“But what is this thing? You must have some idea. You must have thought about it.”
“I’ve thought about it, sure. But I don’t know. I’ve told myself maybe it is something that has survived out of the prehistoric past. Or the ghost of something from a prehistoric age. Although it doesn’t have a ghostly look to it. What do you think, Asa?”
“Sometimes it appears a little faint,” I said. “A little fuzzy, maybe. But not in the same way a ghost would be faint or fuzzy. It doesn’t have a ghostly look to it.”
“Why don’t the two of you stay for supper,” Ezra suggested. “We could sit and talk the night away. I ain’t talked out by any means; I got a lot of things stored up to say. I could ramble on for hours. I got a big kettle of turtle stew on the stove, five times as much as Ranger and I can eat. I caught a couple of young snappers down by a little pond not far from here. An old snapper can be moderate tough, but a young one is downright toothsome. Couldn’t offer much else than turtle stew, but when you got turtle stew, you don’t want nothing else.”
Rila looked at me. “Could we?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I’m tempted, but we should be getting back. It’s two miles out to the road where we parked the car. I wouldn’t want to try those two miles in the dark. We better start now so we’ll have some light to follow the trail.”
SEVEN
Back in the car, heading for home, Rila asked, “Why didn’t you tell me about this Catf ace?”
“I did mention him,” I told her. “I didn’t elaborate on what kind of thing he is. You wouldn’t have believed me.”
“And you thought I’d believe Ezra?”
“Well, don’t you?”
“I’m not sure if I do or not. It sounds like a backwoods tall tale. And Ezra—a philosophical hermit. I never dreamed there were people like him.”
“There aren’t many. He’s a bitter-ender of a died-out breed. When I was a boy, there were a few of them around. At one time, there were a lot of them. Old batches, my grandmother used to call them. Men who never married, who tended to pull away from society and live by themselves. They batched it—cooked for themselves, washed their clothes, grew little kitchen gardens, kept a dog or some cats for company. They lived by hiring out, working for farmers during busy seasons, perhaps doing some wood cutting in the winter. Most of them did some trapping—skunks, muskrats, things like that. To some extent, they lived off the land, hunting, fishing, gathering wild edible plants. Mostly they lived hand-to-mouth, but they got along, seemed generally happy. They had few worries because they had shucked responsibility. When they grew feeble and were unable to fend for themselves, they either were committed to the old-time poorhouses, or some neighbor took them in and kept them for the chores they could still manage to do. In other cases, someone dropped in on their shacks and found them dead a week. They were mostly shiftless and no account. When they got a little extra money together, they would go out on a drunk until their money was gone, then go back to their shacks and then, in another few months, they’d have scraped together enough for another drunken interlude.”
“It sounds like a singularly unattractive life to me,” said Rila.
“By modern standards,” I told her, “it is. What you are looking at is a pioneer attitude. Some of our young people have picked up the idea. They call it living off the land. It can’t be all bad.”
“Asa, you say you have seen this creature Ezra was telling us about, and you talked about panther scares. So other people may have seen it, too.”
“That’s the only way I can explain the panther stories. It does look faintly catlike.”
“But a grinning panther!”
“When people see a panther, or something they think is a panther, they’re not too likely to notice any grin. They’re scared. The grin, in their interpretation, could become a snarl.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “The whole thing is so fantastic. And yet, so is your dig. And Bowser wounded by a Folsom point. And the green dinosaur bones.”
“You’re asking for an explanation,” I said. “Rila, I’m out of explanations. There is a temptation to tie everything together. But I can’t be sure all these mysteries tie together. I can’t be sure at all. I wouldn’t blame you if you walked away. It’s not a pretty thing to face.”
“Perhaps not pretty,” she said, “but exciting and important. If anyone else had told me, I’d consider walking away. But I know you. You’d be honest in your thinking if it killed you. But it is a little frightening. I have the feeling that I’m standing on the brink of something I don’t understand, perhaps some great reality that will force us to take a new look at the universe.”
