The Veterinarian's Ledger of Blackthorn Vale

• Chapter 1 The Miller’s Barren Mare and the Cold Iron Salve
• Chapter 2 Observations on a Curiously Spotted Hound of the Fens
• Chapter 3 The Weeping Heifer of Alder Hollow
• Chapter 4 A Midnight Summons to the Barrowfield
• Chapter 5 Of Murrain, Milk-Rot, and False Curses
• Chapter 6 An Anatomy of the Briar-Hare’s Left Wing
• Chapter 7 Concerning the Miller’s Drowned Ox
• Chapter 8 Missives Sent to the Dean of St. Jude’s Regarding Ghyll-Eels
• Chapter 9 The Foaling of the Black Marsh Stallion
• Chapter 10 Notes on the Extraction of Silver-Thorns from Sheep
• Chapter 11 The Weaver’s Cat and the Whispering Distemper
• Chapter 12 A Treaty of Draughts with the Lord of the Coppice
• Chapter 13 The Castration of a Changeling Swine
• Chapter 14 The Frost-Bitten Flock at Callow Hill
• Chapter 15 Depositions Taken on the High Moor Concerning a Stricken Stag
• Chapter 16 The Treatment of a Gallow-Crow with Two Tongues
• Chapter 17 Liniments for the Hearth-Dog of Dame Margaret
• Chapter 18 A Recipe for Poultices Applied to River-Kelp Foals
• Chapter 19 The Butcher’s Complaint and the Missing Liver
• Chapter 20 Of Salt, Ash, and the Splinting of Rowan-Boughs
• Chapter 21 The Visitation of the Horned Lammas Ram
• Chapter 22 Transcripts from the Parson’s Inquiry on the Churchyard Badger
• Chapter 23 The Broken Wing of a Marshland Harrier
• Chapter 24 A Dissection of the Wyrmling in the Cooper’s Well
• Chapter 25 The Great Sickness Across the Blackthorn Vale
• Chapter 26 Final Entries and the Sealed Tincture of Rowan-Gall

From the Day-Book of Master Tobias Finch, Chirurgeon to Beasts and Farrier-General of Blackthorn Vale. Being the first entry of the year of our Lord 1618, commencing upon the third day of April.

The mud at the low mill-leat was thicker than common porridge, and of a darker scent than usual. It smelled of rusted iron, stale ditch-water, and the sharp, vinegar tang that always attends a creature whose blood has stopped conversing with the natural world. My boy, Kit, carried the leather budget of irons and bottles behind me, his boots sucking out of the sodden clay with noises like bursting bladders. He is a dull lad with cattle, prone to staring into the middens when he ought to be paring hooves, but he possesses the rare virtue of keeping his mouth bolted when he smells things that do not come from a Christian butcher.

Miller Garrow stood by his stable door with a broken pitchfork in his hand. He had grease in the creases of his neck and grey dust from the barley stones caked upon his eyelashes, making him look like a baker newly dug out of a barrow. He did not bid me good morning, for the weather was ill and his purse was likely lighter than his sacks of rye.

"She will not carry, Master Finch," he said, spitting into the ditch between us. "She took the bay from the abbey farm three times come Michaelmas, and twice more before the frost hardened. The seed drops out of her like water from a dry bucket. Now she stands with her belly drawn up like a hound, sweating cold grease, and if I bring the candle near her flanks, the flame turns as blue as a bilberry. The parson tells me it is a devil of the stones, but parson does not have to pull two tons of grist up the High Drove."

I tied my gelding to the elder-bush by the well-head—a poor choice of timber, for an elder is ever untrustworthy when strange cattle are about, but there was no ash-tree within a furlong that had not been stripped for wagon-spokes. I bade Kit unbuckle the side-straps of the hamper and take out the horn of oil and the short pig-knife with the blunt turn at the tip.

The stable was dark, roofed with rotten sedge that dripped brown water into the mangers. The beast was an eight-year-old cart-mare of the heavy fen breed, liver-chestnut, with stockings of dirty white. A useful creature for a man who grinds meal, broad across the rump and short in the pasterns, built to drag ash-timbers through bog without breaking her hocks. Yet she was altered. Her ears lay back against her poll not with common malice, but pinned flat as leeches, and her breath did not steam in the chill air as mine did. When she blew through her nostrils, there came no warm cloud, only the faint reek of sour ditch-silt, such as one stirs up when dragging an old net through the bottom of the mill-tail.

