The jotunn's most useful quality is that it cannot be hurried, and a man who stands in its way on a mountain pass will find the whole weather of the ridge has agreed to wait with it. I have watched one hold a snowfield for an afternoon simply by sitting down.
The encounter I record took place above Bushelmark, a terrace village named for the grain measure once used to size its fields, though nothing grows there now but lichen. A herder named Verrin Dask had lost two goats up the scree and went after them at dusk. I followed at a distance. The first hint was the frost: it crept down the slope ahead of us in a clean line, as though someone had drawn a ruler across the rock. Then the stones stopped clicking underfoot. Then we saw the jotunn, a gray-blue giant some fourteen feet seated, with a broad slab of a face, a jaw like a lintel and pale eyes with no visible pupil. Its beard was braided into four ropes and each rope ended in a hook of black iron. A crack ran from its left brow down through the cheekbone, filled with white rime, as a flaw in a millstone fills with dust.
It was doing something entirely routine. It was combing ice out of its beard with a rake of antler tines, pulling the clots free and dropping them in a neat pile at its knee, the way a farmer knocks mud from a boot. It did not look at us. The goats stood beside it, unharmed, chewing frozen moss it had apparently scraped loose for them. Dask took off his cap and walked up, collected both animals by the scruff, and walked back down without a word. That is the custom at Bushelmark: you never speak to a jotunn first, and you never take anything of its except what it has plainly set beside you. Nobody there will say who taught them this.
The pile of ice clots is the practical sign. They do not melt in summer, and shepherds around Mallowtell, a hamlet named for the old wool-weighing house, carry them down in wet sacking to chill their cheese caves. Local people claim the jotunn has combed that same beard since before the first fields were cut, and that the braids are never the same number twice. I cannot check either statement. Dask, afterward, said only that the giant's rake had a different tooth missing each time he had seen it. Why a creature that large would feed two stray goats, and then go on raking ice into a pile for no one, is a matter on which I have found no one willing to guess.
- Classification
- Frost giant, mountain dweller
- Habitat
- High scree, glacier edges, snow passes
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 14 ft seated, taller standing
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Rimelands of the high passes
- Binomial
- Gelidus montivagus
- Diet
- Lichen, frozen moss, cold-water fish
- Temperament
- Patient, indifferent, slow to anger