Strange Doin's in the Pine Hills

by Ardath Mayhar

  Her eyes soon ached with the effort to see ahead, to guide the horse around the worst of the bad spots in the road. She was tired to the bone too, for her day had been work from beginning to end. But she wasn’t sleepy, no matter how her eyes protested or her body ached. She heard every effortful breath her baby drew, flinched at every wheeze or coughing spasm.

  The night seemed to pass as slowly as the miles. She had no clock, but the stars moved in a narrow ribbon above the cut where the track ran, and she could tell, when she looked, that the constellations were progressing westward. But so slowly!

  She figured that she was somewhere about halfway to her destination when she heard the cry again. Like a woman screaming. The cougar! Had the beast been following her all that distance? Silently creeping behind the slow-paced wagon, drawn by the scent of her child?

  Coaly was tired raw, though she had stopped twice to let him drink at creeks they’d crossed and once to let him rest a bit. But she sat straighter and flicked him with the reins. He snorted with irritation, but he picked up his hooves a bit faster.

  Julie felt beneath the rough plank-board seat and found the handle of the bullwhip Jody kept for running the stock out of her garden. Coaly had never in his life felt the weight of that four-ply lash, but she knew that the time might well be coming when he would.

  Behind them there was another sound—not the scream now, but a rough, coughing growl. As if in answer, the baby went into a fit of coughing that seemed as if it would tear out her tender lungs. She found no relief until Julie reached down, one-handed, and lifted Lissa into her lap. Lying on her stomach, head down, the child gave a last choking wheeze and got a lungful of air.

  Having to secure Lissa on her knees added one more burden to Julie’s load. Coaly was moving faster, bouncing the wagon over obstacles she hadn’t the time to pick out and steer around. Behind her in the wagon bed Jody was whimpering, still half asleep but disturbed by the rough jolting of the wagon.

  “Go back to sleep, baby,” she said over her shoulder. “We’ll be there soon.”

  The little boy reached up to catch a handful of her skirt that hung over the back of the seat-board. “I don’t like it, Mama,” he said. “Don’t like to sleep in the wagon. Don’t like goin’ in the dark. Less go home. Please?”

  “We’ll be at Gramma Dooley’s in a little while. You like Gramma—remember when we went to the revival and she gave you the horehound candy? She’ll likely have some more for you. And sugar cookies. You know how you like her cookies!”

  The wagon lurched over part of a stump left in the track, and Jody forgot about cookies and began to howl in earnest. As Julie spared a glance back, she thought she saw something in the track. It was too dark to tell what, and it was a long way back, but there was a deeper darkness there. Moving.

  “Jody!” she grated, her voice harsher than he had ever heard it. “Shut your mouth! Lie down and roll up in the blanket! And be still. I’m not playing any game. There’s a cougar back there, I’m pretty sure. We’ve got to move fast, and it’s going to be mighty rough. Now you do like I tell you!”

  When he had rolled into a dark lump, she reached down and lifted the lantern from its hook. Then, holding the baby against her with both knees, keeping the reins in her left hand, she turned, holding the light high, and looked fully backward.

  Two reddish sparks glinted with reflected light. Then they blinked once and were gone. So was the shadow, but she knew the animal had taken to the trees. It could travel as quickly through that tangle as Coaly could along the roadway. There was no way a horse could outrun a cougar while pulling a buckboard, even if it had a good surface to run on. But she had to try to make Coaly do the impossible.

  She put the lantern back in its place. One-handed, jouncing and bumping as she worked, she put the baby into the basket on the seat beside her and tied that securely to the braces holding the seat in place. Then she swung the bullwhip in a long arc overhead and cracked its wicked tip just above the black horse’s nervous ears.

  “Go, Coaly! Whup!”

  Coaly went. Faster than she’d have thought he could, burdened as he was. The wagon seemed to leap into the air as it cleared a big bump, and it hit with a tooth-rattling jar. Jody cried out, and she heard him scrambling for a handhold.

