I cut through a pine thicket toward the sound of Rupe’s voice. Just beyond it was a tangle of huckleberry, and I got hung up in that, which slowed me down. By then Rupe was whimpering and yelping and crying and yipping by turns. I couldn’t figure out what in tunket he had got himself involved with. If it had been a skunk, I’d have smelled it by now, I was sure, because I was getting pretty close.
I left part of my sweater and a good chunk of my religion in the bushes, but at last I was out and found a good clear trail that somebody’s cows used to go down to the river to drink. Right ahead was Rupe, and he made enough noise for a whole pack of coon hounds.
I slowed to a walk and went softly the last few yards. My Dad saw the last bear that was in these woods, I thought, but I didn’t want to take a chance that they’d made a comeback. And then I smelled something.
You take rotten. That can be nasty. Skunk is awful, but it’s a clean smell, sort of, like burnt coffee. Spoiled canned goods can turn your stomach. Put all those stinks together, and add a pinch of something that made your hackles rise, and you’d have the stink I was smelling. I was too far under the cover of the woods for the moon to do much good. My hand-generated flash was in my sweater pocket, and I dug it out and began pumping the handle. That bluish light pulsed into the black shadows, making the dust of the path shine like snow.
Rupe was a dark blot on that pale track. I swept the flickering beam up the path, toward the spot where Rupe was staring. It touched a dark bulk that was no bush.
That thing was BIG. Not even a bear would have been that size. A pair of eyes glinted red in the light as I stood, stunned. Then the thing turned and took off up the path, ambling along as if it wasn’t a bit afraid of me. That was when I saw that it wasn’t nearly as hairy as a bear. Patches of skin showed between taggles of scroungy fur.
It’s a good thing it left, for I couldn’t stir. I stood there for several minutes, squeezing the flash to keep from being in the dark, but I wasn’t able to stir a foot. Rupe brought me to when he started shivering against my leg. He had more sense than to chase anything like that.
He licked my hand, and that did it. Rupe whimpered and looked off into the brush. Then he looked at me again, into the brush again, and when he looked at me once more, I could see impatience in his eyes.
I wasn’t really anxious to find anything else that night, and I certainly didn’t want anything to find me. But I knew Rupe. He knew something was in that patch of sawvines, and he wouldn’t quit fussing until I found what it was.
I refused to go into any brush patch armed with a flashlight. I hunted around and found that sapling I needed, broke the top off across my knee, and then, armed with a very iffy weapon, I started into the dark tangle of stickers and brush.
First there was the glint of metal under my light. It resolved itself into a gun barrel—a curved gun barrel. There was a whitish blur behind it, and when I turned my light on it the most godawful face I ever saw stared back at me from dead eyes. I’ll have nightmares about that forever.
There was worse. That face was split half in two, down the middle. I looked at the gun barrel. That had done the job, and it was very, very messy. Whoever had used it had twisted that gun into a pretzel and flung it down beside his victim and left. Or had he? I remembered the size of the creature I had met on the path.
I backed out of the patch, my shoulder blades feeling a cold spot right in the middle. I shook all over, thinking of what might come back down that trail and be waiting for me. But the path was clear, except for the dark dabs of cow manure.
Rupe was shaking so hard against my legs that I had a hard time standing. It felt as if a hundred miles lay between me and any human help. The slim pulse of light from my flash didn’t comfort me at all.
When I was a boy, I knew that country like my own barnyard. Things had changed a lot since I was a boy: farms had been sold and resold; families had moved away and left empty houses and fields lying fallow. There was a house, I knew, toward the freeway, but that would have meant going in the same direction as that Whatever. No way!
My home was five miles or so to the south, and I didn’t want to go flying through those thickets again. My best chance was to follow the river downstream, for there was a big automated dairy there. It would have a phone and probably a crew with a man in charge. I hoped he owned a shotgun.
