Hellsborough Exposed

Somebody named the demonspawn as a joke, or in a bad night's fright, and the name outlived the joke entirely — it's a cow. Black-and-rust, cloven-footed, chewing its way round the same worn droveway it walked yesterday, and I've eaten it more than once without losing much sleep over the choice. What the name gets right isn't the animal, it's what the animal does to a person standing near it without lifting a hoof: the smell arrives first, sulphur and old meat, a stench of decay with no business coming off something still breathing, and then the call, dragged up out of somewhere lower than a lung. None of that is dangerous at murklight — I've walked past working bulls with nothing worse than a long stare for my trouble. What I won't do, and what nobody sensible does either, is stand between a demonspawn and its byre in the hour either side of murkfall, when the gates go narrow and whatever wariness the farming bred out of it all day comes straight back. Every placid, slow-eyed one chewing scran in a Loxley fold is descended, a few careful generations back, from something out past the last working wall that's never agreed to any of this — and somewhere among that wild stock, old enough that nobody farming today has laid eyes on it and lived to describe more than the horns, is supposed to stand the oldbrownhorn.