***Spandrill Magazine is delighted to offer our readership yet another exclusive opportunity: we present a selection especially sifted from the "Edinburgh Series" of the notorious "Longshank Sheets", those long-hidden pages deemed "scandalously unsuitable" for Gould's Bestiary of 1886 which had been created by Edwin Longshank in all his opiate-inspired fury in that summer of 1885 in the Princes Street cot, and which until lately were kept from public scrutiny in the Aberdeen strongboxes of the Huxtable family. Our especial relationship with the Guardians of The Filigree Press has enabled us to acquire these impressions of several of the "Longshank Sheets". It is an honour and a delight to be able to present them in our magazine.***
Excluded From
GOULD'S BESTIARY
The Excised "Longshank Sheets" of 1885
(from the secret archives of The Filigree Press, Taunton)
TYGER
Tigers are irregularly striped, black on gold fur. Having yellow teeth and eye, their muzzles are barbed with incredible fine hair. Striding majestical through the Steppe, these seek riverside bays. Here they like to erect their tall nests, often employing the old and discarded husks of Grebe-nests for their own nests. In groups of three or five, Tigers enjoy a life of breeding family with bones cast about. Ears are fanned and of effervescent strips, somewhat after the fact of a concertina made of raw ligament (grey in a young beast, sandy-hue of a mature Tiger, and grizzled for elder cats): these fanned tufts are heard to whistle, an old Mongolian saying says, only by the victim about to lose their mind. These are the kind of horror-dream that household-homily "Kitty-cats" are parades of, what with their mousings and bird-pieces offered. Open land fear of the terrible Tygers of Bzaghistan!
OLD THREADBARE LION
Sad to see. On an elder day he proudly priveleged stalked the yellow shiningveldt (in the long far, a shade, a flicker, a sudden stab of okapi-terror). Draped sidelong the lionlimb of a djugg-djugg tree in the heat. Ancient eyes stared hot hate out. His lady lioness in a flow of carpetbag bones was the killer as he slept. What a hulk of black heaped meat he tore redmouthed in the sun. Bloated slept a further noon of blinking, tail swipes and the pile of wet bones. Never stirred for the trundling armadillo-train. One eye saw the teetering fleet of old nag wilderbeest. Sad to say now an old threadbare bag of worn lion. Milky stare and shattered bite with tufts of mane, sand-pitted, in the winds. Paws are toy mittens. A dread of bellypain throbs out his dying.
ATKINSON'S NUBUCK
Here come the springer, ramming hard up at a silver branch, all dolly-leg and ribshivery. Red flanks and thick cream underbelly. Mouse's child face soft and blue. Notched ears quiver in the dusty sunshafts. In a small school these nibble, they graze a whole evening in a cooled brook-glade where the even-owl sings. And a marmoset choir in the canopy rings of hollow wood and leaf-fall. Away they go! They leap and they prance at the wall of knotted sessile oaks.
THE BARBARIOUS APES
They have a whigged visage, these lordly sly horror-creepers. In gypsy crews that preen each other and yellow-eyeballed watch. Always among the harsh blood-red rocks in a metal hell-heat they hunker; or shouldering stalk in stinging stab of tongueleaf-fringed afternoon. Down they peer from soapy cliffs while we tread under. Bushed bluewhisker of the aged grandee, sleek flea-cracked orange shanks of the squealing younker. Be far or within door to spy any of their goldenbeige-blazered agony-fang knuckle gangs!
HUNTINGTON'S HARE, HUNTINGTON'S HARE
Norfolk drear. A sky is a baleful ache of grey, a canvas of oily grime. And the wind that's hurled off the vast sea does moan all the dark hours in the arms and legs of the creeled trees, sings wordless, haunts the dreams of sweating salt-crusted churls a'bed in their creaking longhuts huddled at Chelms Hill's back. In the muddied gloam of youngest day, air stinging and sand-blasted, the hawthorn and the creeping hackleaf hunkered at the stinking dykes, all across yon spattered, hail-sore bank flees Huntington's Hare from the crash of the oceans. Darkest of matted rat-rabbit flanks and a wintermoon bead of blind eye. Horrid the squeal at the gibbous lunar grin as the crippled oak groans. Where goes he there, through the coils of the clutch at the hedge? He's gone, as the sallow belly of the sagged sky shines a filthy sodden morning yet again. Far from the salt breath and spit of the shores he sleeps in roots and tubers and keen, yeasty earth. Slumbers in the breakfast hour, gentle his nostrils twitch, as the howl of the ravening foldedface hounds echoes in the woodsmoke by the black gob of Yestey's Cowhouse. Though fed fat on calf-feet and headless hen and heavy blood, the shaggy brutes can taste the slivers of quicksilver in the dew of the Yellow Mead: Huntington's Hare, Huntington's Hare.
