Mutated Serpent

The soberest witnesses say it takes bears: a serpent grown far past any serpent’s size, its coils broken out in sores. Its head has never been brought in.

Those who tell it soberest are the charcoal burners, whose hearths lie toward the wet margin of the wood, and the fowlers at the north end of Lantern Mere, where the carrs stand, alder and willow rooted in water over deep peat; and what they describe is the thing coiled about a bear, with the bear getting the worst of it. Elsewhere such talk is heard as talk. The country is quite certain that the realm’s snakes are small, and a man who speaks of a serpent thick as a cart-horse and long as a lane is asked how much he had drunk. On one rule the priory and the reed men have never differed: into the carrs after dark, for money, nobody goes. Of the reasons offered, the serpent is one; it is not the first.

Under the clause that closes the bounty schedule, for such other noxious beasts as the bailiff shall judge, a serpent would have to come, the schedule naming only wolves and four other things whose names nobody can now read. Five bounty books are kept in the march, and Mereton’s alone would call it a serpent, its bailiff writing descriptions where the others write a word. Among his six hundred entries are twelve that are plainly no wolf, gathered in the north carrs, and not one of the twelve describes a serpent. The bounty men account for that readily: a thing of such size is left where it lies, not brought in. As to what it is, the Collegium’s surveyor holds that bad ground works upon ordinary stock over generations, and would write a strain; the priory writes the marred; the fen says only that there were things in the carrs before ever a priory stood.

Two counsels come with the tale, and the march gives both freely. A drawing of a track is worth more than any written account of it, and the good marcher captains still walk out to make one; a furrow as wide as a cart, cut through the reed, earns the drawing. And a rumour is not to be trusted to remain a rumour, since the realm keeps its darkest tales, those of beast lines that have ceased to behave as animals, in the condition of half legend only until some survey goes missing. At Mereton the bailiff is past sixty, with nobody trained to his practice after him, and he has said that his book will go back to saying wolf once he is gone. Any party with a drawing should take it to him while there is still a man at Mereton to enter it.

As witnesses describe it

Wound about a brown bear in a moonlit wood, a huge serpent holds its fanged and frilled head above the roaring beast, jaws open, its coils swollen with red sores and growths.