"Is it one animal or many?" a boy asked me on the quay at Vesper Lowe, and he asked it the way people ask whether a rumor is true. I told him I had three accounts and would set them side by side. The first is from Gudrun Hallow, who has worked the Vesper Lowe shoal for forty years. She says the leviathan does not surface so much as the sea thins above it. The water goes the color of tea, then of lead, then a ridge of back as long as a harbor wall rolls through, crusted with barnacles the size of washtubs and wearing a pelt of kelp that grows only on its flanks. She counts it a good year when the ridge passes twice. Her trade exists only because of it. She is a chum-caller, one of six on the coast, who paddles out at slack tide and pours fish oil on the swell so the animal turns away from the netting grounds and not toward them.
The second account comes from a salt-boiler named Gil Marrin, in the village of Ullage, a name the founders took from a wine cask term and which no one has corrected. Marrin has never seen the animal. He has seen what it leaves: after a passage, the tide pans fill with fine white sand scoured from deep bottoms, and whelks crawl up from depths where whelks do not live. In Ullage every household keeps a jar of that sand by the door and sprinkles a pinch on the sill when a gale rises. Nobody can say who began it. The jars are older than the lamps.
The third is from a drover, Gaspard Teel, who crossed the tidal flats at night and says he rode a mile on its back believing it was an island. He describes a mouth he never saw, only felt, as a slow cold draft from the south, and an eye he could have stood inside. I have no means of checking this. He is steady, sober, and the only one of the three who will not go near the water now.
Put together, they agree on little. Hallow says it is shy. Marrin says it is a tide. Teel says it is awake. They do agree on size: from the harbor mouth at Vesper Lowe to the first buoy is about four hundred yards, and Hallow says the back covers it with room to spare. They agree it eats whatever the deep currents carry to it, mostly squid and drowned timber, and that it has never taken a boat on purpose. Boats that were taken were in the way. The locals give one instruction, flatly, to every newcomer. When the water goes the color of tea, row to shore and do not stop rowing to look.
- Classification
- Colossal sea beast
- Habitat
- Open deep water, shoal edges
- Danger
- High
- Size
- roughly 400 yards long
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Sea and River
- Binomial
- Thalassophis maximus
- Diet
- Squid, drowned timber, deep drift
- Temperament
- Indifferent, rarely aggressive