The morkoth is a flat, barrel-bodied predator about eleven feet long, and it lives in the round pools where drainage tunnels empty into black tidal water. The hide is bottle-green with ink-blue blotches, the belly pale as old cream, and the four broad fins hang like torn sails. Its eyes ride on stalks and glow amber just clear of the surface. A drover's iron hook is lodged in the left cheek, rust-crusted and half grown over. The hook is older than the oldest harbor records at Brideswater Outfall, a name some clerk made from a local word for brine water and the town kept after the error was found.
In March the tunnels run hard with rain, and the morkoth spins its pool into a wheel of black water, holding the current with its fins. Otters and mullet drift toward the middle with their gaze on the amber. It hunts only at dusk and dawn. Between those hours it sulks, jaw laid on the mud, and does not look up for anything smaller than a cart. By June the tunnels dry to a drip and the spin shrinks to a lazy ring. At every low tide, at the same rotten piling, it opens its jaw, sieves a mouthful of grit through its crooked fangs, and spits. It does this twelve times, then settles. There is nothing more to it than housekeeping.
The trade that grows around it is hooding. Drovers moving stock along the outfall road at dusk hire a hooder, who ties a sack over the eyes of each animal so that none of them sees the amber. Ulla Tench says a hooded sheep walks past a pool as if it were passing a wall. Her fee is a fleece per ten head, and the sacks are boiled each week because the fog rots them. Children on the flats learn one rule early: carry your boots across the mud and never throw one. A thrown boot makes the pool rise, and nobody wants to be standing near the splash it makes when it does.
In October the fog comes in off the tidal channel and the morkoth hunts longer. Its eyes show as two low coins of light from half a mile off. Stray livestock go missing most often now, and the sign is plain: a smooth wet circle in the mud, two drag grooves where the fins braced, and sometimes a herd stick lying by the piling. The drain at the south end is called Grateful Mouth. A surveyor from the coast rendered the old word for gullet as "grateful," and the painted signs are renewed every spring with that spelling intact. In January frost skins the pool and the morkoth goes down under it. The piling carries a fresh groove at the height of its jaw. On the mud below it lies one boot, laced, toe toward the water.
- Classification
- Hypnotic whirlpool predator
- Habitat
- Drain mouths and tidal pools
- Danger
- High
- Size
- the size of a rowboat
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Black tidal water
- Binomial
- Hypnocteis abyssalis
- Diet
- Fish, otters, stray livestock
- Temperament
- Sulky, patient, territorial