"It laughs like my brother-in-law," says Socorro Baptista, dragging a salt rake out of the shed at Lagoa Mourisca before the pans have turned from gray to white. "Same hiccup in the middle. That is why nobody answers it." She says this most mornings, to whoever is near, including the mule. Nobody on the flats whistles after the water goes dark, and nobody laughs back when the sound comes down from the ridge above Pedreira Alta. A shoosuva treats an answer as an invitation. The salters do not say how they learned that.
Her day starts with a fig. She snaps a leaf from the tree behind the shed and rubs the milky sap over the gate latch and then over her boot soles, as her mother did. Every kitchen in the village boils a pot of fig leaves at dusk with the lid off. At first light she walks the long dike to check the sluice boards, and this is the first time the beast shows itself. It stands at the far end in a shallow pan: a hyena's sloped back, forelegs longer than the hind, hide the brown of old rust, and along the spine a comb of black quills as long as her forearm and barbed like fishhooks. Its tracks in the wet crust are splayed, with a drag line where the quills trail. It regards her the way a clerk regards a form with a missing signature. Then it steps into the reeds, the laugh starts up behind her, and she keeps her mouth shut all the way back.
The rest of the morning is rake work, pulling brine across the crust in long gray rows. She works a quill out of her fence post with pliers and drops it in the stove, where it gives off the smell of struck matches. A prick from one goes green and sour for a week. Silvério Gaspar, whose pans run beside hers, wanders over to say that it was his goat the beast took first, eleven years ago. Both goats were named Duquesa. Neither neighbor has ever conceded the point.
At noon, with the sun white on every pan, the shoosuva comes back. It sits on the sluice board, then drags its spines down the gatepost she rubbed that morning, slowly, the way a cow leans on a wall, and leaves two quills in the wood. Then it is gone, and Socorro goes on raking. Does the fig keep it away from the gate, or is that the post it keeps coming back to?
- Classification
- Fiend, hyena-form devil
- Habitat
- Salt flats, scrub and quarry ridges
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 4 ft at the shoulder
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Hell-born, loose on the material plane
- Binomial
- Crocuta spinifera infernalis
- Diet
- Goats, dogs and anything slow
- Temperament
- Patient, mocking, territorial