Once for Joy..

On a stretch of West Peak in the last weeks of May, where the path narrows and the basalt drops away, a small short-haired black dog appears at the edge of a hiker's vision, paces alongside them for a little, and is not there anymore. The body sometimes registers the cliff edge a half-beat before the eye has caught up, and the dog often arrives in that half-beat. What I have been turning over for some time, with this case and with cases of its kind, is whether the dog acts the way it acts on the ridge it acts on because the people who meet it already know, in some compartment they could not have named, what the dog is there to do?

I'm Tillie Treadwell, the How I Met Your Monster columnist for Eerie Expeditions Magazine, and the case I am holding up to that question is one Connecticut has been carrying since 1898, one of the few cryptid cases I know of anywhere that comes with a printed survival rule attached. The rule has the cadence of an old household proverb, a sentence built to outlast the household that first spoke 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.

Hanging Hills sits above the city of Meriden, in central Connecticut, in a band of traprock that pushed up during the Mesozoic and stayed up while the softer sandstone around it eroded down. Two summits hold the ridge between them, the long basalt spine running between West Peak and East Peak, with a stone observation tower called Castle Craig sitting at the East Peak summit about a thousand feet above sea level. Mountain laurel, the state flower, opens its cupped white-and-pink blossoms across the understory of every traprock ridge in southern New England in the last weeks of May, and on the long Sunday that brings Memorial Day onto the calendar the trails fill with families and birders and dogs and the ordinary noise of a holiday weekend, all of it threaded up through the laurel and into the late afternoon light.

What was first printed about the West Peak Black Dog is a piece of short fiction. William Henry Chichele Pynchon, a Harvard-trained geologist who taught at Trinity College in Hartford and who would, two generations on, become the grandfather of the novelist Thomas Pynchon, placed a story called "The Black Dog" beginning on page one hundred and fifty-three of the April-to-June 1898 issue of The Connecticut Quarterly, a magazine that printed poetry and reported pieces and short fiction side by side in the way periodicals of that era did without much fuss. His narrator is, in nearly every way that matters, a Pynchon stand-in. The narrator's climbing companion in the story is a man named Herbert Marshall, identified in the text as a member of the United States Geological Survey, and Marshall and the narrator have, between them, two prior sightings to account for before the story opens. They go up West Peak together on a February afternoon. The dog appears. Marshall, for whom this is the third sighting, slips on the ice at the cliff edge and falls. The piece closes with the narrator carrying his friend's body off the mountain, knowing he has now seen for the second time.

Marshall the United States Geological Survey member is a character in a story. Pynchon was the geologist. His piece ran as fiction in a magazine that labeled fiction as fiction. I think it was a careful piece of literary work by a man who had spent enough hours on Connecticut traprock to know what basalt does in February and what a man's body does when basalt lets go of him at the wrong moment, and the story carries the texture of someone who had been on the ridge.

What I find more interesting than the question of whether the original was fact or fiction is what the piece did after publication, for the story did not stay in its category. Within decades it had stepped out of the magazine and into the trail's own culture, and in the ~hundred and twenty-eight years since the issue closed, hikers on West Peak have continued to report a small black dog at the edge of their afternoons with a steadiness the regional folklore has carried in fuller form than the published literature has documented. A handful of climbing deaths on the cliffs across the decades, including reports as recent as the 1970s, have folded themselves into the legend without, as far as I have been able to track them down, a single cleanly documented eyewitness chain that would carry coroner-grade evidentiary weight. Folk-cases live where folk-cases live, in trail-talk and the visitor-center pamphlet and the half-reverent pause between two hikers who admit to one another, on a long Sunday afternoon, that they each saw the dog earlier in the day. Rule and case have gone into all of those venues together, the way a dog walks alongside the person who knows its name.

What a printed rule does to a witness, once the rule has been installed in them, is teach the body how to count. A first sighting registers as oddity, a small dog at the edge of the trail that the hiker may not even fully notice. A second sighting carries the freight the rule has been waiting to give it, because the rule has been keeping count all along, and the second instance is, in the rule's bookkeeping, the sorrow sighting. A witness who has heard "twice for sorrow" cannot un-hear it, and a third encounter, when it arrives, arrives against a body that has been rehearsing the cliff edge for weeks. This reading is honest as far as it goes, and though I certainly admire the honesty and literal accuracy of it, I think it stops a step too early.

What stops it too early is that the cliff edge is a real cliff edge and the basalt is a real basalt and the late afternoon light on the trail is a real late light. Bodies that have been rehearsing their own falls on real cliff edges sometimes do fall, and sometimes do not, and the woodland the rehearsal is being conducted in has been on the ridge longer than any hiker walking it now has been alive. What I keep arriving at, with this case and with cases similar, is that the rule and the woodland have entered a relationship neither one of them was conducting alone- and couldn't.

Animism, as I practice it, holds that the woodland is paying its own attention back, and that part of how the woodland does its paying is by producing whatever the witness is configured to receive. Hanging Hills, with a small black dog on its books since 1898, has been receiving witnesses configured to count to three for one hundred and twenty-eight years. A being kept on a rule that long, in the older European tradition I read most closely, has had ample time to learn what is expected of it on that ground, and a witness who arrives with the rule installed in them meets a being that has been keeping company with the same rule for as long as the rule has been on the printed record. The trail listens, the dog listens, and the rule hovers between them.

