Oldbrownhorn
The oldbrownhorn is not a species, whatever the ledgers of ear tags and breeding marks might imply if there were any ear tags or breeding marks on it, which there are not. It is one animal, a single bull, and every account I have gathered agrees on that even where the accounts agree on nothing else. It stands close to twice the shoulder height of a working demonspawn bull kept back off the slaughter list for size, and demonspawn are not small animals to begin with. Call it, on the strength of the one clear track anyone has ever measured, somewhere north of a tonne and a half, and I would not be surprised to hear that guess was low. No tag, no brand, no rope or hand of any farmer's has ever got anywhere near it long enough for the beast to allow it. The coat is where the name earns its keep: not the black-and-rust of a working demonspawn, but a deep, dulled brown gone almost black at the shoulder, the colour of wet peat rather than a farmed animal's hide, and it is the one detail every witness agrees on regardless of what else they disagree about. The horns are the detail that stops conversation in the Sportsman quicker than anything else in this book. They do not curve the way a demonspawn's do, outward and down and blunted at the tip from decades of rubbing on gateposts. The oldbrownhorn's horns cross over the skull and grow back toward the eyes, an arrangement that reads as deliberate rather than accidental, the kind of shape you get from years of bending a young bull's horn buds with wire and weight rather than the kind genetics produces left alone. Whoever did that, if anyone did it, did it a long time before anyone currently farming either side of the boundary was born. Say oldbrownhorn to a stockman old enough to have had it from his own father and he will correct you before you finish the sentence: not a kind of bull. The bull. There is supposed to be only the one, and everything with a cloven foot answering a farmer's whistle across three parishes traces back to it, one way or another, whether by the wooltard's wool-and-temper cross or the demonspawn's straight meat line. I have written both of those entries already, and I still had to work harder for this one, because a story with no photograph, no capture, and no two witnesses who agree on anything past the colour of the coat and the wrongness of the horns is not an easy one to pin flat on a page. Tracks turn up from time to time in the soft peat above Bradfield and once, memorably, in a churned mess of turf below Stanage that three separate walkers photographed before comparing notes and realising they had each assumed somebody's onetoe had got loose.
It does not live on a farm and it does not appear to live off one either, as far as anyone has worked out. It lives on the moor edge, out past the last working wall on ground nobody has fenced because nobody has found the nerve to try, and for years at a stretch it does nothing that reaches a farmhand's ears at all. Then, roughly once a generation, not on any pattern anyone has managed to chart against the seasons or the calendar or anything else people have tried plotting it against, it comes down. Not onto the pasture. Not through a gate. It stops above the top wall of a fold, the highest boundary before the open moor takes over, stands there long enough to be seen by anyone still up to see it, and then it calls. One long note first, dragged up from somewhere lower in the chest than a working bull's bellow has any business coming from, and then a second, and by the second note there is no clovenfoot left standing quiet inside that wall. Every wooltard, every demonspawn, every animal on that farm carrying the same two-toed print, answers. It never comes over the wall to do it. In every account I have gathered, and I have gathered more of these than I wanted to, the oldbrownhorn has not once set a hoof on farmed ground. It stands on its own side of the stones, on ground it plainly still considers its own, and everything on the other side comes to it instead. Which wall, which fold, which generation, nobody has ever managed to predict in advance. I have spoken to farmers on the Loxley side who inherited the story from a grandparent and never once heard the call themselves, and a family above Bradfield who have had it twice inside forty years and buried a cousin over one of the two occasions. There is no rota. There is no warning beyond the two notes, and by the time you have counted them, it has already started.
I have had this argument in the Sportsman with men who ought to know better, about what you would need to bring along to stand a chance against something that size, and I keep giving them the same answer: nothing, because you are never going to be handed the chance to try. Whatever number gets put against it in anybody's ledger, and I have seen nine put down more than once by people who like a tidy figure, it is not a number meant to be tested with a blade or a snough torch or anything else carried by a person who starts a night like this with four wounds' worth of standing before they go down. It does not come looking for that fight. It has never crossed a wall to start one. Picture the arithmetic honestly: a beast twice the size of the largest thing it ever sired, stood on ground you cannot easily reach, above a wall you would need a ladder and a very good reason to climb, at an hour you did not choose, that has never once in the record shown any interest whatsoever in anyone on the near side of the stones. There is no version of meeting the oldbrownhorn face to face that ends with you having done anything to it, because it will not give you the meeting. Walk toward it and it does not retreat and it does not charge; it simply keeps calling, unbothered, the way a demonspawn stays unbothered by whoever happens to be standing in its droveway. The only encounters on record are with what answers it, and that is where every death attached to this entry actually happened. Fighting the oldbrownhorn is not a bad plan so much as a plan for an encounter that does not exist. What exists instead, every time, is a farm full of driven animals with nowhere they are used to being driven to at that hour, and that is a considerably worse thing to be standing in the middle of than one old bull ever was.