BEARDED QUATTLE
Feel the kiss of sandalwood in the hot moist air as the sky bruises and bleeds into a monsoon night. It's an oily lake that laps these horny roots, these clawed feet. Velvet is this night, and a heavy world of numb blindness bears down. Hard to breathe in the heat. Hear the myriad calls in unseeable space. Feel the forest burn with a terrible life. There, at the cataract's ebony pool, snouts in the rotting mulch, shiver and snicker these Bearded Quattle.For they denizen the darkest deep of the dying and living forests. Scamper and snort in the black where scent and feel is all. Mostly a sow and a boar and a tiny coughing pup with a trailing "nanny" to look to the kid. Nuzzle and snuffle in the yard-deep leaf, in their trains trot along giant dead Bok-Bok trunks, squabble for Jagnak root. Cornered by a Frilled Dragoness, backed up to a wall of Essgnu-Ghu poles, the boar will raise his matted hackling-hairs, pump up the crimson cracked jowel-foldings, glare out an old eye, grunt, raise his long tuberous muzzle and shake the quattle's full beard of spines at the bewildered lizard and she soon flees. Quattle run headlong at the shins of men and their crocodile snouts and hook-mouths can tear human flesh, crush man's bones. No man of the Gjungo peoples has seen one in the day, and many a hunting party veers away from the "charcoal holes" where Quattle lurk in their sinister family trains.
ERSKINE'S DOVER HOG
Named for its champion, Stanley "Wiffer" Erskine of St Margaret's at Cliffe, author of the maligned pamphlet-series "Celebration-Character Breeds of Folkestone, Dover & Deal". A somnolent beast in sunshine, this is a lively enough pig in cooler climes, and positively rapacious in Autumn and early Winter, though it is said to balk at the first frosts and shudders and curls its rubbery lip at a snowing in the yard (the swineherd having to poke and eke it out from its sheds of a raw dawning, giving it good digs in its heaving sides with a hay-fork, applying a gardener's rake to its shivering flanks, shouting into its coarse bristly lugs). Enjoys in particular a meal of "braggings" (a broth of oat-heggs and "Fulminers Yeasts" usually fed to young kine or fancy skirted goats) and will gnaw anything in wood when in boredom. Will happily trample a cat in the black mud of its den, and runs at a pail, butting it lustily. Likes its jowels chivvying, though surly when coaxed. The piglets ("daggurts" in the Kentish vernacular) are angular and shrill-crying and trot in flotillas; who would guess their provenance or progeny when removed from the shadow of yon vast globular hulk of a "Sow-Matron"? Terrible to slaughter. Has a distinctive bitter, "bark-tang" to its dark meat, which is always eaten fresh in a festival, never salted and barrelled. A "celebration-character" example of a beast of ancient provenance. Named in Alfredstan's Abacus as "the great tun of Dover".
LESSER JOUNDARY
A long extinct denizen of the North American continent. It was hunted out of existence in the 1820s by fortune-seeking itinerant "Moondocker" gangs for its fine chest-hair of vermillion and gold stripe and counter jag. It is said to have had a piercing high hum, heard on clear and moonlit nights. Known to the Red Man for its "demon drumming": a wierd rhythmic beating with the hind feet on tree stumps, etc, in a dry air. The diaries of Scandinavian settlers in Montana record that these Joundary held "festivities" in hot weather, when they would gather to drum, hum, and run their "gallivants" along the thin ruddy soil of the Red Belt of those fierce landlocked states. They were known to the Creele and Pinto tribes as "Mad-Muzzled Pointy Dust-Ox". Said to have been the subject of an unpublished verse by Coleridge which the author destroyed at the behest of Wordsworth, to the distress of Dorothy (it is further reported that De Quincey thereafter dubbed this Joundary "Dorothy's Little River Cow"). It is not a relative of the Greater Joundary of Venezuela, which is a kind of fish-eating river-cat, according to Huskisson's Latin Miscellany. The flesh of the Lesser Joundary was once served to Lord Wellington at a Potanquet reception. The great man described it as "savouring of an aged trout baked in an old boot discovered at the foot of a midden".
