“Thick.”
“Bushy?”
“No, meaty.”
Their mother added a few more dark strokes and turned the art tablet around, showing them the drawing. “So, basically like this? I'm no artist. But you get the idea.”
Joule nodded. Her mother was an artist. Maybe not one who would ever have her work displayed in the Met, but her mother had some serious sketching skills. “Yes, very much like that.”
Nate looked at each of them around the table in turn. He'd been relatively quiet the whole time, but now he said something Joule had not seen coming. “These dogs are killers. They hunt in packs, and they're getting smarter every day. I think we have two options: We either move or capture one.”
14
“That's not disturbing at all,” Kaya said to her husband as they stood in their large backyard. When they’d bought the house, they had thought the cow farms that abutted the back edge of the property were quaint and cool.
The owners of the farm were of the “gentlemen farmer” variety. The herds small, the land large, the occasional stray cow in their yard a humorous occurrence rather than a nuisance. Only once or twice had she even smelled the cows.
Having moved from a cute little neighborhood in Curie, they had been swayed by the place and the deal—and they now owned more than five acres. Given the age of the house and the size of the land, the property came with its own special zoning. They were allowed to have farm animals, and they were allowed to shoot guns on their property. This was the first time she'd considered taking advantage of any of it.
Realizing the kids were seventeen, and because Nate had argued in favor of it, they were now all standing out in the backyard, passing the gun around. Kaya did not like guns. She only agreed to this because she saw no other option. They had a rifle and a nine millimeter, and they all wore ear protection as they took turns firing at the target.
She’d thought about drawing a dog on the hay bale she’d set up in an attempt to curb stray bullets, but instead she’d drawn a standard bull's eye. Tomorrow, they could fire at something that moved, although it appeared only her children would be doing that. She and Nate had proved to be complete marksmanship disasters who should never pick up a gun in either of their lifetimes.
Nate had been literally hit or miss—with either a bullseye or a stray bullet. Kaya, on the other hand, mostly hit the target, but her aim was completely for shit.
As she’d been ready to give up on the first option for their plan, Nate had turned to her and said, “I think we should let the kids take a try.”
Her rebuttal had been swift and fierce. “I don't want them to have a gun in their hands!”
“They're seventeen,” Nate argued softly. She hated when he did that. It meant he was confident of his argument. “They'll be eighteen in a handful of months. At that point, they'll have the option to pick up their own guns. We can’t stop them. And I’m not sure I would, given what's walking in the woods out there.” He gestured with the hand holding the gun, which Kaya quickly motioned for him to hand over. She switched the safety and held it aimed down toward the ground at her side.
“See?” Nate said, gesturing to the gun in her hand. “We shouldn't have guns. And if they shouldn't have guns, it's better that they learn it now. Better than if they figure it out later with an accident of some kind.”
The kids were standing off to the side, pretending they were out of earshot. Kaya knew they weren’t. Nate must know, too. But he kept talking in that low, soothing voice that said he knew he was right and he wanted to let her know gently. “Given what's roaming in the woods, I wouldn't necessarily begrudge them wanting to carry weapons.”
Kaya loved her husband more than the sun rising in the morning. But damn, when he was logical, he could argue her down into a pulp. It was easier to concede. She could tell that, while the gun was out of ammo, he was not.
“You're right,” she whispered. It was the best she could do. Reluctantly, she’d handed the gun to her children.
Cage had been a natural. He'd held the firearm as though he were born to it. How? she wondered. I’m a damned pacifist! But with little instruction from his father, Cage had simply lifted the gun and fired. He, of course, had nailed the bullseye all six times he pulled the trigger.
With no words and a look that only a teenage boy could give his parents, he turned and handed the gun carefully back to her as though to say, Well, you wanted to know. She knew now.
Next, she handed the gun to Joule. Her daughter, in typical fashion, was far more cautious. She set her feet shoulder width apart and squared her shoulders. She lifted the gun in a straight line from the ground to the bullseye and took careful aim. Then she rapidly pulled the trigger and nailed the fuck out of the target.
Behind the kids’ backs, Nate had only shrugged at her again. Cage was the more casual shot, Joule far more meticulous. But both had easily outshot both her and Nate. That made her think that, with a little training, they might be able to protect themselves.
But one of the reasons she had been so against guns was that guns were for killing. And, once you killed something, you couldn’t un-kill it. Even a squirrel or a bird. Even by accident.
Becoming an instrument of death was a burden she wanted to save her children from. But she had never run across a creature before where she couldn’t talk herself into some level of peace. The coyotes had lived here before the houses had come. Some of the neighbors shot them, but Kaya thought they should have a little respect for the wildlife and just bring their cats in at night. Even the cougar she had seen a few times was here because this was the edge of its natural territory.
But these dogs? She felt no mercy. It was them or her.
Worse, it was them or her kids.
Holding her hand out to ask Joule for the gun back, she traded out the empty magazine for a loaded one. It was shocking how easy that became, even in just a few repetitions. While her hands moved cleanly with the motion, her stomach turned with the thought.
