Hellsborough Exposed

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 — twice the shoulder height of a working demonspawn bull, horns crossed back toward the eyes in a shape no wandering genetics ever produced unassisted, coat gone the colour of wet peat rather than any farmed hide. It has never once, in every account I have gathered, set a hoof on farmed ground; it stands on its own side of the top wall and calls, two low notes dragged up from somewhere lower in the chest than a bull's bellow has any right to come from, and every demonspawn and wooltard inside that fold answers whether the gate holds or not. Fight it and you have misunderstood the encounter entirely — nobody has ever been given the meeting, only the herd it calls and whatever stands between that herd and the wall. Stranger still is what a long-worked fold does to its oldest hands: more than one stockman has risen from a chair at a calling three valleys off and walked, unhurried and unstoppable, to stand among the driven animals, unable afterward to say what took him there. Whether it is the original bull line the nascenti and the xin drew the tame breeds out of centuries back, or a breeding failure that got out and grew old on the moor edge, is a question I have asked outright and been told, more than once, is not mine to have answered.