Elk
Elk are the largest deer of the Cradle web: solitary giants of the wet woods and bog edges. They are too big for most poachers to carry off and too rare for most lords to count on, and a bull standing in a forest road, refusing to move, is one of the commonest tales a traveller brings home.
Appearance
A bull elk stands taller at the shoulder than a horse, with long legs, a heavy humped shoulder, a long overhanging muzzle, and a flap of skin hanging from the throat. His antlers are broad and flat, like two open hands with many fingers, wider than a cart, shed in winter and regrown each summer. Cows are smaller and bare-headed. The coat is dark brown, nearly black on the body, with pale grey-brown legs. Calves are plain red-brown.
Elk walk with a long, high-stepping stride that carries them through bog and deadfall where a horse would founder, and they swim well. Bulls in the rut grunt and moan; cows call their calves with a low lowing. They smell strongly in the rut, of musk and wallow.
Habitat and Range
Elk live where wet woods meet bog: on the margins of the Elderweald, where the ground holds water like a sponge, and in the wetter foothill woods and high valleys of the Headwater Marches. They are few, and each keeps a wide range.
Behaviour and Temperament
Elk browse willow, birch, young shoots, and water plants, and stand belly-deep in pools in summer to feed and escape the flies. They live alone or in small groups. They are calm and slow to flee, which makes them seem tame; they are not. A cow with a calf charges anything that comes near, and a bull in the autumn rut will run down a walker or a horse.
Life Cycle
Cows calve in early summer, one calf or twins, and keep them close for a year. Elk live about fifteen years.
Uses and Dangers
An elk gives a great deal of meat, a thick hide, and antler for tools. Wood Elf groves hunt them seldom, since one elk feeds a grove for a long time and the forest has few to give. Human lords count an elk a rare trophy. The danger is the rut and the calving season, and a bull on a narrow road.
Lore and Belief
Headwater carters say an elk in the road is asking a toll and will move when it has decided you have paid. Wood Elves say the elk walk the old wet ways of the forest that no grove remembers. Its antler, ground, is sold in the Basins as a cure for fits, without effect.
Lords' huntsmen count a bull elk the hardest kill in the march woods, and more than one hunter has been opened by the antlers of a beast he thought dead.