Ewan Thorne

Slayer of House of Thorne, parent of a spouse who married into the Proctor line.

Ewan Thorne was born in 1778 in the Kentucky River country, at the ford that would later grow into the town of Frankfort, and he lived fifty-five years as a blacksmith and a vampire slayer of the House of Thorne. The Ledger calls him The Cold Tally. He was a Soldier in the Thorne sense, a hunter who fought in line and under orders, and his craft was Hound Handling, the breeding and training of dogs to track, hold and, if necessary, fight what they found. He died in 1833 in an ambush on a lonely road, leaving a son, Callum Thorne, who carried the name into the second half of the century and married into the Proctor line. The House of Thorne came from the Northumbrian marches, where for generations its members had been border reivers, cattle thieves and feuding clansmen who lived on the line between England and Scotland, and who in time turned their skills to hunting vampires in the same hills. They were famous for their watchtowers, their dogs and their habit of dealing with a threat in a single overwhelming stroke. After the Union, many of the Thornes emigrated, and the American branch, mountain hunters of the Appalachian ridges and the Kentucky knobs, carried on the old traditions. Ewan's family was among the early arrivals in Kentucky, and he was born in 1778 into a world of stockade stations and long rifles, where the Thornes had been hunting before the Faulkners and Proctors had arrived. The Thorne papers do not name his parents, and he is entered in the Ledger as the son of the Kentucky branch. They do record that he was apprenticed to a blacksmith at fourteen and that by his early twenties he had a forge of his own on the river road. He was a square, dark-browed, quiet man with a long jaw and a scar that ran from his ear to his collar, the result, he said, of a disagreement with a hound. The forge was a rough shed with a chimney of limestone blocks, and he worked there at everything the country needed, from horseshoes to shackles. His speciality was dog collars and chains, heavy iron things that no hound could break, and a good many of them found their way into the Thorne kennels. The calling came in 1799, when he was twenty-one, after a fire. A whole lane of cabins on the edge of the settlement had burned in a single night, and the morning revealed that every building had been reduced to ashes except for one door, which stood upright in its frame amid the ruins, unscorched. The survivors were silent. Ewan, who had gone to help dig through the wreckage, noticed that the dogs would not go near the door, and that the hinges, which he had forged himself, were cold. One of the older Thornes, an uncle who was already a slayer, took him aside and told him what he had seen. He was a hunter by the end of the week. His craft was a Thorne inheritance. Hound Handling had been practised in the border country for centuries, and the American branch had adapted it to the Kentucky woods. Ewan bred a line of big, rough-coated hounds, part bloodhound, part mastiff and part something the neighbours did not ask about, and trained them from puppyhood to follow a cold trail, to hold a man without killing him, to stand off at a whistle and, most importantly, to bark at anything that did not smell right. A pack of six of them could clear a wooded hollow in an hour. They were the terror of the district's horse thieves and, on more than one occasion, the saving of the Kentucky settlements from something considerably worse. His gear was a long rifle and silver-cast shot. He kept the hounds, who did not need silver, in a kennel behind the forge. The Ledger credits him with a tally of nearly forty vampires, nearly all taken with the hounds. He never spoke of it. The alias came from his manner in a fight, which was cool, deliberate and entirely lacking in heroics, and from the dry way he kept his entries, which listed each kill in a column without comment. He fought in the War of 1812 with the Kentucky riflemen, attached to the forces that went north against the British and their Indian allies in the Thames campaign of 1813, and he took four of his hounds with him. The army, which had no provision for dogs, found them useful for scouting and assigned one of its sergeants to feed them. He had a son, Callum Thorne, born in 1814, whose mother does not appear in the Thorne papers. Callum was raised in the forge and in the kennel, trained by his father in the hound work and called in his turn to be a vampire slayer, and he lived until 1896. In 1840 he married Minnie Proctor Thorne, a Thorne on her father Hob's side and a Proctor on her mother's, which bound the Thornes to the White Ledger in the way that many of the border families had been bound. Ewan was not there to see it. He died in 1833, at the age of fifty-five, in an ambush on a lonely road. He was riding home from a hunt with two hounds at his heels when a party of men who had been hired to kill him stopped him in a cutting. The hounds killed three of them. Ewan was shot twice and died that night in the lee of a fallen tree, with the dogs lying across his legs. His son, then nineteen, found him in the morning and brought him home. The hounds deserve a note of their own, because they outlasted him. After Ewan's death his son Callum kept the kennel and the line, and the descendants of Ewan's original bitch, a brindled animal named Reiver, were still working the Kentucky hollows a half century later. The Thorne family kept a stud book, written on the back of old shoeing accounts, that listed each animal by name, colour, sire and dam, and the book is one of the few documents from the period in which the Thorne voice is heard at length, dry, exact and full of affection for dogs. Its last entry, written in a shaky hand in the 1890s, records only that the old dog had died and the work was done. Ewan Thorne is remembered as The Cold Tally, the blacksmith who kept hounds, the Kentucky soldier of his house. In the Slayerverse he stands for the old border tradition transplanted whole, with its dogs, its watchfulness and its refusal to make a show of anything.