Callum Thorne

Mercenary slayer of House of Thorne, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line, known as The Bitter Bridle. Craft: Border Tracking.

Callum Thorne was born in 1814 in Frankfort, Kentucky, and lived eighty-two years as a boatman and a vampire slayer of the House of Thorne. The family book knows him as The Bitter Bridle, a name that recalls the sour temper of the horse he rode for forty years and, the family insisted, of the man who rode it. He was a Mercenary in the Thorne sense, a hunter who took a hunt for its fee and finished it to the last shilling, and his craft was Border Tracking, the following of a quarry across a boundary by the old reivers' methods of dog, ground and patience. He was the son of the blacksmith and slayer Ewan Thorne, known as The Cold Tally, and he trained under him. He married Minnie Proctor Thorne in 1840, raised two sons, Hob Proctor Thorne and Henry Thorne Proctor, and died in 1896 of kidney failure, at eighty-two, having outlived his wife, his father, both his fathers-in-law and most of the men he had ever hunted. The House of Thorne came from the Northumbrian marches, where for generations its men had been border reivers, cattle thieves and feuding clansmen on the line between England and Scotland, and had turned their skills, in time, to hunting vampires in the same hills. The Kentucky branch, to which Callum belonged, had kept the old habits: the hound, the peel-tower watch, the ambush, the single overwhelming stroke. His father, Ewan Thorne, born in 1778 at the ford on the Kentucky River that became Frankfort, kept a forge on the river road and a kennel behind it. The papers do not name Callum's mother, and the family did not discuss her. He was raised in the forge and the kennel, by a silent, dark-browed man with a scar from ear to collar, among the smell of hot iron and wet dogs. Frankfort in 1814 was a small, handsome, raw river town, the capital of a state that was twenty-two years old, with a statehouse, a penitentiary, a newspaper and a wharf from which the boats went down to Louisville and New Orleans. The Kentucky River ran beneath limestone bluffs, brown and fast, and the landing was always busy. Callum was a thin, dark, sharp-featured boy, with his father's brows and a temper that took offence easily, and he was in the river before he could read. By ten he could pole a skiff. By twelve he could handle a flatboat in a current. By fifteen he was working as a deckhand on the Kentucky River packets, and by nineteen, though he still helped at the forge in the winter, he was a recognised boatman on the Ohio. His father taught him the hounds. It was the Thorne way. A Thorne child was given a puppy at six and expected to rear it, and Callum's was a brindled bitch named Reiver's Daughter, descended from the original Reiver, who became the matriarch of the kennel. He learned to feed, to train and to read a hound. He learned to know, from the set of its ears and the carriage of its tail, whether it had found a scent, and what kind. He learned to follow one across a ridge, at night, without a light, listening. He said, in later life, that he had learned more from that dog than from anyone. His calling came in 1833, at nineteen, on a canal towpath at night. He had been hired that spring as a hand on a Louisville barge, and the boat had gone through the new Portland Canal, the great cut that was opened in 1830 to carry traffic past the falls of the Ohio. He was walking the towpath, alone, leading the mules back to the lock, when a barge came down the still water out of the dark, drifting, with no hand at the tiller and no one on the deck. Its lamps were still alight. It came on very slowly, with a faint ripple at the bow, and went by him at a distance of ten feet, and he saw that the lamps were burning, that the table in the cabin was set for supper and that nobody was there. The mules, which would have gone through fire, stood in the path and would not move. He took the lead rope in one hand and the lantern in the other, and went aboard at the next lock. The barge was empty, but for a single figure sitting at the cabin table, in the lamplight, with a fork in his hand. It looked up. Callum said afterward that he had never been so angry in his life. It was not fear. It was a hot, sour indignation that anyone should be sitting at a table that belonged to a crew that had, evidently, been murdered. He went back to the towpath for the mules' tow chain. The figure was gone by the time he returned, and the lamps had gone out, and the crew, nine in all, were lying in the hold. He took the news to his father that night. Ewan Thorne, who was fifty-five and had been waiting for it for some years, sat down at the forge and said that it had been a matter of time. He told his son the whole of it, over three days, and taught him, in