By the time the little unicorn had grown into a medium-sized unicorn, the hat on his head had turned into a gold-and-silver gradient, and he had begun to show a slight resistance to Brian's touch, the fields Brian tended every day were already laden with pale green tomatoes. Hagrid's new field had also produced quite a few yellow cucumber blossoms.
It was another gathering for drinks before bed.
Looking a little melancholy, Brian asked the two Fantastic Beasts experts at the table:
"I watched that kid grow up. He used to nuzzle me of his own accord when he was little, and now he actually dodges my hand-ah, puberty, I understand-but I still don't really understand. Why do unicorns become unwilling to let men touch them once they grow up? It's so sudden. Is there some special magic in their blood that specifically tells them, when they're almost adults, 'Men are all bad news. Don't let them touch you!'?"
Brian had recently read quite a few specialized documents about unicorns-both wizarding and Muggle ones.
He had learned that unicorns were ancient creatures, active in the world around the same time as dodos, or perhaps a little later. Naturally, Muggles had sighted them plenty of times.
Unicorns appeared in many works of Muggle literature, but descriptions varied greatly between sources. Most of the time, unicorns appeared in a positive light, described as "innocent, possessed of purifying powers and special healing abilities..." Occasionally, though, they represented evil: "ferocious creatures of boundless strength, the devil's evil incarnation upon the earth." The descriptions in those darker stories were remarkably vivid, as if the author really had been sent flying by a unicorn while taking a walk in the mountains. Yet the unicorns they described were nothing like the ones Brian knew. "The woods were