An invisible stalker is a column of moving air about eight feet tall, shaped loosely like a man, and it weighs less than the coat it pushes through. Nothing lives inside it. It is a wind that was given a direction and never told to stop. The high farms above the Pjerr River, Valdhaug at the top and Pjerrvik at the bottom, have each had one, and no one in either place can say who sent it.
I take the loft over the sheep pen at Valdhaug for four nights. On the second evening the lamp flame leans toward the shut door. Hay dust lifts off the boards in a stripe the width of a pair of shoulders and drifts along the wall, and the ewes below turn their heads together, slowly, tracking something at the height of the lower beam. Arvid Kolsrud, the farm's powderer, climbs up with a sack of barley flour and a sieve made from a stocking. Every farm on the Pjerr hires a powderer, who dusts thresholds and loft floors at dusk, reads the prints at dawn, and is paid in fleece. Arvid says a stalker never sets a foot down in the same place twice, so a floured floor tells him only where it has been and never where it will be.
He sifts the boards between my bunk and the ladder, and we sit on the stair with the lamp turned low. The flour takes the prints one at a time: long, narrow, toeless, the heel pressed deep as though the thing leaned its whole weight there, which it does not have. They cross to the foot of my bunk and gather in a tight cluster, deep, as if it stood a long while. Then the cold arrives, a cellar opened in January, and a slow pull of air crosses my cheek, in and out, as though something were checking whether I breathe. The lamp gutters and straightens. The last print sits against the door.
By day it is duller work. At noon, from the pass above Valdhaug, I watch it walk three slow circles around the cairn and press a ring nine feet across into the snow, the way a dog turns before it lies down. Then it stops. It does nothing else there. In Pjerrvik the hearth ash is left unswept on every threshold after dark, a rule no one explains to me. Going down the track on the fourth morning, I find my own boot prints in the new snow have a second line beside them, long and narrow, one stride behind, and it ends at the first fence of Pjerrvik.
- Classification
- Air elemental, bound servant
- Habitat
- High farms, passes, empty halls
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 8 ft tall, weighs almost nothing
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Elemental Plane of Air
- Binomial
- Aerovagus tacitus
- Diet
- None; draws on moving air
- Temperament
- Patient, single-minded, tireless