Ashfrith Station

The second morning, the fog lifted, and Cole proposed that we walk over the shoulder of the ridge to the field station, because he had a letter to deliver and a question to ask, and because a man who intends to repair the drainage of four thousand acres ought to know his neighbours.

Ashfrith Station sits on a shelf of the same coast a mile and a half east of Harrow Reach, at the point where the good land stops and the Drumble begins, and it is a place with three parts to it. In front, along the shore road, there is a low white building with a car park and a gate and a sign that says COASTAL WILDLIFE REHABILITATION — DONATIONS WELCOME, which is open to the public four days a week. Behind it, across a yard, is a row of buildings made out of an old dairy: a workshop, a feed store, a small laboratory with a fume hood that actually works, and two long sheds of welded wire cages in which, on the morning we arrived, there were two injured cormorants, a hawk with its wing in a splint, a litter of raccoons, and forty-odd other creatures in various stages of repair.

And beyond that, on the rising ground, behind a second fence with a locked gate, there is the rest of it: four acres of grass and shelter-belt and good fencing, and the dogs.

I counted twenty of them from the road, and then stopped counting, because counting was beside the point. They were not pets and they were not livestock. They were enormous, all of them, forty to sixty kilos of them, the sort of animal that has been bred for two thousand years in cold places to stand between a flock and a wolf. Most of them were a pale fawn or tawny colour with black masks, the colour of a lion that has been left out in the rain. When we came to the fence they came up to it, not eagerly and not in a pack but singly, each animal taking its own line, and stood and looked at us with a level yellow scrutiny that I have seen in very few men and in no other dog.

"Livestock guardian dogs," said a voice behind us, pleasant and unhurried. "Anatolian shepherds, mostly, with some Kangal in the line. I'm Emmett Scully. You must be the nephew."

He was a man of about forty-five, in a canvas coat and rubber boots and a flat cap, with grey eyes and a high colour, and, in the moment before he smiled, an expression I can only describe as calculating; but he smiled at once, and his handshake was warm, and within five minutes he had taken us into the yard and given us coffee out of a thermos, and within ten he was telling us, with the fluency of a man who has told it many times and enjoys it, what the station was for.

It was for the coast. He had come here sixteen years ago as a graduate student to survey the spotted owl's downstream neighbours, and had stayed; the rehabilitation side paid the rent and made the county love him, and the breeding side was his real work. The state had given up paying a hunter to kill the problem, and the answer, he said, was dogs — large dogs, on the land, with the sheep, at night — and he said the phrase "at night" the way a man says the name of a woman he is fond of, and then he said the rest of it with his hands, laying the whole argument out in the air between us over the coffee. I noticed that Cole had stopped listening and was watching his hands instead of his face, and I noticed it because I had stopped listening too.

"You'll be wanting the southern acreage," he said to Cole, when the coffee was finished. "I've been running a survey block on the western half of the Drumble under permit for nine years, and my renewal is in March, and the county will not renew it if the land changes hands into a trust that wants it fenced off. So I'll say it plainly: I would rather you sold to the trust and let me keep my permit, than kept it and fenced me out."

"I'd rather neither," said Cole. "I'd rather drain it."

Scully laughed, and it was a good laugh, and then he stopped laughing rather abruptly and looked at Cole with the same level scrutiny as his dogs.

"That's a hundred years of work and a hundred million dollars and I don't think you know what's down there," he said. "Come out with me tomorrow morning and see it. I'll take you as far as the old cutting. I'll tell you now, because I've made a study of it: the Drumble is a peat bog, and a peat bog is a sponge on a slope. It is nine feet of dead moss lying on a bed of blue clay, and the moss is holding water the way a mattress holds a leak, and under the moss, where the railway went in, there are holes in that clay that nothing has mapped. A man who goes out on the Drumble alone and gets off the flags has about ninety seconds." He looked at the two of us, and then at the ridge, and then back at Cole. "I don't say it to frighten you. I say it because I've pulled one dog out of the Drumble in nine years, and I have no intention of pulling out a Vandermeer."

It was while he was saying this, with his back to the sheds, that I saw the dog.

It came up out of the shelter-belt at the far side of the grass — not along the ground but up, so that the first thing I saw was its shoulders and then its head over the top of a fallen fence — and it stood there for perhaps four seconds, looking at us across two hundred yards, and then it turned and was gone into the trees. It was pale, almost white, quite unlike the fawn animals in the pens, and its chest was wide and deep, and it stood, at the shoulder, higher than the bonnet of the station's truck.

"That's one of yours?" said Cole.

"Not one of mine." Scully had turned, unhurried, to see where he was looking. "That's the other problem. Something out there has been breeding with somebody's animals for three or four generations and gone feral. I've had it on my cameras. I'd have shot it two years ago if I could have got within a hundred yards of it, and so would every farmer on the coast, and the reason none of us has is that it does not come near a road and it does not come near a light."

Inside the station's little office there was a woman, whom we had heard before we saw: not her voice, but the sound of an animal in the next room, and a low voice soothing it. Her name, Scully said, was Wren Ashcombe; she was his sister, and she ran the rehabilitation side, and she came out to meet us with a towel over her shoulder and a soft leather glove on one hand, and a barred owl hooked on the glove like a hat.

She was younger than Scully by eight or ten years, and quite unlike him: slight, dark, and with a manner that kept its distance from her brother even when she was agreeing with him. She said all the correct things about the birds and the raccoons and the license; and twice, while Scully was talking about the land and the trust and the survey permit, I saw her look at Cole Vandermeer, and it was a look I could not read, and that I wrote down in my report that night as "a person who knows something and has decided not to say it."

The thing I did not write down, because I did not know it yet, and because I have since had reason to think about it a great deal, was that when Scully said the phrase "ninety seconds," his sister looked at the floor.