The Barghest: The Death-Dog Whose Funeral Passes Before Your Own
The North of England keeps the darkest and most specialized of all the black dogs this chronicle has run with — the Shuck of the East Anglian storm-lanes , the green Cù-Sìth of the Highland hills — and gives it a name that carries its whole grim office in two grinding syllables: the Barghest, of York and the Yorkshire Dales, the "spectre-hound" whose appearance was, above all the world's other death-dogs, a notification . He is the standard monstrous canine — huge, shaggy, black; eyes like coals or saucers of fire; padding the snickelways of old York and the moor-tracks of the Dales after dark; dragging, in the town versions, a clanking chain whose sound was his herald in the narrow lanes. But the barghest's terror is not that he savages — the black dogs rarely do; it is that he knows , and shows, and above all that he goes ahead . For the barghest's signature, preserved across the northern accounts, is the phantom funeral. When a person of importance in the di...