Mabyn Crole tans hides at Fley Down, and she reads a coat the way other people read a face. On the yeth hound the black hair lies forward over the withers, then turns at the neck into a tight whorl, like the tied end of a sack. There is no cut there, no seam, no scar. Every skin she has handled has a hole where the head came off. This one closes over smooth as a drumhead, ringed with pale gray fur. The hair it sheds, which she picks off the bramble fences at Nask Wood, is oily, cold to the palm in August, and will not take dye. She has stopped trying.
The howl comes from the chest. Between the forelegs the hide parts along a vertical crease the length of a man's forearm, and the lining is dull gray and ridged like the inside of a mussel shell. The crease opens slowly, stays open for the whole cry, and shuts without a sound. The cry is thin and climbs at the end, like someone calling across a valley. Birds in Nask Wood go quiet about a minute before it starts, and the beech cutters set down their saws on that silence.
The feet are plain, which is somehow worse. A forepaw print in the Fley Down clay measures six and a half inches across. I took it with a cooper's calipers, pressed to the rim before the water seeped in. The hind feet land exactly in the forepaw prints, with no scuff and no drag. The hound stands about four feet at the shoulder and moves in a long, level trot, a body with nothing on the front end to bob. Its left forefoot is stained rust red to the knee. Clay washes off other things. It does not wash off this.
In Nask nobody calls a dog by name in the wood after dark. The hound is said to answer to any name spoken aloud, and a dog that goes to it does not come back. People clap twice instead, and the dogs have learned to come to that. Households hang a sack tied shut at the neck on the kennel door, since a closed neck is thought to read as kin. Mabyn hangs one on hers. The hound has crossed her yard four times this winter, left clay on the step each time, and taken nothing. Where does the breath for that howl come from, when nothing in that body has ever been seen to draw one in?
- Classification
- Headless spectral hound
- Habitat
- Beech woods and clay downland
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 4 ft at the shoulder
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Beech woods of the western downs
- Binomial
- Cynopsis acephala
- Diet
- Unknown; strays vanish, sheep untouched
- Temperament
- Patient, silent, always listening