Everyone remembers the water advisory that was put on Brindle lake, however for the first time since the start of June you may walk down to the Brindle footbridge and count tadpoles again, the way Posy Hartwell used to tell us to do. ORCM says you still can’t, but somehow they don’t know that the lake is empty.

The kelpies left, but they did not disappear. They went south, out of the lake and Downs entirely. I am not going to give a precise location for I do not wish to harm them. All I will say is go south and they like water.

There are more of them than I have ever seen in one place, more than anyone in the Downs can remember seeing. What’s more striking if you can believe it is that their manes have turned white as snow, not the black we used to catch in the moonlight and go quiet over, but a dry, flat white, the white of a winter this country has not seen in generations. They move slow, when they move at all, and mostly they do not. They stand in the shallows facing the same way, south, toward the Faded Lands, and they wait. Tam Rushel, who has poled that stretch of water for forty years, put his boat right in among them and told me not one of them turned its head. He said they looked like they had aged a hundred years between Brindle and here.

There is not a single word from ORCM about why the creatures that near drowned half the southern basin should suddenly stand quiet as old plow horses and point themselves south, or how a whole lake of them went grey in a single season. I asked. You already know what I was told. It does not trade in that kind of talk. I am getting very tired of that sentence.

The fishers who work that water trade in it plenty. Stand with them long enough and they will tell you the kelpies are not sick and they are not lost, that the animals know exactly where they are going. They will tell you, that the kelpies are not the only things that have started moving south this spring, and that they are somehow being called to the Faded Lands, and it is getting louder. I did not stay to hear much more than that. I have little ones in the Downs, and for the first time in my life I stood on that bank glad of the way the water runs between us and the south.

Clementine Ferrow-Aldworth writes about food, family, and life in the Rolling Downs.