Long Hunt (9781101559208)

by Judd, Cameron

  As she entered the head of the trail, she glanced over her shoulder and saw Sikes bearing down upon her, much more fleet than she would have expected. Beyond and behind him, the cabin door was filled with the bulk of Sam, who had managed to push himself to his feet and stagger after her, but who had literally wedged himself in the doorway, too big to get out of his own dwelling. He was red-faced, sweating, and shirtless . . . and had lost his trousers, too, in the process of rising. All in all, an uglier vision young Maggie had never seen.

  Hastening, she pounded along the pathway, hearing Sikes keeping pace behind her and sometimes gaining. Surely, she thought, she could outrun a grown man. She was young and light and fleet, and surely far more motivated to escape than he was to catch her.

  He would not catch her! The thought couldn’t be tolerated. She would outrun him if she had to wear her feet off doing it. She pushed harder, her heart hammering as fast as her feet.

  Her foot struck a root and she went forward, hard, her chest hitting a humped area of ground and driving every bit of air from her lungs. Her vision swam and blackened a few moments and she thought she would faint again. Stunned, she forgot for a moment that she was being pursued, but when she remembered, she rolled onto her back and prepared to kick her feet upward and pound him heel-to-crotch.

  He was not there, not where she had expected him to be, anyway. She sat up and gaped.

  He was back down the trail, having been stopped in midpursuit, apparently about the same moment she had fallen. The one who had stopped him was fighting him hard at the moment, big fists pounding and guttural voice grunting with each blow. Sikes was making sounds, too, high and almost girlish wails of pain as he was trounced by the one who had come bursting out of the brush beside the path and knocked him down.

  Maggie, with lungs gasping and refilling with air, looked at the one who had stopped her pursuer and now seemed intent on beating him to death. Her eyes bulged. She recognized the stranger who was protecting her.

  Loafhead.

  For the second time in mere minutes, Maggie Harkin fainted.

  Above, the sky was making a fast change, suddenly darkening and going gray, thunder rumbling like an angry deity off to the west. A storm was coming in.

  Maggie lay swooned and senseless, unaware of the approaching storm and no longer hearing the sound of fists on flesh coming from a short distance back on the trail. The guttural sounds had stopped now, as had Sikes’s reactive squeals.

  Finally even the sound of blows came to a halt, and the big man with the misshapen head left the body of Sikes where it lay and walked up the trail toward the spot where Maggie lay unmoving. When raindrops began to fall, driving down through the trees, Maggie stirred beneath the impact of the cold drops as the man knelt beside her.

  Back behind them, Sikes’s form also was pounded by the mounting rain, but he did not move at all, and never would again.

  Maggie was only partly aware of it when strong arms slid beneath her knees and shoulder blades and lifted her up. She groaned softly and felt herself carried along through the rain.

  The storm covered almost the entire over-mountain region, whipping the waters of the Holston, causing surges in the Nolichucky, hammering the Watauga, turning Lick Creek from a mere stream to a temporary wide river.

  Riding along on increasingly skittish horses in the Doe River area, a region of gorges and bluffs and wooded ridges, Crawford Fain was beginning to reassess a statement he had made to Titus earlier, that the storm would pass over quickly. At present it looked likely to linger for an hour or more.

  Lightning fired down suddenly, striking a tree atop the ridge beneath which the two frontiersmen rode. The tree splintered in an eruption of fire and noise, and smoking wood dropped toward the riders, a large piece barely missing Edohi. The crack of thunder was simultaneous with the strike, as close as it was, and as loud as a cannon fired mere yards away.

  “Pap, we have to find shelter,” said Titus. “This ain’t one we can ride out here in the open.”

  Crawford Fain nodded. “Let’s go over yonder way . . . might be some shelter amongst the rocks.”

