Claudia's eyes light up.
"Hell yes! You're my kind of person."
"Mad Jack was hated by the Catholic peasantry, less because of his sacrilegious ways and more because of his deliberate, relentless repression of Catholic tenant farmers. A secret society known as the Stag Boys was formed to oppose him, one of dozens such groups operating in the Irish countryside at the time. But Dunbar's real passion in life was hunting wolves. There was still a handful of wolves surviving in the Irish wilds by the eighteenth century, and Mad Jack pursued them obsessively and systematically.
"He hunted down and killed the last one in Glenkildove."
"Or did he?" asks Claudia, donning a portentous scowl.
"Claudia's talking about the Beast," Simon explains. "The Beast of Glenkildove. The Beast is a folk legend, going back centuries. It's said to be a monster that stalks the Wicklow Mountains, preying on deer, sheep, cattle, and sometimes human beings. It roams up and down the length of the mountains, but its lair is in Glenkildove. Some stories say it's a hunting creature of the Sidhe, the fairy folk of Irish folklore. Others that it's a hellhound that Mad Jack Dunbar and the Sons of Perdition called up one stormy night."
"But I say," says Claudia with relish, "that it's the last wolf in Ireland. Mad Jack never finished it off and if he couldn't do it, nothing could. It just kept on stalking through the nights, getting older, more cunning…"
Without thinking, you interject.
"…lonelier."
"…angrier."
"…and more dangerous."
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