Hellsborough Exposed

Nobody provokes a gnawmard; they get to hostility on their own schedule, usually before you've said hello. The first one I met bit me through the boot in the murkneet outside a barn near Loxley, and the bruise spent a fortnight turning colours it had no business turning. They live two to eight to a warren, in drystone gaps and field boundaries and crawl spaces nobody has checked in years, and every extra gnawmard winds the rest tighter, the way one dog barking sets off a whole street. What makes them worth watching rather than just avoiding is that a colony reads a rising murk before I can, before most survey gauges can, and leaves all at once, ears flat, all heading the same way. I have used their warrens as an alarm more than once. If you find an empty one that was full last murkneet, do not walk toward wherever they went.