It was almost as light as day, once I reached the path along the river. The moon was just past the zenith, and the rocks in the streambed sparkled amid a glimmer of ripples. I felt better there, and Rupe did too. We went down faster than I’d have dared in full summer, when the water moccasins were out. We fairly flew along.
After a bit, something that had been nagging me worked up to the top of my mind. The air held a taint of that smell I’d found on the path in the woods. It was growing steadily stronger. I stopped for a minute, and there came a rustle in the woods. It halted almost as quickly as I did. I moved again and stepped to clear a muddy patch in the trail. Then I froze.
At the edge of the mud, etched clearly in shadow by the moonlight, was a footprint. Half again as big as mine, bare, with a strange sort of mark where the toes had gripped the ground like fingers. A gorilla, I thought, might make a mark like that.
There was another sound, and my heart raced for a moment. Then I relaxed, for it was my own breath, whistling in my throat. I forced myself to settle down. We were being tracked, off in the woods, by one or more of the things I had seen. Rupe knew it too. He was snarling so deep in his throat that it was almost inaudible.
I had no weapon but the sapling. I was trapped against the river, for I felt certain the thing could swim faster than I could; I could think of only one move to make. I had to go on downstream, fast enough to keep ahead, not so fast the things would begin chasing me.
Then I looked down at Rupe. I’ve said he was smart, but that leaves a lot unstated. He was well-nigh human when it came to understanding. On the days when Becky-Sue got up on the wrong side of the bed, he was a model dog, and I took my cue from him. For days before I knew it myself, he knew when I was going hunting.
I could tell him anything reasonable, and if he felt like doing it, he would. But this was going to be the most complicated thing I had ever tried to get across to him.
I waited until we hit a wide patch of beach, curving out into a bend of the stream. I followed it out until we were a good thirty yards from the edge of the trees. Then I paused and knelt, fiddling with a bootlace, while I said to the hound, “Go downriver, Rupe. Go find a man. Find a man, boy! Bring him!”
I was going to be right behind him, if I was let. I figured the critters would let him go—he wasn’t as big as I was and he was a hell of a lot faster. His scraggly tail waved back and forth; his tongue lolloped out in a quick grin, and he was gone.
Once he was out of sight, I felt lonelier than I ever had before in my life. Now there was nothing but me and the thing—or things—in the woods. Even Rupe’s shivering against my knee had reassured me that there was one thing in the world more scared than I was.
I moved onward, my pace deliberate. When I hurried, my unseen companion edged closer through the underbrush, the deep whoosh of its breath audible. When I went too slowly, I could see the brush rippling as it pushed through, and that didn’t comfort me a bit.
It seemed like hours that we went down the path, the moon seeming to be glued in the same spot in the sky. Time seemed not to be passing as fast for that moon as it was for me. Then, far ahead, I heard a sound—a dog’s high-pitched bark. Rupe. The blast of a shotgun followed on the heels of that cry, and I could hear a hubbub. I lit out running as hard as I could, forgetting the stalker in the woods.
That thing was fast! It was after me instantly, but sheer panic gave me more speed than ever before. I stayed ahead of it around two bends. Then I saw light ahead—the glare of lanterns and the white flare of flashlights. A speeding shape bulleted into me, knocking me flat just in time for a load of buckshot to zing over me.
/> There was a startled grunt, off in the brush, and I rolled clear of the path to let a mess of snarling Dobermans go tearing past. There was a terrific crashing and growling in the woods, and I figured that those devils would take the thing down, if anything could.
Then there was a shriek you wouldn’t believe could come out of a dog, and the whole pack went screaming back the way they came. They almost ran down the burly fellow leading the men with the lights and guns.
“What in the blue-toe-nailed hell is going on?” he yelled.
I rose up almost under his feet, with old Rupe tying himself in knots around my legs. “That thing’s been following us through the woods. Your dogs tangled with it. There’s a dead man upriver, if I can find him again, and if I can’t, Rupe can. I saw what killed him, I think. That thing, or one just like it.” I shivered hard.
The men had gathered around me, now, their faces grim.
