The track into Eddenfurlong climbs between limestone walls, and by the second mile the gateposts wear a gray crust that is not lichen. I walk it in the last daylight with a hooded lantern, because the carter who left me at the foot of the hill would go no farther. Every shutter I pass is already closed. Every yard has a tall pole at its far edge with an iron cage lashed to the top, unlit. A woman sweeping her sill looks at my lantern, then at the hood over it, and nods once.
The oldest account is one line in a quarry master's day book: smoke rose from the north face at dusk and sank back at dawn, and no fire was found. That was the swarm, roosting in the cut. The second account is two centuries younger. A rendering works went up on Tallowgate, the lane below the quarry, and its vats drew moths in clouds. The swarm followed the moths into the drying loft and stayed. The third is the flood year, when the leat jumped its bank and the swarm spent a month in the church roof while the sexton swept out guano by the barrow. The fourth is recent. Lisbet Hawn, a chandler, began keeping a written roster of who tends which pole lamp, and has been disliked ever since.
The swarm is a column about twelve feet tall and wider at the crown than the base, perhaps a thousand bats. A band of frost-gray animals winds through it in a spiral and keeps that line however the column turns. It eats moths and midges and nothing larger. What it drops is a pale grit on sills and cart seats that comes off with a stiff broom. It is tracked by sound, a dry riffle like a deck of cards being shuffled. The village keeps a single law: no lit window once the swarm leaves the loft. The pole lamps burn instead, trimmed with rank tallow, and the swarm goes to them for the moths and passes the houses by. Hawn and her neighbor have quarreled eleven years over a pole the neighbor moved nine feet closer to Hawn's roof. At the same hour each evening the swarm drinks from the mill leat, skimming low in single file until the line thickens to a ribbon, then returns up Tallowgate. The whole business takes about as long as boiling an egg.
Every winter the loft stands empty for nine days. The droppings stop, the leat goes undrunk, and the pole lamps burn for nothing. Hawn has watched the loft door through every one of those nights and seen no bat leave or enter. Where does the swarm go, and how does it know which morning is the ninth?
- Classification
- Colonial flying mammals, swarm form
- Habitat
- Quarry caves and rendering-works lofts
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- a column about 12 ft tall
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Limestone uplands and lamplit villages
- Binomial
- Nyctivolans columnaris
- Diet
- Moths, midges, and other night insects
- Temperament
- Wary, single-minded, drawn to light