"It clears its throat first, like a man about to ask you a question," says Edvin Sorak, who was stacking split beech against his north wall in Ostrovnik when I put the matter to him. The sound comes from the face. I have heard it across sixty yards of scree, a dry, courteous cough, followed by a pause long enough for a goat to lift its head. Edvin hums one low note over his gate each dusk and goes inside.
A salt carter on the Vyshkov pass road, retying a mule's load, says the cough is only manners and the tail is the warning. The spines knock in their sockets like dried peas in a gourd, she says, and by then the animal has already chosen. A boy of about twelve, driving goats down a gully above Ostrovnik, says it makes no noise of its own at all. He called his herd one evening and an answer came back from the rocks in his own voice, pitched slightly wrong. Laid end to end, the three accounts make one sequence. I sat forty-one evenings on a ledge above Vyshkov and heard the cough, then the rattle, then, once, a copy of my own throat-clearing from a slab I had not looked at.
The animal itself has a lion's body, dust-colored and long in the flank, and a man's face: broad jaw, heavy brow, flattened nose, a mouth fixed in a grin that does not alter. Its eyes are pale and do not blink. The tail rides over the back in a jointed curve, longer than the body, ringed at the tip with yellow-green spines, and one of those spines is snapped to a stub. Spines turn up in the scree, hollow and thin as knitting needles. Nobody in Ostrovnik carries one indoors; they push it point-down into the ground at the nearest wall. The tracks are lion pads with a long drag mark between them where the tail trails. Horns and hooves are found in a heap on a flat rock, picked clean, and it hunts at dusk. When I first came, the upper pasture wall stood hip high. It now reaches a man's shoulder, rebuilt in pale limestone slabs.
Everything above holds for every manticore I have watched but one. On the Vyshkov side, through a single spring, an old male lay in a dry streambed with his tail hanging slack to the stones. He did not cough, did not rattle, did not answer anyone's voice, and took nothing from the flocks. In summer the streambed was empty, with no spines in it, no track, and no mark on the rock where he had lain.
- Classification
- Hybrid predator, lion and scorpion
- Habitat
- Limestone gorges and scree slopes
- Danger
- Extreme
- Size
- 7 ft body, 8 ft tail
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Highland gorge country
- Binomial
- Anthroleo caudaspina
- Diet
- Goats, deer, strayed sheep
- Temperament
- Patient, territorial, unblinking