The miller at Duinhoek says a wererat is a sick man, a fever that gets into the hands and teeth. His sister, who farms the next plot over, says it is a rat that learned to stand and borrowed a face to do it. Neither has seen one change. Both have lost seed barley to one. At Lindeveer, forty miles down the dike road, the argument is settled by Nel Brouwers, whose trade exists because nobody else will settle it. She is a gnaw-reader. Granary owners pay her to study tooth marks on beams and sacks and say whether the thief went on four legs or two. A rat gnaws at the floor. A wererat gnaws at the height of a man's belt, on the door frame, where a rat would have to stand to reach.
I go with her to a granary on a bright, cold morning. It starts with the third tier of sacks, at chest height, each opened with a tidy slit and not a kernel spilled. A rat spills. Nel runs her thumb down the door frame, finds paired grooves level with her ribs, and sniffs the latch. It is greased with tallow. A wererat oils the hinges so the door will not complain, and that smear is how farmers here track one. Across the flour dust on the floor run the prints of a hand with a long fourth finger. Midway to the wall they become rat prints, as though something had set its palms down and kept going on them. "Two feet in, four feet out," Nel says. "Clean about it, too."
The household remedy in both villages is juniper tar, painted on the sill and under the latch on the first of each month. A wererat in either shape sneezes at it, loudly enough to wake a house. The farmer's wife brushes it on while we watch. That night the family hears two sneezes at the door, a long scrape, then nothing. By morning the third tier is whole, and the tar holds a single print, a narrow human heel, turned back toward the road.
Nel claims the creature never opens the same sack twice in a month, and that it does this out of manners. I have no way to check it. The exception is the miller's own loft at Duinhoek. No tar has touched its sill in four generations, and Nel's chalk finds no gnawing anywhere in it. The sacks stand open to the rafters. The sister says something sleeps on the warm side of the chimney and has taken nothing since her grandmother set out a dish of boiled barley after the first frost. The miller says that is nonsense and a fever. He refills the dish anyway.
- Classification
- Shapeshifter, rat-kin lycanthrope
- Habitat
- Granaries, cellars, dike-town lofts
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 5.5 ft upright, 3 ft as a rat
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Dike country and river granaries
- Binomial
- Cavimus bipedalis
- Diet
- Grain, tallow, cheese rinds
- Temperament
- Tidy, wary, patient