Hunters

By Chet Williamson

Smashwords Edition published at Smashwords by
Crossroad Press

Copyright 2011 by Chet Williamson

Edited by Paulo Monteiro

Cover designed by David Dodd

Blood on Cover image courtesy of:
http://jiangshi.deviantart.com/

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NOVELS:

Ash
Wednesday

Soulstorm

Lowland
Rider

Second
Chance

Reign

UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOKS:

As author & Narrator:

Ash Wednesday

Soulstorm

Lowland Rider

Second Chance

As Narrator:

Blood: A Southern Fantasy – by Michael
Moorcock

Fabulous Harbours – by Michael Moorcock

War Amongst the Angels – by Michael
Moorcock

Nightjack – by Tom
Piccirilli

Blood Lust: Preternaturals Book I – by Zoe
Winters

Save My Soul: Preternaturals Book II – by Zoe
Winters

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The following occurred ten or fifteen years ago,
long enough that some of those who survived have almost forgotten
about it.

Almost.

T
he sound of the
shot startled him. He had expected to hear some shooting today, but
not this far from any of the camps.

Boys would be boys, and hunters were often
the biggest boys of all. They got jittery waiting for the first
day, and blasted away at tin cans and bottles with their deer
rifles or the pistols they had brought into the woods for just such
plinking. And of course they fired innumerable times if they hadn't
been able to sight in their rifles before coming to the
mountains.

But they didn't sight them in two miles from
the nearest deer camp, and they didn't fire only one shot from a
high powered rifle.

Ned Craig started walking in the direction
of the shot. He rested his hand for a moment on the butt of the
Ruger .357 revolver the Game Commission had issued him, thankful
that he had never had to use it against a man and hoping that he
never would. Fortunately, hunters were also like little boys when
they got caught breaking the rules, chagrined, embarrassed, and a
bit hostile. Sometimes they tried to talk Ned out of citing them,
but only once had someone given him a hard time, and that had been
years before.

He didn't carry the sidearm against hunters,
though. He did it for the animals. During his first year as a
Wildlife Conservation Officer, six years earlier, he had come
across a long-shot buck. Whoever had shot the deer had apparently
lost its trail, and it had lain there in agony, struggling to
breathe. Ned had had to use a rock to end its suffering, and after
that unpleasant duty he swore to himself that he would never be in
the woods without a pistol again. He had found two such animals
since then, both during bow season, and had killed each of them
quickly and painlessly, with a single shot to the head.

Now he trudged on through the thickly grown
trees, but slowed when saw a spot of blaze orange. It was a man,
old enough to know better, carrying a 30.06 and walking slowly
through the brush away from Ned. Ned hailed him with a not
unfriendly, "Hey!" and the man turned.

When he focused beyond Ned's own bright
orange chest patch and saw the green Stetson hat, the forest green
Refrigiwear coat with the Game Commission patch on the arm, and
Ned's name plate, his already pasty face went even paler. Then his
cheeks turned pink with something more than the cold. He lowered
his rifle wearily.

"Getting an early start?" Ned asked,
smiling.

"I, uh..." The man was grizzled, and Ned
thought he had seen him before. A local, probably. Ned guessed that
he was in his mid-forties. He was wearing an old tan hunting coat,
and holes revealed the quilting beneath. His rifle showed a lot of
wear on the stock. "Just checkin' things out," the man said.

"With your rifle? Making sure it fires
okay?" Ned let a practiced grin of gentle reproach slide over his
face. After all, the people he cited nearly always carried guns.
"Do you know that by just walking out here with a loaded rifle,
you're breaking two provisions of the Game and Wildlife Code?
Carrying that loaded weapon is prima facie evidence of hunting, so
you're both hunting out of season and hunting on a Sunday. I'm
sorry, but I'm going to have to cite you. Let me have your license,
please."

Always polite but firm, just like a state
trooper when he stops you for speeding. Ned always added a touch of
regret as well, as though he'd rather not be giving them a
citation, but he had no choice in the matter, and they had no
choice but to accept it. He wrote up the man, then handed him the
paper.

"Okay, this is a field acknowledgment. The
fine is two hundred dollars, and that must be paid to me now,
either by cash or check."

