Redfront
The first redfront I saw properly, I mistook for an ordinary robin sitting a bit too still on a drystone wall along the Bradfield Dale road. Small. Red-fronted, hence the name, though not everyone bothers with the plumage once they have had a proper look at the eye. The pupil does not move the way a bird's should. It holds you the way a lens holds a subject -- not interest exactly, more like it is still deciding whether you are in focus. It does not startle when you get close. It does not startle at all.
Robins hold territory and sing to warn off rivals. A redfront does neither. It sits on walls and in roads at murkneet and does not feed, does not preen, does not do anything a bird is supposed to do with its time. What it does instead is log you -- your pace, your direction, the fact that you exist on that stretch of road at that hour -- and pass it along whatever the organic network's old lanes have been carrying since before the lanes were lanes.
There is nothing here that will hurt you directly. HP 1, no bite, no claw worth the name. The danger is what happens after. One redfront on a wall means you have been noticed. A second one further down the same road means whatever noticed you the first time has already acted on it. On the Dale road that usually means an onetoe is moving before you have had the chance to explain yourself to nobody in particular. I have twice been tempted to knock a redfront off its perch out of irritation and stopped myself both times. Striking one is logged the same as anything else it logs.
I do not know how old the practice is. Older than the road, certainly. The wall it favours near Ughill was built around where it already liked to sit, as if the drystone had been coaxed to grow around a fixture already there, rather than laid by hand around a bird that had simply picked a good stone. Real robins still exist out there, going about whatever business robins are meant to go about. It is only ever the still ones -- the ones that watch you the whole way past without once turning their head to track you -- that are worth crossing the road to avoid.
Field note: count the redfronts, not the road. One on a wall is the toll for using it. Two means someone already knows you're on it.
| Type | Blinker |
| HP | 1 |
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