“There it stood in the middle of the path,” I said, “seven feet tall if it was an inch. Face on it like nothing you ever saw, hair all over with skin showing through. It walked away as if I wasn’t worth bothering with. And then Rupe showed me the corpse. Its head was split open with its own gun.
“The thing followed us, and I sent Rupe ahead to get help.” I was chattering too much, and my teeth were beginning to join in, but the big man put his hand on my shoulder.
“Damndest dog I ever did see,” he said. “We were getting ready to go to bed, when that hound ran against the door like he was going to bust right in. Gage looked out and give him a cussing and let off a round of shot, but that didn’t faze him. He set in the yard and raised Cain till I got the gun and went out to shoot him. He come right up to me and grabbed my pants leg and tried to haul me off upriver.
“I don’t claim to be awful bright, but I know a good dog when I see it, and this ’un was telling me something just as plain as he could, so I called out the crew and turned the dogs loose, and here we come. But what in tarnation could scare those devils?”
“Believe me, you don’t want to find out. Just come with me and help me find that body. I don’t know if the thing will come back and eat it or bury it or haul it off, but we might hurry, just the same.”
The trip upriver was far more cheerful than the one down had been. Hal Bartley, the big foreman of the dairy, knew that river like the fisherman he was. He knew just the cow trail that ran down to the water. And once we found that, the rest was only very messy details.
I got home with the dawn. Becky-Sue was in the kitchen, listening to the coffeepot bubbling and thinking up mean things to say to me when I came up the path through the back yard. But I fooled her. The foreman sent me home in a pickup, and Gage let me off at my front gate.
I staggered up the flagged walk, followed by Rupe, who was even more beat than I was. I let the front screen bang shut, and Becky-Sue was out of the kitchen and up the hall in half a shake, her checkered shirt-tail popping in the breeze.
She halted in the door, her gaze going from Rupe to me and back again. “What happened to you two?” she asked.
I told her, while she dished up bacon and flapjacks and Rupe gobbled a bowl of oatmeal (his favorite dish).
“You mean to tell me that there is a monster like that wandering down there in the woods?” she asked.
“More than one, I think. Two, I feel sure, stalked us down the river path.”
“And who was the dead man?” She was busy wiping down the stovetop.
“Bartley knew him. He was part-time help at the dairy, and he’d gone squirrel hunting. His gun had been fired, but squirrel shot couldn’t possibly have stopped that thing. He would have been better off if he’d been like me—with not even a stick that looked like a gun. I suspect those things have gotten wary of firearms, if they’ve met many hunters in the woods.”
I finished my coffee and looked up at her. “I’ve just about lost my taste for coon hunting. When Rupe and I get an itch to run in the woods, we’re going to do it in the daytime. And not downriver. Okay?”
She grinned. “In one month, you’ll both be down there hunting that whachmacallit,” she said. There wasn’t a trace of doubt in her tone. “I’ve already seen you cutting your eyes around toward the gun rack, wondering if the .306 will stop it. If you score the slugs across the ends of the lead to make them spread on impact, they just might. But those things have a right to live too, Bruce Williams. You think about that, before you go hunting them.”
I looked down at my plate. Becky-Sue may not appreciate coon hunting, but she has me down cold. She was right. I was already thinking about going after the thing that had scared me so.
I listened close to the radio and the TV news for a few days, while the sheriff’s men combed the woods around the spot where the body was found. They came up with some mighty strange tracks, but that was all.
They also came and questioned me more than once, but anybody looking at what was done to that gun, not to mention the skull of the dead man, could see that a middle-aged ex-schoolteacher simply couldn’t have done either one, even if he’d had a motive, which I hadn’t.
After a while things calmed down and no more investigators roamed around in the woods. That was when I took Becky-Sue’s advice and scored some rounds across the ends of the slugs and set off with Rupe again.
By now the moon was dark, and I took with me a big hand light we used around the farm. It weighed a ton, but it was mighty bright and the battery lasted for a lot of hours without running out of juice.
