It’s not that I wasn’t flattered by this yipping and squeaking, which could go on for up to a quarter of an hour. I did feel, however, that it was a little fawning and unearned. My cats curled up on my lap, played inspired paw piano on my chest and headbutted my knuckles affectionately, but that was the result of my willingness to make myself an annexe of their personalities, plus the years of research I’d done into their likes and dislikes: what food to buy them, when to stop buying it and purchase a more expensive kind instead, which knitwear to donate to them as bedding, where exactly behind their ears to scratch them and at what time of day. All I did with Billy was allow him to accompany me on long walks across moors and cliff tops. I’d have been doing the walks anyway, even if he didn’t come along, so it was honestly no big deal.
Dartmoor is the only place in Devon where the bite of the wind can almost match its east coast counterpart. As I climbed past the Nutcracker, a logan stone near Britain’s loneliest Christmas tree, to the summit of Rippon Tor, the breeze spun me in a quarter-circle and turned my hair into old, useless bindweed. Beside me Billy sulked slightly, having been put on his lead for the benefit of sixteen semi-wild cattle. Once we were over the brow of the tor I let him off and threw a stick to appease him. He fetched it then guarded it jealously from me in his customary fashion. I seldom put rotting wood between my teeth and had never given Billy any concrete reason to believe that I would steal one of his sticks, but even after knowing me a couple of years, he remained suspicious of my motives when he had one in his mouth. Billy is a black dog, an apt shade for Dartmoor, which is so full of demon hound legends they sometimes slosh over its sides, but ghoulishness is not really his area of expertise. A toy–miniature poodle cross, he is scarcely bigger than Uncle Fuckykins and possibly a degree smaller when his black curls are slicked down with upland rain. Susie had recently had a terrible infestation of rats, who’d chewed through the bathroom pipes and electrical cables in her cottage. A few weeks ago she’d gone into her kitchen and an especially big one had hurtled straight at her. ‘I jumped on a chair and screamed,’ she told me. ‘I was hoping Billy might come to my rescue but he just jumped on the chair with me and started screaming too.’
As my borrowed black dog and I turned west for Top Tor and Pil Tor, I mentally listed the dark and mysterious moorland legends he might inspire. The best I could come up with were the following.
1. The dark and mysterious legend of how he ran after a cyclist on a path near Ivybridge but then got spooked by some rainbow-jumpered hippy kids listening to dubstep under some trees.
2. The dark and mysterious legend of how he ran away from me and my birdwatcher friend Roy down a deep ravine near Venford Reservoir, yip-squeaking after seeing what he thought was a sheep, and didn’t come back for thirteen minutes.
3. The dark and mysterious legend of how a post office receipt fell out of my wallet, and he ran off with it then barked and chewed it when I ran after him and asked for it back.
4. The dark and mysterious legend of how he wove through the legs of three cows in a water meadow, like a tiny idiot.
5. The dark and mysterious legend of how he ran after a black Labrador into a river then thought better of it.
6. The dark and mysterious legend of how he got miffed with me when I dropped him off at home an hour earlier than usual.
Above us, further west, a celestial hole opened up in the clouds, shooting rays down over the ancient stone rows of Fernworthy Forest: as good a spot for a bucolic alien landing as there could be in England. In the valley below, just over a mile away, I spotted the unusually tall, damaged spire of Widecombe church and abandoned my route to turn half-right towards it, remembering the story Mike, a veteran member of the Dartmoor Search and Rescue Team, had told me about Jan Reynolds selling his soul to the Devil there in the autumn of 1638. One of the many commendable facets of selling your soul to the Devil in the seventeenth century was that you’d invariably have to go to a tract of bleak and windswept land to do it properly. Nowadays you can accomplish it far less romantically from the comfort of your own home just by running a corrupt property developing enterprise or writing a hateful column about immigrants or homosexuals for a tabloid newspaper. The Reynolds story is a West Country equivalent of Suffolk’s legend of Black Shuck and Blythburgh’s Cathedral of the Marshes, in which a real-life violent storm caused damage to the house of God and was blamed on demonic activity. In Widecombe the damage