  They rode toward the base of the escarpment and into a maze of boulders and slabs that had collected there over a century or more as the bluff eroded and broke apart above. Hoping for an overhang to keep the worst of the rain off them and the horses, they did better than that, finding a large natural tunnel opening into the hillside, a cave that instantly put Fain in mind of the cave in which he had lived far away in England’s Skellenwood in the days of his boyhood. They were able to enter the cavern without having even to dismount.

  “Have you known this place before, Pap?” asked Titus.

  Fain shook his head. “Never seen it, although I’ve traveled the Doe country many a time. But never in this exact part of it.” He looked around. “Quite a place.”

  With the storm darkening the region, combined with the natural shadowing of the cavern, it was difficult to see much except when lightning flashed outside. With each flare the cavern flooded for a second with penetrating light, revealing dank stone, fingers of rock reaching from cavern floor to ceiling, and places where water trickled down the stone to stream out in a rivulet that ran in a gully along the base of the wall.

  The light also revealed evidence of previous human use of the cave, mostly in the form of places where fires had been built for light and heat, fire locations perhaps generations old and used by both native and later-settlement inhabitants of the region.

  “Son, I say let’s scrounge up some wood and get us a fire burning,” said Fain. “You look about and see what firewood might have been left in this place by folks before us, and I’ll pull in some from the outside.”

  “Anything from the outside will be soaked, Pap.”

  “Lord, son, you shame your name! Wet bark pulled off uncovers dry wood.”

  “So it does.”

  They began their separate quests for fuel. Fain didn’t much mind the rain—his attitude had always been that it was only water, after all—and he gathered up several armloads of wood quickly and deposited them inside the cave. When lightning flashed, he could see Titus moving about, gathering wood scraps carried in by past users of this cavern. At length Titus used some hickory wood he’d found to create a torch and explored farther back into the cave, where the cave ceiling was lower and the open, broad space of the entrance diminished to tight, small passages that appeared to simply vanish into the rock of the mountainside.

  Fain watched Titus’s light go dark as the young man entered one of the passageways, the torchlight suddenly hidden. Fain returned to the outside and fetched one last armload of sodden wood, and when he came back into the cave, Titus was waiting for him, a strange, intense expression on his face.

  “Come here, Pap. There’s something you have to see.”

  “What?”

  “Just come and I’ll show you.”

  Fain followed his son back into the cave, following the light of Titus’s torch.

  Rain on her face as she was carried along is what awakened Maggie Harkin from her faint. She had no idea where she was or what was happening to her at the beginning, and her body stiffened in fear as she thought for a moment that she was being held by the man who had captured her and taken her to the foul cabin with the horrible fat man in the corner. The memory of that swept back, and then she wondered if maybe the wicked men had already misused her, and she simply didn’t remember. With a great feeling of dread, she sent her mind roaming through all the parts of herself, examining every feeling, every nerve . . . until at last she decided she had not yet suffered any intimate physical abuse. Relief overwhelmed her, but tempered by fear.

  Who was carrying her? The memory rushed back of what she had seen that had caused her to swoon: a figure that appeared to be the legendary Loafhead himself, beating her captor. Drawing in a shuddering, deep breath, Maggie forced herself to move her head until she could see the face of the one carrying her now, and when she did, she t
hought she might faint again.

  A broad, ruddy face, an ugly bulge extending down from forehead and across one eye . . . How could she ever have told her brother that Loafhead was not real? She had to face the fact that he had been right in his fearful belief in the ogre, and she had been wrong.

  But was he an ogre? So far he had defended and rescued her. And was this misshapen man really Loafhead at all? Might he be someone else with a similar deformity?

  Maggie dared not speak to him. The very idea was too daunting. So she merely held on, and let him hold on to her, and was carried along the woodland trails in the driving rain, lightning glaring every few moments, sometimes far, sometimes close.

  At length the man’s trot slowed as he became fatigued, and Maggie suspected he was looking for a place to stop. Soon they reached a little clearing with a half-faced camp, and he ducked into the slant-roofed shelter and deposited her on the ground. Then he sat down beside her, panting for breath. His form was so tall and muscle-bulked that he nearly filled the little shelter alone. She drew her legs up close to herself, wrapped her arms around her bent knees, and scooted as far away from him as the shelter would allow.

