“Wolf, wolf, wolf, wolf, and then a line in a different hand that says a thing out of the north carr, taken at the ninth bench, and a description that runs to four lines. I have twelve such lines in a book of six hundred entries and they are the only twelve worth anything.”
As the bounty men of the northern march tell it
Wolf season went into the same line of the accounts as revenant season, and the villages remembered the year the wolves came down beside the year the bell returned. Most of what the bounty men brought to the bailiffs was wolf, and honest wolf, two shillings a head through the hundreds, as it had been for as long as anyone had kept a book.
Then one of the bounty men sat a fortnight at Harrowgate with all five books of the march open in front of him. Two bailiffs had written whatever word the bounty man gave them. Two had written wolf for everything. The fifth, at Mereton, wrote a description, because his predecessor had put the reason in the front of the book: a name is a guess, a description is a fact. Wolf, wolf, wolf, the Mereton pages ran, and then a line in a different hand: a thing out of the north carr, taken at the ninth bench, and four lines of what it looked like. There were twelve such lines in six hundred entries.
What the bounty man found, when he had read them all, was that the payments gathered by place and by year, and followed a few years behind the giving up of something: a cut let go, a walk stopped, a holding abandoned. The bounty men tell it as a warning. The wolves, they say, were never the difficulty.
What is known
The Crown pays two shillings a head through the hundreds for anything on the schedule. The schedule names wolves, names four other things by names no longer clear, and ends with a clause for such other noxious beasts as the bailiff shall judge. Most payments in the northern march are made under that clause, by bailiffs appointed for honesty and literacy with no training in what they are shown. Only the Mereton bailiff writes a description, and his book is worth more than the other four together; its twelve entries that are plainly no wolf cluster in the north carrs.
The books count outcomes, not encounters. An unclaimed kill, a district that deals with a thing itself, and whatever was driven off go unrecorded. Wolves are met across the realm, and manors keep dog handlers for them. The things the clause covers are rare, and in the march they gather where ground has been given up.