Kostya Marek of Drozhna says the jackalwere sings. His sister-in-law Halina says it only hums, low and through the nose, like a man working a sum. They have argued it out at three weddings and a burial, and both are probably right about different nights. On what follows they agree: the dogs go quiet, the children stop asking for water, and the whole house sleeps through the rooster.
Before the sound comes, there are tracks. Bare human heel prints cross the yard toward the woodpile, and somewhere past the chopping block they turn into four-toed pads without any change of stride. The hens' eggs are gone, and the shells are stacked beside the water trough, licked clean. By day it comes to the door as a thin traveler asking for a drink, polite, hat in hand. In its other form it is a jackal's head on a man's frame, the left ear nicked to a notch the width of a thumbnail. In either form the eyes do not match. One is amber and the other is the gray of river gravel. Farmers at Radovets, the hill hamlet above the Drozhna road, look at a stranger's eyes before they look at his boots.
Every household keeps a silver spoon for it. Before dusk the mother boils the spoon in the rinse water and wipes every sill and threshold, and the water is poured out on the north side of the house, never the south. Beeswax goes into the children's ears. Nobody in Drozhna hums or sings once the hay is in and the sun has dropped below the fence. A woman who wants to quiet a baby carries it indoors and shuts the shutter first. A lullaby is not lent to a neighbor, either, because the song a jackalwere uses is said to be borrowed from whoever was careless with theirs.
What the villagers get wrong is the wax. A household that wakes unharmed credits the wax, and the wax goes in again the next night. The jackalwere has no use for sleeping children. It wants eggs, a lamb, a ham taken down from the rafters, and it collects them while the family dreams. Foxes get blamed for half of what it takes, and it has never corrected anyone. On the Marek gatepost a spoon hangs from a nail, black with tarnish.
- Classification
- Shapeshifting thief and lurer
- Habitat
- Farmsteads, hayfields, village outskirts
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 6 ft tall in hybrid form
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Borderland farm country
- Binomial
- Canithropus somnifer
- Diet
- Eggs, lambs, cured meat
- Temperament
- Patient, polite, thieving, sly