  Finally he turned to look at her, and by the glare of lightning she got her first fully clear look at his face. Her shock must have been visible, because when he realized she was looking at him, wide-eyed, he put his hand over the misshapen lump marring his face and turned away. “Don’t look,” he said in a voice she could only later describe to herself as muddy.

  “Sir?” she heard herself ask, curiosity overcoming caution. “Are you Loafhead?”

  He turned back to her, his only visible eye squinting in a frown. “I know nothing of ‘Loafhead,’ ” he said. “I am Tom. I am Tom Crale.” He looked away again. “I am ugly.”

  “Are you going to hurt me, sir?”

  “No. I will not hurt you. I took you away from the bad men. Did they hurt you?”

  She felt bashful suddenly, and now it was her turn to break away her gaze. “No. No . . . but they would have hurt me if I hadn’t run, and if you hadn’t stopped me from being caught again.”

  “They were bad. Very bad men. They do bad things to young ones.”

  Maggie began to realize how great a horror she had escaped. However disconcerting and, indeed, ugly Tom Crale was, he did not horrify her like the memory of the two men in the stinking cabin she had fled.

  “Who is Loafhead?” Crale asked.

  It was awkward, hearing that question. How to answer?

  “There is an old story, from across the ocean, about a . . . a dweller in a forest who eats the heads of children who do bad things. He has a face that is . . .” She looked at him and pointed briefly at his deformity. He winced.

  “No. I am not Loafhead,” he reaffirmed, forcefully. “I am a man, Tom Crale. I don’t do . . . what you said, eating the heads of children.”

  “I don’t think there really is a Loafhead,” Maggie said. “It’s that you made me think of him, and I was already afraid, and my little brother believes that one time he saw—”

  Crale rose and stepped out of the shelter, seemingly unwilling to hear more. The rain had stopped, though it looked likely to be merely a lull, not a full cessation.

  Maggie felt a wave of guilt. She had insulted and hurt the man who had rescued her, and it seemed the worst thing she could ever have done.

  He never left her view. For long minutes Tom Crale wandered in the woods before the half-faced shelter, but never did he let himself go out of sight.

  Maggie had the impression he was watching her, but despite his horrific appearance and endless vigilance, she did not feel his attention was threatening, as had been the attentions of the other two men. Rather, she was sure that Tom Crale was guarding her rather than attempting to possess and control her. There was nothing amiss in his interest in her.

  At length he returned to the shelter, his sensitivity over her indelicate “Loafhead” question seemingly abated. “What is your name, little girl?” he asked her.

  “Maggie Harkin. But I’m not a little girl. I’m nigh grown up now. I live in Jonesborough. Do you know Jonesborough?” She realized she was speaking to him in the same tone she might use with a smaller child, and asked herself why she was doing that. Crale seemed odd, sensitive, injured . . . but he had given no evidence of mental slowness. The slight slur she heard in his words seemed to her to have a physical basis, perhaps a misshaping of the human mechanical instruments of speech, related, maybe, to the same malady that had distorted his head and face.

  “I know Jonesborough,” he replied. “I have been there. In secret.”

  “Did you carry a man there in the night recently? A man who had been hanged?”

  Crale looked at her with surprise. “Yes. I found him hanging but took him down. He was still living, so I carried him to the town so he could be helped.” Crale paused. “Did he live?”

  “The last I was aware of, he was still alive,” she said. The timing of her abduction had kept her from being aware of the murder of Gilly. “Do you know who hanged him, Mr. Crale?”

  “No.”

  “Could it have been the same men who tried to hurt me?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Who were the men who tried to hurt me, Mr. Crale? Do you know them?”

  “Only Sam. The fat man. He is Sam Crotty. He is like me . . . an alone man. Hidden man.”

