The yokai sleeps in whatever is hollow and dry that month, and it changes lodgings when the weather changes. In April I found one in a dead ash trunk on the shore of Llyn Carreg, folded inside so tightly that only the ears showed, two flaps of gray-green fur shaped like creased paper. Rain had been falling for nine days. It came out at dusk, ate snails off the wet stones one at a time, and went back in.
By June it has moved to the stone culverts under the Abergwyll road, where the air stays cool. I measured it there on a clear afternoon by laying a hazel rod cut to six feet beside its sleeping outline and marking the rod with chalk: the body runs two rod-lengths less a hand, and the legs, which are narrow as heron shanks, add nearly another. Standing, it reaches my shoulder. The face is a flat pale oval with no visible nose, and the left eye is clouded. Fflur Madoc, who keeps sheep above the village, says she hangs her wash on the north side of the house all summer so the thing does not mistake it for bedding.
The summer diet is windfall plums, snails, and bread left soaking in puddles, which it picks out with a long tongue and sets down again if it turns out to be stale. The tracks are the surest sign: a ring of flattened sedge about four feet across, always smelling of wet cedar, with two deep punctures at the center where the legs folded. Where the rings appear the villagers close their lower gates and leave the upper ones open. A yokai that cannot find a latch to lean on will go elsewhere, and nobody wants it elsewhere in their orchard.
In September it comes down to the fields and takes up one small, dull habit. Each morning at the same hour it scratches its flank against the third gatepost on the Llanfair lane, for about the length of time it takes to boil an egg, and then it wanders off to the hedge. There is no menace in this and nothing else to see. The post has worn to a polished hollow at exactly the height of its ribs. The cold drives it into the abandoned lime kiln above the village, where the brick holds the day's sun until midnight. By January the snow around the kiln mouth is pressed flat in one wide ring, and in the middle of it sits a blue-glazed teacup, rim down, from a house that lost it years ago.
- Classification
- Hollow-dwelling hill spirit
- Habitat
- Dead trees, culverts, abandoned kilns
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- 5 ft at the shoulder, 11 ft nose to heels
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Eastern hill country
- Binomial
- Tsukumo hollowensis
- Diet
- Snails, windfall plums, soaked bread
- Temperament
- Shy, territorial about gateposts