No dog in Moundwren is given a name before its second winter. Pups are called pup, or nothing, and a child who lets a pup's name slip gets the pup carried out of the room. The reason is the howl. A death dog calls in two pitches at once, one head a third below the other, and it learns the cadence of household voices from beneath open windows. A dog with a name will answer the counterfeit and walk into the scrub to find who is calling. A dog without one hears only noise.
The village knows the animal is near by its goats. They stop chewing and stand in a line facing downwind, and a stick will not move them. Then come the tracks: paired prints, the right foot dragging a split dewclaw. Moundwren supports a trade found nowhere else I have traveled, the rakers. Two of them, paid in barley, comb a ring of fine sand around the houses at dusk with thornwood rakes and read it at dawn like a page. A clean ring means a quiet night. Paired prints across it mean the doors stay barred until noon and the goats are counted twice.
The ring has changed. When I first came it ran thirty paces wide, and the dogs came only in the dry months. Now it runs sixty, because they come in wet months too, when the sand clots and holds a print badly. The rakers say the dogs have grown bold. At the north gate I measured the rub mark where one had scratched its shoulder, standing a ten-foot ash pole painted in inches beside the post: thirty-four inches, gray-brown hair still caught in the splinters. The villagers get a few things wrong. They say the left head bites and the right only watches; I saw both take hold of a ram, one high and one low. They say salt lines turn the dogs, and the dogs lick the lines clean. They say the sickness lives in the breath. It lives in the bite. The wound goes gray and cold within a day, fever follows on the third, and only slaked lime packed in early holds it back.
Dunehook, two days north, is the exception to all of it. Cordell Ash, who keeps its only well, named his dog the day its eyes opened, has never raked a ring, and has not lost a goat in nine years. The dog is half death dog and wears both heads. One answers to Pitch, the other to Wick, and it sleeps across his threshold with the gate open.
- Classification
- Two-headed desert hound
- Habitat
- Scrub flats and dry hills
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 3 ft at the shoulder
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Dry borderlands and goat country
- Binomial
- Geminocanis necrodens
- Diet
- Goats, sheep and carrion
- Temperament
- Patient, wary and relentless