The mule track up to Rincón Amargo climbs eleven miles through cork oak, and the slope reports on the ghasts before any person does. Below the sixth mile, goats graze the verges bare. Above it the grass stands knee high and untouched around every trunk. The mule I hired at Caldeira Morta stopped twice, sat back on its haunches, and had to be talked forward by its owner in a low, bored voice. At the top, forty-odd graves cover three terraces, every one under a flat slab mortared with lime, and the slabs are scored with grooves as long as a forearm.
The village knows a pack is near by small failures. Milk sours between the udder and the door. Flies leave the stables by evening. Dogs lie flat with their chins in the dirt and cannot be coaxed up. Dalmiro Quintela, who keeps the mule yard, tells every newcomer to breathe through the mouth and stay uphill of the cemetery wall, and he says it without looking up from his boots. The animals themselves are gray, stooped, taller than a man when they straighten, with arms that hang past the knee and jaws hinged too far back. They dig for the buried and eat carrion where they find it. I laid a surveyor's chain downwind from a freshly scored slab and walked it until my eyes stopped streaming: 212 feet, on a still night.
Against them the village does three things. Graves are sealed with lime before the mourners have left the wall. Salt goes across every doorsill. And on the dark of each month a crock of rancid mutton fat is set at the field's edge, which the villagers believe buys the pack's patience for the weeks after. It does the opposite. The fat draws the ghasts up from the gully, the crock gets a few minutes of attention, and the slabs get the rest of the night. The deepest grooves turn up the morning after a crock goes out. The crocks, meanwhile, do not come back. The village is down to its last eleven, and one household still holds a grudge over a blue-glazed one that went out perfectly good.
The exception is the Lobato cellar, a hundred yards below the wall. It has no salt on its sill, no lime on its dead, no crock in its field, and in living memory nothing has been taken from it. The Lobatos wash their cheese rinds in a brine of whey and old wine that smells worse than anything in the gully. The pack comes down the hill, reaches the cellar door, and turns around.
- Classification
- Undead ghoul-kin, pack carrion-eater
- Habitat
- Hill cemeteries and cork-oak gullies
- Danger
- High
- Size
- Nearly 7 ft when it straightens
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Terraced uplands above the coast
- Binomial
- Nidorax ossivorus
- Diet
- Buried dead and carrion
- Temperament
- Patient, foul, pack-minded