Pig-killing week in Sobrecastro comes with the hard freeze, and the ogre keeps the date better than the almanac does. By the second morning its tracks run down the slate road from the quarry scree to the pig yards, twenty inches long, toes splayed, pressed into frozen mud. The animal stands nine feet and is shaped like a grain bin, with arms that hang to the knee and a hide the gray-green of wet roofing slate. In autumn it does not hunt. It gleans. Offal tubs, scraped hides, split shin bones and any cheese left on a wall are gone between moonset and the first rooster, and it eats them standing in the road, which is why the road stays greasy for a week.
The first snow settles its habits. Every morning it visits one larch above the Sobrecastro wash and scrapes its back against the trunk, forty or fifty slow strokes, eyes half shut, grunting on the downstroke. Then it goes on. The bark at seven feet is rubbed to a bare, polished saddle. Nothing about this is dangerous or strange. A mule does the same at a gatepost, and the ogre appears to want nothing more from the tree than the itch.
By January it visits less. Cold slows it, and it takes shelter in spent charcoal kilns, curling against the warm clay. Custódio Rainho, who burns oak above Ormazal, found one asleep in his old kiln with steam lifting off its shoulders, and he has built his burns on the north slope ever since. A sleeping ogre can stay down four or five days and wakes with its ribs showing. In Ormazal nobody whistles on the slate road, not a tune, not a signal to a dog, because the ogre answers a whistle by walking toward it to see what is calling. Every house there smokes its hams over green juniper and rubs the doorposts with crushed berries. The smell fouls the ogre's nose, and it sneezes and turns back with a sound like a cart tipping gravel.
The thaw makes it thin and bold. Mud holds every print ankle-deep, so tracking is easy, but avoiding the ogre works only if the lofts are empty. It lifts roof slates to reach hanging cheeses and stacks them beside the house, edges squared. By the time the swallows return it has gone back up the scree, and the larch is being scraped again. The instruction in Ormazal is short: set the offal tub at the gate before dark, latch the door, and do not look out.
- Classification
- Solitary giant-kin, scavenging brute
- Habitat
- Slate scree and charcoal-burning hills
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 9 ft tall, about 700 pounds
- Activity
- Seasonal
- Realm
- Highland quarry country
- Binomial
- Gigas sebivorus
- Diet
- Offal, cheese, bones, acorns
- Temperament
- Dull, greedy, easily drawn by noise