◆ PARALLAX

We have had two lambs taken in eight days. Vet says dog because vet always says dog. The neck on the second one had two deep punctures and not much tearing. There was black hair on the lower wire where something went under. I have it in a bag. Tell me what to do with the hair before my brother throws it away or shows it to the pub and ruins it.

Do not show it to the pub. Keep the hair dry in paper, not plastic if it is damp. Label date, place, which fence wire, and whether it touched the carcass. Photograph the wire with a ruler. Photograph the punctures with a ruler. If the hide is still there, cut the section around the bite and freeze it in a clean bag. Ask the vet for the inter-canine distance, not the conclusion.

And rope off the approach, not the kill. Everyone walks to the dead lamb and destroys the path the predator used. The path is where the animal tells on itself.

Did as told. Vet measured 39mm between the deepest punctures and wrote "large dog or large cat cannot exclude either" which is the first time he has written anything useful. Hair went to a friend of my brother who works in a university lab, informal, and he says not enough root for anything clever, but under microscope it is not sheep and not fox. He would not say cat. He would only say "guard hair from a medium-large mammal, dark, degraded." So we have almost nothing, but it is labelled almost nothing.

"Labelled almost nothing" is beautiful. That is the exact border where folklore usually rushes in and names the thing before the label dries. Resist that.

The old woodcuts give the devil-cat a face because people cannot live long with a dark hair and a dead lamb. The face lets the village sleep. Our little cruelty here is to deny the face until the evidence earns it. I say this as the man who loves the face.

For the record, because this gets misquoted: I am not saying there are zero big cats loose in Europe. Zero is a silly number when people with more money than sense have kept big cats for decades. I am saying the number of actual cats is much smaller than the number of cat-shaped stories, and the way to find the former is to stop feeding the latter.

The Wales hair is interesting. Not proof. Interesting. The original farmer's first ewe is interesting. Not proof. Interesting. That is as far as the evidence lets me walk, which is farther than I expected when Hexenring opened this.

Year end, then: one dog caught, one dog owner made to pay, one private-collection ghost, several lane shadows, one hair that refuses to become a headline, and a handful of old stories leaning over the fence to see what we will call it.

I still think the Beast is older than the cat. Cascade still thinks the ground outranks the story. Occams still thinks the boring five percent is the real one. Pierre still wants the file, Lars the log. The farmer keeps the camera up. Good. Let the thread stay open and unresolved. A good border mystery should have a gate, a ruler, and no altar.