Cataloging where the current holes were in the target, so she could figure out if she’d made any new ones and where, she lifted the gun and aimed again. Again, she sucked at it.
Her shots hit the target, but in a few cases only because the rectangle of paper extended well beyond the colored circles. Several shots hit the hay bale directly, not even on the paper, and each one sent up a small puff of hay dust to let her know of her failure.
She shot again. And again. Her family waited while she tried, but eventually, even she gave up on herself. This wasn’t going to happen.
Turning to Joule and Cage, she asked “So, do either of you think that you can shoot a living animal?”
15
Cage headed out into the woods again, his sister following along again. He hoped to find something. Again. But he didn't expect it to happen.
They'd been checking the traps every afternoon. Despite what they’d all thought was an excellent design, nothing had worked. Where to put the traps had been a full-family debate. They wanted to be able to check them daily, yet the traps needed to be far enough apart that the dogs wouldn’t be able to call for help if they got stuck. Traps were no good if the dog could summon a brethren to break them free.
But having baited traps near homes was a crappy idea. Purposefully bringing one of the dogs closer to the people was a terrible strategy. So they had gone out into the cow pastures and set the traps.
This meant they'd had to talk to several of the farmers, so it had taken several days to get everything up. Luckily, the farmers had not had the same reservations about baiting the dogs into the pastures. It seemed the cows themselves were already more than tempting, and the farmers were glad to have something to distract the dogs from their livestock.
Between getting permission and jury rigging the traps, it had taken a while to get going. This was finally the third day of trapping.
The third probably failed day of trapping, Cage thought. He turned to his sister, “What's the over und
er on the traps?”
“Zero.” Clearly, her hopes were no higher than his. She had the bow clutched in her hand again, the metal arrow hooked across the grasp and notched onto the string—not pulled back, but ready.
They'd spent the money and made four traps. Now it was taking a good hour and a half daily to check them. Nate had come home early yesterday and he and Cage had gone out. The first day, it had been Kaya and Joule. But Cage and Joule were on duty by themselves for the weekend. Now the twins were out hiking through the woods while their parents stayed home making up for missed work during the week.
Pretty much everyone who had a job these days was working double time. If you made tacos, you had extra tacos to make for the FEMA workers in your area and for the people who didn't have a home anymore.
Cage’s parents worked in think tanks, and most of the think tanks had turned their gaze away from flying cars and shooting for Mars. Now they were looking at alternative fuels, installing solar arrays, and designing devices for flooding safety, earthquake braces for houses, compact and safe heating and cooling systems for power outages, and more.
Cage looked around the woods, trying to remember where they had put the next trap. They hadn’t fully camouflaged it, but if they didn’t get close, they wouldn’t see it.
The two out in the farmers’ pastures had been empty, but the bait was missing. There were two more traps in the woods. Cage was wondering if there would be a dog inside or if the bait would be missing here as well.
He didn’t see it, but he knew they were close.
“I don’t hear anything,” Joule told him, her way of saying she suspected this one would be empty, too. As they came up closer, he saw that she was right and the bait was gone from this one as well.
But the trap was not closed. On closer inspection… “Damn it,” he said. “Look, Joule.” Kneeling down, he looked inside and he checked it out. “Look at the door.”
“Fuck,” Joule muttered. “It's completely bent. We're going to have to haul it back with us.” She was starting to pick it up.
They’d designed the contraptions out of dog crates, using a basic wildlife trap designs where the door slid shut after the animal went inside and tugged on the bait. The family had spent time rigging one end of the door to be open and slide down once the bait was touched. But they’d maintained the basic dog crate design so they could fold it up and carry it by the handle.
“It won't even fold up,” Joule moaned as she lifted one corner of the trap.
“Shit,” Cage spat as he joined her, circling it to look at the damage. “We have to go look at the other one, first. I would hate to spend the effort to carry this back and then have a dog sitting in the other one and not get it checked.”
Joule nodded in agreement and began stepping carefully down the trail toward the last stop.
“What do you think,” he asked her a few minutes later, “are the chances that no one has killed one of these dogs yet?”
“If they have, they're not talking about it.”
Cage stopped in the woods then, letting her walk a few feet ahead before she realized and swung back to look at him. “Joule, you survived the night out with them. You got away… and we don't tell people that.”
“Well, we never specifically agreed to not tell people that.” She was almost looking at him now, but her eyes still darted from side to side, checking the area around them. She'd always been vigilant, but she was much more so since they'd seen the dog in the daylight. “It was just kind of something we did.”
“I know,” Cage said, “but maybe other people did it, too. Maybe they killed one of the dogs and they just don't tell people… kind of like us. Maybe they're afraid of the backlash.”
“It's plausible,” she mused. “But it doesn’t matter. If they did it, they're not talking. And if not, then how are we going to find them anyway? They aren’t bringing us a carcass. We need our own.”
