Parish book of Kilbrennin, entry for the fourteenth of October: four fence posts, one heifer, no persons. The clerk has written the same three lines, with the numbers altered, for as long as the book has had pages. Rhian Pugh, who traps eels along the Tregwyn cut, reads them aloud each autumn as other people read the weather.
Her day runs on the water. She is out at six to lift forty-one willow traps from the black channel, and she works with her back to the deep side. Eels are the hydra's main food, so a full trap in the morning means the wyrm was somewhere else the night before. Rhian keeps the empty ones in a separate pile and says nothing about them. By noon she is mending fence along the Kilbrennin dike with fresh oak posts. She sets them on the dry side now, because the old ones stood in water and were gnawed to points, each gouge about three inches from the next. I measured those gouges with calipers against a post she let me pull. Across a whole row of them the spacing never varied, so I take the jaw to be wide and the bite careful. Rhian says the thing is particular about its posts and sloppy about heifers.
At dusk she carries a bundle of dried mint down to the half-sunken pole in the Tregwyn shallows and lashes it high, above the waterline. The rule in Kilbrennin is that mint is never cut in the fen after dark and never tied up before it. The hydra is fond of the smell and will take the bundle and leave the livestock alone. I stand on the dike and watch. The body comes up the length of a hay wagon, fourteen feet by my sighting along the pole, which Rhian's father painted in one-foot bands. Five necks rise from it, each longer than the barrel of the trunk. The central head lifts to the pole with half-closed saffron eyes and takes the mint as if collecting a debt. The smallest head at the rear keeps turning to look at the dike, then away. Since my last visit it has changed. There were four necks then, and the fifth is thinner and newer and has not yet learned to stay still.
Rhian walks back up the dike with her empty hands swinging. Shortly after she goes in, I pack the calipers and leave by the cinder track toward the road. A strip of dried mint has dropped onto the path. Past the reeds the pole is bare, and a lamp comes on in the window of the last house in Kilbrennin.
- Classification
- Multi-headed marsh wyrm
- Habitat
- Black fen water and reed beds
- Danger
- High
- Size
- The length of a hay wagon
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- The Sallow Fens
- Binomial
- Hydrophis polycephalus
- Diet
- Eels, drowned livestock, fence posts
- Temperament
- Wary, territorial, oddly fond of mint