Scrufftail
Ten inches of grey-brown vermin with a tail it is absurdly proud of, and at a glance you would call it a squirrel and keep walking. Keep looking and the legs are wrong -- too many joints, ending in a hooked claw built for gripping bark, not burying nuts, the kind that makes you reconsider every squirrel you have ever fed by hand. The eyes are the other thing. Too large, too black, and entirely too aware of where you are standing.
You could pick one up. That is the problem. A single scrufftail does not read as a threat, because it is not one, not on its own -- it will not fight you, it will barely acknowledge you, right up until you notice there are six of them behind you and your pack is lighter than it was five minutes ago. They work the rooter diggings on Wadsley Common and similar ground for whatever the bigger animal misses, and they work travellers the same way: patiently, in numbers, and without ever quite doing anything you could point to as an attack.
The tail is not decoration. It is a counterbalance, used mid-grab the way a cat uses one on a narrow ledge, and it is why a scrufftail can take something off your belt or out of an open pocket without you feeling the pull. Corner one and it will scratch -- not hard, barely worth calling damage -- but you will not corner one. They do not allow it. Touch one hard enough to matter and it is simply gone, not fled, not ducked out of sight. Just absent, the way a word goes missing from a sentence you were sure you had finished. So is whatever it was carrying. So, usually, are the five you did not notice.
Nobody has satisfactorily explained the eyes to me. They do not blink the way I would expect vermin to blink, and they track you the whole time you are near, the way the organic network tracks everyone -- noting where you are, filing it, passing it along to whatever wants to know. I do not think a scrufftail is part of the network in any way that matters. I think it just learned to watch like something that is, because everything in the Dark Peak eventually does.
Field note: count your pockets before you count the scrufftails. By the time you have finished the second count, the number will have changed.
| Type | Hungry |
| HP | 2 |
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