Devil’s hounds

The Devil’s hounds are the feared predators in the sheep’s account of what happens to a soul after death: once it leaves the body, it is vulnerable to being seized by them. They are never shown as physical creatures; instead, the flock’s belief in them helps Miss Maple interpret the murder of George Glenn and judge what a human witness might have felt at the scene.

Place in the Sheep’s Beliefs

Miss Maple explains that death separates the soul from the body, whose post-mortem smell is unbearable to the soul’s sensitive nose. Newly separated, the soul is exposed to danger: the Devil’s hounds may catch it before it can escape. The idea gives the sheep a way to connect the body’s physical decay with an unseen spiritual peril, using scent—one of their most important means of understanding the world—to imagine the soul’s vulnerability.

The hounds also belong to a shared local story rather than to a danger Miss Maple claims to have witnessed. When she asks what horror the lost soul must have felt beside George Glenn’s body and the spade, Mopple recalls the account of the Devil’s hounds. The fear is therefore present in the flock’s understanding of death even though the creatures themselves remain unseen.

Role in the Murder Investigation

Miss Maple brings the hounds into her consideration of Rebecca. She reasons that Rebecca comes from elsewhere and does not know the local belief about the Devil’s hounds. If Rebecca had stood beside the body and spade, Maple argues, she would not have felt the particular horror that someone familiar with the story might experience. This difference in knowledge becomes a clue in Maple’s effort to interpret reactions to the crime, though she acknowledges that it does not prove Rebecca guilty.

The hounds also figure in Maple’s later theory about the murderer’s motive. After recalling the words about being unable to live without one’s soul, she proposes that George’s soul was in danger and that the murderer wanted to claim it before the Devil’s hounds reached it. She then extends the speculation to God, whom she believes is frightened for his own soul and might seek a replacement. This is Maple’s chain of interpretation, not a confirmed explanation of the murder.

Narrative Significance

The Devil’s hounds make the sheep’s investigation distinctively theirs: a creature that has no visible presence in the crime scene can still shape how they assess fear, knowledge, and motive. Their importance rests on the flock’s belief, not on an encounter with actual hounds. The idea also exposes a gap between human and sheep understanding. Rebecca’s unfamiliarity with the story may make her response to the body seem suspicious to Maple, but that inference remains uncertain, and the supernatural account does not settle the question of who killed George Glenn.