I approached her on the near side, letting my boots scuff the straw so she might know a man was moving. A horse is an honest brute in its stupidity; it will kick out of fright or kick out of temper, but it does not plot treason unless something older than a horse has sat upon its neck.

"Hold her ear, Kit," I muttered. "Twitch it with the cord if she shows the white of her eye, but do not look between her front teeth. If you see what is lodged behind the tongue, you will drop the rope and run into the weir, and I have no fancy for dragging you out before the meal-sacks are dry."

The boy did as he was told, though his knuckles were yellow where he gripped the hempen halter. I ran my flat hand down the mare’s shoulder. The hide was dry as an old saddle, but along the line of the jugular vein there was a corded hardness, like a hazel-twig thrust beneath the skin. It did not throb with the heart’s stroke. When I came to the flank, just forward of the stifle-joint, the mare gave a low groan that rattled her ribcage like dry hazel-wands.

The miller lingered by the door, refusing to step beyond the threshold stone. A horseshoe of crude forge-work was nailed above the lintel, but some fool had placed it with the heels pointing downward, so whatever small grace it might have held had run out into the mud months ago.

"Has she eaten the hay?" I asked him.

"She mouths it," Garrow said. "She draws it into her cheek and mumbles it till it is a gray cud, then lets it fall into the bedding. She drinks enough to drown a shoemaker, but her bladder does not yield three gills in a day. It is an ungodly dry rot, Finch. If she dies, the stones stand still till the sheep-shearing, and the parish will eat bran instead of bread."

"She will not die of dry rot," I told him, drawing my spectacles from their horn case and wiping the mist off the glass with my sleeve. "Dry rot belongs to joists and rafters. This is an intrusion of the water-side. Did you let her graze the reed-bed below the sluice after the Martinmas flood?"

The miller blinked through his flour-dust, shifting his broken fork from the right hand to the left. A man who lies about his pastures is always known by the way his shoulders drop toward his belly.

"The common was cropped bare," he mumbled. "The sheep from the Grange had eaten the turf down to the flint. There was green grass by the back-drain, tall as a pike. A man cannot let good feed rot while his cattle starve."

"A man who lets his beast graze the back-drain after the sluice-gate has been dropped for winter deserves to carry his own grist on his shoulders," I said plainly. "The gray weed that grows where the mill-tail swirls is not grass, Garrow. It is the fleece of the drowned folk from the lower parish, and whatever seeds took root in their ribs."

I drew off my woollen mittens and called Kit to fetch the three-legged stool and the horn lantern. When the candle was brought near the mare’s side, the light did indeed take a pale, watery hue, neither yellow nor white, but the color of willow-leaves turned upside down before a tempest. Upon her belly, three inches behind the navel, was an ulcer no larger than a silver groat. It did not weep pus, nor was it crusted with scab; it was open, smooth, and rimmed with a pale, grey-green fungus that smelled faintly of river-moss and elder-pith.

Every farrier between the Wash and the Ouse would have clapped a boiling pitch-plaster to that hole and blistered the beast until she dropped her skin. Old Master Clout of Crowland would have burned it with a hot iron shaped like an arrow-head to drive out the worm. But this was no worm of the common earth. If you burn the thing that sits in a water-mare, it does not die; it merely burrows deeper into the kidney-fat and turns the beast’s milk to white brine before she rots from the inside out.

"Fetch the grease-pot, Kit," I ordered. "Not the lard from the kitchen, but the black gall-pot from the bottom of the sack. The one marked with the three cross-hatches."

The boy brought the pot. It was heavy, turned out of coarse green earthenware and plugged with oakum and tallow. Within was the ointment I had prepared three winters ago, when the ditch-dwellers had troubled the herds at Thorney: four parts of hog’s lard that had never seen salt, two parts of powdered henbane leaves gathered under a dry moon, and three parts of the fine scale that flies from the blacksmith’s anvil when cold iron is beaten between two hammers.

It is the iron that does the work, though the clods in this parish believe it is the Latin muttered over the vessel. A fool may speak Latin until his tongue swells like a sausage, but the dwellers in the wet sod do not care for church-talk; they care only for the stroke of the hammer and the dust of the cold hearth, which smells to them of the things that tamed the woods before their dams were whelped.

"Now hold her nostril, Garrow," I said, "and do not let her strike with her fore-foot. If she treads on you with that hoof, you will walk with an ash-stick till the day they dig your trench."

The miller took the lead-rein with both hands, his knuckles turning white as his flour. I dipped my two middle fingers into the pot. The salve was thick, greasy, and smelled of the smithy floor—charred horn, coal-smoke, and the dry, bitter dust of unrefined ore.