  Around blind curves, through masses of foliage that had leaned forward into the track the horse flew, and the wagon bounced along behind as best it could. Julie had her feet hooked into the seat-brace beneath her, reins clenched uselessly in her left hand, while her right steadied the basket and the baby.

  When the scream sounded again it was entirely too close. Behind the wagon...but not by much. She risked a glimpse back, and a shadow was flowing along with the wild shapes cast by the swinging lantern. When the wagon-shadow bounced and jumped, the other moved smoothly and steadily, not ten feet from the tailboard!

  Julie was thinking faster than ever before. The creature wanted Lissa. That was what all the folktales suggested...unless it wanted Coaly. They liked horsemeat too. But she felt sure it would prefer something tender...and human. What if she could distract it? Throw something out that it could smell baby-scent on?

  She took the reins in her teeth and dug into the basket, pulled out a soiled diaper, and flung it over the side of the careening buckboard. Then she cracked the whip again.

  But by now Coaly had caught scent of the big cat, and the horse’s instinct told him what words could not. The stocky black had leaned his chest into his work and was making his former pace look slow. It was all Julie could do to keep from being flung out into the darkness, and nothing but the basket straps kept Lissa from being dislodged from her place. Jody was rolling around in the wagon bed, too frightened to whimper.

  They flew along the track for a half mile before Julie pulled Coaly down a bit...enough so she could risk another look to their rear. The other shadow was gone. For now. She had no illusion that the cat would waste much time on the diaper, once it was sure it was empty.

  With the horse under some control, she tore through the woods. And now she was able to see some landmarks that told her she was getting nearer her goal. The immense oak tree that leaned over the track—that was less than three miles from the Dooleys’ house. With any luck at all, they just might make it. She cracked the whip again, but not quite so close to Coaly’s sensitive ears. He kept moving, but he wasn’t bolting now.

  “Jody...how are you making it, son?” she asked.

  “M...M...Mama...there was a great big something back there!”

  She made her voice matter-of-fact. “Yes. That was the cougar. Remember...I told you, just before we went so fast.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know they were so big. It was like Aunt Till’s tomcat, but lots and lots bigger. It was scary, Mama.”

  “Well, it didn’t get us...yet. And it won’t, I think. I believe I’ve figured out the combination. You just get a good grip on the seat-braces and you watch for it for me. Its eyes will shine in the light that gets back there from the lantern. You sing out if you see it coming after us again.”

  “Yes’m.” His voice sounded as frightened as Julie felt.

  The wagon went swaying and jangling and creaking around more bends in the track, and Julie had begun to hope they’d left the beast far behind when Jody’s warning came.

  “It’s there, Mama!” he shouted.

  Once more the thing neared the tailboard, its shadow mingling with those of the wagon and its passengers. Again she picked a bit of cloth from the basket and pitched it into the road. And they gained another half-mile or so.

  There was the skillet nailed to the ash tree, set there as a marker of the trail by some long-dead explorer of the region. It gleamed rust-red in the lantern light for an instant. Only a mile left to go. And then the wagon hit something with an ominous c-r-a-a-ck! The right front wheel went, and the bed pitched forward at an angle.

  Even as Julie went over the side, she was trying to see behind, to see if the cougar was there again. She w
as up almost before she hit the ground, rescuing the lantern from its hook, unhooking Coaly from the harness.

  “Jody! Climb down, son. That’s right...come here to me. You’re going to ride Coaly, you know that? Do you think you can ride him?”

  “But Daddy said he’s too uppity for me!”

  “Ordinarily, that’s true. But this is something out of the ordinary. You’re not only going to ride him, you’re going to see to Lissa, too. See? I’m tying her basket right here onto his back with the harness straps. You can hook your legs right into here...that’s right. Whoa, Coaly. Easy, boy.” She settled the two children into her makeshift rig of hamstrings and bits of harness, checked it out for security, then stepped back.

