Gluttons

Overview

Gluttons are squat, fearless hunters and scavengers of the high forest and snow. They follow trap-lines and eat what is caught in them, dig up buried caches, and break into stores, and they will not give up a carcass to anything smaller than a bear. Every trapper in the mountains curses them by name.

Appearance

A glutton looks like a small bear with a long bushy tail: the size of a stout dog, low and broad, with short powerful legs, huge paws, and long curved claws. Its fur is long, coarse, and dark brown, with a broad pale band running along each side from shoulder to rump and a pale mask across the brow. Its teeth and jaws are strong enough to crack frozen bone.

It moves at a humping, rocking lope that it can keep up all day across snow. It growls and snarls. It sprays a foul musk over food it means to come back to, and a cache or store it has visited stinks of it.

Habitat and Range

Gluttons live in the high forest and on the snowfields of the Ironspine, the lower edges of the Stormcrown, and the heights of the Headwater Marches. Each roams a vast range, and they are few.

Behaviour and Temperament

A glutton eats almost anything: carrion above all, hares, whistlers, birds, eggs, roots, berries, and the young and weak of crag goats and deer. It follows wolves and stone cats to their kills and takes them over. It is solitary, tireless, and afraid of almost nothing, and it is clever with traps: it springs them, eats the bait and the catch, and leaves.

Life Cycle

A female bears two or three young in a snow den in late winter. They stay with her until autumn. Gluttons live about ten years.

Uses and Dangers

Glutton fur does not frost when breathed on, and it trims the hoods of hold wardens and Headwater hunters. Their cost is to trappers, whose lines a single glutton can strip, and to caches and stores left in the mountains: a hunter's meat cache buried under stones, a waystation's outer store, a stranded caravan's supplies. They are rarely a danger to people, though a glutton defending a carcass will face down a man with a spear.

Lore and Belief

Trappers say a glutton is the mountain's tax on greed: set too many traps and it will come. Dwarven hold wardens say that a glutton once in a store-room will never leave it, and seal the store until it is gone or dead. Headwater children are told that a glutton eats until it bursts, which it does not, though it comes close.

A glutton that has learned to rob a trap-line is hunted like a thief, and the trapper who finally kills one boasts of it for years; in every mountain hut someone has seen, or knows a man who saw, a glutton drag a full-grown hunter's pack up a tree and eat his winter while he watched.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Animals