The mare knew what was coming. Before the grease had even touched her skin, her skin began to shiver with small, quick tremors, like the belly of a perch when it is drawn out of the weeds into the boat. A thin whistle came through her nostrils, not the snort of a horse, but a sound like wind blowing through an empty bottle.

I drove my fingers into the ulcer.

A horse’s flesh should be warm, sixty or seventy degrees of heat at the least, even in an April frost. The mare’s meat inside that little hole was as cold as a stone plucked from the bottom of an iced brook. My fingertips felt no pulse, only a strange, fibrous knot that turned under the knuckle like a bundle of wet wicker.

The mare shrieked. It was a vile noise, high and thin, such as no four-footed beast with a mane should make, and her hind-legs gave way beneath her. She sat back upon her haunches like a dog, her ears twitching in contrary directions—one pointing forward toward the hay-rack, the other turning backward toward the dark loft above our heads.

"Hold her, damn you!" I shouted at the miller, for the man was falling backward into the dung-trough. "Hold her head down, Kit! Kneel upon her neck if she lifts it!"

I took a handful of the iron-scale salve and worked it deep into the passage, turning my hand clockwise as one drives an auger into seasoned oak. The creature within her—whatever seedling of the marsh-drift had taken harbor in the vessel of her womb—hated the cold iron. I felt it contract, shrinking from the greasy grit like a snail from salt. It was slippery, about the thickness of a carp’s gut, and it had small, sharp hooks or burrs along its length that caught at the grain of my flesh through the grease.

With my left hand I took the blunt pig-knife from Kit’s belt. I did not cut the beast’s flesh; I used the rounded point merely as a hook, sliding it beneath the core of the weed where it was anchored to the great vein.

"Come out of her, cousin," I said, speaking low into the horse’s flank, for there is no profit in shouting at things that have no ears. "The mill-leat is drained, the wheels are greased, and the blacksmith has laid his hearth-stone over your mother’s bed."

With a sudden twist of the wrist—a knack I learned thirty years back from an old cow-leech in the High Peak who knew more of the old blood than was healthy for a churchwarden—I levered the mass outward.

It came away with a sound like a leather boot being pulled from deep silt: a wet, sucking plop that splattered the boy’s hose with green-tinted grease.

It lay in the straw between my feet. In the lantern-light it looked like nothing more than a bundle of marsh-grass rolled tight by the current, about the length of a man’s forearm, but it was knotted together with a silvery slime that did not run like mucus, but stayed firm and quivering like the jelly one finds on the commons after a night of shooting stars. At one end of it, where the roots should have been, were three small, dark points that opened and shut together, like the gills of a gudgeon dying on a bank.

The miller looked down at it, his jaw hanging so slack that his white tongue showed against his teeth. "Is that... is that the foal?"

"It would have been," I said, wiping my greasy fingers upon the mare’s side-strap. "If you had waited until Midsummer, she would have dropped three pecks of pond-water and a thing with skin like an eel that would have followed your dairy-cow into the ditch and sucked her dry before the cock crew. It is a marsh-leash. It comes from the seed of the gray weed when the sluice is opened on an east wind."

The mare had fallen onto her side, breathing now with great, rattling heaves of her ribs, but her skin was already turning warm. A yellow steam began to rise from her belly where the cold sweat had dried, and her ears lost that unnatural tightness, falling slack into the bedding as an honest horse’s ears should when it is spent by labor.

"Will she draw the wain?" Garrow asked. His voice was hoarse, and he was looking at the thing in the straw as though it might leap up and take him by the throat.

"She will draw the wain if you give her a bushel of crushed oats with two handfuls of dry soot from the forge-chimney," I told him, rising from my knees and rubbing the stiffness from my hip. "And do not turn her into the fen-meadow until the buttercups have shown their yellow heads. If she smells the stagnant water before the hay is carried, she will pine for the ditch again, and next time I will not come out for four groats and a measure of middlings."

"I have no silver," the miller said quickly, his natural caution returning now that the beast was breathing like a Christian draft-horse. "The miller at the bridge took all the trade from the manor three weeks ago."

"Then you will give me two sacks of sound rye-flour," I said, "and a firkin of small beer for the boy. And you will take that bundle of weed upon your shovel, carry it to the dry knoll behind your kiln, and burn it with dry ash-wood. Do not throw it back into the leat. If it goes down to the bridge, the baker’s pigs will eat it, and then you will have to deal with me again for the swine-rot, which costs twice as much and smells three times worse."

