A sphinx is a winged lion with a woman's face, and the one that hunts the moor above Bryn Tellach has a wingspan of nineteen feet. I took the figure from its shadow, which crossed Gethin Llewar's turnip field at noon. I drove a hazel stake at each wingtip and paced between them with a six-foot ash pole, three lengths and a foot over. Its forepaw prints sink an inch into peat and fall seven feet four inches apart at a walk. The body is tawny shot with rust. The hair is dark red, braided as thick as a hawser, with one streak gone iron gray at the brow. The left wing is short by three outer flight feathers, the stubs worn smooth as horn, and the animal lists to that side whenever it banks.
People near it know it is close before they see anything. The sheepdogs lie flat with their jaws shut, and not one will bark. Ewes crowd the lee side of the walls. Below Vaddoch Hollow the scree shows two shallow furrows a stride apart, drawn by the wingtips trailing when it walks with its wings folded, and the left furrow is always the fainter, broken by the missing quills. Along the drag it drops pellets of fleece and small bone the size of a fist, which the shepherds lift with a stick and read for age, the way a farmer reads the droppings of a fox.
When the dogs go down, a household shuts its shutters and puts one question to the dark room, aloud, a question with no answer: how many stones are in the Hollow wall, who was the first person to be cold. Then nobody speaks until daylight. The belief is that the sphinx walks the roof ridges listening for an answer and takes from the house that offers one, so a question left hanging keeps it moving. Mothers teach children to ask it in the flat, slightly bored voice used for reciting chores.
What they get wrong is the roofs. I watched from Gethin's hay loft for nine nights, and the sphinx passed over his house twice without lowering its head. It takes one ewe from the Hollow every eighth or ninth night, by the neck, and eats alone on the high ledge with its back to the wind. Gethin's wife answered the question out loud one night in March, out of plain temper, and nothing came to the door. The ewe lost that week was lost a mile away. Over Gethin's lintel hangs a single flight feather, thirty-one inches long and barred slate blue, on an iron nail.
- Classification
- Winged lion with a human head
- Habitat
- Moorland scree and high ledges
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 19 ft wingspan, 5 ft at the shoulder
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Upland moors and stony hollows
- Binomial
- Aenigmoleo alatus
- Diet
- Sheep, moor ponies, the odd stag
- Temperament
- Aloof, patient, fiercely territorial