The cellar-keepers of Nantyrwen say a mimic eats grain and leather and nothing else. The quarry hands at Rhosgelli say it eats fingers. Both are partly right, and the naturalist, who has watched four of them feed, can add only that the diet runs in that order of preference, with fingers last and taken only when offered.
Branwen Pugh keeps the stores under the Rhosgelli cutting-office, and her day begins with a sack of potatoes. Every chest in the storerooms gets one thrown at it before a hand goes near a lid. A real chest lets the potato bounce and roll. By nine she has done eleven chests, a trunk of fuses, and a coffer of surveyors' chain. At the twelfth, a squat oak box she does not remember, the potato vanishes in a pink rope of tongue, and the lid comes up with a wet clap. Branwen says a short word, drags the barley sack out from beneath its flank, and walks away backward. The naturalist measured a mimic of this kind at Nantyrwen with a carpenter's folding rule fixed to a broom handle, working from the stair: the gape at full lunge was twenty-six inches across, the lid a hand's width wider. It was the size of a washtub, and it sat as still as one.
The rest of her morning goes to the arguments. Quarrymen blame a lid that sticks on damp, and a chest that smells of old porridge on the cellar floor. They call a swollen, sweating box a rot-chest and leave it be, which is how most mimics are fed. Branwen has stopped correcting them. She chalks a ring of lime around anything she suspects and keeps a hook on a ten-foot pole for pulling out whatever the ring catches. The practical sign she trusts most is the grain wood: the oak on a mimic is painted on flesh, and the iron bands stop short where the skin shows through at the corner. Real strapwork never ends in a gray-pink edge. She checks corners before she checks anything else, and eats her bread standing in the yard, where nothing in the light is anything but a box.
In the afternoon she is back in the cellar with the pole, nudging the barley sack toward the stairs, when the old chest by the grate gives her pause. A brass hasp hangs off its flank on a rusted chain, which no honest chest would wear. She throws a potato at it from the fourth step. The potato bounces and rolls to her boot. She throws another. It bounces again. The chest has eaten its fill of a spilled sack and has no interest in anything small, and for a full minute she cannot tell whether she has been wrong all day or only this once. The lid stays shut. She leaves the chest where it is and counts the sacks that are left.
- Classification
- Shapeshifting ambush predator
- Habitat
- Cellars, quarries, abandoned storerooms
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- the size of a washtub
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Hoards and forgotten rooms
- Binomial
- Arcamorpha furtiva
- Diet
- Vermin, grain, leather, careless fingers
- Temperament
- Patient, sticky, easily startled