He nodded, though he did not like the price. A sack of rye is hard to come by when the seed has rotted in the furrows, but a barren mare that dies of the fen-chill is harder still on a man with five miles of water between his wheel and the market town.

Kit had already bundled the irons back into the budget. The lad was pale, but he had taken a lump of tallow from the grease-horn and was smearing it over the leather where the green stuff had splashed. He is a sensible lad in that regard; he knows that what rots a horse will rot a boot if it is left to dry into the grain.

We left the miller standing in the lane with his shovel and his charcoal-brazier, waiting for the smoke to rise from the knoll. As we rode up the hill toward the ditch-side path that leads to the parsonage, I looked back down into the hollow where the mill sat. The wheel was motionless, its paddles black against the pale grey sky, but the water in the pond had ceased to bubble. It lay flat and dull as a pewter trencher, which is the best that can be hoped for in this valley until the sun climbs higher toward the Ram.

My fingers still smelled of the iron-scale and the bitter grease, a scent that does not leave the nails for three days, no matter how many times a man washes in lye-water. It is a comfort, in its way. It reminds the hands of what belongs to the hammer and what belongs to the mud, and in Blackthorn Vale, if a man forgets that difference for the space of a single tide, he will find his stable full of weeds and his bed full of willow-knots before the year is out.

We reached the road-gate by the third hour of the afternoon. The parson’s tithe-cock was crowing from the hedge, an ill-favored, one-eyed bird that had been pecked by an owl when it was a cockerel, but it had the throat of an honest fowl. When a cock crows upon the ditch-bank, the small things that have no business with feet crawl back beneath the flag-stones to wait for the rain.

I took the ledger from my saddle-bag, sat upon the mounting-block by the churchyard wall, and made my entry while the ink was still wet from the small stone bottle in my pocket:

Item: To Miller Garrow, for the extraction of a fen-growth from the five-year-old mare. Applied three drachms of the cold-smith-scale with unctuous herb-grease. Mare relieved and sweating naturally. Received: promise of two sacks of rye, one small firkin of ale, and the skin of an otter taken in the reed-cut.

Nota: The weed was longer by four fingers than the one taken from Master Tylden’s cow at the last frost. The water is rising in the deep drains. Kit must gather more henbane from the south side of the churchyard wall before the sheep are let into the lane, for the old stock is nearly spent and the ditch-mothers are restless after the long snow.

I blew upon the paper to dry the ink, shut the calf-skin cover, and turned my nag’s head toward the High Drove. There was a report of a heifer at Alder Hollow that had not ceased weeping since the new moon, and if the water-cress in her ditch had the same look as Garrow’s mill-grass, I would need more iron from the forge before nightfall.

From the Day-Book of Master Tobias Finch, Chirurgeon to Beasts and Farrier-General of Blackthorn Vale. Being entries compiled between the fourteenth and the eighteenth days of April, anno 1618.

A fowling-piece fired three times over the reed-beds of the Great Wash will commonly bring down five teal, two curlews, or an honest marsh-heron. When Master Simon Vane, the younger bailiff of the Duke’s low drained lands, discharged his matchlock into the gray mists of the Alder-Carr on the second Tuesday of April, he brought home neither fowl nor fish. Instead, he arrived at my forge door before the dew had dried from the gooseberry bushes, riding an unkempt pony and dragging behind him by a plaited horsehair tether a hound the likes of which has never been catalogued in Master Caius’s treaties on British dogs.

Simon is a man who thinks in ditches, drain-pipes, and surveyor’s chains. His blood has been so soured by Dutch engineers and drainage-levies that he sees no marvels in heaven or earth, only acres that might grow oats if five hundred tons of water were lifted over the sea-bank. When a man of that turn of mind looks unsettled, it is generally wise to keep a hand near a stave or a horn of salt.

"Master Finch," the bailiff said, sitting crooked upon his pack-saddle while his beast blew thin smoke from its nose, "I have caught an unchastised poaching hound upon the salt-dyke. Old Hob, the warrener, tells me it belongs to the peat-cutters of Crow-Bank, but the peat-cutters have not had a dog with four good legs since the hard frost of eighty-eight. It bit my boot-heel twice without leaving a tooth-mark, and my best lurcher bitch went mad at the smell of it, leaped into the sluice-gate, and had to be fished out with a sheep-hook. I would have cut its throat with my wood-knife, but the skin was so strange I thought the Duke’s steward might give two groats for the pelt."

