Jory Teague reads a footprint before he reads a face, and he knew the barghest from its left forefoot long before he saw the animal. The track is a dog's, nine inches across, but the outer claw on that foot is gone, so every print on the left side shows four marks and a gap. Jory rakes sifted hearth ash over the lanes around Fode Hill each dusk, and the farms pay him in barley for it. The job exists for one reason. Ash holds a print the way mud never does, and a household that wants to know whether the dog came by in the night wants to know before breakfast.
His day starts at the Fode kiln, where the wives leave sacks of cold ash by the wall. He shakes each one through a wire hoop and pulls out what the kitchens hide in it: nails, comb teeth, a spoon once. By noon he is on Pitch Common with the rake. The rake handle is new again. The barghest has chewed every ash-wood handle Jory has owned, one a spring, and has never touched the iron ones he bought out of spite. Jory has taken this personally. The neighbors find it the funniest thing about the whole arrangement and say so often.
He sees the animal itself twice a year, if that. The most recent time was at midday, in the dry ditch on the common's north side. It sat with its forelegs too long and bent at one joint more than a dog's, the coat a blue-black that took the sun and gave nothing back. The eyes did not match, one wide and one narrow, and neither moved when Jory did. It did not growl. Its jaw hung a little open, showing teeth the length of a thumb. He kept raking, fifty steps, then a hundred, and when he looked again the ditch held only a flattened place in the grass.
The second sighting comes at the end of the same day. He lays the last line of ash across the Pitch lane at dusk and sees a long dark shape standing past the last gatepost, beyond where the ash stops. It waits until he has the latch down. Then it goes. In the morning the prints begin at that gatepost and run toward the third farmhouse, and Jory walks up and knocks, because that is the other half of the work. Locals say it plainly. Rake your own ash at dusk and latch the gate. If the ash shows the left-clawed print at your door, sweep it away before you speak to anyone. Do not follow the tracks out.
- Classification
- Black dog fiend of death omens
- Habitat
- Moorland lanes, ditches, common land
- Danger
- High
- Size
- the size of a calf, 3 ft at shoulder
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Border moors and sunken lanes
- Binomial
- Canis umbrivagus
- Diet
- Livestock, sick animals, sorrow-struck wanderers
- Temperament
- Patient, silent, grudge-holding