That message was well known in the days gone by, when the world was a wilder, more dangerous place and the margins between the natural and the supernatural were not distinct as they would later seem. People were well aquainted with the manifestations of death in life. They watched for the signs of the Reaper, so that they might be ready to meet him when the time came. Accepting the inevitable, they did not care to go to their graves unprepared or leave their world without good-bys, all dignity lost in fear.

Some signs were homely warnings, oddities in domestic life that signified the imminence of change. A clock that stopped or chimed between the hours, disturbing the measure march of time, meant Death's eye was on the household. A guttering candle whose melting wax slid down the shaft in a broad stream--a winding-sheet shape--was another. Bees that swarmed not to fields or orchards in their quest for nectar but down chimneys into houses--so many winged souls, searching for companions--were another. A barnyard cock that crowed not at dawn but in the dead of the night, breaking the seemly silence, was still another.

Birds, in fact, ranging across the countryside in flight high above roof, steeple, field and forest, easily able to see any stranger and observe any change, served as heralds of Death more than any other beasts. A bird that beat against the windowpane or, worse, flew into a house, brought grim news to those within. Owls, which hunted at night and possessed sharp eyes that saw every stealthy movement in the dark, knew when the Reaper drew near: An Owl that hooted persistently near a house or tapped at the windowpane conveyed a bleak message. And the world over, the raven, with it's wheeling flight and keen intelligent eyes, was a precursos of death. The raven had served as a bird of phophecy from time immemorial. It was sacred to Apollo and the Oracles in ancient Greece. In Arabia, the raven was called Abu Zaj'ir, or "Father of Omens." In Germany, when a raven deserted it's raucous flock and flew alone over a house or croaked harsly near the door, the family within prepared for grief. The British thought the bird could detect odor of decay in a sick person even before the breath had left the body.

These were all creatures of the natural world, however, and while deviations from their usual behaviors might mean that Death was on it's way, they might as easily been simple oddities with perfectly reasonable explanations. But there were other forerunners of death that lent themselves to no natural explanation and that could ever be dismissed with a shrug or a show of indifference.

Such were black dogs, nightwalkers feared throughout the British Isles. The dogs that preceeded death were given various names-Black Shuck in East Anglia, Skriker and Trash-hound in Lancashire, Padfoot in Yorkshire--but all were of the same fell race. They appeared on dark nights in country lanes, loping easily along, eyes searching for solitary travelers who should've been safe at home. The people of Lancashire said that as such a dog approached, it swelled and grew until it was the size of a calf, and it's saucer -wide eyes glowed red in the dark, fired by malice and hunger. Those who saw the dog knew- even though it passed them with little more than a sideways glance-that their time had come.

No less eerie were the banshees that wailed for the dying throughout the British Isles and France. The name comes from the Gaelic bean side, meaning "woman of the fairy folk," and some banshees were indeed of fairy lineage; others it was thought, were ghosts themselves. They seemed attached to individual families, and they mourned the coming intrusion of death into the clan. Family members might hear their terrible cries swirling around the house at night, rising, it seemed, from the very walls and floors. Sometimes the wailing came from out of doors, and thoses within who looked from a window would see a rail-thin woman, her face white, her long hair streaming, her eyes blood red with weeping. She would drift in the air around the walls, peering through the windowpanes, to search for the one whos death she awaited. When she found that one and beckoned, the person had to go.

In Scotland, the banshee took another form: she was called the bean- nighe, or "washing woman." Small and squat-sometimes even grotesquely childlike in appearance-the bean -nighe was seen by travelers passing remote pools and fords. She ceaselessly beat bloodstained shrouds upon the river stones and wrung the water from the cloth, and sometimes she crooned a dirge all to herself. It was said that the traveler who dared to address her would hear the names of those about to die and would also hear--if he wished--his own fate fortold.

The bean- nighe was frequently described as a ghost herself-usualy the ghost of a woman who had died at childbirth. This was an untimely death, a curtailment of the normal course of a life. The dead mother was doomed to be a beckoner of the living, washing the shrouds of those among them who were about to join her, until the date of what would have been her natural death had been reached.

There was another beckoner, much less obtrusive than the banshee, one not attached to Celtic countries: It appeared in every land and in every walk of life. It was a quiet creature, but it's demand was inexorable, and all who saw it knew it's intent. Nodding in the window, tapping on the stair, a fetch waited patiently for it's victim to appear. It took a humans shape, the same as the human it was looking for, and when that same person saw it--they knew their time had come. The fetch, or double, summoned mortals to the grave.

Double or banshee, raven or owl, were no more than heralds, the forerunners of the hunter of souls, Death himself. He was the fearsome slayer of man, woman and child, of peasant, priest and prince alike. No one knew who he was, for he assumed many shapes and guises as he went about his business. But in every country there were names for him and tales about him.

In Brittany, Death was a man known as the Ankou. Some said he was none other than the fratricide Cain, eldest son of Adam, who was doomed to roam the earth as a collector of human carrion. Others thought he was the ghost of the last man to die each year, coming back to fill new graves before yielding place to his successor. Most people simply accepted him as Death.

All agreed, however, about his appearance. Tall and gaunt, often wearing a wide-brimmed hat, and sometimes manifest as a whitened skeleton swathed in a ragged shroud, the Ankou was a night stalker, emerging when prudent folk were safely indoors. He walked the lanes of the province with a peculiar, awkward gait, his head turning stifly from side to side with each step, scenting the air, for his eye sockets where empty. The Ankou was blind. Sometimes he carried a club or a sword, sometimes he went about with a sythe slung over his shoulder. Always he was accompanied by a cart drawn by horses or oxen, which he used to carry away those he had come to claim. This betrayed his presence: living folk in their houses could hear the creaking of the cart wheels and the heavy footfalls of the death bringer.

From dusk to the hour just before dawn, the Ankou continued to travel the roads and byways of Brittany, from Nantes to Rennes to Finist`ere, patiently waiting for those who ignored the curfew bells. The unwary would find themselves struck between the shoulder blades by a heavy hand, pushed face down into the dirt of the ditches, their nostrils filled with the earth that soon would be their home. Those trapped thus at dusk were lucky: They might live for another two years. But the people who met the Ankou late at night would die before the month was out.

The Ankou was a plodding workman himself, with his wide-brimmed hat, his creaking wooden death cart and his limitless, quiet patience. In this respect, he was quite different from the death harbingers to the north and east.

In Germany and Scandinavia, in Scotland and Whales and England, Death came for his victims with a cold, triumphant shout. He rode a mighty horse and led a wild troop of huntsmen across the night sky. When silver clouds scudded past the moon's face, the troop might appear as shadows galloping on the winds, surrounded by spectral hounds. The shouts and laughter of the riders often carried to the people huddled in cottage and castle far below, and few dared venture out when the winds howled and whined. It was better not to look, for a glimpse of the huntsman of souls brought madness and death.

Such death dealers as the Ankou and even the devil himself-when he rode as a huntsman of souls-generally carried out labors at measured pace. They struck down a cottager here and a townsman there, and perhaps a prince or prelate in between. Death seemed on occasion to be untimely, but it scarcely disturbed the even tenor of the world; if the number of the living was diminished by the exit of the dying, that number was also replenished by the entrance of the newly born.