Behemoth

How it fights

Everything about a colossus is slow and none of it is safe. It will not chase you and it has no need to: the ground it is standing on is the ground the fight happens on, and it has more of itself to spend than you have of yourself. Blows land on it the way weather lands on stone. The danger is never a single strike but the arithmetic of a long fight, and the moment you decide you are winning is usually the moment you have run out of what it would take to prove it.

Field notes

A behemoth walks the same line across its country in the same direction until something turns it, and the line becomes a road that smaller things use after. It eats standing and drinks lying down, and the drinking is the only time it is not watching the horizon. It does not chase, because nothing it wants runs; it arrives. Fresh churned ground with the trees pushed over rather than broken means one has passed within the day, and it is upwind of you if you can smell it.