Rabid by Monica Murphy, Bill Wasik Read Free Book Online Page B

when Hubert is a young seventh-century nobleman in the Frankish kingdom, son of the Duke of Aquitaine. Hubert decides to spurn courtly life. He retreats to the deep forests of the Ardennes, the range of noble hills that roll through what is now Belgium and into the east of France, and devotes himself to the hunt. One Good Friday, so the legend goes, the young man is giving chase to a stag when the beast rears around, a crucifix hovering between its antlers. “Unless thou turnest to the Lord,” a heavenly voice intones, to the bewilderment of the stag’s pursuer, “and leadest an holy life, thou shalt quickly go down into Hell.”
    Hubert bows before the creature that a moment ago was his prey. “Lord,” he asks, “what wouldst Thou have me do?”
    It is a startling cross-cultural transformation: this is the myth ofActaeon, overhauled to serve a distinctly different cosmology. Again we have a hunter, surprised to find himself in the company of a deity. Again a stag is imbued supernaturally with consciousness. But the resolutions of these two brushes with divinity, Actaeon’s and Hubert’s, could not be more divergent. Vengeful Diana chooses to make Actaeon the stag, thereby condemning him to a senseless, though symbolically appropriate, death in his own hounds’ jaws. But the monotheistic deity, resonant with the divine sacrifice of the Christ story, makes Himself into the hunted form. To the early Christian mind, the Hubert tale also resounded because it played on both sides of a sometimes contradictory medieval fascination with the hunt. When hunting appears in medieval narratives, as the historian John Cummins notes, it generally “detaches a man…from his normal environment and, frequently, his companions, and takes him into unfamiliar territory”—territory that “is not merely topographical, but emotional and sometimes moral.” In popular romance, it was in pursuit of the stag that heroes proved themselves above all.
    Yet the finest stag was as revered as (or perhaps more revered than) the finest hunter was. The most exalted prey in the medieval hunt, the hart was believed to be uniquely holy. A stag pursued by hounds would sometimes figure as a marginal illustration in Bibles to symbolize good encroached by evil; one Christian allegorist likened the ten points of its antlers to the Ten Commandments. Bestiaries, in their treatment of the stag, would sometimes invoke Psalm 42: “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after you, O God.” The devil, meanwhile, was portrayed as a hunter, setting traps for his human prey. One fourteenth-century German work goes so far as to say that Christ himself was hunted down and killed by “the hounds of hell and the infernal huntsman, the devil.”
    As that last example suggests, the dog was not seen in nearly so rosy a light. Though bestiaries often did remark on the helpful characteristics of dogs, they also lingered on not especially flattering examples: for instance, comparing the recalcitrant sinner to the dog thatreturns to its own vomit. In general, the spread of Christianity from the fourth to the eighth century had brought along with it a more uniformly dark vision of the dog, a view that is literally inscribed in scripture: of the forty-odd times that “dog” or “dogs” appears in the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, depictions of the creature range from revolting to merely distasteful. The best that the Bible can deign to say of a dog is this characteristically sardonic aphorism from the narrator of Ecclesiastes: “Anyone who is among the living has hope—even a live dog is better off than a dead lion!”
    From there, though, it just gets nastier. As a holy people, the Israelites are ordered not to eat the flesh of wild beasts; instead, “throw it to the dogs.” Dogs appear often as eaters of human flesh and drinkers of human blood. In 1 Kings alone, they are not just devouring corpses in the towns of Jeroboam and Baasha