He realized the coyotes and the insects had all fallen silent. Only the wind
still had a voice.
Frowning, he turned to look at the dark forest that encircled the small clearing
in which his cabin stood.
Something growled.
Wes squinted at the night-swaddled woods, which suddenly seemed less well
illuminated by the moon than they had been a moment ago.
The growling was deep and angry. Not like anything he had heard out there before
in ten years of nights alone.
Wes was curious, even concerned, but not afraid. He stood very still, listening.
A minute ticked by, and he heard nothing further.
He finished closing the lean-to doors, pegged the latch, and picked up the hod
full of cordwood.
Growling again. Then silence. Then the sound of dry brush and leaves crackling,
crunching, snapping underfoot.
Judging by the sound, it was about thirty yards away. Just a bit west of the
outhouse. Back in the forest.
The thing grumbled again, louder this time. Closer, too. Not more than twenty
yards away now.
He could still not see the source of the sound. The deserter moon continued to
hide behind a narrow filigree band of clouds.
Listening to the thick, guttural, yet ululant growling, Wes was suddenly uneasy.
For the first time in ten years as a resident of Holy Jim, he felt he was in
danger. Carrying the hod, he headed quickly toward the back of the cabin and the
kitchen door.
The rustling of displaced brush grew louder. The creature in the woods was
moving faster than before. Hell, it was running.
Wes ran, too.
The growling escalated into hard, vicious snarls: an eerie mix of sounds that
seemed one part dog, part pig, part cougar, part human, and one part something
else altogether. It was almost at his heels.
As he sprinted around the corner of the cabin, Wes swung the hod and threw it
toward where he judged the animal to be. He heard the cordwood flying loose and
slamming to the ground, heard the metal hod clanging end Over end, but the
snarling only grew closer and louder, so he knew he had missed.
He hurried up the three back steps, threw open the kitchen door, stepped inside,
and slammed the door behind him. He slipped the latch bolt in place,
a security measure he had not used in nine years, not since he had grown
accustomed to the peacefulness of the canyon.
He went through the cabin to the front door and latched it, too. He was
Surprised by the intensity of the fear that had overcome him. Even if a hostile
animal was out there—perhaps a crazed bear that had come down from the
mountains—it could not open doors and follow him into the cabin. There was no
need to engage the locks, yet he felt better for having done so. He was
operating on instinct, and he was a good enough outdoorsman to know that
instincts ought to be trusted even when they resulted in seemingly irrational
behavior.
Okay, so he was safe. No animal could open a door. Certainly, a bear couldn’t,
and it was most likely a bear.
But it hadn’t sounded like a bear. That’s what had Wes Dalberg so spooked:
it had not sounded like anything that could possibly be roaming those woods. He
was familiar with his animal neighbors, knew all the howls, cries, and other
noises they made.
The only light in the front room was from the fireplace, and it did not dispel
the shadows in the corners. Phantoms of reflected firelight cavorted across the
walls. For the first time, Wes would have welcomed electricity.
He owned a Remington 12-gauge shotgun with which he hunted small game to
supplement his diet of store-bought foods. It was on a rack in the kitchen. He
considered getting it down and loading it, but now that he was safely behind
locked doors, he was beginning to be embarrassed about having panicked. Like a
greenhorn, for God’s sake. Like some lardass suburbanite shrieking at the sight
of a fieldmouse. If he had just shouted and clapped his hands, he would most
likely have frightened off the thing in the brush. Even if his reaction could be