Murdoch Thorne

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

Murdoch Thorne was born in 1790 in Lexington, Kentucky, at the heart of the bluegrass horse country, and he lived fifty-seven years as a riverboat pilot and a vampire slayer of the House of Thorne. The family book calls him The Slow Crook, for the long, curved hunting staff he carried and for the unhurried way he closed on his quarry. He was a Soldier in the Thorne sense, a hunter who fought in company and under orders, and his craft was Hound Handling, the training of dogs that the Northumbrian border hunters had brought across the Atlantic. He died in 1847 in a fall from a roof during a chase, leaving a son, Ninian Thorne, who married into the Faulkner line in 1840. The Thornes of Kentucky were an old-fashioned family. Their ancestors had been border reivers of the Northumbrian marches, raiding cattle across the English and Scottish line, and had turned, in time, to hunting the things that hunted cattle. They kept peel towers, watched from roofs and trained hounds, and they brought all of these habits with them to the Appalachian frontier, where they settled in the hills of Virginia and Kentucky. Murdoch's kin were among the first families on the Kentucky River, and in the decade of his birth they had established a number of farms on the rich, rolling limestone land around Lexington, where the horses were already becoming famous. Lexington in 1790 was a frontier town of a few hundred people, which had been founded only fifteen years earlier, when a party of hunters, hearing the news of the battle in Massachusetts, named their camp after it. It was already the largest settlement west of the mountains, with a courthouse, a number of stores, a printing press and, soon, a university. Its streets were mud in spring and dust in summer, and its taverns were full of land speculators, horse traders, lawyers, surveyors and boatmen. The bluegrass country around it was being cleared and fenced, and every other farm kept a stud. Murdoch grew up among horses and dogs. His father, whose name the Thorne papers do not give, kept hounds, big rough-coated animals of a blood that mixed bloodhound, mastiff and something older, and the boy was put to training them at eight. The Thorne method, which the Ledger calls Hound Handling, began with the puppy. The trainer raised the animal from birth, slept beside it, fed it from his own hand and taught it, through patience, a vocabulary of a hundred words and whistles. A fully trained Thorne hound would track a cold trail, hold a man without harm, stand at a command, bay at the scent of a vampire and, if necessary, fight. It was slow, careful work, and it gave Murdoch a patience that shaped his entire temperament. By his teens he was a tall, lean, unhurried young man with a craggy face and a mild voice, who moved, as a neighbour said, as if he had all the time in the world. He worked on the river. The Kentucky and the Ohio were the roads of the country, and a pilot who could read the currents was always in demand. Murdoch piloted keelboats and flatboats down the Kentucky to the Ohio, and down the Ohio and Mississippi to Natchez and New Orleans, and back up again on foot or by the long, slow labour of poling and warping. He knew every sandbar, snag and bend between Frankfort and the Gulf. His calling came in 1809, at nineteen, in a stable. He had gone to a horse farm near Lexington to collect a dog, and the horses in the barn were screaming, a sound he had heard only once before, in a fire. He found the groom lying in an empty stall, cold and pale. His hounds, which he had brought with him, would not go in. He stood in the doorway for a long moment, with the dogs pressed against his legs, and then he did what a Thorne would do: he took up a pitchfork, stepped inside and waited. The thing that came down from the hayloft did not see him until it was on the floor. It was his first tally, and his family took him in as a hunter that week. The work suited him. As a Thorne, he was trained in the discipline of the watch, in which a small group holds a perimeter and lets the enemy come to it, and as a pilot he had an excellent sense of the ground. With his hounds, he hunted up and down the river, from the horse farms of the Bluegrass to the landings of the Ohio. He took twenty-six vampires in his first ten years, and the Ledger notes that he never lost a dog. His gear was silver-cast shot and a revolving pistol of the new kind, which he carried more for its novelty than for its reliability, and a long hunting staff with a crook of iron at the end, which he used to turn a door, hook a window and, on one celebrated occasion, pull a vampire off a roof. He fought in the War of 1812 with the Kentucky volunteers, in the northern campaign of 1813, and he took four hounds with him, which the army billeted in a barn and fed on salt pork. The army, which did not know what to make of the dogs, found them useful for scouting, and Murdoch, who was made a sergeant, was obliged to write in the muster book that they were for the detection of Indians. They were, in fact, for something else. His son, Ninian Thorne, was born in 1815 and lived until 1878. The boy's mother does not appear in the Thorne papers, and the family did not discuss it. Ninian was raised on the river and trained in the kennel, and he became a vampire slayer of the House of Thorne like his father. In 1840 he married Effie Faulkner, the daughter of the printer Jacob Brewster Faulkner and the landlady Abigail Putnam, and with her he carried the Thorne name into the Faulkner family. Murdoch, then fifty, attended the wedding at Newburyport, a voyage of several weeks that he made by river, coast and stage, and pronounced the town too flat. He hunted into his fifties. In the spring of 1847, at fifty-seven, he was pursuing a vampire across the roofs of a river town when a slate gave way beneath him, and he fell into the lane. He died the next day. The hound that had been with him, a grey bitch named Thistle, would not leave the body, and the Thorne family buried her beside him. Murdoch Thorne is remembered as The Slow Crook, the riverman who kept hounds and never hurried. In the Slayerverse he stands for the border tradition at its most patient, in which the dog, the watch and the long approach did more than any rifle.