Kit had come out from the charcoal-shed with a rasp in his hand, his mouth open as usual. When he set eyes on the thing tied to the pony's tail-strap, he did not run, but he stepped back behind the rain-butt and began thumbing his tallow-greased horn spoon as though it were a Catholic rosary.

The beast was sitting upon the gravel path, neither trembling nor barking. At first cast of the eye, one would have marked it down as an ordinary fen-gazehound, long in the flank and narrow across the brisket, built to outrun a hare upon the flat saltings where there are no hedges to turn a chase. Its hair was short and close, like that of a mastiff pup, but there the resemblance to any earthly whelp ended.

The dog was spotted, yet not with the honest brown liver-patches of a setter, nor the black ticks of a Dalmatian brache. The ground-coat was the dull, dead color of winter sedge, and upon this cloth were set round markings of an absolute, lightless black—not hair of a dark hue, but bald circular vacancies, each about the breadth of an angel-coin, where the skin beneath seemed to have fallen away into small hollows. When the morning sun struck across the dog’s ribcage, the spots did not gleam; they swallowed the glare entirely, as though a tailor had snipped round circles out of the air and stitched the emptiness to the creature’s frame.

"Bring the hempen muzzle, Kit," I commanded, "and set the chain to the iron ring by the shoeing-post. Not the lead rope. The hemp from the rope-walk has flax in it, and whatever was bred in the fen-carr has a great appetite for flax."

The bailiff swung down from his stirrups, his heavy marsh-boots creaking with wet leather. "It will not bite you, Finch, unless you touch its ears. It has an unnatural spite against any man who reaches for its head. I had to wind my cloak about my forearm like a buckler merely to loop the cord over its muzzle."

I did not touch its ears. A man who has practiced physic on the borders of the wild bog for thirty years learns very early that the ears of a fen-beast are the hinges upon which its senses swing between our daylight world and the deep mud. I took a piece of dried bullock’s lung from my pocket—an unctuous morsel that no honest dog born of a bitch can resist—and tossed it before the creature’s nose.

The hound lowered its head. Its muzzle was extraordinarily narrow, tapering to a point as sharp as a pike-staff, with nostrils divided not by a simple fleshy seam, but split into three distinct clefts that worked independently, tasting the air like the feelers of an alder-beetle. It smelled the meat, touched it with the tip of a grey tongue, and turned away. It did not devour it; it merely buried the morsel under two sweeps of its fore-paw, casting dry grit over the offering as though it were an uncleanness.

"Has it drunk water?" I asked the bailiff.

"It drank from the salt-ditch," Simon replied, spitting into the grass. "It drank three gallons of brackish brine that would have given a bullock the scour, and when it finished, it sneezed twice and sat upon its tail. It has no cry. When the curlews went up from the saltings, it made only a clacking sound with its jaw-bones, like sheep-shears being shut in an empty barn."

I drew my apron tight and knelt upon one knee, keeping my shoulder turned toward the post so that if the hound sprang, my throat would not be the first thing offered to its meat-cutters. The beast watched me with eyes that were entirely round, lacking any white corners; the irises were the clear, yellow-green amber of pond-ice when the sun shines through it from below. They were eyes that had never looked upon a whitewashed kitchen ceiling, nor watched a turnspit go round before a chimney of coals.

"Kit," I said, "reach into the north cupboard in the back room. Fetch the small phial of walnut-water and the bronze calipers I had from the apothecary at Spalding. And tell the maid to bring no milk near this threshold until I have washed my apron."

When the boy had scuttled off, I laid my hand flat upon the dog's spine. The skin was cool—neither the cold clay-flesh of the marsh-growth I had drawn from the miller’s mare, nor the warm, leaping fever of a spaniel in summer. It was like touching the belly of a live tench newly lifted from a shaded pool. The hair along the back was coarse as boar-bristles, but beneath the coat, the creature’s muscle did not run in straight cords from flank to stifle; it seemed to twist in flat, overlapping plates, like the tail of a river-crayfish.

Most singular of all was the breath that came between its black lips. It had no taint of the kennel, no reek of rotten tripe or dried blood. It smelled distinctly of marsh-gas, wet peat-turf, and that sharp, brassy stench that rises from iron pyrites when a plow-share strikes them in the furrow.

"How much do you ask for the hide, Simon?" I asked without turning my face.

"Three tester," said the bailiff, who was ever ready to turn a loss into an exchange. "The Duke’s steward gives fourpence for a dog-otter and sixpence for a badger, but this thing took two hours of my morning, and the pony’s off-hind is cast in the ditch."

