Grit collects between the teeth within an hour of reaching Jarnsvall, a gray powder that tastes of struck flint and survives a pint of beer. The villagers say it falls from the nalfeshnee when it speaks. The animal stands eleven feet at the crown of a boar's skull, with the heavy shoulders of an ape and a pair of wings too small to lift a calf, let alone itself. Three people have described it to me, and they do not agree on what it is for. Ragna Holt, who cuts peat on the heath above the village, calls it a creditor. It comes to the edge of her cutting at dusk, tusks lowered, and recites in a level voice what a person owes: an hour, a borrowed ladder, a sharp word said to a sister at a christening. She says it never raises its voice and is never wrong, which she finds hard to forgive.
Rune Aldahl, schoolmaster at Grimsholt across the fjord, calls it a mathematician. By his account it draws a proof in the frost beside the school gate with one tusk, always the same proof, never finished, and it snorts at any child who adds wrong aloud. It also refuses to step in puddles. On wet mornings it detours a quarter mile around the schoolyard, and Aldahl says it arrives late and visibly put out. I measured its stride on the cart track with a surveyor's chain: nine feet four inches, the hoofprints sunk two inches into frozen clay, the left always a little deeper.
Rikard Sund, a drover, calls it a mourner. It goes to funerals, he says, and stands at the back of the churchyard with its head bowed until the last spade of earth is set. He swears it has attended every burial in the parish since his grandfather's. I have no way to check that, since the parish books burned. What I can say is that its prints are at the lych-gate after each burial, and gray dust lies thick on the latch.
The households of both villages keep one rule. Its questions are not answered aloud. A nod or a shake of the head is allowed. Speak, and it stays to hear the whole matter out, which can last until dawn. Each dusk the doorsills are swept, so that fresh gray dust on the step means it passed in the night and the house should keep quiet the next day. The exception is Rasmus Dahl, nine, who answers it aloud every evening, at length, with opinions. It has never once stayed. It turns and goes around him the way it goes around a puddle.
- Classification
- Greater fiend, boar-headed lecturer
- Habitat
- Heaths, peat cuttings, village edges
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 11 ft at the crown
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Abyssal borderlands, heath-side
- Binomial
- Sus cinerarius
- Diet
- Stone dust, salt, unanswered questions
- Temperament
- Patient, lecturing, easily put out