“That's true,” he said. “But I’m still having a hard time believing that one of these gun nuts hasn't gotten his AR-15 out and just mowed a dog down. I think you're probably right. Maybe they just aren’t sharing.”
“But,” she said as she turned, “I'm not sure that bullets would stop them.”
“You think they're bulletproof?” Cage stopped again, his brain overriding his feet.
“No, not really. I just think they're a lot more bulletproof than we are. Obviously, a single bullet would kill you or me, but it's not taking them down. The police put so many bullets into them. I think they might have mortally wounded some of them, but the pack still killed the officers and managed to get away.”
“That's true.” Cage sighed, not liking where the conversation was going. “Remember how our psych class in Curie talked about the horrible irregularities in eyewitness testimony? And they said even trained police officers only hit their target less than forty percent of the time. So my guess is, if people have been shooting at these dogs, they’re probably missing more than they're hitting.”
Joule nodded along as he talked, then turned and put a finger to her lips as she whispered, “We're getting close to the last cage.”
In another fifteen steps, she let out the words, “Son of a bitch!”
16
Joule stopped dead in the woods. The late morning sunlight filtered through the trees, making the path bright. The foot trail was cleared enough to walk on comfortably, but that wasn’t where they expected to find a dog. So they’d laid the trap about ten feet away from where they walked.
She could see the twisted bars from here. What a mess the trap was! “It's completely mangled,” she said to her brother. Not that he needed her commentary. “We managed to get another dog inside the cage, and—”
“How do you know?” he interrupted.
“Because the bait is gone.”
“But another animal could have eaten the bait.”
“Sure, but what other animal could have taken all of it and then fought their way out from the inside?” She sighed. “It's too much of a mess to even be worth carrying home. Clearly, our design sucks.”
Joule turned to look at her brother, her bow and arrow still in hand, her eyes scanning, her ears listening beyond their conversation. As she flicked her eyes up to Cage, she could see that he agreed.
She would have rolled her eyes, but she didn’t want to take them off the surrounding area. The look of that cage only irritated her. “Back to the drawing board.”
It was something her parents had said since she was small, and it seemed so appropriate right now. All that money lost on the cages. All the time spent designing them and trying to trap a dog. It seemed so useless. Or worse. “All we did is feed them.”
“That's true.” Cage waved his hand at the twisted metal, indicating it was a loss. “Let's go back and get the other one.”
Nodding, Joule followed him back along the path they’d just come down. Today’s hike was about efficiency, not about finding things.
“The good news about feeding them is that we seem to have fed them the right things,” Cage offered into the general air. The words held a little bit of snark, and Joule nodded her agreement.
They'd fed the dogs whole, raw chickens stuffed with mushrooms. Normal dogs weren't supposed to have chicken. The bones could splinter when chewed with a dog’s powerful jaws and the shards could then rip up their intestinal track. A good chicken bone—splintering as the dog ate it—could kill a dog.
To be fair, it was what they were hoping for.
Mushrooms were rumored to have possible deadly effects on many dogs. So they’d bought several containers at the grocery and stuffed the chickens full, hoping that these guys didn't have a good enough sense of smell—or sense, period—to stay away.
Joule walked softly and spoke just loud enough for her brother to hear her. “All four pieces of bait were gone. So they ate them.”
“Well, something ate them.”
She was relatively certain that the offending party was one of t
he dogs. A smaller animal should have been stuck in the converted dog crate. The metal was sturdy, welded, and designed to hold household pet dogs up to eighty pounds in weight. So a good shoulder thrust by a German Shepherd or a Rottweiler shouldn’t have accomplished anything more than a dent. This trap had been broken out of from the inside.
What she had was logic. It would be better to have proof. “Let's look around.”
Joule was thinking that the bones might have been left behind for them to find, or the dog might have rejected the mushrooms and spit them out somewhere. There might be footprints in the vicinity of the crate or some other evidence of what had eaten their bait—something she hadn’t thought of but would hopefully recognize when she saw it.
While they headed back to the other crate—the one they would do the work to haul in—she tried to think of other, less obvious possibilities. “I suppose it's possible the bait attracted a different animal, like a coyote or something. Then the dogs came in and got it. So the bait didn’t work, but it baited something that then served as bait.”
That would provide reasoning for the mangled crate, too. And it would mean they were serving up the wrong bait. They didn’t want to catch a coyote. They wanted to catch one of the dogs.
Joule thought for a moment. When had she last seen a coyote? She’d just assumed that they were pack animals and that would afford them protection from the dogs. But she didn’t know.
Cage interrupted her musings. “I’m assuming that would leave blood everywhere. And wouldn't eating a coyote make them cannibalistic?”
Joule hadn't thought of that. “Would they eat wolves? They did eat a bunch of the neighborhood dogs. So yeah, that would make them cannibalistic.”
She thought another moment and amended her answer. “Eating coyotes doesn’t make them cannibalistic. Coyotes have been known to eat small dogs. Cats, too, but dogs are the important standard here. That’s not cannibalism.”
The Hunted Page 6
