Alasdair worked as a clerk for the laird, calculating wool yields and rents, a job that kept him indoors, covered with ledgers and the soft hiss of a paraffin lamp. The glen was different in his absence: the new road from his father’s time welcomed motorcars and tourists, but the old places — the hollow above the birches, Cnoc na Pìobaire — were still as they had always been, moss-black and wind-scoured.
He read his grandfather Malcolm’s notebook by the fire, running through family stories: Kelpies, Glaistig, Washer, lights, piper. They seemed far away from him now, echoes of a life before trenches, before the mud that never quite washed from his boots. “Old wives’ stories,” he’d say if asked, with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
But there were nights when the wind was loud enough to sound like shrapnel and the lamp was low enough to flicker, and he woke sweating and heard dogs barking across no-man’s-land.
The ledgers helped, for a time. Numbers did not lurch the way memories did. A column of figures for wool yield, a tally of rents, the careful notation of acreage: these were solid things, things that stayed where you put them. He had learned in France that the mind would find patterns in chaos whether you wanted it to or not — a silhouette in smoke, a face in a crater’s shadow. Better to give it clean columns. Better to keep the lamp burning and the pen moving.
He had not told his father about the worst of it. Ewan Ross was a careful man, a kind one, and he would have listened with the full attention of a man who had copied
Jean’s lullabies into three different notebooks against the day they might be lost. That attention was the problem. Alasdair did not want his nights examined, categorised, set alongside the family’s other hauntings as though shell shock were simply the war’s contribution to the MacGregor catalogue of the uncanny.
The glen was quiet enough by day. By night it was a different matter. The wind off the high corries could sound, in the half-sleep hours, exactly like incoming. He had learned to lie still and count backward from a hundred, waiting for his own heartbeat to slow, waiting for the dark to be just dark again. Some nights it obliged him. Some nights it did not.
One evening in autumn 1920, as red leaves burned on the rowans and frost silvered the grass, old Jean — now in her nineties, frail but fierce — died in her sleep. The glen assembled for the wake in the schoolhouse, walls hung in black crêpe, candles guttering in draughts.
Alasdair stood by the door while his father Ewan Ross accepted hands and murmurs. Around midnight a howling came low from the hillside above the village. Not a farm dog’s yap, but deep, resonant, as close to howling as a foghorn on water. It paused for a moment, then dropped abruptly. The room stilled. An old woman crossed herself.
“Cù-sìth,” she whispered. “Hound comes for the newly dead.”
Alasdair rose. “Wolves are gone. It’s a stray. I’ll quiet it.”
Ewan Ross gripped his arm. “Let it be, son. Some sounds aren’t for chasing.” But Alasdair shrugged him off. The howl had tugged something inside him — a remembrance of nights in the mud waiting for dawn, hearing baying that obscured the whine of shells. He had to show it was not exceptional.
He emerged into the night with a lantern and his stick. The air was bitter, silvering grass and stone. He walked uphill toward the source — a shoulder of moor where heather met rock, known as the Dog’s Knowe since his grandfather’s days. The howl came again, closer, rolling off the dark like thunder in a barrel. He kept telling himself: fox, or a large deerhound gone feral.
His lantern threw a weak circle. Mist curled about at a low pace. Then: eyes ahead, shining green and steady, the size of saucers. Not rushing forward, but waiting, forty paces off.
Alasdair halted. A dog, he thought. Big one. Mastiff, maybe, gone wild. He raised the lantern. The eyes didn’t blink. No sound of fur, no growl. Just that gaze, pinning him. “Who’s there?” he called. “Come on, then.”
Then the third howl — shattering in proximity, as if the sound emanated from the ground itself. It thrummed in his chest, roiled the mud-memory of baying on wire. The eyes vanished. He pressed on, breath shallow.
At the crest of the knowe the moor opened to a bowl of heather. His lantern caught form: big, low-slung, the size of a calf. Shaggy coat black as pitch, ears pricked. It sat watching him. Too large for any dog he knew. Chest like a barrel, paws splayed wide. “Easy,” he whispered. “Good lad.”
It didn’t move. No hackles, no snarl. Only those eyes — shining, ancient, without hunger or fury. The beast stood slowly — shoulder high as his hip — then turned broadside and walked off ten deliberate steps to a dip in the moor. Alasdair followed, unthinking. The lantern bobbed.
At the dip the hound hesitated, turned back, then faded like smoke into the heather. He reached the spot. No tracks. No smell but earth. The ground sank to a dark pool, half-hidden, water dark as ink. His lantern sputtered. He knelt and peered in.
Beneath the surface: pale, human-like forms drifting slow, faces turned upward, eyeless, mouths open in silent calls. The pool had been dry last time he remembered. Jean’s caution flashed in his mind: The ground is never the same twice.
He rocked back. Yet another howl — not from the pool, but from the knowe, dissipating westward, toward the churchyard where Jean would lie the following day.
Dawn found him standing at the schoolhouse door, mud to his knees, lantern empty. Ewan Ross waited, face lined. “You look like you’ve seen the war again.”
Alasdair sank to the step. “The Cù-sìth. Straight from the tales.” His father nodded without surprise. “Jean spoke of it once. Said it howls three times for the glen’s own, then leads them homeward.”
“Led me to a pool. Full of… faces. It wasn’t hiding. It wanted me to see.”
Ewan sat beside him. “The knowe’s shifting. New drains, road runoff. That pool’s been filling slow. Dangerous right now.”
Alasdair met his gaze. “You think it knew?”
“I think the old things notice when the ground changes. Like the lights for Malcolm. The piper for me.”
The church bell tolled. Mourners gathered. That week Alasdair marked the pool on the laird’s map: Hazard. Do not drain here. No one asked why. He also wrote in the inherited notebook: Cù-sìth at Jean’s wake. Led to hidden water. Not malevolence, but caution. The glen’s guardian?
Sometimes after that, on nights when wind blew, he no longer woke sweating. The baying, whenever it came, no longer sounded like shells. It felt like a call home. The glen spoke on, and Alasdair heard it closer, his scepticism both cracked and not destroyed, but expanded — a door ajar for whatever might walk through.