Coda: The Skeleton at Ashfrith

The skeleton of the animal is at the field station, in a glass case in the front room where people come to look at the birds, and it is there because the state laboratory finished with it in April and nobody could decide what else to do with an object nine feet from nose to tail. It is mounted standing on a shallow plinth with its head up and its jaws closed, and it looks less like a monster than like a very large and rather elderly dog, which is what it was.

The label was written by Wren Ashcombe herself and it is four lines long, and the county historical society has objected to it twice and the county board has let it stand:

Anatolian shepherd cross, male, approximately three years old, weight one hundred and six kilogrammes. This animal was kept in darkness, painted with a fluorescent compound, and worked at night on the Drumble by its owner, who used it to kill two men in October. It has never been one of ours, and it is in this case because a county that has been told a story for a hundred and forty years ought, once, to be shown the animal.

I go up to the coast three or four times a year, and when I go I usually walk out on the new crossing at the middle of the bog, because I am a man who was trained at a hospital and then at a war and I have spent my whole life being curious about the exact place where a thing went wrong. It is a good crossing. It is four feet wide and it has a rail and the wind comes off the water and the fog comes in behind you, and at the middle of it, where the stonework is, you can turn around and look back at the shelf of land and see the grey roofline of Harrow Reach a mile and a half away, and the twenty-two windows, of which nine are shut.

The county still tells the story. Of course it does; it has a better ending now than it ever had. In Quillon they will tell you in the Anchor that the pale dog of the Vandermeers was shot by a marshal on the path in the fog, and that it was painted with phosphorus, and that a man was drowned in the cut for it, and every word of that is true, and it has not made the smallest difference to the way the story is told, because the story was never about the dog.

I will finish with a thing that has no place in an account of a case and that I set down because it happened and because I have not been able to make it go away. In August of the following year a rancher in the county to the north of us, a man I have never met, wrote to the state's agriculture office to report that something had been running with his flock for three weeks at night; and he wrote, in the flat, embarrassed way that men on that coast write such things, that it was a dog and that it was pale, and that it had not killed anything, and that it had not made a sound, and that when he went out with a lamp it went away over the ground in the fog with a light on it like a lamp behind a wet window. The office filed the letter. There is a copy of it in the county's file, because Deputy Marshal Ozer sent for it, and there is a sentence in her covering note that I have read many times: "Register indicates two litter-mates placed in that county. Recommend no further action." I have never written down what I think of that note, and I will do it here once and then leave it. I think the register is right, and that it was a different animal: the thing that ran on the Drumble had been made into a tool, and a thing that has been made into a tool does not stop being one. I also know that I cannot prove a word of that, and that no court will ever ask me to, and that this is the last page of a case and not the last word on that coast.

It was a different animal. It is always a different animal. That is the thing about that coast, and about this whole business of the pale dog of the Vandermeers, and it is the last thing I have to say about it: for a hundred and forty years the county has been looking for the beast, and the reason it has never found one is that it never needed to be a beast at all. It only ever needed a man who had decided in advance that a family's bad luck would do his work for him, and a wall of fog, and a place where the ground lets nothing come back up. The dog was the cheapest part. It was always the cheapest part. You can paint a dog; you cannot paint the fog.