"The goat came back and the rope didn't," says Edda Voss, rinsing a milk pail at the pump above Kemp Pond. She has told this to every visitor for eleven years and never changes the order of the words. Her day runs on the cattle. Before light she milks six cows in a shed whose door faces the water, then walks them down the ramp to drink one at a time, never as a herd, because crowding stirs the silt and silt hides things. Midmorning she mends the pond fence with split willow. At noon she eats bread with a raw cucumber and carries the cut ends to the bank, where she drops them upstream of the drinking place, stem first. Nobody taught her the stem-first part. Her mother did it, and so does everyone along the road to Rowe Weir, a mile down, where the water narrows and the reeds close over it.
The weir people blame their drowned ducks on otters and read the prints in the mud as a big soft-shell turtle's. The naturalist laid a joiner's rule beside a fresh print below the ramp and read nine inches from heel to fingertip, four webbed fingers, the prints paired and upright. A turtle plows a groove with its belly, and this print has none. An otter leaves fish heads scattered. Here the spines are laid straight in a row on the flat stone, picked clean, as though sorted. At the last visit the crossing above the pond was two hung ropes. It is now a plank bridge with a rail, and the prints have moved under it, into the shade.
At four in the afternoon the lead cow stops dead on the ramp and will not be pushed. Edda looks at the flat stone. A webbed hand, flat as a spoon, lifts the cucumber end from the moss and draws it back into the reeds. That is all she sees until dusk, when she comes down with the lantern unlit. The kappa sits on the stone, about four feet of olive skin and jade shell with a pale crescent scar on the left side, its dish full to the brim. Edda bows from the waist, slowly, until her hands reach her knees. It returns a shallow bow, dish held level, and looks away toward the water as if the matter were settled. The cow goes on drinking. Edda climbs to the house, and the window lights behind her.
The instruction is given flatly to every child and hired hand: bow before you draw water, and wait until the other bow is finished. Drive stock home before the light goes blue.
- Classification
- Aquatic shelled imp
- Habitat
- Slow rivers and village ponds
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- about 4 ft tall
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- River Spirits of the East
- Binomial
- Hydrosaurus cavipalmus
- Diet
- Cucumbers, fish, and unwary livestock
- Temperament
- Proud, mischievous, bound by courtesy