The strongest single body of evidence I know that beings of this kind respond to the local frame they have been named into runs across the British Black Dog tradition. Mark Norman, a folklore researcher in Devon who is a council member of the Folklore Society and who holds what is believed to be the largest United Kingdom archive of these traditions, has documented over seven hundred eyewitness accounts of black dogs across the British Isles. In the Maldon and Dengie corner of Essex, the local tradition has it that a sighting of Black Shuck means the observer's near-immediate death, and the reports collected from that region have shown that texture across the centuries. In northern Lincolnshire, where the Black Dog is held as a protector of travelers on lonely roads, the reports gathered there fit a different shape entirely. In Yorkshire, where the dog is called the Barguest or the Gytrash, it more often heralds a death in the family than the death of the witness, and the reports there fit that shape too. Same broad form across all three traditions, a black dog of moderate size, mostly silent, glimpsed at dusk, and three different sets of behaviors, each one tracking the regional rule the local witnesses have been carrying onto the ground for centuries before they ever met the dog.

The earliest dated Black Shuck incident on the British folkloric record places the dog inside two East Anglian churches on the same August afternoon in 1577. A violent thunderstorm came in over the Suffolk coast on Sunday the fourth, and the dog appears in the surviving accounts at St Mary's Church in Bungay, where it ran the length of the nave during the service and killed a man and a boy at their pew, and at Holy Trinity Church in Blythburgh seven miles further south, where the burnt claw marks it left on the north door are still visible to visitors and have come to be called the devil's fingerprints. A pamphlet by Abraham Fleming, "A Straunge and Terrible Wunder," set down from a written eyewitness account and printed in London later that same year, is the document most often cited, and what it records is one of the harder cases to set aside, because the contemporaneous report is unusually full for a folk encounter and the marks at Blythburgh have outlasted four hundred years of weathering. East Anglia in the centuries after 1577 has been Shuck country in the same way south-central Connecticut has been Black Dog country since 1898, and what the two regions have in common, in my reading of the cases, is that an early dramatic instance entered the printed record and gave the resident population something to settle around.

A pareidolia reading would predict random variation in reported behavior. A pure-suggestion reading would predict that the witnesses across the regions were generating different dogs out of their own different expectations, and the dogs in the reports would be different dogs. What the data shows fits neither model cleanly, because the form holds across the regions, dog-sized to calf-sized, mostly silent, often glimpsed at dusk, and the behavior tracks the regional naming with a fidelity that suggests, in my reading, that whatever the witnesses are encountering has settled into the relational arrangement each region has built for it across the long centuries of the meeting.

Alas, there is a spirit on the ridge, the spirit has a name, the name carries instructions for how the spirit will move when met. My own conviction about the claim, on a scholarly point of caution, falls short of the conviction Pynchon's narrator carried through his fiction. I do think the case, when set alongside the British regional data, is asking a question popular psychology has not yet figured out how to take on without flattening it.

A second usage worth keeping close, on the way out of the case, is one the language has borne in parallel with the cryptid for at least two and a half centuries. In a 1776 letter to her friend Samuel Johnson, Hester Thrale wrote a sentence the lexicographers later picked up as the earliest documented use of "the black dog" to mean a melancholic mood, telling Johnson that he scorned the black dog now and would swing him round and round. Johnson seems to have known what she meant. Oxford's first formal citation of the phrase in this sense comes from Thrale's diary in 1790. From there the image moved forward through the nineteenth century as a household idiom for low mood, then Winston Churchill picked it up from his Victorian nanny rather than coining it himself, and the historians who later wanted to read his usage as evidence of clinical depression met some pushback from his daughter, Lady Mary Soames, who wrote that the phrase had been an expression of Victorian nannies for bad moods and that the historians had made rather a big meal of it.

What I find more interesting than the question of whether Johnson's black dog or Churchill's black dog was an inherited folk-name or a private depressive metaphor is that the same image, a black dog that arrives without warning, paces alongside a person they cannot quite shake, takes a different texture on different days, and goes when it is ready to go, has been used in English to name a particular interior weather and a particular cryptid simultaneously, for as long as either usage has been written down. I read the convergence as a kinship the language has held for centuries between creatures of this kind and the moods they have always seemed to walk beside, with the kinship older, in my suspicion, than either Pynchon's piece or Thrale's letter by a long stretch.

What I have come to believe, on a ridge like Hanging Hills in the year 2026, is that the rule and the dog and the woodland have been keeping company together for so long that they have become difficult to disentangle from each other, and the witness who walks onto the ridge with the rule installed in them meets a relationship the ridge has been holding open for more than a century. A first sighting brings what a first sighting is supposed to bring. A second sighting carries the freight a second sighting is supposed to carry. A third sighting, when it arrives, arrives against a body and a basalt and a late afternoon that have been holding the rule together with the dog for as long as anyone walking the ridge can remember.

On the long Sunday before Memorial Day this year, with the laurel just opening its earliest cupped flowers across the understory of the ridge and the gold of late May lying along the basalt the way late May has lain along it for as long as basalt has been part of southern New England, somebody will step onto West Peak who has read about the dog. The rule will already be on the ridge. The dog will already be on the ridge. The hiker may be a person who has counted to two before, and may be a person counting for the first time, and the ridge will receive them on whichever set of terms the hiker has brought along, as I have found nearly all nonhuman peoples and beings to do when encountering humanity. What walks across the trail on a long afternoon will be, in the only sense the older traditions have ever asked it to be, what the rule and the dog and the woodland have agreed between them to make of the day..

I suppose the one remaining question is, What would you bring to the woods..?

Tillie Treadwell