Four hoofprints cross the mud below Cairnkettle Ford, and none of them climbs out the far side. They are deep for a horse of any size, and they fill from underneath, brown water welling up even in a dry week. A joiner's rule laid across the best of them reads six inches wide. The stride between prints, taken along the bank with a folded surveyor's tape, runs a little over five feet. The depth suggests something heavier than it looks, standing about fifteen hands at the shoulder.
The people along the river know the other signs. Nets hung on the weir fence come up with every eel gone and the mesh unbroken, not a knot disturbed. Ducks leave the reed beds in a line, one behind another, and swim toward the deep side of the pool without looking back. The surface lies flat against the wind. Boots left on the bank at dusk are found with the laces undone and the pair set side by side, toes to the water, which is the kind of petty tidiness that annoys the owners more than a theft would. Nobody at Cairnkettle says the animal's name within sight of the river. It is "the lad from the weir," or nothing. Nobody lends a halter or a length of rope after the light goes, and a nail of iron is pressed into the top of each ford post, where the heads have rusted into orange coins. A rider is the lure, and the lure works best when the horse looks like someone else's.
The habits of the animal itself are less dramatic than the stories. It is a patient hunter that keeps to peat rivers, weir pools and tidal flats, and it moves at dawn and dusk, never in a hurry. It lives on eels, trout, ducks and whatever the nets have already gathered, and it prefers the netted fish because someone else did the work. People are an occasional matter, and the villagers overrate their own importance to it. They also believe the iron keeps it off. The nails seem to interest it more than they frighten it: prints have been found circling a post and stopping at the nail, as if reading it. In the light of a clear sunrise it does not look black at all, but a deep green with gold in the eyes, and the spray it throws off the water turns the color of a struck match.
At Poolheron Weir the rule fails. Sorley Dunn has worked the nets there for thirty years and says the name out loud every morning, standing on the sill stone, and calls it Bess. She leaves the first eel of the day on the flat rock. The prints at her weir are the same size as those at Cairnkettle, and they run up out of the water and back again, but her nets come up full and she has never found a lace undone.
- Classification
- Shape-changing water horse
- Habitat
- Peat rivers, weir pools, tidal flats
- Danger
- High
- Size
- about 15 hands at the shoulder
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Rivers, fords and tidal narrows
- Binomial
- Equus aquaticus fulvoculus
- Diet
- Eels, ducks, trout, netted fish
- Temperament
- Patient, lure-minded, never hurried