Visitors call it a peacock with the rest of the animal added on, and that holds only as far as the throat. Emerald runs down the back, turquoise along the flanks, saffron gold under the jaw, every feather overlapping and beading with fog. But a peacock fans its colors at whoever is watching. The feathered wyrm fans nothing. It is forty feet long and barrel thick through the middle, with a small wedge of a head held slightly turned away. One scarlet feather grows crooked behind the left jaw and will not lie flat in any wind.
Field notes from Kjellvik Gorge, late winter. The fog sits in the cut until noon, and the wyrm does most of its moving inside it. Tail coiled around a cliff root, neck drawn up into the gray in a long S, it works along the ledges below the rope bridge looking for hawk nests. In the first warm weeks it takes eggs and nothing else. Hawks scream at it from the rock face. It lets them, tongue flicking plum purple, and eats the egg with an expression I can only call unbothered. Once the spring rains swell the caves, it drops to the pools under the falls for blind cave fish, and its back goes dark and glossy with wet.
Summer is quiet. The wyrm is crepuscular and sleeps through the heat on a shelf above Wollstad Bridge, where travelers mistake it for a fallen cedar until the trunk breathes. Nothing about it is hostile, but it steals. Gunnel Aas, who repairs the bridge ropes, has lost two gloves, a lunch pail and a left boot to it. The boot was the one it kept. On my second visit it was hooked over a back-curved claw and stuffed with moss, and it wore it the way a clerk wears a good hat. In autumn it switches to bats, taking them at dusk as they pour out of the gorge walls, and it stays closer to the bridge than at any other season, as though the village were a pantry.
The people of Wollstad will not sell a boot to anyone who is going up the gorge, and they will not lend one either. A boot given up once is a boot the wyrm expects again. They also will not say the animal's name while standing on the bridge, only "the neighbor." Its droppings, pale and gritty with fish bone, mark where it has been, and the fresh ones are slick enough to send a mule over the edge. Anyone crossing at sunrise or sunset walks the downhill rail, keeps a river stone in one hand, and sets it on the rail when the wyrm rises out of the fog. Then they keep walking and leave the stone where it is.
- Classification
- Feathered serpent, wyrm kind
- Habitat
- Cloud forest gorges and cliff faces
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 40 ft long, barrel thick
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Mist-hung highland gorges
- Binomial
- Serpens plumatus nubilus
- Diet
- Cave fish, bats, hawk eggs
- Temperament
- Aloof, tolerant, mildly thieving