And I very nearly asked Constance how she knew what had been in the local papers and on the local news, given she was in Los Angeles back in March. But there are always phone calls to, and from, relatives and friends back east, right? There’s always the internet. I kept the question to myself.
“You saw a coyote?” I asked, instead.
“No. Well, maybe. I’ve seen something a couple of times now, skulking around by the garbage cans. It might only be a fox, but it seemed big for a fox. And the wrong color.”
“Should we tell Blanchard?”
“What for?” she asked. “So he can murder the poor thing.” That was the word she used—murder.
And then we were talking about bears, specifically about the black bear that was spotted around South County in May. It had displayed a fondness for bird feeders. But I wasn’t thinking about bears or birdseed. I was thinking about Harvey’s manuscript and the account of Susan and William Ames. Back in 1840, not so long before the last wolves were exterminated from the forests of New England, didn’t the doomed Mr. Ames claim to have repeatedly seen his missing wife in the company of a very large wolf? That’s what I remember, though I haven’t looked back through the manuscript to see if my memory is mistaken.
Time to end this meandering mess of an entry and go to bed. If I’m lucky, I won’t dream about wolves and the wayward wife of William Ames. If I’m really lucky, I won’t dream about Amanda, either, or Constance Hopkins, for that matter. Somehow, in only the space of half an hour, while we were sitting there in the hallway talking about wildlife, I went from furious to horny. I think I prefer furious; it’s quite a bit less distracting.
So far, I’ve hardly seen Constance today. She came down for breakfast. And she walked with me to the mailbox. But that’s pretty much it. Whatever she’s doing in the attic, at least she’s returned to doing it more or less quietly. On the way back to the house, I brought up her “coyote” sightings again, though I didn’t tell her I’d had a nightmare because of them. Unlike yesterday, she seemed oddly reluctant to talk about the matter, almost as if, in the interim, she’d thought better of having mentioned it at all.
“If there are coyotes around, doesn’t it seem odd that we never hear them?” I asked. “I’ve always gotten the impression they’re pretty noisy animals.”
Constance shrugged and sorted through the day’s junk mail. “It might have only been a stray dog,” she said. “There must be lots of feral dogs about. Maybe a stray German shepherd or something like that.”
“Maybe,” I said, and didn’t press the issue, as it does seem perfectly reasonable that someone could mistake a feral German shepherd for a coyote.
As for the nightmare, I might just as well blame Harvey’s manuscript as Constance’s coyote. I didn’t go to bed last night when I was done at the typewriter. I sat in the living room a while, trying to concentrate on a DVD — Deborah Kerr and Jean Simmons in Black Narcissus(1947). It’s one of my favorites, has been for ages, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Harvey’s manuscript in its cardboard box. So I ended up in the kitchen again, flipping through the pages in search of the account of William and Susan Ames (if only the thing had an index). Turns out, it was way back in the first chapter, right there in the first few pages. But Harvey returns to the subject later, and on page 173 proceeds from numerous retellings and embellishments of the Ames legend to the subject of ghostly dogs and purported cases of lycanthropy in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. His writing here is somewhat less focused than usual, and I’m assuming that, like most of the book, he must have meant this only as a rough first draft:
Traditions of spectral canines of the sort best known from the British Isles are, as it happens, not alien to the States. Indeed, I have assembled numerous examples from various parts of New England. Though hardly as well known as the Barghest of Yorkshire or dreadful Black Shuck of East Anglia, there is, for instance, central Connecticut’s “Black Dog of West Peak.” Like many of its ilk, the appearance of this “black dog” is said to be an omen. Indeed, there is even a folk rhyme devoted to the animal’s seeming ability to bestow good luck or ill upon those who happen to catch of glimpse of it: “If a man shall meet the Black Dog once, it shall be for joy; and if twice, it shall be for sorrow; and the third time, he shall die.”
Though often sighted, the dog that haunts the steep volcanic Hanging Hills south of Meriden is said to leave no tracks and to utter a silent howl. The most oft-recounted tale associated with this apparition concerns the fate of one W. H. C. Pynchon, a geologist from Manhattan who frequently made excursions to the area to study its igneous rock formations. The April-June 1898 issue of The Connecticut Quarterly includes the definitive account of Pynchon’s three encounters with the beast, which, as the rhyme dictates, ends with his death (though, in actuality, the geologist did not perish in the Hanging Hills at the end of the Nineteenth Century, but died peacefully on Long Island in 1910).
Closer to home, there is Rhode Island’s own “phantom dog of Fort Wetherill” in Jamestown. Less renowned, perhaps, than its cousin to the west, sightings of this dog are also reputed to portend doom. In Tiverton, there are reports of a “pitch-black dog” that has been seen to transform itself into the figure of a woman, who then proceeds to play a violin before vanishing. Similarly, though less musically inclined, is the shape-shifting black dog of Newport, which also transforms itself into a woman who is given to peering in through windows.
That last detail is reminiscent of the famous Bête du Gévaudan, an unidentified wolflike animal that terrorized the peasantry of France’s Margeride Mountains from 1764 until at least 1767, slaughtering as many as one hundred and thirteen people.La bête was also alleged to have possessed shape-shifting abilities, and some of the reports indicate that, like the Newport lycanthrope, it was fond of gazing in through windows. Similarly, there are reports of a huge animal, suspected of being a werewolf, that is said to have wrecked a coach and laid waste to a farm east of Gresford in northern Wales in 1791, and to have stood up on its hind legs “like a human being” to gaze in through the windows of the farmhouse. The creature was said to have had blue eyes.
Yeah, I know. Precisely the sort of shit I needed to be reading before bed. Anyway, Harvey eventually finds his way back to the red oak and the strange happenings here at the “old Wight place”:
We see an element of the lycanthropic associated with the property, beginning with the death of Mr. and Mrs. Ames. The latter, you will recall, was said by her distraught husband to have been witnessed walking in the company of “a great wild beast,” though he also seems to have been of the opinion that it was nothing so mundane as either a wolf or panther. I will assume he also ruled out bears. A contemporary account of the affair, from the Providence Journal(“Horror from Moosup Valley,” October 2, 1840), even mentions that Ames had repeatedly looked up to find the face of Susan watching him from one of the windows, and that, on one occasion, William saw both the woman and her bestial attendant staring in at him.
During my research, I have assembled more than a dozen additional tales from the Moosup Valley/Coventry region featuring wolflike creatures, and oftenwere wolflike creatures. Many of these encounters are reputed to have taken place on the farm, usually within sight of the red oak, though a fair number come from what is now the George B. Parker Woodland Wildlife Refuge in Coventry. I will begin this catalog of lupine oddities with those sightings from the Parker Woodland.