- Polder dikes, hedgerows, village lanes
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 6.5 ft standing upright
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Flooded farmland and canal villages
- Binomial
- Lupanthrops hesperius
- Diet
- Livestock, eels, salted herring brine
- Temperament
- Patient, watchful, fixated on windows