The wyvern steals fish it has no intention of eating. It stands eighteen feet from nose to tail, slate gray and dusty, with two legs, wings too big for its wedge of a body, and a spade of pale bone on the tail. It lives well enough on sheep, seabirds and stranded seals. Smoked herring is not on the list. It takes the herring anyway, because the herring is hanging where the wyvern can see it.
The village of Moorkettle smokes its catch on racks along the harbor wall, and Edda Larkin, who has tended the racks for thirty winters, knows the first hint of a raid: the gulls stop. All of them, mid-argument, heads turned toward the cliff. Then comes a long shadow out of the low coral sunrise, from behind and to the right, so the racks are in glare and the thief is not. The wyvern arrives from below, seaward side, and opens its wings with a crack like a wet sail at the last moment. One herring goes by the tail. The rack swings. The animal banks away, tail trailing, small narrow head already turned to check whether anyone is watching. Edda does not shout. A shout makes it come back, and it is easily provoked. She counts the rack and goes in for her tea.
Its ledge above Peakwren, four hundred feet up, is easy to find. A heap of wool pellets, gray fleece balls the size of loaves, lies at its edge, and a fresh heap is damp and dark while an old one is bleached. Shepherds read the heap before they decide where to pasture. The wyvern lands, drops the herring on the pile without a bite, and looks at it. It turns three times, like a dog, to settle. Then it faces the sun with wings half spread to dry and sits that way for the better part of an hour, a routine so dull that the villagers set clocks by it. On a bad morning it nudges a loose bucket off the ledge with one chipped knuckle-talon and watches it fall the whole way down. That is all the malice in it that I have witnessed.
The people of Moorkettle leave the last herring on every rack hanging loose, unclipped, at the end nearest the cliff. They call it the thief's fish, and a rack without one is said to get raided twice. Around the wyvern's right ankle is knotted a band of saffron rope, frayed nearly through. Edda says a trawler once held it. I could not confirm this, and no one in the village can name the boat. Every habit above holds all season except one morning. After a gale, when seals lie stranded along the tideline below Peakwren, the wyvern ignores the racks completely. It walks the shingle with wings folded, eats without a glance upward, and for an hour sulks at nobody.
- Classification
- Two-legged winged dragon
- Habitat
- Sea cliffs and rocky headlands
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 18 ft nose to tail
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Northern coasts and cliff country
- Binomial
- Draco bipes cinereus
- Diet
- Sheep, seabirds, stranded seals
- Temperament
- Territorial, sulky, easily provoked