Two farmers on the Jessup Ridge road agree that a unicorn is good for something, and disagree about what. Corwin Hale says it cleans water: he has watched it dip its horn into the Marlow Scar pond at dawn and seen the green scum pull back from the tip in a bright, widening ring. His neighbor Ilsa says it only likes the taste of cold stone, and the clean ring is a side effect. The naturalist stood at that pond three mornings running and can report that both are partly right, and that both took it well.
The animal arrives at first light from the alder side, so quietly that the frogs keep singing. It is the build of a hill pony, thirteen hands, barrel-chested on slim legs, with a thick neck, a long fine-boned head and a coat of dove gray with a silver sheen. The color people remember is the horn, a spiral as long as its head that gives off a clear blue-white light, bright enough in the dim hour before sunrise to read a hand by. A pale crescent of hair marks the left shoulder, and the hooves are cloven like a goat's. It wades in to the fetlocks, lowers its head and sets the tip of the horn in the water. The scum parts in a ring, and inside the ring the water runs clear to the bottom. Then it licks the stones at the rim, one after another, with obvious patience, and spits out the moss.
Locals keep one rule: no iron near the pond between dusk and sunrise. Corwin leaves his spade at the gate and carries a wooden rake instead. A shod horse led to the water, he says, will be politely ignored for a year. A petty detail the naturalist can add is that the unicorn will not drink after a goose has been in the pond, and waits at the edge with its ears forward until the water settles. Tracks are the practical sign: a cloven print, split like a goat's, with a small round dimple beside it where the horn tip touches the mud. Clean water and a ring of bare stones mean the animal has come and gone.
Whether it cleans the water on purpose the naturalist cannot say. It did not respond to any test devised, and it left each morning before the water could be sampled again. The pond was clear when first visited and is clear now, and a second set of dimpled prints, smaller, has begun to run alongside the first. Corwin says that is a foal. Ilsa says it is a goat. The prints measure three and a half inches across. "Clean enough to drink," Corwin said on my last morning, and he did.
- Classification
- Horned equine of still water
- Habitat
- Ponds in alder and stone country
- Danger
- Minimal
- Size
- 13 hands at the shoulder
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Marlow Scar and Jessup Ridge uplands
- Binomial
- Monoceros fulgidus
- Diet
- Stone moss, pond algae, cold rim stones
- Temperament
- Calm, patient, quietly proud