The sluice gate at Dunt clogs with shed skin twice a year, and someone has to go down with a rake. This season it is Kessa Marl, eleven, who works for a dried plum a trip and complains about the plum. The skin comes out in lengths as long as a plow handle, gray-green and clear as horn, each scale pressed into it like a seal in wax. She lays them on the bank. The thatcher at Jarr Cut buys them to line his ridge caps.
I come in the dry month, when the main channel is down to the shin and the rice stands in flat green rows. Kessa stops raking. The water behind the gate is rising, though nothing upstream has been opened, and the weed mat parts in a long wet seam. The hood comes up first, a spread fan of olive-black with a bite-shaped chip out of its left edge. Then the face: broad brow, flat nose, a closed mouth, green eyes with upright pupils that go straight to the rake and stay there. A mantle of lotus leaves, pinned with fishbone, covers its shoulders and chest. Below the ribs the body turns to scale and keeps going, forty feet by the length of weed it flattens.
Dunt walks the dikes in single file, each person setting a foot into the print of the one ahead, so the mud holds one set of tracks. The elders hold that a naga shown many feet assumes many trespassers and drains the channel to be rid of them. Kessa steps back into her own print without being told. The naga takes the rake in two coils, turns it over, and looks at the bent tine. Then it lays the rake in the mud tines up and hisses once at the upper pool, where someone rinsed a pot nine days ago. The pool has stood at puddle depth since. Nobody has owned up. It eats carp, frogs and the occasional duck, and leaves a flattened S through the rice, which is how Dunt tracks it.
The gate frees with a suck of mud. The naga slides under the weed, and the channel drops to the shin again in the time it takes Kessa to find her plum. Three years ago the chip in its hood was a nick; now it is a notch the size of a thumb, and the hood has paled along that edge. The stone step at the sluice, rough then, is worn glassy where it rests its coils. By evening Kessa hangs the rake on the gatepost. A loop of fresh skin is still draped over the tines, whole to the eye caps.
- Classification
- Serpent-bodied water guardian
- Habitat
- Irrigation channels, paddies, flooded shrines
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- about 40 ft long, human-sized torso
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Rice country water systems
- Binomial
- Anguihomo fluminalis
- Diet
- Carp, frogs, ducks
- Temperament
- Territorial, fussy, slow to anger