Foulrei
Built low and lean, the smallest frame after the Foulek, buff-grey with black patches either side of the muzzle and legs disproportionately long against a short body. Fastest of all the kin, and burrow-dwellers of the open plain.
They work the grain villages and the drove roads, where there is no forest to disappear into and speed has to do the work instead.
Body
Buff-grey with black patches either side of the muzzle. The legs are disproportionately long against a short body, and the digitigrade spring that every Foulen carries is in the Foulrei taken as far as the frame will take it. They are the fastest of all the kin.
The cost is the same cost. The sprint is one breath long and is paid for over the following ten minutes, and a Foulrei that has been made to run twice in an evening is a Foulrei that can be caught. The brush is the balance organ and the turn belongs to it, and on open ground with nothing to duck behind, a docked brush is not a punishment but a sentence carried out on the spot.
Country
Open plain, grain villages and drove roads, with burrow mouths cut into the bank of the road where another kin would want a root ball or a barn floor. There is no forest to disappear into, so the Verge on a grain plain is a hedge line, a threshing floor and a village with no trees within a mile of it.
A Foulrei does not hide after a theft. It leaves, at forty miles an hour, in a straight line, and is in another county by dark.
Regard
The villages answer the way villages answer anywhere, with dogs, and a plain gives a dog no advantage at all, which is why the counties that bounty the brush on open ground buy trappers instead. The Boalden take Foulen work personally and are expert at it, and a plain is the country a trapper wants.
Among their own they are ordinary Foulen: the two Nights, the taboos, the oath on the brush, the rite at dusk performed exactly and answered by nothing.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Which plains countries hold the Foulrei warrens
- How a Foulrei holds a range it can cross in an afternoon
- Whether the counties that bounty the brush hire Boalden trappers for it
- How the two Nights are called across that much open ground