"I will give you two groats and a pot of hoof-grease for your pony's heel," I said. "And you will tell no man in the ale-house that you brought the hound to my forge. If the parson hears of a dog with spotted voids upon its hide, he will have the boys dragging the ditch for witches’ puppets before the week is out, and my roof will be pelted with turf by every fool who cannot make his butter come."

The bailiff took the silver, spit upon his palm to seal the bargain, took his small earthenware crock of grease, and turned his pony back down the drove. He was glad enough to be rid of the beast; men who live by the compass and the ditch-shovel are always uneasy when they meet with a thing that cannot be measured into roods and perches.

When he was clear of the lane, I bade Kit bring the iron collar from the smithy bench—the heavy hoop with the three rowan-pegs inserted through the links—and we slipped it over the dog’s head while holding its fore-legs tight in a sheep-binder's knot. The creature did not struggle as a wolf or mastiff would; it turned its spine with an impossible, oily ease, almost like an eel turning within an eel-buck, yet the touch of the seasoned rowan-wood against its throat caused it to freeze instantly into a stiff, wooden quietude.

Notes from the Examination of the Phenix-Hound or Marsh-Brache

Upon closer view within the forge, the shutters being three-parts closed against the midday glare, the nature of the spots became more apparent. They are twelve in number upon the near side and eleven upon the off side, disposed in an irregular orbit around the ribs, like the stations of the planets in an old almanac.

Where these black patches occur, the epidermis is not bare skin, but a dark, thin membrane, exceedingly tough and elastic to the thumb, yet having no pores or hairs whatsoever. When I applied the bronze calipers to the largest of these markings—situate two inches behind the left shoulder-blade—I found the depth of the depression to be near three-eighths of an inch below the level of the surrounding hide.

More remarkable still: when Kit held a tallow candle behind the dog's rib-cage, no shadow was cast by these spots upon the whitewashed wall behind him. The yellow beam appeared to enter the hole and vanish, as if it had been poured into a dry well.

I took a needle of fine steel, such as is used to sew the torn eyelids of hawks, and touched the center of the third patch on the left flank. The beast did not wince or show its fangs, but from the prick there issued no drop of red gore. There came forth only a single bead of clear, viscous liquor, thick as birch-syrup, which hardened almost immediately upon contact with the air into a glassy grain of yellow resin.

I took this pellet with my knife-point and cast it onto the embers of the hearth. It did not sizzle or pop; it burned with a pale, grass-green flame that smelled powerfully of burning meadowsweet and wet gunpowder, causing Kit to cough and the martins under the eaves to flutter their wings in great disturbance.

"Is it a hound at all, Master Finch?" the boy asked, wiping his streaming nose on his sleeve. "It has the pads of a dog, but its claw is shaped more like the talon of an osprey that haunts the meres."

"It is a hound by service, Kit," I told him, "though its grandam was likely whelped beneath the barrows before the Romans dug the high dyke. It is what the old people in the hills called a Gwrhyd-Gwn, or a fen-chaser. They are hounds kept by the marsh-folk—not the poor souls who cut the peat, but those who dwell below the reed-roots where the silt never dries."

The beast’s teeth were forty-two in number, matching the dental count of a common hound, yet the molars were not broad and blunt for cracking bones; they were sharp, serrated blades, like the bill-teeth of a great pike. Behind the last molar on each side of the lower jaw was a small glandular sack, about the size of a bean, from which there constantly distilled a sour, thin water that dripped from the jowls and caused the oak floor-boards to turn black, as though vitriol had been spilled upon them.

I knew then why the bailiff’s lurcher had taken to the water. A beast that lives by scent cannot endure the odor of those sacks; it smells to them not of life, but of the great cold bog that swallows horse, rider, and gear without leaving a bubble upon the green scum.

Upon the fourth hour of the afternoon, the dog began to exhibit symptoms of an internal distress. It lay upon its belly with its chin pressed hard against the flag-stones, uttering that strange, scissor-like clatter of its jaws at every change of the wind.

Its belly had swelled considerably since Simon had departed, becoming tight and resonant as a drum-head. It had taken no food since its capture, yet the stomach was laboring with violent, spasmodic thrusts, as though it contained something alive that sought an exit through the flank.

I had seen the like once before, thirty winters ago, when an old shepherd from the High Fen brought me a sheep-dog that had swallowed an adder while running through the ling. That beast had died in great agony, its belly turning purple within an hour of sundown; but this fen-hound was not of the common mold. It was not dying; it was attempting to cast a meal that its unnatural stomach could neither digest nor pass.

