Authors: R. A. MacAvoy
The front door of the house flew open and hit the wall so hard that the door’s small window cracked. The sound of breaking glass makes me sick, for I have heard it too often in my work, and I watched the large, barrel-shaped man in the black frock coat come on with great misgivings. My ghoulish friend vanished like a demon of the night.
The big man said nothing coherent but advanced upon me with both arms out and raised, like an enraged bear. Like a bear he flung his great paws at my head and he roared, and I was too busy avoiding his blows to apologize. Besides, what could I say?
For perhaps half a minute I danced a reluctant, bobbing dance with him. He neither punched nor slapped at me. I think his object, as much as he had one, was to grab me and break my back. When he failed in this, he flung himself at the casement window and the wall below so that the latch gashed his chin bloody, and hugging that ordinary window, he began to weep.
When I thought he might be able to hear me I told him I was a forest tracker. That I was there to help. I left him with a small circle gathering around him on the street, people with their heads bobbing, making noises like a flock of ducks. It didn’t matter if he understood or not. Or even if he hated me or not.
It was always Powl’s greatest criticism of me that I allow myself to become involved in things around me. One event, be it a wedding or a dog’s defection or a man weeping into a window, sparks me on into three others, each of which demand their own loyalties and attentions, until I am like a ball bouncing down a steep street from cobble to cobble. He would say the sagacious attitude is one of distance and indifference. In return I would answer that he went through life fearing the cobbles would hurt him.
Before the day was out my self-proclaimed intention was known throughout the village, and many people took an interest in this ragged man who had claimed (by nightfall the tale had grown to this) to hunt and root out the demon of the woods. I had no trouble finding food and lodging that evening, nor people to show me marks in the snow.
Many of these marks were those of the white dog, though I had not seen its furry face since it denied me a share of its dinner, and I looked at those with an attempt at disdain and pronounced them dog tracks, not wolf tracks. No one asked me the difference.
I did not think the brute could have been here four days before to steal a child. I did not think it had the art of stealing children from high windows. But I wasn’t certain. It took me another two days to discover a track worth following out of the village, and I only knew that success because the snow melted again, revealing what it had held in storage for most of a week.
It was not a wolf track, but it was not that of a man in boots or clogs, either. It looked like feet wrapped in rags, which is no garb for the Zaquashian winters. The steps came heavy on the toes, and each was placed in front of the last, like the gait of a sheepdog, or of a man dancing. There was the bulk of something that fell and was dragged some steps through the
muck, and then one perfect, tiny child’s footprint, with five toes spread, and then another, and then the tracks went up the back of the road onto drier ground.
It was very little evidence, and seemed less as I quartered the thawing turf above. The road was cleared for safety fifty feet from the public road, and beyond that the forest was allowed to press, a dry strutwork of birch and maple, simple as a block print against the gray sky. There I found a passage among the trees—hardly a path—and more of the formless prints. I followed with the hedger in my hand, though I had no intention of chopping branches.
The day grew older, and the air freezing in my nostrils and ears made a hammer-string sort of music, like a distant clavichord. I saw three deer, and I found the empty skin of a rabbit hanging from a tree. It had been rough-ripped and yanked off the body, and though it was thoroughly chilled, it was nonetheless fresh, for such a tempting thing would not make it through one night of foxes and their like.
Men do not skin rabbits where they are caught unless they intend to eat them immediately, for it is much more convenient to carry the beast in God’s wrapping. Beasts do not skin their prey. I stood in the freezing wet and contemplated this sad bit of fur, and I considered it might have symbolic significance. So many of the worst sights do.
I caught no rabbit nor tried to that evening, but ate a hard black loaf I had saved from breakfast, along with a bottle of ale. By twilight it was frozen above the ground, but two days of thaw could not be reversed so quickly, and the earth was nasty wet. Ripping a dozen small limbs from the birch trees, I made a platform high up in a maple, and my leather bootlaces secured the thing in place. My pack and I rested better up there than we might have on the ground, but lying still is not the same as sleeping, and the cold crackles of the woods jarred me awake repeatedly.
Since I found the skin I had not known peace of mind, though I am not sure it was fear I felt. The night sky was obscure and interrupted with clouds like faces, like that of the man I had killed, and that of Solinka, whom I had left curled up with her sister and her sister’s husband.
There was a brushing and a crashing below, so noisy that it could be made only by a deer. (It is a popular misconception that beasts are silent in the woods.) I pushed to the edge of my tree fort and made out under starlight the flat back of the doe and her pale breeches. She breathed raggedly and slammed down the path anyway. I waited to see what was chasing her.
Short behind came another set of four feet pounding, but these in peculiar rhythm. For a moment there was the round top of a very hairy head, or perhaps a furred cap, and then the disturbance passed. In the distance I saw a flash of white buttocks. Not a deer’s. And I heard a human giggle.
It seemed my mind had lost the ability to do more than witness, but my hair had gained the ability for independent action, for it stood erect and crawled about my head. I told myself to move, if only to retreat more firmly under the covers, when there was another sound, and this time the passerby was unmistakable and familiar: a pale, furry shape with plume tail hanging behind. Even the sound of his panting identified him. So intent was he on his own pursuit (of the doe? of the pursuers?) that he did not scent me on the earth below, or did not care to stop if he did.
I sat up, wrapped the blanket around me, and stared into the darkness as though it were a brick wall.
Moonrise came only slightly before dawn, but in the sliver of light I unwound my temporary shelter and followed after the hunt, using the flounderings of the doe in the shrubbery for marker instead of the frozen ground. The sun joined her brother in the sky by the time I had reached the carcass stretched out beside the path. The black-red of the frozen blood was the first color I saw that day. Her throat had been ripped. She had been half carved and half gnawed. The remaining meat had been pissed on, and there was a mound of watery shit on the path. I moved with a greater attempt at stealth after finding this.
