Barley cutting on the Fosk uplands runs eleven days in late August, and for those eleven days nobody works a field alone. The minotaur lives in the drove-ways between the fields, a lattice of dry-stone walls laid by whoever farmed here before the farmers. From a distance they look like field boundaries and nothing else. The creature stands just over eight feet. The head is a bull's, dun and heavy, with the left horn broken short and capped in a yellow callus. Below the neck it is a man, thick through the back, with hands that could close around a milk churn. The legs end in split hooves.
The oldest account is a slate from Arle, a hamlet two miles south, scratched by a shepherd who counted nine ewes out and seven back and blamed a wall. The wall is still there. A century later the parish raised the lane walls from five feet to their present height, and the whistling rule dates from that work. No one whistles inside them, because the creature answers a whistle the way a dog does, by coming to look. A reaper caught at it is sent home for the day. The next account is a surveyor's. He mapped the lanes in 1794 and wrote in the parish book only that they do not close where they should. The Fosk reapers hold that the animal in the lanes now is the same one the slate describes. I have no means of checking that.
It is easy to track. It eats thistle first and barley second, and takes a ewe perhaps twice a summer. It leaves cropped thistle heads in lines along the lane foot, straw torn from the stacks at the height of a raised horn, and a dark polish on the walls at shoulder level where it passes. At noon on every cutting day it walks to the stone trough at Fosk Cross, drinks for about as long as it takes to boil an egg, rubs its neck once against the gatepost, and walks back at the same pace. It does not look at the reapers, and they do not stop cutting. Rennick Dole, who has cut the north field for forty harvests, says only that it is a neighbor and is to be treated like one.
I leave by the west lane on the last evening of the cut, with the stubble gone yellow on both sides. At shoulder height the stones are polished dark on the left wall and not on the right, and the polish stops exactly at the gap where the lane opens onto the Arle road.
- Classification
- Bull-headed humanoid, solitary
- Habitat
- Dry-stone drove-ways between barley fields
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 8 ft 3 in, broad as a doorway
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Stone lanes of the Fosk uplands
- Binomial
- Taurovir lacunarius
- Diet
- Thistle, barley, the occasional ewe
- Temperament
- Incurious, territorial, drawn to whistling