Bull Stuart,  with Tom Calver,  Van Hallam,  Pip Rippon,  Ward Moorhouse  

Hellsborough & The Dark Peak

Paranoid Adventure in the Rapacious Blood-Soaked Parallel World of Sheffield, S6

Today in The Dark Peak:  79.spit-hoverwing.14.12  

Dullslid

Dullslid — Bestiary of The Dark Peak

Ask three people what a dullslid is and you'll get three different fish. Brown trout, somebody'll say. Roach, says the next. A carp, surely, just off-colour, says the third. They'll all be a little bit right and none of them exactly right, because a dullslid doesn't hold one shape long enough to be properly identified.

It sits on silt, the colour of silt, at a depth where the light's given up before it reaches the bottom, and it does not move for it. Weeks, some of the old canal-side regulars reckon, though nobody's tagged one to prove it. What moves is the water round it, very slightly, in a way you'd put down to current if you hadn't just watched the current run the other way.

The danger isn't the bite, though there is one, and it's a bad one. The danger is that a dullslid looks so much like a lump of nothing that most people wade straight over the top of it, and the strike comes from directly underneath, which is not a direction anybody's watching.

What it eats down there in the dark I couldn't tell you with any confidence. Waterfowl chicks, certainly. The odd dog. I'd rather not speculate past that.

Field note: in murky water you can't see the bottom of, walk it, don't wade fast. A dullslid reads a fast-moving shape overhead as a threat and answers accordingly.

Type Lurker
HP 3

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