Carr Giant

Antlered and tall, made of moss and branch, it walks the carrs and is taken for a dead tree until it stirs. The reed men hold that it belongs to the carr.

A man who mistakes one fen water for another drowns, the fen holds, and it reckons three: mere, the honest one; moss, the dishonest; and carr, wood standing in water, which will have a horse. In the black water of the carrs dead trees stand close together, and the cutters will have a stranger count them; for among them, by their account, is one with antlers and long fingers that walks, and walks slowly, among its fellows. In the week after Lady Day comes the walking of the islands, and from the wall of Saint Ceolwulf’s island the party can see the district entire, the uncut carrs of the north end not excepted. The older men count the standing dead from there. Crossing back, they say whether last year’s number still holds.

Not to be confused, the reed men insist, with the thing in the reeds. That one, which Harrowgate market calls the hand-kind, comes up to the cut edge as the cover thickens and retreats when the cutting is kept up, and a bounty man can bring one before a bailiff. The carr’s thing never quits the carr, and none has been brought in. It appears on no bounty schedule, save as the clause for other noxious beasts might be stretched to it, a point no bailiff has yet been asked to rule on. As the lights are the mere’s, says the fen, so this is the carr’s: a part of the place, and not the place itself. Out of Redham the bounty men work the north carrs and do not hunt it, and one told the sub-prior to his face that the ground is unhallowed, and was so from the first.

For money, nobody in the wet country enters the carrs by night, whatever else he may believe; half the reason given is the giant, and the other half the ground, which can be walked by those who know it and by no one else. Three things recur in every telling. At dusk it is seen from the carr edge; it passes for a dead alder until it moves; and it walks along the water and not towards the holm, the closest of the fen settlements. All agree besides that the man who saw it does not go back next morning to count the trees, but the morning following, and in company; and the count he finds is the count it always was. Of the whole tale the reed men like that part least.

As witnesses describe it

In a misted swamp of dead trees and standing water, going by the stump of a ruined tower, strides a towering figure of moss, bark and trailing weed, crowned with branching antlers, its long hands clawed.