  “You head right up the track, Jody. You can see where it is by the stars, and Coaly isn’t going out into the brush, and he certainly isn’t coming back here where the cat is. I’ll be right behind you with the lantern. But you make him run, you hear me? Kick him with your heels. Slap him with the reins. Go, now!” and she struck the horse sharply with the stock of the whip she had taken from the wreck of the wagon.

  As the hoofbeats rattled away up the red-dirt track, she turned where she stood and held the lantern high. No eyes sparked at her... yet. She backed slowly up the way, watching sharply. Then she turned and ran as hard as she could for a couple of hundred yards. When she turned again there were red points of light there in the road.

  Julie’s heart thumped high in her throat. Beads of sweat sprang out along her hairline, as she watched the tawny shape that she saw clearly now for the first time.

  The cat was cautious. An adult human being wasn’t its usual prey, and the fire in the lantern filled its eyes disturbingly. But its gut growled with hunger. Julie could see the creature weighting its hunger against the unknown threat she might pose.

  Before it could make up its mind, she was upon it, the whip swinging down in a wicked arc, the metal tip cracking viciously as it drew blood that showed bright against the tan coat. The cougar crouched, snarling, its ears flat against its head, its eyes glaring. But Julie was past caution. To buy time for her children she was prepared to risk everything. She danced to one side and cracked the whip again. Another trickle of blood gleamed against the creature’s neck.

  The lantern that she had hung on a stub of branch beside the track gave her enough light for maneuvering, and she struck again as the beast backed away, keeping its head toward her, its eyes focused on her as the pressing danger it knew it faced.

  Then a rain of whip strokes drove the creature backward into the edge of the wood...deeper. And then it was gone, a frustrated cough of anger coming back to Julie’s ears as the last twitch of brush marked its passage.

  Julie listened hard. The only sounds were tree frogs, a whip-poor-will in the distance, a hoot owl somewhere nearby, and the many small noises of a wood at night. There was no scream to be heard, nor any other sound that might mark the hunt of a big cat.

  She turned in her track, the lash of the whip marking the red dust of the road. She took the lantern from the stub.

  Now she could hear sounds from the road ahead. Men’s voices, calling...but she was suddenly too exhausted to make a sound. The children were safe...that was all that mattered. If they hadn’t reached Dooleys’, nobody would be calling in the forest in the early morning hours.

  Letting the lantern dangle wearily from her hand, dragging the whip, she started up the trail toward the east. The early morning constellations hung above the cut. A mockingbird was tuning up his song in the woods.

  THE PUSHOVER

  Our little bank in the town near which we live was robbed several years ago by real pros. I wish there had been a Lena McCarver in the woods to give them their comeuppance....

  It looked like a piece of cake. Mel and I had knocked over six little country banks without a hitch, though if course the FBI had makes on us, and our pictures were out all over the map. Hell, this little old bank had them posted—I saw them when I cased it a couple of days before the job. Nobody gave me more of a second glance than a stranger in a back-country town gets anyway.

  We had it down pat, with a car stashed in the woods a couple of miles from a three-way crossroad, the timing worked out to a second, everything smooth as oil. When we busted into the side door of the bank and all the people froze with surprise and fear, we worked it right to schedule. In three minutes we were in number one car and moving, with well over fifty thousand dollars in the bags at our feet.

  That was when things came unglued. Somebody must have slid out the front door when we came in the side, for an old codger behind a beat-up pickup let loose on us with a double-barreled shotgun. It didn’t stop the car or hurt either of us, but it made hash of the windshield, and that slowed us down getting to the second car.

  The police band scanner in the car saved our bacon. We had thought we’d have plenty of time to get clear before the nearest law could get thirty miles out into the country and get descriptions of us. Just bad luck made a deputy be cruising the highway three miles away. He’d have had us, without that scanner. As it was, we had to ditch number two car and take to the woods in a hurry.

