Tag Archives: hermits

Views of Hopeless

Hermit Cottage

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Text and image by Nimue Brown

Hermit Cottage has been inhabited by members of the Jones family for generations. The main body of the cottage is the shell of a giant mollusc. There’s no knowing from the shell alone whether there was a more regular ocean-going giant mollusc, or whether it belonged to one of the hermits indigenous to the island. However ‘Hermit Cottage’ has a nice ring to it, and ‘Might have been a massive conch  cottage’ doesn’t quite have the same swing.

Hermit Cottage features in a story set after the graphic novel series. If you support me on Patreon, you’ll have already run into this (and thank you, it really helps). There are a couple of stories set after the series, and figuring out what happens to those will be a job for this winter. 

The cottage is in a fairly remote spot, tucked in amongst the dunes. It’s a short walk to the sea and a much longer walk in to town. Here we find Necessity, a young female-ish person who has built a wandering mechanical device. And yes, this whole thing started with the notion of necessity being the mother of invention, but I managed to get through the entire story without actually saying it.

Hopeless inhabitants

Hermits

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Text and image by Nimue Brown

Hermits start out life as very small things, and they keep growing. If you find modestly sized hermits on the beach, they tend to be easy to catch, and while they will try to hang on to rocks, they have very few defences. The tentacles you most often find in island cuisine usually come from small to medium sized hermits. They are bland and chewy sort of thing to eat, no matter how you cook them, and as such represent one of the safest and most reliable kinds of food the island has to offer.

Although there are all sorts of things that hang out on beaches keeping an eye out for anything that might be trying to find hermits to eat. Collecting hermits as a food source is not a risk free activity.

As the same suggests, hermits tend to be solitary, but that depends a lot on size. The bigger they are, the further apart they like to be, so you can often  find lots of very small ones fairly close together. A massive one will want a whole beach to itself.

The massive ones are rare, and are more likely to live underwater than at the tideline. You might  see them in the shallows sometimes, waving their tentacles about as they search for food. And of course the bigger a hermit gets, the bigger its food items need to be. The tiny hermits you might collect in your bucket are probably eating things so small you can barely see them. The kind of hermit that wants a whole beach to itself is big enough to be able to consider humans a viable meal.

Hopeless inhabitants

Hermits

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The defining quality of a hermit is that you never see the whole creature. What emerges from the chosen shell may suggest something to you, but inside the shell there is mystery. The hermits do not like to be fully known. They shelter the truth of themselves inside whatever they find that fits. 

They aren’t a species. All kinds of creatures can produce the odd hermit here and there. These are the oceanic introverts, the shy entities that do not want anyone to see their posteriors.

For beach scavengers, a hermit on the shore is always a tempting proposition. The shells can make them easier to catch, and it is sometimes a simple business to cook the entire hermit inside whatever they’ve hidden in. Of course it won’t be until you get the hermit out of the shell that you’ll know if they were worth the effort of baking them.