"Does it have a beak or a nose?" a girl at Sawpit Rood asked me, wanting the matter settled before she climbed to the cedar line. Three people in the district had given her three answers, and she had come to the stranger with the notebook for a fourth. I have none of my own to give. I can only set theirs in a row.
The charcoal burner at Nailer's Furlong says beak. He has watched it twice at noon on the roof of a kiln: a crow's head on a man's shoulders, black wings folded like a coat, the tip of the beak chipped and filled with gold lacquer. It carries a fan of feathers and uses it to wave the kiln smoke away from its face. It eats what is left for it, rice dumplings on a stump, chestnuts, the husks of cicadas, and where it has been it leaves a single black flight feather standing upright in the leaf mold and cedar twigs snapped at the height of a man's chest. He swears the fan can lay a wind on one valley while the next stays dead calm. Whether it can, I have no means of testing.
The schoolmistress at Sawpit Rood says nose. Hers has a red face and a nose as long as a forearm, and it keeps to the ridge above the last cedars, where the trail turns to scree. She does not dispute the charcoal burner. The low ones are crow-headed, she says, and the high ones are the other kind, and both take an interest in children. A child who comes home with cedar needles in the hair has the head washed twice in rice-rinse water, and the needles go into the stove. Needles mean it has been looking the child over. Her pupils do this without being told, and a few of the parents now do it to themselves.
The third account is from a boy of nine, who lost his cap on the ridge and found it next morning folded in thirds on a low branch, with a dumpling beside it that he had not brought. He ate the dumpling. Mirek Haddow, who sharpens saws at the Rood, says only that the tengu has better manners than most of his customers. A pair of tall wooden clogs, each on a single tooth, stands upright on the fence post at the head of the lane, with rainwater standing in the left one.
- Classification
- Mountain spirit, winged trickster
- Habitat
- Cedar slopes and high scree ridges
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 6 ft tall, 9 ft wingspan
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Mountain cedar forest
- Binomial
- Corvanthropus sylvaticus
- Diet
- Rice dumplings, chestnuts, cicadas
- Temperament
- Wary, proud, fond of pranks