  Those are big damn woods down there. Undergrowth is so thick you can hardly plow through, some places. But there’s lots of creeks and quite a bit of swampy land, so we felt as if we could throw off the bloodhounds that were sure to be put on our trail. Both of us are country boys and know the woods like the palms of our hands. Besides, we stopped in the middle of an overgrown field and scrubbed ourselves down, shoe-soles and all, with goatweeds. That ought to change the scent of anything that walks.

  We’d had all sorts of supplies packed in number two, so we had with us enough food for a good while, with blankets, all rolled into easily carried bundles. But what with sawvines and huckleberry thickets, we were glad to find a spot that we figured would do us until the heat died down. It was a low ridge rising out of a sandy flat that was awash with springs, and covered with trees that had never been discovered by the sawmill men. Some of them must have been a hundred feet tall. There was plenty of cover from the small plane that began coming over, now and again. We figured it was watching the dirt roads all around.

  The first night we didn’t even keep watch. We knew what we were doing, but they didn’t, and it would take a while to get bloodhounds up from Huntsville and put them on our trail. Which, we felt sure, they wouldn’t be able to follow anyway.

  The middle of the second day we could hear the hounds trailing, way off in the distance. They weren’t coming our way, so we didn’t worry. We had a laugh at the moonshiners that were likely to be caught with their goods, with the place all full of deputies and the FBI. Our transistor radio said they had every policeman, reserve deputy, and dogcatcher in fifty miles down there in the woods looking for us. It would have been a sweet time to hit one of the bigger towns, but nobody seems to have thought of it. Anyway, we sat back and let them boil.

  For the better part of a week we let things ride. According to the radio, the hunt had moved off to the north, where some poor pair of suckers had looked something like us.

  But we knew how to wait things out, which is why we’ve done so many jobs without being caught. Then it began to rain.

  Woods in fine October weather are mighty nice to live in. In chilly, wet October weather they’re instant pneumonia. We needed a place to spend the next week without freezing our tails off.

  All around us were big woods, never cut as far as we could see. We figured it must be some big family holding that was tied up in the courts, or some timber company would have cleaned it out. Sure enough, after looking around for a while, we found a crooked dirt track that led through thick timber to a big old tumbledown gray house.

  Part of the house was empty—no windows were in the frames, the doors were black holes in the scaly walls. But the low half, behind the curving porch, was pretty tight, and smoke was coming out of the stovepipe. We scrootched under a magnolia that covered as much ground as the
house did and watched for half a day.

  Twice a tiny little old woman came out, once to go to the well for water, once for a trip down the brushy path to the privy. When she came back from there, she went by the woodpile and took an armload back in with her. It was getting on for dark, and we thought if she had anybody else in there, they’d have gotten the wood for her. So we went in.

  She looked up when we walked in. The door hadn’t been locked, though she had a portable radio going on the kitchen table, and she must’ve known we were or had been around close. But she didn’t turn a hair. She ought to have been scared stiff, for she wasn’t much taller than a ten-year-old, and wouldn’t have weighed eighty pounds soaking wet. Her hair was white, and she wore it screwed up in a tight knot that pulled her eyes into a slant so you could hardly tell what color they were. They were black and bright and had a wicked light in them. I could tell when she looked up at me.

  Like I say, she should have been scared. I’m six-two, and Mel is a lot bigger. We could have pinched her between our fingers, and she’d have gone out like a candle. But she just looked up at us with those slanty black eyes and said, “Good evening, gentlemen. I wondered if you weren’t playing possum out in my timber stand. Come and have a cup of tea.”

  “Coffee,” Mel grunted. “Make it strong.”

  “Don’t buy the stuff,” she said, lifting the kettle off the stove-eye. “Costs too much and gums up your innards. Mint tea or comfrey tea you can have...unless you want to go into town after coffee.”

  Mel stood over her and reached down. He took her by the scruff of her neck and lifted her like a cat does a kitten. He spat on the floor; then he growled at her, “Listen here, old woman, you’ll do what we say, and you won’t talk back. You live out here all by yourself and think maybe you count for something. You don’t. We run things, when we’re around, and no dried-up skirt gives us any lip. Get that, and get it good.”