  “But I think he is a bad man . . . and I think you are not a bad man. So he’s not like you that way.”

  Crale nodded. “He is a bad man. He has hurt others. Girls, like you. Young. He hurt them with the help of the man I saved you from. I don’t know that man’s name.”

  Maggie was pleased that Crale was becoming more talkative and open. There was much about this curious woodland figure she wanted to know. Where had he come from? What was his life? Why was he . . . the way he was?

  Perhaps she could learn some of those answers. But instinct told her she needed to be patient and not over-inquisitive.

  Fain stared silently at the pigmented image on the cavern wall that Titus’s torchlight revealed. Titus had discovered it during his hunt for cast-off wood back in the cavern, and it was this that he had fetched his father to see.

  The longer Fain looked, the more he was sure the well-rendered face was who he took it to be. The details all matched, from the yellow hair to the clearly visible streak of gray in the lower portion of the iris of the left eye. Someone had painted this image, using pigments derived or compounded from nature, with meticulous precision and detail.

  “Is that her, Pap?”

  “I suspect so, Titus. Almost has to be.”

  “That was my thinking, too. You reckon she put this picture up here herself?”

  Fain paused, mulling something over. “Son, you ever heard reference made to the ‘cavern man’?”

  “I ain’t sure.”

  “Well, the story has it that he’s somebody who puts pictures like this on rocks and such, mostly in caves, like this. I don’t know if it’s somebody doing it that made the legend come about, or whether the legend is there and every now and then somebody goes and does something such as this picture here, just to make the legend seem real.”

  “Why would somebody bother to do that? Don’t make sense to me.”

  “Who can say what makes people do what they do, son? All I can say for sure about this picture is a couple of things. First off, whoever did this cared a lot about it and took a lot of time to make it look just right, and two, this picture surely does look to be an image of Eben Bedsoe’s daughter. Who else could it be? There wouldn’t be two women in the same wilderness with such an unusual features as marked eyes, ’specially two marked in just the same way. Has to be her!”

  “But we still ain’t found the real woman.”

  “No. But this here picture gives me some hope that there’s a real woman to be found. Hold your torch up closer there . . . see? That coloring is right fresh. That ain’t an old picture. Som
ebody done that not all that long back.”

  “Pap, you said folks talk about a ‘cavern man’ who does this kind of thing. I ain’t never heard of the ‘cavern man,’ but I have heard somebody talk of a man who maybe does something like this. Somebody I knowed in the Cumberland Settlements who had come from Watauga told me about him. I believe he said his name is Tom Crale. Reckon Tom Crale and the cavern man could be one and the same?” Titus paused and looked intently at his father. “Pap? You all right?”

  “Let’s don’t talk more about this now,” Fain said. “We’ve got our wood now. Let’s get us a cook fire going and get dried out, and get us up a bit of supper. And we need to feed the horses.”

  “Pap? You know this Crale fellow?”

  “Later, son. Let’s talk about it all sometime later.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Tom Crale had returned to the shelter and now sat as before, staring out from it into the woods. The storm had stopped for a time, then returned in milder form with a steady rain that poured through the crude roof of the half-faced camp shelter in several places. Maggie had managed to find a dry corner in which to shelter herself, but Crale sat unheeding of the two streams of water that poured down on his head and shoulders from the leaky, sloping roof.

  “What do you do?” she asked him, because he had begun to show some evidence of willingness to talk about himself. “Are you a hunter? A trapper?”

  “I do what I must do to live. I live among the animals. I am more like them than I am like people, I think.”

  “Are you around people much?”

  “Some. Mostly I watch them. That’s what I do. I watch.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I go to the towns sometimes, or to the forts, and even the towns of the Cherokee, and I watch. Without being seen. I see how people live, the things they do, the places they go, the things they try to hide from other people. And I hear the words they say to each other. The songs they sing when they are alone. That is what I do. I watch. And I listen.”