This wood wasn’t the clean place I knew back when I was a boy. Once I got off our land and into the cut-over forest, it was a mad tangle of vines and saplings; dead tops left by loggers were grown up with persimmon sprouts, and it held hidden traps where the log trucks got stuck, winched out, and left deep holes that later weeds and brush grew over and covered up.
I could have gone the way I went before, of course, but I reckoned that the critter I’d seen wasn’t going to be within miles of all the activity there had been there. I put myself in his place and decided I would be up in the logging company plantation, which was well grown but not ready to cut. It was the nearest good cover for miles.
I talked it over with Rupe, and while he looked pretty doubtful when I got through to him what I wanted, he set off, his tail low and his ears looking droopy. I followed him. Animals know things that people have forgotten, and he went pretty straight toward the place I’d picked.
I didn’t go in the dark, did I mention that? I might be out after sundown, which is why I took the light, but I wasn’t such a fool that I’d hunt one of those monsters by night. No, I intended to check out tracks and trails for footprints, and once I located those I had my plans pretty well made.
Rupe was a master hand at finding what he looked for, and before full dark he’d sniffed out a deer trail and started giving his “Here it is, why don’t you come ahead and look at it?” yelp.
There were those oversized prints, all right: two sets, one smaller than the other. There was even the barest hint of overpowering stink left on the bushes alongside the trail. We were in the right place, and it was just on the edge of getting very dark indeed.
I cast around to find one of the big hardwoods they sometimes left among the pines, and sure enough there was a hickory tree at the fence line, its heavy branches black against the last light in the sky and bending over the path where the tracks appeared. I hitched my rifle around my shoulder, tucked the torch in my pack, and went up it, groaning all the way. The climbing you do so easily at ten is a lot harder in middle age, believe me.
Then I waited. Rupe was settled into a clump of huckleberry off to one side of the path, and I knew he’d let me know the minute anything walked up the trail, so I let myself rest, even doze a bit, once I had the spotlight hitched to a branch above my head and the rifle laid along the limb on which I was sitting, my back to the heavy trunk of the tree.
I woke when my head nodded forward. The pines rustled in a light breeze, but otherwise the nig
ht was quiet. An owl, way over toward the creek, gave a quavering cry, and a killdeer whimpered sadly as it flew. Then Rupe gave a growl, just barely loud enough for me to hear. I sat and hefted the rifle. My left hand was on the button of the light, and when Rupe gave his “Here they come!” bark, I pushed it down and looked along the path.
They were almost just below me, staring up toward the brilliant light as if it blinded them, freezing them in place. I had the rifle at my shoulder before I realized what I was seeing.
The big one was ugly, true, but those eyes, shining like a dog’s in the beam, seemed somehow puzzled and anxious. Its arm was around the shoulders of the smaller one, and I took a good look at it, too. Damn! It was just a kid, its hair almost downy compared to that of its...father? Those eyes shone silver, and the awkward shape shrank against the other’s side as if for protection.
All of a sudden it hit me. We humans had cut out the woods for miles all around the river. Who knows how many centuries these creatures had lived in the deep thickets, never being forced out where people would see them or pose a danger to them? And now that we had pushed them out of their natural place, we wanted to shoot them.
That man they killed over by the river had been, I was willing to bet, aiming to shoot the one that wrapped his gun around his head. Self-defense has always seemed to me to be the only rational reason for killing anything, now that we don’t have to hunt for food. By that measure Old Ugly there had been perfectly justified in what he’d done.
I looked down at the gun in my hands. They weren’t any danger for me. I sure as hell didn’t want to eat them. Why was I here in a tree like some sort of silly owl, intending to kill something that belonged here far more than I did?
I clicked off the light. Rupe gave an inquiring snuffle, but I didn’t hear anything at all. I gave them five minutes to move before I lit the torch again. The path was empty except for Rupe, who was looking disgusted and staring up at me, his eyes red in the beam.
Strange Doin's in the Pine Hills Page 14