The day had brightened considerably and the bare trees were groaning, as though they might be forced into thaw again by the light of the sun. My stomach, too, was groaning with hunger, and my sense of smell sharpened when the path I was following broadened, cluttered with footprints both canine and human. The wind was coming at me from before, and it carried all the most objectionable smells of settlement and some that were merely unknown to me.
The dog had gone this way and not returned, so I had to assume there was one alert creature with a good nose ahead of me. At least one. On both sides the underbrush rose to my hips, with dead briar and vine maple. It would be hard to get off the path quickly. I resisted the temptation to drop to an inhuman crouch myself, and I walked forward until I could see the forest open up ahead. Then I opened my pack, took out my lens case, stuffed it in my belt, and climbed a likely tree.
Two lenses, positioned a certain distance apart, become a telescope. Large or small, the principle is the same, so I had turned my great art into small artisanship and made a hand-held, collapsible telescope out of stiffened leather, held into tube shape by buckles and holding the light-gathering lens in place with leather washers. Into this a small bronze eyepiece slid in and out. Second to the hedger, it was my favorite toy, but I had never had to cling to the trunk of a tree while fitting it together. A standard spyglass is more convenient in the long run.
I was not in clear sight of the place yet, but I was close enough to make out a very tiny triangular hut of saplings roofed in fir boughs (which must have been carried a distance) and backed by a stone-faced hill, which stood out like a gaunt hipbone of the earth. In the area before it there was dead grass, some pointed sticks like crude javelins, a fire pit, and a small cairn of rocks. I could not see significance in the latter, unless it were a grave.
From this angle the entrance to the hut was black; I could not tell if it were a dark wooden door or an opening. Not much could fit into a place that size, regardless.
I dismantled my glass and came down. Nothing changed as I approached the clearing, not even the wind, but as I left the trees and felt the sun on my back, out of the crude entrance to the hut stepped the white dog, or wolf, which I no longer thought of as mine. As though by law of opposition, now that I showed him no affection he put his head down and fawned toward me, wiggling his hind end like a saucy girl.
I did not try to touch him, so I don’t know whether he would have let me. I approached the empty doorway with my hedger at the ready.
The hut itself was only a doorway. The living space was under the hill, in a cave that yawned a good five yards deep. There were pots and pans cluttered into a corner, the ceiling was black with soot, and on poles hung skins of deer and larger beasts, badly tanned if tanned at all. There was a cot in the back, against the wall.
All this I saw in a moment without paying it attention, for on the cot was the center and focus of the room. Crouched on that dirty bed was a woman of middle years with no clothes on, and over her, engaged in conjugal rites after the style of a dog, was what might or might not have been a man.
His legs were long enough and his hands (propped against her shoulders) human enough. The hair on his head continued down his back in a thin line, and I saw that it was not merely long hair but instead a large expanse of short, bristly growth. His ribs had a good covering, too, and his ears. He was working away at full intensity at the moment of my arrival, and before I could react—I was as shocked and embarrassed as I have ever been—he reached his satisfaction with a grunt and a groan and collapsed upon the back of the silent, seemingly uninvolved woman. And then he saw me and I saw his face.
His forehead was normal enough, though fashion prefers more height. His eyes seemed human, seen in this light and at this distance, but under them like a mask was a growth of bristle like that on his head, joining with his overgrown beard like a mask cut from a bear’s hide. His teeth, which in his understandable outrage were exposed to me, were too discolored and broken for me to say much about their size or shape.
With a howl—again human enough—he vaulted off his partner’s back, but was brought up short in a manner I could not understand, and I was about to retreat the way I had come when I saw that he was his own impediment: that he was tied into the woman in the manner of a dog with a bitch. Horror and amazement kept me where I was as he strained and lunged toward me and she cried out in pain, her hands over her head.
The coupling broke by this force, and as the fellow rushed at me, his penis still half stiff, I saw there was a red swollen bulb at the end of it, like the bladder on a jester’s wand.
Whatever he was, he was in the right of it at this moment, in his own house and with his lady-wife, and I was aware of my infringement in every atom of my body. I could not turn in time, nor did I fancy being chased through the woods by an angry husband, wolf or man, so I lowered both my hedger and my head and caught his charge to fling him over my back.
In the light he was very pale under the hair, and his skin stank and glistened. I am told certain primitive natives of North Sekret grease their bodies with fat to hold out the cold. I had never been told these people were furry, however, nor that they had fingernails thick as horn, as this one did as he hit the frozen earth and sprang up again. I swished my blade through the air between us, both as a warning to him and to encourage him left, so that I could exit to the right, away from house and home and all. I heard the woman moving behind me but I still was young and had never taken seriously being hit with an iron frying pan.
It was a good blow. Had she hit with the rim she might have broken my skull, but she went flat-on to the crown of my head.
The world rang like a bell, but I did not pass out. Through long practice at being hit, I have become difficult to knock out. The monster before me took this opportunity to advance, nails raised to rend or strangle—I don’t know what—and I found my blade slapping him across the face, flat-on as the woman had struck me. He reeled enough for me to leap through the entrance and past him, and then he spun around, crouching, fingers spread wide.
The white dog was barking, barking and running in excited circles around us. He seemed to be enthused but neutral in his opinions. The woman threw the pan at him.
I hesitated among flight, attack, and apology, but my resonant head decided on none of these. I danced from one foot to another over the dead grass, blade toward my naked enemy, and I said, “Is that a grave of a child over there?”