Feral Crocodile

A huge crocodile whose teeth sprout from its jaws in all directions lies among the drowned buildings of the flashes, and comes at boats and dogs and men ashore without distinction. The drowned gables have been shunned by the flash families for a long while, and no one now asks the reason.

It is a flash family tale, and the flash families are at once the county’s easiest hire and its hardest for the single thing anyone wants of them. No one dug the flashes. Over worked coal the ground sank, the hollow filled, and a farm and a lane turned to water, hedges running down into it on one side and out of it on the other; some still show a gable or chimney above the surface. Eel men and coarse fishers on that water have kept three rules since before any reason for them existed: no working the big flash after dark; no taking within some eighty yards of where a drowned building stands clear; and no going onto the Netherlode water whatsoever. Those who tell of the crocodile broke the second rule, at Lower Tin Flash, down among the reeds of its shallow end.

Up it came from a flooded yard between drowned walls, a beast longer than the boat with a ridged back and teeth jutting crooked from the jaw in every direction. The boat’s side it stove in; the eels it left in the bilge; the man in the water it went for, and when a dog leapt from the bank to him, the dog it took first. A field within living memory, that water was, and how so large a beast got into it the families cannot tell, nor does anyone ask them any more. Over the flashes no one has jurisdiction. They are under no licence; a line they could not walk the drove courts would not fix; under several of them the Bank Council owns the coal, yet claims none of the water. Thus there is no one to post a bounty, nor anyone to forbid it.

Instead, in the Sarrum fashion, the county disputes whose loss this is. Four families work the big flash on the Sarr levels, and inside forty years they have made an arrangement among themselves, sharing out the water instead of the season, which no quarrel has yet broken; but hunt the crocodile on one family’s water without leave from the rest, and a company may break it on their behalf. Marred, write the vestry clergy, and the Collegium, a strain; a spoilt thing, say the families, and name it no further. Beasts drink from the flashes, though no person in the county does, and drovers watering herds there keep now to the open banks where nothing rises from the water. Let a summer run dry and the level drops as much as four feet, and the water gives things up.

As witnesses describe it

From a flooded street in a ruined settlement surges a crocodile of great size, water foaming white along its ridged and spiny back. Its long jaws are a bristle of jagged, overgrown teeth jutting at every angle, and its eye is red. Behind, in the water, stand roofless cottages of stone, dead trees and a broken cartwheel.