the autumn, what a Thorne needed to know. The son went with him, and a pair of hounds, into the Kentucky hills, and in the course of that season took his first quarry, by a method that his father called the old one. A boundary, he was told, is a thing a vampire does not cross easily. One finds the line, and one follows it, and sooner or later the thing is on the wrong side. Ewan was killed a few weeks later, in an ambush on a lonely road. He was riding home from a hunt with two hounds when a party of men who had been hired to do it stopped him in a cutting. The hounds killed three of them. Ewan died that night, in the lee of a fallen tree, with the dogs across his legs, and Callum, who was nineteen, found him in the morning and brought him home. He buried him at the forge. He stood at the grave for an hour, in the rain, with his hat in his hand, and the family says that the expression on his face was the one he wore for the rest of his life. The bitterness was in him from then on. He became, in the years that followed, a hard and difficult man. He did not hate anyone in particular, but he trusted almost nobody, and he took a dim view of human nature, which he found a good deal less reliable than a hound's. He took to the life of a mercenary, which the Thornes had never been ashamed of. He took hunts for a fee, from the Ledger's cousins, from towns that had suffered, from landowners who could pay, and he finished them, to the letter, and sent in a bill. He was not greedy, but he insisted on being paid, on the principle that a man who works for nothing is not taken seriously. His rates were fixed. His word was good. Border Tracking, in his hands, was a craft for the long road. A quarry that had crossed a river, a county line or a state line, and thought itself safe, was in the country that Callum preferred. He would find the boundary, walk it with his hounds, and pick up the trail on the other side. He followed a single vampire from Kentucky to Ohio, to Indiana, to Illinois and back, in a hunt that lasted three years, and brought it down at last in a barn on the Wabash. His gear was a revolver and silver-cast shot, a brace of hounds and a coiled rope. He married in 1840. The bride, Minnie Proctor Thorne, was twenty-four, the younger daughter of the circuit preacher Hob Thorne and the midwife Rebecca Bowen Proctor, a Thorne on her father's side and a Proctor on her mother's, and she kept a small shop in Lexington, selling ribbons, tea and stationery. He met her at a funeral. She was standing at the back of the church, in grey, with a parcel, and he, who had come to pay his respects to the dead man's family and to collect a fee from them, found that he had forgotten what he was there for. She said that she had seen him before. She said that he had been standing outside the shop one evening in October, with a dog, for an hour. He said that he had been thinking. She said, dryly, that he must have had a great deal on his mind. She was the only person who ever softened him. She took no notice of his temper and laughed at his jokes, which were few, and she told him that he was a great deal kinder than he thought. They made a home in Lexington, in a small house behind her shop, with a kennel in the yard. His work took him away, for weeks at a time, to the river and beyond, but he came back. Their sons were born in the first years of the marriage. Hob Proctor Thorne was born in 1842 and lived until 1923, and became a vampire slayer of the House of Thorne. Henry Thorne Proctor was born in 1846 and lived until 1910, and did not hunt. He was a hard father and a fair one, and the boys adored him. He taught Hob the hounds, the boundary and the stubbornness of the family, and he taught Henry, who was gentler, to keep the accounts. The Civil War, which came when he was forty-seven, was a wretched time for a border man in a border state. Kentucky's loyalties were divided. His own sons were of an age to go, and Hob did, in a cavalry company, which Callum regarded as a great waste of a good tracker. He followed the war, by letter, from Lexington, and in the last year of it, when a band of guerrillas took to the hills, he went out with the hounds, at fifty, and brought three of them in. His wife's death in 1887, of a stroke, was a great grief, and he was a silent, unapproachable man for the nine years that remained to him. He died in the winter of 1896, at eighty-two, of kidney failure, in the little house behind the shop. The last of the hounds, an old brindled bitch of the Reiver line, lay across his feet. Callum Thorne is remembered in the Thorne family as The Bitter Bridle, the boatman of Frankfort, the tracker who followed a line to the end. In the Slayerverse he stands for the mercenaries of the old border houses, the hunters who were paid for the work and did it better than those who were not.