The hay barge up Sundalsfjord takes five hours against the current, and for the last of them the water under the hull turns from gray to a hard bottle green, clear enough to show the rudder's shadow forty feet down. At the landing I climb 340 slate steps to Skjelvik. The houses stand on larch stilts. Beside every door hangs a wooden dipper on a peg, and below it lies a flat stone that stays dark and wet though no rain has fallen in a week.
Rolf Sunde keeps the sluice at Nesvatn, the lake a mile above the village, which feeds the dye works and every cistern below it. He greases the rack and pinion with tallow, rakes the weed screen, and drops what comes out onto the bank: birch leaves, a drowned grouse, a pewter spoon. By the third rakeful he has not looked at the lake, which is how he prefers it. Then he cranks the gate up to an iron pin driven into the post, and the shallows beside him stand up.
It is shaped like a stooped man nine feet high, clear as window glass and green where it is thick. Weed and gray foam hang over its shoulders and chest. An oar blade, black with age, is lodged in the middle of its body and turns there slowly, and three trout circle around it inside the torso without once crossing the surface. It watches the water pass through the gate. Then it sinks without a splash, and the level does not change. Asked what it wants, Rolf says it wants the gate opened to the pin and not a finger past it, and he has opened it to the pin for twenty-six years.
Rolf draws no water until he has poured the first dipperful out on the shingle, and every household in Skjelvik does the same at its doorstep stone, since a skipped pour is said to leave the second dipperful tasting of iron. The practical sign is on the shore: wherever the figure has walked, the stones stay wet and black for a day and a night, and no lichen takes hold on them. Rolf reads that track each dusk. If it runs toward the village instead of along the bank, he goes down and has the dye works close their intake. In the afternoon a slab of scree lets go from the fell and slides into the shallows. The figure rises to its full height, brings one arm down flat across the surface, and the wave it throws breaks against the sluice house and stops. From the shingle its head is level with the eave, which I measure afterward with a folding rule laid against the doorpost: nine feet two inches.
- Classification
- Elemental, lake-bound water spirit
- Habitat
- Deep glacial lakes and mountain tarns
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 9 ft when risen
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Cold mountain lakes
- Binomial
- Aquanthropus lacustris
- Diet
- Nothing; keeps whatever sinks in
- Temperament
- Patient, territorial, slow to anger