The man nodded, but then his lower lip
started to quiver like a child's, and tears rolled from his rheumy
eyes over the pocked cheeks. He struggled to keep himself in
check.

"Problem?"

The man shrugged. His attempt at nonchalance
was pitiful. "I don't
have
two hundred dollars,
officer."

"Then I'm going to have to confiscate your
rifle in lieu of payment. You can come by my place within thirty
days to pay, and you'll get your rifle back."

The man handed the rifle over to Ned, who
worked the bolt and removed the cartridges. "I won't have it in
thirty days, sir. Maybe not even sixty." He cleared the phlegm from
his throat. "Got laid off from Gleason last month. Been kinda
rough...with the kids 'n all. I guess I just wanted to get a step
up on the other guys. Get some meat for this winter. Wasn't fair,
though."

Gleason Homes was a small concern near St.
Mary's that built manufactured housing. Ned knew a few families who
had been hurt by Gleason's downsizing. "That's tough," Ned said.
"I'm sorry." It was too late to change anything now. He'd already
written the citation. "You in a camp?" Ned asked.

"No, come out on my own."

"Tell you what. This is my stomping ground
tomorrow. So I'll give you tomorrow." He held out the rifle to the
man. "You get one tomorrow, you keep it, I won't say anything. If I
see you, I won't see you, got it?"

The man nodded dumbly, as though he couldn't
believe it, and took the rifle back.

"But that's just for tomorrow. Whatever
happens, you bring that rifle to my place by sunset, or you're
going to be in even worse trouble. My address is on the citation.
Got it?"

"Yeah...yeah."

"And don't say a word about this to anybody.
This gets back to me, you're going to be very sorry. Okay, now take
that rifle and get out of here."

The man did as he was told, and didn't even
say thanks. Ned shook his head as he watched the blaze orange
vanish through the brown brush. He'd been a chump. Maybe the guy
didn't even have any kids. More likely they were grown and had
their own trailers or shabby apartments now.

Still, it couldn't do any harm. The guy was
a veteran hunter. Odds are he would have taken a buck tomorrow
anyway, and after all, Ned did cite him. He'd get his deer
tomorrow, and have meat for his family. And he'd eventually pay the
two hundred. Ned wouldn't forward the rifle to the Game Commission
unless he was sure the man had no intention of reclaiming it by
paying the fine. But Ned believed the man would pay when he
could.

Hell, hunters weren't a bad lot. Oh sure,
there were a few idiots who hit the woods. Some just came out to
whoop it up in their camps, drink, and blow things away and there
were others who compared their firepower like it was a dick
measuring contest. But most of them were okay, just working Joes
anxious to get some venison in the freezer and maybe hang a trophy
on the wall, happy to get out into the woods, be together with
their friends and alone with nature.

The thought made Ned Craig stop and
appreciate his surroundings. The woods of north central
Pennsylvania were darkly delicious this time of the year. The
burning reds and golds of autumn had faded away to a mulatto tint,
a uniform coffee and cream shade that spoke of stillness and
desolation and the kind of decay that new life would spring from in
the months ahead. Ned had often traveled through the southwest, and
he thought that early winter was the only time of the year when
these forests had a desert feel to them, dry and crackling, when
the trees seemed more like giant cactus and the carpet of leaves
underfoot neared the spongy consistency of sand.

But there was no openness here, none of the
vastness of the western deserts. This was a desolation you could
hide in.

Ned breathed in the cold air and felt the
lining of his nostrils prickle. He loved the desert, and often
thought about retiring there when the time came, but he knew that
he would miss the forests too much, the changing of the seasons,
the pageant of green life and brown death the woods silently put on
every year.

But one thing he would not miss was
tomorrow's pageant of violence.

The first day of deer season always
depressed him. He knew the annual kill was necessary, for otherwise
the deer population would grow too large, and starvation was a far
more miserable death than being shot. He had witnessed one
snow-covered winter in which he had come across the slat-ribbed
carcasses of starved deer every few hundred yards, and did not wish
to see another.

But there was something about seeing these
gentle, graceful animals hung up for slaughter, or finding their
piles of entrails cooling on the ground that saddened Ned. He was
not a hunter, though he had hunted with his father when he was
young. The trips had inspired a love of the outdoors in him, but
that love had not encompassed the act of killing game.