"Why are your spectacles tied on with gut instead of wire?" Lotte Harrow asks from the back step of her mother's house in Ambertide. She is eight and has been studying my face for some time. The frames are horn, and the reason is in the stable on the other side of the wall, where a rust monster is working on the stall hinges. Its antennae enter any room before the rest of it does, two of them, feathered at the tips, and they find iron the way a tongue finds salt. I measured the longer one at twenty-two inches with a yard of pearwood lashed to a pole and held out from the loft rafter while the animal fed below, and the shorter at fourteen. The long one swung from the stall hinge to the skillet by the door and stayed there, quivering like a dowsing rod over water.
The hide is plated like a roof, orange on the back where it dries and dull blue along the belly where it lies in sedge. It flakes. Rub a plate with a thumb and the thumb comes away red. The same powder lies in drifts along the cart ruts outside Sinnock Cross, and a drift still damp means the animal passed within the hour. A trade lives on those drifts: the rouge sweepers of Sinnock Cross go out with goose-wing brushes and leather sacks, and sell what they gather to potters for glaze and to farmers for painting barn doors.
The mouth is a short beak ringed with flat teeth worn level, like a mason's chisels. It licks more than it bites. A plowshare's edge takes about as long as a boiled egg and comes out as powder. Iron and steel only. Tin, bronze, lead and silver it noses and leaves alone. The parish clerk at Sinnock Cross keeps the harvest alms in a tin plate and takes the animal's neglect of it as a personal compliment.
In Ambertide every house sets its oldest cracked skillet on the back step at dusk. If the skillet is gone by morning, the family sleeps easy for a week. If it is still there, they walk the house and check the hinges. Hinges are leather, latches are loops of sinew, and wheels are rimmed in bronze. I leave at dusk with the cart creaking on its bronze, and the girl comes out to the step carrying this evening's skillet. She sets it down the way one sets down an egg and wipes her hands on her apron. From the stable door, two feathered stalks are already turning her way.
- Classification
- Metal-eating armored burrower
- Habitat
- Damp lowland lanes and abandoned mines
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- the size of a hog, 5 ft nose to tail
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Wet lowlands and old mine country
- Binomial
- Ferrophagus rubiginosus
- Diet
- Iron and steel, nothing else
- Temperament
- Placid, greedy, entirely unafraid