The harpy is a bird-bodied hunter with a woman's face and a wingspan of eleven feet, measured on one that fell dead across a drying rack at Costa Mirada. The body below the neck is that of a vulture-sized raptor, barrel-chested, with legs as thick as a man's wrist and talons the length of a thumb. The head is human in outline, with a flat brow, a hard jaw and a nose sharpened to a ridge, and it sits on a ruff of coarse gray feathers that hides the join. The eyes are yellow and do not blink often.
One encounter, from the first hint to the end of it, is worth setting down in order. On the cliff road above Mondrago the goats went quiet before anything else did. A flock of forty stopped grazing and stood with their heads turned toward the sea, and the dogs sat down in the road and would not be pushed. Then came the smell of the nests, a sour reek of old fish and wet feathers, and a long shadow slid up the slope without a sound. The harpy came in low from the water with its legs hanging, took a kid from the edge of the flock in one pass, and rose again with the wind under its wings. It did not circle. It carried the animal to a ledge of black rock two hundred yards out and began to sing, a thin scraping tune in a woman's voice with no words in it, which carried clearly over the water.
People on that coast do not whistle on the cliff road, and they do not repeat the harpy's song, because a harpy that hears its tune returned will follow the one who sang it home. Leocadia Brandão, who keeps the last house on the road, says she has gone fifteen years without humming at her own washing. Her habit is to rub the doorposts with crushed rue and rancid fish oil each new moon, since the smell of a harpy's own nest-reek is the one thing that turns it from a door. The doorposts of the whole village are stained dark yellow from it.
The harpy leaves practical traces. Pellets of bone and hair the size of a fist collect under every perch, and long gray feathers, stiff as pen quills, turn up in the thornbushes after a hunt. Locals track a nest by the whitewash of droppings down the rock and by the dead gulls laid in a neat row on the ledge. Sheep and kids go first, then dogs, and only rarely a child left alone at the tide line. The goats are kept in stone pens after the evening milking, and the pens are roofed. When the singing stopped that night, Leocadia shut the shutters and slid the bar across. "Let it keep the kid," she said. "It will not come back for the dog."
- Classification
- Winged hybrid raptor, woman-faced
- Habitat
- Sea cliffs and rocky headlands
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 11 ft wingspan, 60 lb
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Coastal cliffs of the southern shore
- Binomial
- Aellopia rapax
- Diet
- Goats, gulls, dogs, carrion
- Temperament
- Cruel, patient, fiercely territorial