CRACKED: An Anthology of Eggsellent Chicken Stories by J. Posthumus (read after txt) 📕

He did not add that he had used the Cornish word for a walk precisely once at school. It had been two months before the other students had stopped laughing whenever they saw him. In the greater world, stank meant something else entirely.

“Take care you hei back before dusk. ’Tis cold as a quilkin up there at night. Oh, one more thing,” his father added. “Tyach swears he saw something big out there when he went to collect the cows. Not a dog.”

After grabbing the binoculars, his harmonica, his enchanted black bracelet, and a sturdy hiking stick, Gaius found Tyach in the paddock with the heifers. Branok Tyach was balding with a toothy smile, dressed in green dungarees and black wellies. Gaius asked the farmhand for a better description of what he had seen, but Tyach, who had always struck Gaius as bluntly good-natured, seemed strangely reluctant to answer.

“Father said big. Big… like the Hound of the Baskervilles?” Gaius asked.

Tyach shuddered, shaking his head. “Weren’t no dog, b’y.”

“What… was it?” asked Gaius, puzzled. “I’ve never heard of bears in this area.”

But Tyach refused to say more. He just muttered something like “Wouldn’t believe me if I told ye,” and suggested that Gaius take a look at Bessie’s body.

As Gaius departed, Tyach called after him “And, b’y, keep a sharp eye out for any sign of that wee ‘un, gone missing from Clover Farms.”

Bessie’s body had already been hauled away by the knackerman. Gaius headed down to the barn to where the vet was treating Clarabelle. Luckily, the doc had not bandaged her up yet, or it would have been very hard for Gaius to explain why he wanted to unwrap the cow to look at the wounds. Doc Tremeth had sedated the old girl and was scowling at her black and white body in consternation. Gaius instantly understood why. It was a strange wound.

It did not look at all as if the cow had been mauled by dogs.

“Ah, young Gaius. How’s school?” the vet asked, looking up with a congenial smile.

“It’s proper job,” Gaius replied airily. “How’s Clarabelle?”

“She’ll be all right, but..” The old doc shook his head. “Don’t know what to make of this. Doesn’t look like dogs. Yet it’s becoming common. I’ve tended a number of sheep with wounds like this. Too deep and wide to be claws and teeth. What do ye make of it, b’y?”

Gaius looked at poor Clarabelle and shook his head. A lump grew in his throat as he again recalled how he had carefully cradled Bessie, the little brown calf whose mama had died, on his lap as he helped to feed her. He had never bottle-fed Clarabelle, but he remembered her as a frisky heifer. He hoped fervently that she would recover.

Then he froze. He had seen wounds like that once.

Normally, barnyard fowl let mice come and go, but once, a mouse had slipped into the broiler barns. The chickens had pecked it to death. A farmhand had chased the birds off before they could eat it—which chickens will do—and Gaius had been given the task of removing the thing.

The wounds on the little body had looked like this…only tiny.

Mist was moving across the moors as Gaius hiked up the rolling hill where Valiant Farm backed onto Bodmin Moor. A light dusting of snow covered the rocky outcroppings and brown grass. After a quarter of an hour, he reached The Hurlers, three circles of standing stones that local legend claimed were hurling players who foolishly did not stop their game when dawn came on some holy day and, thus, were turned to stone. As a child, Gaius had assumed this was just fancy. Now that he knew about magic; however, he could not help wondering, had these standing stones once been men?

There were a great deal more strange things in the world than he had previously imagined. His thoughts returned to Clarabelle and the dead mouse. Could Tyach have seen a gigantic chicken? Certainly would have explained why the man was hesitant to speak. Gaius lived every day with strange things, and he would have had trouble believing such a story, too.

Turning up the collar of his peacoat against the winter chill, he hiked up the gravelly path, shading his brow as he searched for any sign of dogs, injured livestock, or the little boy Tyach had mentioned, the grandson of Farmer Angove over at Four Clover Farms. Word had come last night that the five-year-old had wandered onto the moors and had not been seen since.

That had been five days ago.

People went missing on the moors, a few every year. Usually, they were strangers who had come up here to hike, but occasionally, they were locals, like Mrs. Fiddock, the butcher’s wife, who went out for her daily stank last summer and never returned.

Almost none of them were ever found.

Gaius continued across the mist-shrouded, snow-speckled moors. At nine hundred and twenty feet above sea level, Minions was the highest town in Cornwall, but Bodmin Moor was even higher. With all the rises and old quarries, dogs—or gigantic barnyard fowls—could hide almost anywhere.

Was that a motion? Gaius reached for the comforting presence of his wand, but, of course, it was not in its customary place by his hip.

He sighed.

Years of hard work had made him the best duelist at his school, but dueling required previously-prepared spells. The sapphire at the tip of his wand contained thousands of spells, ready to be fired by a thought. At school, casting charges to be stored in that gem was one of his main free-time activities. It was this preparedness that had led to him becoming an excellent duelist.

Without the pre-stored spells, however, sorcery was a much slower and more awkward art. Many types of spells could not be performed at all without considerable preparation. Worse, because Gaius had been focusing his main effort on dueling, he had not been sharpening many other skills. Instead of performing many