This year, an archaeological excavation in Egypt unearthed some eight million mummies, none of which were human. The team was digging in a so-called dog catacomb in Saqqara, a vast necropolis that received the dead of the capital, Memphis, for more than three thousand years. The head researcher explained that the dogs were associated with a nearby temple of the jackal-god Anubis. He noted that since the remains were not exclusively canine, many cults likely practiced at the site, mummifying “bulls, cows, baboons, ibises, hawks and cats, all of which were thought to act as intermediaries between humans and their gods.” Another Egyptologist explained the funerary custom:

In some churches people light a candle, and their prayer is taken directly up to God in that smoke. In the same way, a mummified dog’s spirit would carry a person’s prayer to the afterlife.

The otherness of the animal makes it the perfect emissary to the spirit world. Since we can’t know what an animal knows, we are free to imagine it knows a great deal we don’t. We speak of acute sensitivities to the ethereal, and in horror films it anticipates the evil threat lurking close at hand—the very peril its master happily blunders into. The paradox of pets: they can be loyal, intimate companions, but they cannot save us from ourselves. They remind us of our uniquely human weakness, insignificance and dread.

“To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears,” Werner Herzog warns in the 2005 documentary Grizzly Man, which traces the reasoning of Timothy Treadwell, who succumbed to a blissful and finally fatal illusion: that the grizzly bear, by its mere if majestic proximity, offers a way out of the misery of higher intelligence. For Herzog, the grizzly has only instinct, no answers. It will not teach us about the world, rather about itself and its place in that world at this moment. Animals, lacking a sense of time, convey the perpetual present—all they can do is be.

But what if that were the illusion? It is hard to look a dog in the eye and see anything but an ignorance that amounts to fiercely protected wisdom. Every pet owner knows the feeling: somehow, this creature has domesticated me. So it appears with Poe’s raven, who drills his one-word communiqué into the narrator’s mind as though they were sitting in obedience school. Poe scholar John F. Adams wrote a bit of marginalia about the author’s choice of bird:

Ravens can be taught to speak, they have a reputation for following armies and relishing death, and their dark plumage suggests melancholy and gloom. More subtle and ironic significance, however, can be found in the curious traditions which have accrued to this dark bird, associating him with wisdom, deviousness, and messenger service. In Hebrew folklore the raven, originally white, was turned black in punishment for not returning to the ark when Noah sent him out to check the flood conditions. His failure to return when he learned the waters were receding was attributed to bestial appetite, for which he was constrained ever after to feed on carrion.

One sees how the biological fact of the species—the raven is a scavenger, not a hunter—translates neatly into anthropomorphic trait: the raven is cunning, morbid, melancholy. The Noah story captures the contradiction well. The bird, given a human directive, loses out to its “bestial” nature, and for that the bird is punished as though it had a choice. Didn’t it? Didn’t the clever raven, sighting land, resolve to abandon that floating menagerie to its fate? When he learned the waters were receding…

This is a rule of sorts. If an animal has good news, it’ll never reach you. If it brings bad tidings, you’ll get the message loud and clear. Lassie and Flipper were glorified alarm systems. The former was supposedly based on a collie mix who, during World War I, sniffed out a breathing British sailor left for dead in a makeshift mortuary. On TV, however, she’s a troubling expression of parental negligence.

In periods of national upheaval and political disaster, or when a security guard has been drinking, the Demon Cat, a phantom of the U.S. Capitol, makes its presence known. According to the late Florian Thayn, a historian who worked there for twenty-five years, the legend began with a rat problem. Of the many cats let loose in the Capitol’s basement tunnels, one was apparently immortal, and continued to stalk the halls of government buildings.

The demon cat would usually meet someone alone in a dark corridor. It had large yellow eyes that seemed to hypnotize, and it would snarl. It would seem to grow larger and larger until it would make a final lunge toward its victim and then either explode or disappear over the victim's head.

We’ve all met a similar cat, I believe. The fickle feline is rightly associated with changes quick and drastic, often assassination—he and the country mutate as one. Sharing his initials with the capital itself, he has uncanny resonance: in a place rife with shadows, rats and deception, the mighty cat is king. He operates not in the open but interstitial space, the hidden passageways of power. He outranks, and outlasts, each passing president. He is the specter of a predatory empire.

And if some macabre zoological apparition is going to symbolize our angst, it will also reflect our communal guilt for exploiting and abusing that particular beast. The ghosts of hundreds of horses, conscripted to serve in a human war, are said to gallop the moonlit fields of Gettysburg. Wild specimens killed for sport in the Roman Coliseum have stuck around as well. Visitors claim to hear the ancient roar of lions and tigers provoked into pointless battle. Lessons in historical atrocity, delivered without language.

The cryptids, too, have hard truths to impart. Sasquatch, Bigfoot, the Yeti, whichever local variation you prefer, has become a “missing link,” a boogeyman for the (anti)scientific age, not to mention a reminder of what we have lost and gained in coming down out of the forests. For that reason, the fear of Bigfoot is also a fear of atavism. Like the Loch Ness Monster he must, for plausibility’s sake, keep in some state of stealthy hermitage. Both are therefore isolated on what appears to be the edge of extinction. But animals don’t worry about extinction. We do.

Which brings us back to dogs: no other animal so aptly demonstrates how the soul and destiny of human civilization is bound up with the rest of nature. Dogs became pets when they traded protection for the food we dropped by the fire. They are friends by way of symbiosis. Around the globe, however, thrive stories of hellhounds, brutes with glowing eyes, black harbingers of storms, execution and devilry. Nowhere are these tales more popular than in the British Isles. A Scottish version involves the Cù Sìth, a fairy hound identified by its light green color. A 1900 volume by J.G. Campbell, Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland: Collected Entirely from Oral Sources, describes the animal:

Its motion was silent and gliding, and its bark a rude clamour (blaodk). It went in a straight line, and its bay has been last heard, by those who listened for it, far out at sea. Its immense footmarks, as large as the spread of the human hand, have been found next day traced in the mud, in the snow, or on the sands.

A dog that leaves human-sized prints. Again that dubious epiphany: we are the animals, the animals are us—we just don’t understand how. This gulf will separate us always. But there is one helpful certainty: only in life are we any different from them. The Cù Sìth, when he’s not patrolling the hills, has a job. At the appointed hour of death, he arrives to shepherd you to the afterlife—a furry, four-legged Grim Reaper. Isn’t this a fine humility? We are asked to abandon our bodies, everyone and everything we know, to follow a dog somewhere. We follow. After all, we can trust him.