As of last week the Office of Resource and Civil Management, in a committee session, appropriated money for what it called “Operation MantiMouser.” When asked to comment on the meaning of the name, the operation, or what the funds were for, ORCM would divulge nothing. Nothing, that is, but “a routine measure for the safety of our personnel and posts,” and the word “precautionary,” which I received so many times it lost all meaning.

What the office actually ordered

The office describes a routine measure with funds appropriated from the Civil Compliance Initiative’s annual budget. The order does not read like one.

A routine measure does not get a codename. It does not get its own agenda item in a committee session. Operation MantiMouser got both, and then a PR campaign to tell the rest of us it was nothing that wanted explaining.

I have spoken with two people with direct knowledge of the operation, one with insider knowledge of ORCM and one outside the office but with direct knowledge of the deal, and both describe a standing order rather than a single purchase: a fixed number of animals to be delivered to secret sites in the Faded Lands and Whispering Groves regions. These animals will be trained with secret officers to go on roving patrols. There is also a longstanding commitment to replace and add to them through the season. This is not a handful of animals kept at the ready in case of an emergency. It is a supply line.

The order was placed with the Entmoot conservatory, and there are rumours of similar orders being worked out with other Whispering Groves breeders. Waiting lists at the conservatory were already long with private buyers. By every account I could gather, the office’s commission has pushed those lists longer still, which means ordinary households that queued for a serpent-mouser may not receive one for the foreseeable future. The office would not explain the season’s panic buying. It has now joined it, and outbid everyone.

What a serpent-mouser is for

Much is unknown about this breed as it is only in its third generation. A breeder at one of the Groves conservatories, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution, walked me through what characteristics they have been selecting for. “We are selecting for binocular night vision, heightened olfactory acuity, stalking prowess, auditory sensitivity, and for a venom that’s uniquely effective against the Serpentes evolutionary clade,” the breeder said. The serpent-mouser is a hunter, specifically bred to hunt snakes and anything snake-like. “You do not commission a barn full of them to keep mice out of a grain store and birds from eating your crops,” the breeder told me. “They are bred for one task. Everyone who buys one knows what they are for, we literally tell them before purchase.”

I asked whether the animals could tell a serpent from a serpent-folk farmer walking home in the dark. The breeder was quiet for a moment and then said, “No. That is not a thing we’re selecting for.”

Where are they going?

By the accounts I gathered, the patrols are to run a corridor that begins in the Faded Lands and reaches up to the southern border of the Whispering Groves. This area has been subject to much scrutiny, as recent reports indicate that fields and crop stores have rapidly decayed and that tuskboars, phoenixes, and kelpies have flocked to the area.

I do not know what the office intends by any of this, or what its dispatch timeline is. I do know that it is at some point in the future, as the committee indicated a training period before deployment. The best estimate we can give is that it will likely take a few weeks, based on the training protocols the Bureau uses for its other animal-based units.

What is unknown

For all that has been appropriated, the office has never said what this program is for once the animals leave their training. We do not know what that training consists of, to what standard it is held, or who is meant to answer for the animals in the field. And there is a plainer problem waiting at the end of all of it, one that nothing I have been shown so much as acknowledges. These animals were bred to hunt one thing, and they are bound for the one stretch of country where people and prey are most easily confused. What happens the first time a serpent-mouser takes a serpent-folk farmer walking home for the thing it was bred to hunt? Is there any part of the training that answers for that?

I put the question to the Faded Lands Community Board, and asked whether it had been consulted on the program, or informed of it at all. It had not. The prospect visibly unsettled the members I reached. “You do not set an animal bred to kill one thing loose on the roads where people live who might read as the target, and call it a safety measure,” one member told me. “That is a recipe for a confrontation, a bad one, and it will be our own citizens caught in the middle of it.”

Merritt Vance is a staff reporter for the Chronicle’s Vaelthir section. Anyone with information about the Office of Resource and Civil Management’s commission, the conditions on the Faded Lands and Groves roads, or where the animals are being kept, trained, and put on patrol, is urged to write to the Vaelthir desk by owl. Correspondence will be held in confidence.