"Kit," I said, "we must drench it. Fetch the long horn from the stable-wall, and take down the earthenware jug containing the juice of boiled ash-keys and ground mustard-seed. The ash-tree is ever sovereign against the enchantments of the stagnant waters; its wood holds the sun’s fire even when green, and its sap will loosen what the fen-damp has knotted."

The boy was terrified, for the hound’s yellow eyes had begun to take on a dim, reddish fire in the gloom of the shop, but he had a stubborn country heart. He held the dog’s hind-quarters between his knees, pressing the beast down by its loins, while I straddled its neck. I took its upper jaw in my left hand, wrapping my fingers in a stout strip of sail-cloth to protect them from the knife-edged teeth, and forced the jaw upward.

The roof of its mouth was not pink or black, but the dead, pale white of an elder-pith. As I forced the horn into the corner of its maw, the hound gave vent to a low, vibrating hum—a sound that made my teeth ache in my gums and caused the blacksmith’s tongs hanging upon the chimney to ring like little bells.

I poured a pint of the ash-key broth down its gullet.

For the space of ten breaths, nothing followed. The dog lay motionless under my knees, its ribs locked as though turned to bog-oak. Then, with a suddenness that nearly threw me across the anvil, its whole body heaved together in an extraordinary paroxysm.

Kit tumbled backward into the wood-shavings. The hound arched its spine until its head almost met its tail, and with a great, coughing gasp, it discharged upon the floor of the forge the burden that had troubled it.

It was no mass of common offal or road-carrion.

There lay upon the stones three objects, perfectly preserved and coated in that same thick, yellow resin that had issued from the skin-patches.

The first was the leg-bone of a roe-deer, neatly carved around its midriff with seven small notches, such as the wild folk make when they keep count of the turns of the moon.

The second was a ball of horse-hair, rolled exceedingly tight and bound about with three strands of fine brass wire, within which was enclosed a small silver penny of King Edward the Third, beaten flat and smooth on both faces so that no image of the king’s head remained upon it.

The third was a living thing—an eel-like worm, about seven inches in length, of a brilliant, unnatural vermilion color, having two short, fleshy arms near its head like those of an eft, but no eyes. As soon as it touched the cold air of the forge, it began to writhe with extreme fury, seeking the shadow of the coal-slack with great speed.

"Kill it with the rasp!" Kit cried, scrambling to his feet with his boots slipping in the shavings.

"Hold your hand, you young clod," I shouted, catching him by the skirt of his doublet. "If you crush a red barrow-worm with iron, the blood will rot the floor-timbers to powder before Michaelmas. Fetch the stone jar with the brine from the pork-barrel!"

The lad brought the jar. With the long smith's pincers, I seized the vermilion creature by the middle. It felt remarkably tough, like an over-cured strip of ox-hide, and it bit viciously at the iron jaws of the tongs, leaving two smears of a yellow, oily milk upon the metal. I plunged it deep into the salt-brine and hammered the wooden bung home with the mallet. The thing thrashed twice against the earthenware with noises like a trapped bird, then grew still as the pickle entered its spiracles.

Meanwhile, the spotted hound had undergone an instant alteration.

The moment the three matters were cast from its belly, the great swelling of its flanks fell away. Its sides drew in until the ribs showed clearly beneath the hair, like the wicker-work of a fish-basket. Most wondrous of all, the round, lightless voids upon its hide began to close.

The blackness did not fade; the skin around the margins simply puckered and drew together, exactly as the mouth of a leather purse draws shut when the strings are pulled, until nothing remained of the eleven spots upon the off side save small, puckered stars, no larger than pea-scars, where the hair had turned white and crisp.

The dog rose to its feet. It did not snap at me, nor did it offer to flee through the open half-door into the lane. It stretched its fore-legs forward, hollowed its back as an honest terrier does after a long sleep by the hearth, and yawned. Its teeth were no longer like the teeth of a pike; the sharp serrations had retracted into the gums, leaving only the ordinary fangs and grinders of a five-year-old running-hound.

It looked down at the carved bone and the wire-bound hair-ball upon the stones, sniffed them once with its divided nose—which had now smoothed itself into a common hound's muzzle, with only a small split remaining at the lip—and then looked up into my face with an expression of quiet, humble exhaustion.

"Fetch it a bowl of cold well-water, Kit," I said, sitting back down upon the shoeing-stool and wiping the cold sweat from my forehead. "And bring a handful of barley-meal mixed with sheep-broth. The beast is an honest dog now, or as honest as anything can be that has hunted in the ditches of the middle kingdom."

