Wooltard
The wooltard is the only entry in this book that nobody has ever come to me frightened of. I have had fell runners come off Bamford Edge unable to hold a mug steady over what they saw at the top. I have had farmhands refuse to go back into a byre after murkneet for reasons they would not put into words. Nobody has ever grabbed my sleeve in the Sportsman and told me, white-faced, about a wooltard. It looks exactly like what it is: cream fleece gone grey with peat, a black face, legs that seem to have been fitted on with more optimism than engineering, an expression that suggests it has never once had a thought worth finishing. Farmers on the Sheffield, S6 side of the boundary keep them for wool and scran the same as anyone keeps a flock the ordinary side of the hex, and I have stood in a field with forty of them around me and felt nothing but the urge to be somewhere with a roof and a door that shuts. I have counted flocks of six hundred head on Ronksley Moor without one of them so much as lifting its face at a barker running full pelt across the same slope. That is not a sentence you will find attached to anything else in this book, and I want it on record before I explain why the wooltard is in here at all. The reason is not the animal. The reason is arithmetic, and arithmetic does not care how silly the thing doing the adding up looks.
A wooltard on its own does whatever the nearest wooltard is doing, and a wooltard in a flock stops being countable as an individual at all. Watch one long enough and the forty heads resolve into a single shape, drifting across a hillside with one collective sense of where the good grass is and no apparent means of agreeing on it. They graze the same slopes year after year, generation after generation, and the paths they wear into the ground outlast the animals that made them by decades. Walk any high ground in The Dark Peak at murkrise and you will find the trods: cut a foot deep in places, running along the contour like something surveyed rather than grown into the turf by hoof alone. Nobody laid these paths out on purpose. Forty thousand ordinary mornings of the same flock walking to the same water did it, and the flock that replaced them kept to the same lines because the hillside had already made the decision for them. I timed one crossing the old packhorse track below Cutthroat Bridge: forty minutes to cover four hundred yards, a pace that would insult a garden slug, every animal in it holding the same speed as its neighbour and arriving in the same order it set off. They funnel, too. Put a gate, a gap in a wall, a fallen fence post in their way, and the flock does not fan out to find another route around it. It compresses. Dozens of them narrow into the same few feet of gap at once, patient about it in a way that looks a good deal like intelligence and is not. Whatever decides where the flock goes, it is not any single wooltard doing the deciding. It is the weight of the whole lot moving in one direction, and that is worth keeping in mind before the next paragraph, because it is also how they close on you.
A single wooltard cannot hurt you. I want that stated plainly, because the habit with everything in this book is to reach straight for teeth and claws, and the wooltard has neither worth mentioning. What it has is the hungry way of moving: slow to start, and faster the longer you stay in front of it. Stand at the edge of a flock and for a long while nothing happens at all. Stay there, and the gap narrows by degrees too small to notice one at a time, the way a tide comes in without ever appearing to move. By the time you register that the nearest animal is a yard closer than it was ten minutes ago, the sum of that yard is not one yard, it is one yard times however many head are grazing that hillside, and you have become the only stationary object in a field that has quietly started filling in the space around you. It does not feel urgent while it is happening. That is the whole danger of it. Nobody has ever been killed by one wooltard. Farmers have been put underfoot by forty of them, on ground that looked like nothing worse than a Splend'y walk, in weather nobody would have thought to call dangerous, because the animal that finally reaches you was never the threat. A shepherd on the Redmires side lost a Midd'y afternoon and both hips to a flock she had counted at murkrise and stopped watching by midday. She said the same thing every account of this says: it never once felt like a rush. The rest of the flock behind the nearest animal were the threat the entire time, and they had been closing on her since before she thought to start counting.
What the wooltard is, under the fleece, is selective breeding stock that the nascenti and the xin between them spent centuries getting right, which is a stranger fact than it sounds given how long the two have spent trying to get each other dead. Both had form for keeping animals before they ever agreed to keep this one: the xin already drove cryptobites as dray beasts and rode mentiloths between camps, and the nascenti already ran the farms of Hellsborough through hands that had no idea whose interests they served. The wooltard was bred from wild stock, the same family that still runs loose on the moor edges as wild-cloverfoot, crossed at some point with the bloodline of the oldbrownhorn, the same ancestral bull that gave rise to what is now sold and slaughtered as demonspawn, for size and a calmer temper in the herd. Two-toed, the same cloven print as its wild cousin, not the single hoof of an onetoe, and that detail matters more than it looks: everything about a wooltard's foot is built for a soft hillside and a slow, deliberate gait, not for speed and not for a kick worth ducking. What the breeders were trying to remove was the wariness, the solitary readiness to fight or bolt that a wild clovenfoot or an ancestral bull carries as standard equipment, and by every written account they succeeded completely. Taken one at a time, a wooltard has none of that left in it. Put several hundred generations of that same removed wariness into a group of several hundred animals moving as a single organism, though, and you find it did not vanish so much as it changed address. It moved out of the tooth and into the trod. The wool comes off soft and pale and sells well at the Hellsborough markets, the meat is plain and cheap in a way nobody complains about, and neither species has ever had cause to revisit the arrangement since. The nascenti file the programme as a success. I would ask them to define their terms before I signed off on it.
Field note: never stand on the low side of a slope with a flock grazing above you, and always know where the nearest gate or wall stands before you stop counting heads. Forty looks like nothing. Forty is a great deal fewer than the number that will actually be moving toward you by the time you notice. - P.R.
| Type | Hungry |
| HP | 2 |
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