Along the eastern bank of Wyszogrod Flats the reeds lie combed flat in lanes a yard wide, all running from the water toward the dike. Between the lanes stand stakes of split willow, each topped with a pike skull scraped white. Three-toed prints cross the mud overnight and fill with a greasy sheen that stays on stones for two days. Scales snag on the reed stems at the height of a man's belt. In September nothing living is seen.
By late October the creatures show themselves at dusk. The kuo-toa are gray-green and stooped, nearly as tall as a man, with a fish's head, eyes set wide on either side of the skull, and a mouth that never fully closes. One hauls a drowned sheep into the shallows with a pole hooked at one end and murmurs at the pike skulls in a wet, clicking rhythm, as if the stakes could answer. Kasia Wrobel, who mends nets in Ostrowna, a hamlet of nine houses on the dike, has watched them longer than I have. Her household keeps its fires on the dike side, and nobody in Ostrowna will hold a lit lamp toward the lake or lend one to a stranger who asks. A light facing the water, she says, is taken for an answer.
Once the shallows skin over, the lanes freeze in place and the kuo-toa go under the ice. Their prints stop. Kasia sells no rope to anyone heading for the flats and does not say the lake's name after dark. She says the kuo-toa know every person drowned in it by name. I have no way to check this, and she says it as flatly as the price of salt. I return in March. The stakes number thirty-one where September had nine, and the skulls now face the houses instead of the water. Meltwater brings the creatures ashore at night, quick and restless. Prints reach the shed door, and a film of scales lies on the latch.
All of this holds except once. At noon in June, under full sun, a single kuo-toa stands in the open shallows at Wyszogrod, motionless, a crack running down its left cheek spine. It does not flee when I walk to the bank. It watches me the whole afternoon and never once looks at the water.
- Classification
- Amphibious fish-headed humanoid
- Habitat
- Flooded reed flats and lake shallows
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 6 ft tall, stooped
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Lowland lakes and river marshes
- Binomial
- Piscanthropus limnophilus
- Diet
- Fish, carrion, drowned livestock
- Temperament
- Devout, skittish, sudden when cornered