The washing on the lines at Marshpost comes down with claw rakes in it three mornings out of ten, and nobody there thinks this worth a remark. Sheets are mended with a coarse running stitch and hung again. The weretiger is the cause, and the village has stopped arguing about whether it should be blamed, which is the only argument it has settled.
The ones it still has are about the creature's hours. Oswin Harl, who keeps the grain store at Marshpost, holds that the weretiger changes only on the dark of the moon and can be avoided by a calendar. His neighbor, a net-mender named Orsolya, holds that the change follows hunger and not the sky, and she points to the three raked sheets last month, which fell under a half moon. I spent nine days walking the reed edge between them with a measuring pole. The tracks favor Orsolya. Each print is five inches across, the pads splayed wide from carrying a body heavier than the stride suggests, and the trail wanders to the grain store's back wall and stops at the water jars, where the tiger drinks. It then returns on two feet. The second set of prints is a man's, narrow, with the left heel dragging. They belong to nobody the village will name.
What the village will not do is say a particular word. The word is the common name for the animal, and in Lowrun Reeds, the second settlement downstream, it is replaced by "the reed uncle." Children are taught to give it that name before they can read. Nobody lends salt to a house where the uncle has been seen, and nobody sells that house rice, though they will leave it on the step. Practical people also scatter dried orange peel along thresholds each evening, since the sharp oils make the tiger sneeze and turn back, and Marshpost smells faintly of it from the first frost.
Since my last visit one thing has changed. The stripes on the grain store's door, cut by someone years ago to mark how high the beast could reach, have been planed away, and the new boards are pale and smooth. Oswin says this was done to stop the argument. Orsolya says it was done so that nobody could measure it again. On the sill, where the old frame met the stone, someone has set a single dried orange peel, curled like a shaving, and left it there.
- Classification
- Shapeshifter, human to tiger
- Habitat
- Reed marshes and river villages
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 9 ft nose to tail in tiger form
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Marsh country of the lower river
- Binomial
- Panthera mutabilis
- Diet
- Livestock, waterfowl, stored fish
- Temperament
- Wary, patient, territorial