A thumb drawn along a fence rail at Strikepeck comes away white and gritty. It is bone meal, ground fine as flour, and it settles on rails, doorsteps and the lids of rain barrels wherever a crocotta has passed in the night. The animal is the size of a mastiff, with a hyena's sloped back, brindled dun hide and a dog's long muzzle. It has no teeth. Where they belong, the jaw carries a single unbroken ridge of yellow bone that closes like a pair of shears and reduces a ewe's shin to powder in about the time it takes to say so.
The second sign is a voice. A neighbor calls from the dark of the lane, using the right name and the right tone, sometimes with the right cough. People at Strikepeck answer nothing until the third call. A person repeating himself changes: louder, more irritable, a little hoarse. The crocotta gives back the same call each time, down to the breath taken before the first word. Households keep their dogs indoors on such nights, since a dog will answer a voice it knows, and the crocotta then knows where the dog is. It lives on carrion, windfall apples and sheep lost to weather, and it leaves hollowed bones in the hedge bottoms with the marrow gone.
What the villagers get wrong is whom the voice is for. Delwyn Corrick, who keeps sheep at Vintry Rood, spent a winter convinced the animal was calling his wife out to the gate. Three nights in his lambing shed showed otherwise. It used his own voice, bellowing "Get out of there!", at a fox standing over a dead ewe, and the fox went. The crocotta ate the ewe. Its favorite is Mrs. Corrick's "Wipe your feet," which it uses so often that the household now scrapes its boots at the gatepost even on nights when she has said nothing.
Routine fills most of its evening. At dusk it hones its jaw ridge against the same gatepost, twenty strokes, then yawns and scratches an ear with a hind foot before it goes to work. The repertoire shifts. Three years ago it did the squeal of the old pump handle at Strikepeck. The pump was replaced, the squeal dropped out, and it now does the dry knock of the new one. The post at Vintry Rood was sixty inches when it was set and measures forty-one today.
- Classification
- Voice-mimicking scavenger, hyena-dog kin
- Habitat
- Farm lanes, hedgerows, sheepfolds
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 3 ft at the shoulder
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Farmland borders and hedge country
- Binomial
- Canis vocalis
- Diet
- Carrion, bone, windfall fruit
- Temperament
- Wary, opportunistic, unnervingly neighborly










