A kami in the wrong rock makes the rock heavy. Farmers at Wenllyn Ford know this, because a wall they built in spring is shorter by autumn, and the missing stones turn up in the middle of the pasture, set in a ring, with a neat gap where one stone should be. The cows have stopped looking.
The kami itself is not a body. It is a tenant. At Pen-y-Garrow it lives in a single stooped hawthorn above the sheep wash, and the tree shows it: bark polished smooth at the height of a child's shoulder where the spirit leans out to listen, a hollow the size of a bread oven, and moss that grows only on the side facing the road. Rain falls differently under it. Drops land in a line, one after another, as if counted. When it shows itself, it is tall and narrow, a figure of living bark and pale lichen in a cloak of green moss, with a crooked crown of white blossom and two amber knot-hole eyes, and it has the calm of something that has watched one slope for centuries. Hawthorn kami are small and particular. River kami are broad and slow. Hearth kami keep to the soot above a chimney and keep the fire drawing while the household is at peace.
What it wants is plain. Water in a cracked saucer, a pinch of barley, the grass around its tree cut short with shears and never a scythe. The shears are the particular part. A kami that has been scythed withdraws into its tree for a month, and the milk in every house within sight of it runs thin until someone apologizes properly. Morwen Tegle, who keeps the sheep wash, will tell anyone that the whole trouble in 1911 came from a hired boy with a sickle. It does not care for boiled cabbage and will move a gate latch an inch to the left until the household stops.
The habit people keep is to say good morning to it, aloud, before touching anything of its. Salt on the doorstep is for visitors; a spoon of honey on the sill is for the kami, and a house with a sticky sill is a house with an easy year. Where a kami has outgrown its tree, a trade has grown up around it. The stone-settlers of the Garrow valley are paid to walk a boundary at dusk and ask the spirit, politely, whether it would like a better tree. They carry a flat-bottomed pail, a pair of shears and a pouch of barley, and charge by the number of questions the spirit answers. At Wenllyn Ford the last one left a pail of rainwater beside the ring of stones, with a single hawthorn leaf floating in it.
- Classification
- Place spirit, tenant of rock and tree
- Habitat
- Old trees, boundary stones, hearths
- Danger
- Minimal
- Size
- No body; its dwelling is hearth-sized
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Pastureland and hill farms
- Binomial
- Numen vicinalis
- Diet
- Barley, honey, saucers of rainwater
- Temperament
- Particular, gracious, loyal to tidy households