Indian Creek Chronicles

by Pete Fromm

  We raced through a small dip of a draw and lumbered up a south slope, losing speed in a hurry. The snow was still light, but deeper here, with only the scattered ponderosas sheltering the ground. I slowed down to keep from running over Phil, then slowed again. The slope kept getting steeper. Finally rocky teeth began to poke through, turning sections of the slope into cliff.

  Cary stopped and wiped his face with a handkerchief. “We’re getting close,” he panted. “Hear ‘em?”

  Not too far up the draw I saw a thin, gray-blue line in the snow. I pointed it out, not able to tell if it was the dogs’ track or just the old mark of something else, elk maybe. Cary laughed and said, “That’s it. No wonder he treed early. Coming up this steep son of a bitch.”

  We waited for our breathing to quiet until we could all hear the unabated howling of the hounds. Cary shook his head proudly.

  Circling around a jutting spur of stone, we found a narrow path between two sections of the growing cliff wall. We had to use our hands for the next stretch, swimming up the face more than anything else. At the top we rested again, our hands on our knees as we bent and tried to breathe slowly enough to get air in. Brian was the first one to straighten.

  He clapped snow off his chest, lifting his shoulder holster to get inside his coats. He pulled out his binoculars and gazed along the sidehill to the next outcrop of rock. “Got em,” he said.

  We passed the binoculars around, all of us seeing the dogs leaping off the ground only to land back in the same place and bay and leap again. They were at the very end of the outcrop. A huge old ponderosa grew from the hill below, towering above the cliff by a good fifty feet. Ten feet of vacant space separated the dogs from the tree.

  “We better get over there before they start jumping off the cliff,” Cary said, and we started off again.

  The walking was easier on our lungs now, but we were sidehilling from our outcrop to the hounds’ and we had to lean into the hill to keep the trail from collapsing beneath us, sending us down the hill in our own avalanches. Our legs strained with the tension of trying not to slip.

  When we reached the hounds they acted as if we weren’t there. They were all shivering now, and it didn’t have anything to do with the cold. They leapt to the brink of the drop-off, whining and howling, crazy about not being able to get at the lion. We edged around the lip of the cliff until we could see through the branches. The lion was a long, tawny rope of muscle lying quietly on a limb of the tree. It watched us through half-lidded eyes, as if bored and slightly inconvenienced, but not much concerned about waiting it out. They black tip of his tail twitched and he lowered his head onto his wide, soft-looking paw.

  Cary whistled and said, “Boone and Crockett. Boone and Crockett easy.”

  Phil was still fighting for air but he smiled back at Cary and nodded. I didn’t like asking questions that’d show my ignorance but when Brian came up next to me I asked quietly what Boone and Crockett was. He told me it was the name of the record book.

  Brian took out his camera then and snapped several pictures of the lion and of the dogs. He tried to back up and get them into the same picture, but the branches blocked the view of the lion. I took a couple pictures myself, of the lion’s face, his smoldering, gold eyes.

  When Phil seemed to have his wind back, Cary and Brian began to wrestle the dogs again, snapping on leads and pulling them away from the edge of the drop-off. Even as they were hauled backward they kept leaping at the lion, flipping over and landing on their backs when the leads caught them short, choking and snarling. Brian sat down, bracing his feet against a rock, and Cary pulled a loop of the leads around a burned stump of a snag, holding the dogs with the tree. He looked at me and said, “If we’d let them, they’d follow him over the edge.”

  Then Cary told Phil they were ready. “Go ahead and take him,” he said, and Phil almost seemed surprised. He stared at Cary a second, then reached beneath his coat, as if he’d just remembered his gun. From the black folds of wool he pulled a stainless-steel revolver, a .357 magnum, and looked at it in his hand. He’d taken off his mitten, and it must have been cold.

  He walked to the spot where the view was best and he held up the gun. The cat wasn’t twenty feet away and its expression didn’t change a bit. Phil sighted along the four inches of barrel, then hesitated. He looked back at us, at Cary mostly. Cary smiled and said, “Into the chest. You don’t want to mess up that head.”

