I walked the last nine miles to Leck behind a salt wagon whose driver refused to stop after the second milestone, and the road gave his reasons. Every gatepost carried two iron latches, one at hip height and one above a tall man's hat. Shutters were pegged at noon. At a farm called Ibb Moss a woman stood over a copper in the yard, and the steam smelled of juniper. The driver said the pegs were willow, never ash, since ash splits and willow only creaks. That was all he said until the first roofs of Leck came up out of the barley.
Wenna Prill is the parish heel-reader. The post is old, it is paid, and it exists nowhere else in the county. On the morning after a full moon she walks the lanes at first light with a trowel, a pot of tallow and a plank cut to the length of a man's foot. At the Sned pen she kneels in the mud and reads. A dog's print is blunt, the claws splayed. A wolf's runs in a straight line. What she is paid to find begins as one and ends as the other: four toes and long claws at the fence, then, thirty paces toward the river, shorter toes and a bare human heel carrying the weight. Across the water a gray animal the size of a yearling calf trots along the far hedge in no hurry, and Wenna does not look up. She presses tallow into the best print, lifts the cast, and chalks the farm's name on a slate.
Her midday is spent at doors. Every kitchen in Leck burns juniper chips in the stove for the three nights of the full moon, and at nearly every one she is handed a cup of tea that tastes faintly of gin. The parish has three ways of treating her findings. A dog is shot, a wolf is hunted, and the third kind is chalked on the slate and left alone, because Leck knows whose heel it is. Nobody will say the name to a stranger. The complaint she hears most is not about hens. It is that the thing never shuts a gate behind it. It goes through by the low latch every time and leaves the high one hanging, and a farmer named Wick Dace has, by her count, mended the same hinge nine times.
At dusk she nails a second latch to the Ibb Moss gate. The animal is on the wall by then, long in the leg, gray to the ears, watching juniper smoke drift across the yard. It sneezes. Wenna taps in the last nail and writes the evening's only entry: left hind, eleven inches from heel to claw tip.
- Classification
- Cursed shapeshifter, wolf-man
- Habitat
- Moorland farms and barley country
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 6.5 ft upright, calf-sized on four legs
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Northern parish farmland
- Binomial
- Lupihomo ostiarius
- Diet
- Sheep, hens, unguarded larders
- Temperament
- Wary, unhurried, careless with gates