A miller reads his floor before anything else, because flour keeps every foot that crosses it. Aldous Krenn, who runs the stone mill at Felmaru, sweeps the grinding room each morning with a birch broom and a lamp held low, and for eleven winters he has found the same fault in it: dog prints that stop. Four pads, four pads, then bare white boards, then four pads again a long way off. Measured with a wooden yardstick on three separate mornings, the gap comes to nine feet four inches each time, within a finger. The dog that made it stands two and a half feet at the shoulder. It did not leap. The prints at both ends are shallow and even, with no scuff of a landing.
The rest of Aldous's day has no dogs in it. He opens the sluice, sets the stones a hair apart for buckwheat, and climbs to the bin floor to check the rye. By midmorning the carter from Dosqueth, a market town two miles down the race, is in the yard disputing a count of sacks he has come up short on every week since spring. Aldous eats cold barley and onion standing at the hopper so he can hear the stones. His one standing complaint is mild, and he airs it to anyone: the dogs sleep on the buckwheat sacks, which are the warmest, and never on the wheat, which is worth twice as much. They also ignore the mill cat entirely, as though she were furniture.
They come in the afternoon, when the wheel is stopped for greasing. Six stand in the yard. The lead bitch is tawny, with a V cut out of her left ear and a ring of pale hair around each eye, and when she turns her head the pupils catch the light a pale blue. She yips once. She is on the gatepost, then on the far bank of the millpond, then on the ridge of the roof, each time with her tongue out and her weight already shifted forward, as if she had walked there. The pack clears the bins of rats and voles and takes them somewhere else to eat. Nothing is left but prints. Aldous sets a pan of whey on the sill every dusk, scoured with sand and never with soap, because they will not drink from a pan that smells of lye.
Felmaru has one instruction for newcomers, and it is the same for the carter as for anyone else. When a dog blinks, stand where you are until the yelping stops, and do not put your foot down on the spot it left.
- Classification
- Teleporting hunting hound, pack-living
- Habitat
- Grain country, hedgerows and mill yards
- Danger
- Minimal
- Size
- 2.5 ft at the shoulder
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Farmland and river valleys
- Binomial
- Canis transitorius
- Diet
- Voles, rats, rabbits and field mice
- Temperament
- Alert, quick, loyal to the pack