A tall, handsome man with an almost unnervingly youthful face, pale skin, straight blond hair, and clear blue eyes that seem to burn brighter when he is angry or frightened. He moves with a shepherd's economical balance, placing each step as if testing the ground for a hidden bog. In a crowded room he takes up more space than he realizes, standing squarely in doorways and turning his shoulders only at the last moment. His flat cap is polished smooth where his thumb worries its brim, a small, persistent motion that people notice before they know why it unsettles them. His smile is warm; the stillness that sometimes follows it is not.

Oswin is gentle with frightened animals and patient with William, yet shrewd enough to spot a bad bargain before it is spoken. He wants a settled home but dreams of the open dales; he can be tender with Mary and evasive about the thing that most deserves her honesty. In company he is practical and faintly humorous. When frightened or cornered, his warmth drops away and an old, watchful predator shows through.

Oswin says he was born among the Yorkshire dales and spent his youth roaming their high pastures, but his memories have seams in them: winters that seem to repeat, roads that lead to places he cannot find again, and a childhood cottage no one else remembers. He was already a wanderer when he met Mary, a practical young woman who made him want to stay. On their wedding night, frightened by his human failure and driven by a nature he had never learned to master, he took his hound-headed, headless Barguest form and approached Mary while she slept. She woke to a headless shape with red, saucer-bright eyes and struck at him with iron scissors. He fled, then returned in human shape and let her believe the terror had been a Barguest intruder. He has never confessed that it was him, or that she had been asleep when he first came to her. Mary remembers the youthful face of the man who later lay beside her, and still fears what the night means. Their son William was born with black hair and Oswin's blue eyes, and develops more slowly than other children. Locals call him Black William or Blackby and whisper that he is devil-spawn. Mary has told her father about the wedding night; Oswin does not know. Her father watches Oswin closely, suspecting that his age, his avoidance of iron, and the hound said to haunt the lanes are connected. Mary's other pregnancies have ended early. Oswin loves his family and makes time for them even on days when seasonal signs keep him awake, yet the dales still call to him in dreams, and some mornings he cannot trust his own memories.