The first sign is the cold on the iron. Door latches in Lovdalen turn to ice under a bare palm in the middle of a mild afternoon, and the frost leaves a grit on the fingertips like crushed salt. Within a day the water in the milk pails tastes of rust. The villagers know what that means. An oni has come down from the ridge above the Orsvik Pass, and it is looking for a roof.
The oni is a red-skinned brute nine feet tall, with two horns curving forward from a heavy brow and a mouth full of flat, yellowed teeth. It carries an iron-studded club the length of a fence rail and wears a kilt of stitched wolf pelts. Nobody has seen it carry food. It takes salt pork from smokehouses and leaves the hooks swinging. Its tracks are the size of dinner platters, and each one is rimmed with white frost even in July.
The response in Lovdalen is practical. Every household keeps a bowl of roasted soybeans by the door and flings a handful across the threshold at dusk, because the oni hates the rattle and the smell of scorched bean. Mother Marit Lindqvist, who has kept the village's bean roasters going for thirty years, sells the sacks by the bushel in late winter. Her trade exists for no other reason. Children are made to hold a sprig of holly under the pillow, and nobody in the valley will say the creature's name aloud after dark, or lend a stranger a club, an iron pot or a hammer while the frost is on the latches. A borrowed tool, they say, becomes the oni's invitation.
What they get wrong is the horns. The villagers hold that snapping one off ends the creature, and they tell of hunters who tried. The horns are only bone, and they regrow within a season, thicker. The beans do not drive it away either. The oni simply finds the rattle tiresome and goes to look for a quieter house. Old Marit's own cottage has stood untouched through eleven winters, and she has never thrown a single bean. The oni takes its salt pork from her neighbors and leaves her door alone. She will not say why. She keeps a pot of barley soup on the stove, and on the coldest nights she sets a second bowl on the step. In the morning it is empty, and the spoon is clean.
- Classification
- Horned ogre, mountain dweller
- Habitat
- High passes and abandoned shepherd huts
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 9 ft tall
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Eastern Legends
- Binomial
- Daemonoceros ferrugineus
- Diet
- Salt pork, smoked fish, barley
- Temperament
- Sullen, territorial, easily bored