What the calling does to a fold is straightforward enough to describe even if it is ugly to stand near. Every stalled animal turns, presses at whatever is holding it, and goes, and a byre gate that has held a shut-in herd quietly through a hundred ordinary murkneets will not hold one that has just been called by name from above the top wall. That much is animal, mechanical almost, forty or four hundred beasts finding the same door at once the way a wooltard flock always finds the same gap in a wall, and any stockman caught between the herd and the sound is caught the way you would expect, not through malice but through weight and momentum with somewhere to be. It is the other part I want a farmer to sit with before reading past this paragraph. Spend long enough working the inside of one fold, moving the same beasts along the same trods at the same hours for years on end, and you stop being entirely outside whatever keeps that fold moving as one animal instead of forty or four hundred separate ones. Nobody I have spoken to will put a tidy name to it. What they will tell you, if you get them somewhere quiet and away from the rest of the farmhands, is that they have known an old hand rise from a chair at the sound of a calling three valleys off, before the dogs so much as lifted an ear, and walk to the top wall the same unhurried, unstoppable way the herd does, and stand there among the animals until it passed, unable afterward to say what had taken them there or what had brought them back. It is always the ones who have given a fold the longest years. It is never the young hands, the seasonal ones, the ones who have only worked a place a summer or two. A fold that has kept the same family working it for long enough does not only teach a person its hours. It appears to open a channel to them, the same one the beasts already share between themselves, and the oldbrownhorn's call does not check whose head it is reaching before it goes down that channel. I have heard of one such elder kept indoors deliberately on the anniversary of the last calling, on the theory that a locked door might do for a person what a byre gate has never once managed for a demonspawn. I have not heard whether it worked.
Where the oldbrownhorn actually comes from is the one part of this entry I cannot make tidy, and I would rather say so plainly than paper over it. The comfortable reading is the one every old stockman gives without hesitation: it is the original stock, the ancestral bull line itself, alive and unaltered and considerably older than any fold currently standing, the animal the nascenti and the xin drew both the wooltard and the demonspawn out of centuries ago and never managed to draw in fully themselves. Under that reading, every horn and every extra hundredweight on it is simply what the bloodline looked like before anybody started breeding it down for wool money or meat, kept going somewhere past the last wall the same way the wild-cloverfoot keeps going on the same moor edges, feral by refusal rather than by escape, and the wrongness of the horns is simply what an unbred bull's horns do when nobody has ever selected against it. The less comfortable reading is that it got out. A breeding programme that has run for centuries produces the occasional animal too large or too badly tempered to keep, and a programme run jointly by two parties as guarded with each other as the nascenti and the xin is not a programme that publishes its failures. An animal like that, released or escaped rather than left deliberately wild, could grow old on the moor edge and pick up exactly the reputation the oldbrownhorn now carries, horns bent by hand in its first year and never touched again, without being ancestral to anything at all. I cannot tell you which reading is true, and it is not for want of trying. Nobody has taken a sample off it. Nobody has stood close enough for long enough to weigh its foot or its bulk against a controlled animal, and the one archive that might settle the question, whatever records the original crossing programme kept, is exactly the kind of record the nascenti do not hand over to a jobbing writer of field guides. I have asked. I have been told, more than once and in those exact words, that the question is not mine to have answered, which is its own kind of answer if you sit with it long enough.
Field note: if you are anywhere near a fold's top wall at lowmurk and you hear one low note where you expected none, get off that ground before the second. It calls, at most, from lowmurk until the sky starts lifting toward murkrise, and whatever it has called does not settle again until full murklight is back on the fold. That is not a fight you arrive in the middle of. That is a night you spend somewhere else entirely, and you decide that on the first note, because by the second it is already too late. - P.R.
| Type | Boss |
| HP | 9 |
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