The boy brought the bowl. The hound drank with long, clean laps of its tongue, making the honest splashing noise that a tired hunter makes when brought into the hall after a ten-mile run. It drank until the bowl was dry, then laid its heavy head upon my boot-toe, sighed through its nostrils with a breath that smelled now only of dry barley and well-water, and closed its eyes.

Further Observations and Disposal of the Case

I kept the hound confined within the smithy-chamber for three days and three nights, keeping the rowan-collar about its neck as a precaution, though it showed no further disposition toward the marsh-fury.

On the third day, Master Vane the bailiff came back past the forge, his saddle-bags stuffed with parchment rolls and tax-assessments from the drained estates. He looked over the half-door and saw the dog lying in the sun by the water-trough, gnawing contentedly upon the knuckle-bone of a mutton-ham.

"Why, Finch," he said, reining in his pony, "you have made a Christian brache of that fen-devil. What became of the black spots upon its flank? Did you burn them out with the hot stone?"

"I did not," I said, leaning upon my paring-knife. "I gave it a drench of bitter herbs to scour its stomach, and the spots dropped away of their own accord. It was only an inward surfeit of salt-weed and dry ditch-leek that had corrupted the blood and broken out through the hide in dry scabs."

The bailiff shook his head with that dull, satisfied wisdom that belongs to men who understand nothing outside their ledgers. "I knew it was some common distemper of the marsh. The clods at Crow-Bank would have it that the dog was a familiar of old Mother Clough, who died in the stone-drain three winters back. They swore it could run across the green scum of the mere without breaking the surface. Give a peat-cutter an ill-favored pup and an empty belly, and he will see the devil sitting in every thistle-bush."

"That is the truth of it, Master Vane," I said, keeping my face as smooth as an unworked horseshoe. "A man who looks too closely into a ditch will generally find more water than he can drink."

He rode on, well-pleased with his own judgment.

When the sun had fallen behind the church-tower, and the owls were beginning their rounds among the pollard-willows by the drove, a small man dressed in a ragged coat of water-rat skins came quietly up the ditch-bank. He had no boots upon his feet, yet he made no more sound upon the flint-stones than a hare running over moss. He did not come to the door; he stood behind the elder-hedge, whistle-calling twice with the note of a spotted crake.

The hound rose from the hearth at the first note. It did not bark; it looked at me once with its clear amber eyes, then stood waiting by the latch.

I unbuckled the iron collar with the rowan-pegs and set the half-door open. The dog went through the gap like an arrow shot from a yew bow, leaping the garden ditch with a single, soundless spring.

Through the twigs of the hedge, I saw the rat-skin man lay his hand upon the hound's shoulder. He looked across the ditch toward the forge, touched his forelock with two fingers—which were webbed to the first knuckle with a thin, brown skin like the foot of a coot—and dropped down into the drainage-cut.

A moment later, there was only the sound of water rippling over the stones of the weir, and the far-off whistle of an otter hunting in the reeds.

I took the day-book from the desk, trimmed the quill with my small pen-knife, and entered the matter under its proper heading:

Item: To Master Simon Vane, bailiff, for the discharge and scouring of one fen-hound taken upon the Duke’s new dyke. Administered a draught of ash-keys, mustard, and river-mint. Scoured three foreign impediments from the crop.

Received from the bailiff: two groats and three pecks of dry oats (unpaid).

Received from the fen: one silver Edward penny (without the king’s head) and three grains of amber-resin, very good for the stopping of tooth-hollows and the subduing of convulsions in weanling calves.

Nota: The red worm taken from the hound’s gorge remains preserved in the brine-jar beneath the water-butt. It does not die, but turns itself against the glass whenever the moon is at the full. Kit must not draw water from that cask for the tea-kettle, lest the sweat of the earthenware corrupt the broth.

I laid the sanding-box over the entry, shook the grey dust across the ink, and closed the ledger for the night.

From across the valley, toward Alder Hollow, there came the long, mournful lowing of a heifer—a sound that was too high for a cow that wanted the bull, and too wet for a beast that had eaten dry clover. It sounded as though the animal were blowing its throat through three inches of standing water.

I looked at the heavy leather hamper by the door. The iron tools were clean, but the rowan-pegs in the collar had grown dry and cracked from the heat of the hearth. I took three fresh slips of the mountain-ash from the bundle Kit had cut at the churchyard gate, pared them down with the knife to fit the links, and went to bed to wait for the morning messenger.