  Phil nodded and turned back to his cat. I could see the gun waver a little and I wondered what was going on inside him. This had all been good until now.

  The blast from the gun sounded small and ineffectual pointed into the vast spaces of the empty, snow-muffled draw. Even though I’d waited for it, the noised startled me a little, and I missed the very beginning of the lion’s leap. By the time I was able to register what my eyes had recorded the lion was already in the air, not tumbling brokenly through the branches, but in full control, stretched wide from the power of his jump. I stepped to the edge of the cliff, standing beside Phil while Cary and Brian struggled to hold back the dogs.

  The lion landed in the snow well below the outcrop, at least thirty feet below where he’d been lying on the tree branch. The same as jumping from the roof of a three-story building. I saw him just as he hit, disappearing in an explosion of soft snow. Before I could picture how broken he would be, he erupted from the snow in another leap that covered twenty feet, straight down the side of the hill we’d toiled up. His body began to ball up in mid-air and he crashed down into the snow again, only to reappear a moment later, stretched out and bounding. In a few seconds he was into the bottom of the draw and out of sight. No one had said a word.

  Brian grunted, “Is he down?” His dogs had nearly pulled him over the rocks he’d used as a brace.

  “No,” I said, and Phil said, “I think I missed him.”

  “Missed him?”

  “He’s gone,” I said. “All the way to the bottom and gone.”

  Cary wrapped his leash one more time around the old gray snag and tied it off. He walked up beside us on the rim of the drop-off and I pointed at the craters the lion had left in the snow.

  “Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch,” he said. He laughed and clapped Phil on the arm. “Buck fever. Nothing to worry about.” He laughed again. “Man, did he go.” He shook his head and stepped back to his dogs. “You put the fear of God into that old boy, that’s for sure.”

  He knelt down before his wild dogs and began to grab each one in turn, rubbing their heads and thumping their ribs in rough, friendly pats. I wouldn’t have put my face or throat within their reach for anything. But it seemed to break the hold the lion had on them. Cary stood up and said, “Let’s get them off this cliff and let them go. He won’t be far.”

  After watching Cary, Brian did the same trick with his dogs. The hunters tugged their hounds back off the outcrop, out onto the trail we’d made through the steep sidehill between the sections of cliff. They knelt down and unleashed them again, and they were off down the hill, covering nearly as much ground as the lion had in his leaps, moving with a hint of the same supple grace.

  They streaked to the bottom and were lost in the thick stuff, though we could hear them well in the cold air. “Won’t be a minute,” Cary said, and we stood on our snowshoes on the sidehill and waited.

  Phil said, “I pulled up. Right when I pulled the trigger, I pulled up. I could feel it.”

  “You’ll get another shot here in a minute,” Cary said, and he held his hand up for silence. A moment later the shrieks of the hounds changed to that same maniacal yowling we’d heard before, when the lion has first treed.

  “They’ve got him,” Brian said, wrapping his dog lead around his waist. He started to slide down the path the dogs had made.

  Phil and I glanced at Cary. He said, “That’s that,” grinning, and he whacked Phil on the shoulder again. “You’ll bust him this time. Don’t worry about it.” He sounded like a coach trying to work a prized shorts
top through the unexpected error.

  Phil nodded and noticed he was still holding his gun. He slipped it into the holster beneath his coat and pulled his fat mitten back over his hand. His smile wasn’t as steady or as strong as it had been before he’d pulled the trigger. Cary slid down behind Brian and Phil and I followed, all of us squatted over our shoes, ready to drop to our butts if we should start going too fast.

  The lion hadn’t gone a mile, and this time it was all downhill. We were on him quickly, without losing our breath on the way.

  The dogs had torn the area around the trunk of the tree almost to bare dirt. They’d prance and whine and howl, finally leaping against the tree, reaching as high as they could, bouncing off it back to the ground only to leap again. The snow around the tree was littered with the orange jigsaw-puzzle-shaped pieces of bark they’d knocked off the ponderosa’s trunk. And I noticed the bright specks of blood scattered through the snow. At first I thought the lion must have been hit. Then I saw that the dogs were biting the tree, cutting their lips, splitting their gums. The tree itself was ringed by a lighter band of fresh bark at the zenith of the dogs’ bounds.

