The path from the Ormdal road to Isvik is cut into scree and takes a day and a half on foot, and the climb announces its tenant well before the village does. Below the last birches the boulders carry pellets the size of a fist, gray marmot fur and small bones packed in a felt of chewed grass, always set on the flattest stone available. Above the birches the cairns carry feathers. Each is a primary as long as a forearm, brown at the shaft and barred white at the tip, pushed upright into a gap between rocks. Walkers coming down leave them where they stand.
In Isvik, the pack ponies give the first notice. Their ears swing uphill and their tails clamp down, and a few seconds later comes the sound, a dry creak like a wicker basket being twisted, which is the stiff flight feathers of a hippogriff working against one another. It has an eagle's head, forelegs and wings set on the barrel, hindquarters and tail of a chestnut horse, and it stands about as tall as one. Valdis Orm, who keeps goats on the upper pasture, says the slope goes quiet "the way a kitchen does when the mother walks in." Then the village does what it has always done. Winter-killed sheep are hauled to the flat rock called Arnhaug and left there, and nothing is buried above it, because any grave dug higher is found open by morning, the carcass dragged onto the stone.
The village is wrong about two things. It holds that the creature screams to warn of avalanches. In fact it screams at its own reflection in the meltwater pool under the east face, wings half open, every morning until the sun reaches the water and the glare drives it off. It also holds that the animal hunts the flocks. The sheep it eats are already dead, and what it hunts is marmots, taken from burrow mouths in a single drop. Its afternoons are routine. On the same shelf, it draws each primary through its beak from outermost to innermost, works over the coverts, then spends ten minutes picking scree out of one hind hoof. It will not land on the dairy roof, where a tin rooster turns in the wind, and takes the privy roof instead. That roof has been rebuilt twice.
One exception stands against all of it. Each year on the first hard frost the hippogriff comes down to Isvik, past Arnhaug and the last cairn, and lands in Valdis Orm's yard to eat barley from the same pan as his old gray gelding. Valdis goes on mending harness in the doorway and does not look up.
- Classification
- Eagle-horse hybrid of the high passes
- Habitat
- Scree slopes and cliff shelves above treeline
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- about 5 ft at the withers, 14 ft wingspan
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Northern mountain passes
- Binomial
- Equaquila scopulina
- Diet
- Marmots, hares, winter-killed sheep
- Temperament
- Vain, aloof, fiercely territorial