Two intertwined tribal dragons

A carter called Maud Pell came down to the crossing one autumn with a cart of copper pans and no patience. She had heard the old rule, that whoever spoke first to the dragons paid the toll with their own name, and she laughed at it. Then she stood on the bank and shouted that the water belonged to the mill and the mill to her brother, and she would have her cart over before the frost. The northern head lifted, sniffed the copper, and asked in a voice like wet slate what she would give for the crossing.

Maud said nothing for a long while. Then she unhitched the mare, walked out along the knotted coil with a pan under each arm, and set one on each dragon's brow, the way you would lay a cloth on a feverish child. Pay yourselves, she said. You have squabbled over one river since before my grandmother, and neither of you has ever once been dry. The southern dragon coughed a ring of smoke that hung over the water like a loose stitch.

By morning the knot had slackened. The two heads still faced their separate banks, but the water between them ran in a clean line, and the cart rolled over without a scale touching its wheels. Maud took no toll that year. The copper pans still hang on the bridge rail at Cold Ferris, turning in the wind, and the dragons have never once since asked anybody's name.