  The lion was above us now, rather than at the eye-level the cliff had given us. Though he still lay stretched out along a stout branch, maybe fifteen feet over our heads, and his eyes were still only half open, he looked angry now. “Do they ever come out of the tree?” I asked. It felt less than safe walking around under him.

  “Not while we’re here. Not before they’re dead,” Brian said.

  I took some more pictures. I walked around under the lion, even savoring the odd feeling of putting myself in such a position. He was tired now and his mouth was open a little as he breathed. I could just see a trace of the pink edge of his tongue. His eyes followed every move I made.

  I put my camera down and Cary asked, “You done?”

  I nodded my head and noticed that he and Brian both had their dogs held back, the leads stretched around the trunks of trees, well away from the tree the lion had chosen. Phil had walked up a small sidehill and sat down. From there he had a clear shot, no branches or needles blocking his view. I’d been mesmerized by the lion’s heavy-lidded eyes and I hadn’t noticed anything the men had done.

  I moved away from the tree without looking back up at the lion. I sat down in the snow between Cary and Brian. It was as far away from Phil as I could get without putting myself on the other side of the tree, in his line of fire.

  Phil had his gun out again and even in the dark timber I could see the sheen of sweat on his bare forehead. We’d been under this lion a long time, plenty long for any sweat from the hike to have dried or frozen. Cary’s voice seemed loud when he said, “Let him have it.”

  Phil looked around the torn patch beneath the tree, then lifted his eyes to the lion. I watched him brace his elbows on his knees, wriggling them a little to make sure his stance was solid. Then he lowered his gun to a line between his eye and the lion. I saw him squint down the barrel, closing his left eye, and I saw how steady he went when he stopped breathing. Then I turned to watch the lion.

  I’d stopped breathing when Phil had and I began to cringe as I looked at the lion, waiting for the sound of the shot, bracing for it. The lion was broadside to Phil and wasn’t looking at him. He seemed not to be looking at anything now, just waiting for us to leave. Patient.

  As I watched the lion’s sleepy face I wondered when Phil would fire. And I wondered why. Cary and Brian had spent years training their dogs, Cary giving Brian the tips he’d learned himself. I could see their pride in the way the dogs worked, the way they treed the lion so fast, not once, but twice. Their pride was evident even in the way they cussed and tugged, holding back the barely tamed savagery of their hounds. I felt sure Cary was glad Phil had missed the first time. It gave him a chance to let his dogs out again. They didn’t seem to be here just for the money, and I wondered why Phil was out here. What would he do with a lion skin back home in Philadelphia or wherever the hell he lived?

  I kept waiting for the shot until finally I needed to take a breath. I looked away from the lion and the tree, hunching my shoulders in case the shot should come now that I was beginning not to expect it. I glanced at Phil just as he lowered his gun, and for an instant I hoped he’d realized what a letdown his shot would be after having seen the power unleashed in the lion’s wild free-fall down the draw.

  But in one big rush Phil let out the breath he’d held and laughed nervously. I saw him shake the tension out of his arms and rotate his head, getting the kinks out of his neck. Then he brought his elbows back to his knees and his eye back to his sights. He just hadn’t thought about what he was doing at all. I couldn’t tell. Maybe he had, but thought that this far into it it would be impossible to back down.

  I had just turned to the lion when Phil shot. This time, in the heavy cover of the timber, the gun sounded sharp and heavy and lethal. The cat leapt again, straight up this time, over three feet, his mouth opened in a snarl or a roar that never quite made it out. His eyes went wide and his legs cartwheeled into a dead run, claws out, tearing at the branches he began to fall through, not completely unlike the spin of legs in cartoons.

  As he fell past the branch he’d been lying on, his right front paw caught it and he swung to a halt, hanging onto the branch with that one arm, the muscles thick and taut. He pendulumed there for a moment, graceful even in that. But his head began to droop, as if he was looking down, trying to select a place to land, and I saw the toes of this right paw begin to relax, the hard claws retracting back into their broad sheaths. The lion fell.

  He struck one branch on the way down, spinning, so it was hard to tell if he was still alive or not. It was hard to look at his sleek, motion-filled body and imagine him being anything but very much alive.

  I felt a little sick even before he hit the ground and suddenly I heard Cary erupt in a stream of swearing. I glanced quickly his way, wondering if he could possibly have felt the same sense of waste and loss. But he was cupping his hand under his armpit and his dogs were gone, having torn the leash through his hand fast enough to burn him. They met the lion at the same time it met the ground and Cary chased after them, still holding his wounded hand under his arm.

  By the time he’d taken the five or six steps to the cat and dogs it was clear the lion had been dead before it hit the ground. Cary stood at the tails of his dogs, which worried viciously at the lion, tugging it this way and that, snarling through mouthfuls of fur and skin, ripping their heads crazily back and forth, the same way I’d seen dogs playing with blankets. I wondered what Cary would have done if the lion hadn’t been dead.

  When Brian saw the lion was dead he let his dogs loose, too, and they joined the melee on the dead cat. The hounds snarled and snapped at each other, only Cary’s old bitch, Locus, never once relinquishing her stranglehold on the cat’s throat.

  I couldn’t look away from the dogs. This had all been for the lion’s skin. I said, “Won’t they ruin it?”

  Cary looked at me and said, “No. We’ll pull them off before they start to chew. This is their reward. It’s good for them. Let’s them get to know what they’re after.” I noticed he wasn’t smiling now. Everything, for a moment or two, had turned serious. “Kind of spooky, isn’t it?” he said.

  When Cary and Brian began to pull their dogs back off, leaving Locus her hold until the last, I looked for Phil. He’d just stood up from where he’d shot; this time he remembered to put his gun away, hiding it quickly beneath his heavy, borrowed coat.

  He walked slowly toward us, Cary and Brian and me, and the dogs and the lion. The dogs had calmed by then and the lion lay by himself in the trampled snow, his once smooth fur tangled and matted by the mouths of the dogs. We all stood over him for a moment and then Cary reached down and lifted a front leg. A small smudge of blood marred the white fir of the armpit. Cary said, “Right into the heart. Hell of a shot.”

  Phil smiled a little. “Now what?” he said.

  �
�Tag it! It’s yours.” Cary started to laugh. It sounded like the first pull of a boat motor on a quiet lake. “The way you chased him back down we’re almost back to the machines. Good plan.”

  He winked at Phil when Phil looked up. Phil’s smile was gaining in strength. “It’s big, isn’t it?”

  “Hell, yes. It’ll make Boone and Crockett. Not tops, but up there.” Cary knelt down and pulled back the lips of the lion. “Look at those choppers.”

  The canines were ivory white and over an inch and a half long. They looked healthy. Cary said, “That’s a record book head.”

  Phil’s smile kept gaining confidence, and I saw how he was putting the letdown behind him. He was already starting to rearrange this so it would be something he could tell about later, something he could even think about with pride and satisfaction I said, “Do you remember how it jumped?”

  Cary glanced at me and Phil looked down. Cary said, “Like it was stung by a bee. I knew you had him as soon as he jumped like that.”

  “No,” I said. “I mean out of the first tree. And down the draw. I’d never seen anything like that in my life.”

  Cary looked at me again, not smiling. Brian bent down and hauled the cat up from the snow. It was as long as he was. He draped it over his shoulders and said, “Might as well start.” The dogs followed after him, almost like pets now.

  Phil walked by me, without meeting my eyes, moving after Brian and the dogs. Cary followed down the trail the others had beaten into the snow, and as he passed he clapped me on the shoulder. Like a coach helping me past my error.

  I stood in the quiet trees, looking at the trampled snow—the broken orange bark and flecks of blood the only bright spots in the white and gray of the woods. A moment later one of the dogs yelped and I looked up, almost startled to find myself alone. I hurried down the slope after them.