I laughed, but the laugh came out a little forced. “Let’s not take ourselves too seriously,” I said. “Let’s go one step at a time. It’s easier that way.”
“Yes, let’s do that,” she agreed, sounding relieved. “I wonder how Bowser is getting along.”
When we arrived home a few minutes later, it became apparent that Bowser was getting along quite well. Hiram was perched on the back stoop, with a stretched-out Bowser plastered close against him. Seeing us, Bowser beat his tail in welcome.
“How is he?” Rila asked Hiram.
“Bowser is okay,” said Hiram. “Me and him had a good day. We sat and watched the robin and we did a lot of talking. I washed out the place where the arrow hit him and it looks good. There ain’t no more bleeding and the wound is beginning to scab around the edges. Bowser was a good dog. He lay still when I cleaned it out. He didn’t even twitch. He knew I was helping him.”
“Did you find something to eat?” I asked.
“There was a piece of roast in the refrigerator and Bowser and me snared that. There was a little left and I gave that to Bowser for supper and fried some eggs for myself. We went and got the eggs out of the nests. There were eleven of them.”
Hiram got slowly to his feet, seeming to unfold as he arose. “Since you are here,” he said, “I’ll go on home. I’ll be back in the morning to take care of Bowser.”
“If you have something else to do,” I said, “there isn’t any need. We’ll be here. We’ll take care of him.”
“I got things to do,” Hiram said with dignity. “There are always things to do. But I promised Bowser. I told him I’d take care of him until he was all well.”
He came down the steps and started to go around the house, then stopped. “I forgot,” he said. “I didn’t shut the chicken house. It should be shut. There are a lot of skunks and foxes.”
“You go on,” I said. “I’ll shut up the chickens.”
EIGHT
The noise brought me straight upright in bed.
“What’s the matter?” Rila asked sleepily from her pillow.
“Something’s at the chickens.”
She stirred protestingly. “Don’t you ever get a night’s sleep here? It was Bowser last night and now the chickens.”
“It’s that goddamn fox,” I said. “He’s got three of them so far. The chicken house isn’t much better than a sieve.”
Through the night came the squalling of the frightened birds.
I swung my feet out of bed, found the slippers on the floor and shoved my feet into them.
Rila sat up. “What are you going to do?”
“This time, I’ll get him,” I said. “Don’t turn on any lights. You’ll scare him off.”
“It’s night,” said Rila. “You won’t be able to see a fox.”
“There’s a full Moon. If he’s there, I’ll see him.”
In the broom closet in the kitchen, I found the shotgun and a box of shells. I clicked two of them into the chambers of the double-barrel. Bowser whined from his corner.
“You stay here,” I told him. “And keep quiet. I don’t want you messing around, scaring off the fox.”
“You be careful, Asa,” Rila cautioned, standing in the doorway of the living room.
“Quit worrying. I’ll be all right.”
“You ought to put something on,” she said. “You shouldn’t be running around out there, just in your slippers and pajama pants.”
“It’s warm,” I said.
“But it might be dewy. You’ll get your feet wet.”
“I’ll be all right,” I said. “I won’t be out long.”
The night was almost as bright as day; a great golden Moon shone directly overhead. In the softness of the moonlight, the yard had the haunting quality of a Japanese print. Lilac scent hung heavy in the night air.
Frantic squawking still came from the hen house. A clump of cabbage roses stood at one corner of the structure, and as I went pussyfooting across the wet, cold grass, heavy with dew, as Rila had said it would be, I got the impression, somehow, that the fox was not in the chicken house at all, but hiding in the rose clump. I stalked the rose clump, gun at ready. It was silly, I told myself. The fox either was still in the chicken house or had left; he would not be hiding in the roses. But the feeling persisted that he was in the roses. Thinking this, almost knowing it, I wondered how I knew, how I could possibly know.
And at the moment I was thinking this, all thought and wonderment were knocked out of me. Out of the rose clump, a face stared fixedly at me—a cat face, the whiskers, the owl eyes, the grin. It stared at me, unblinking, and never before had I seen it so clearly as at that moment—so clearly or for so long a time. Most of my sightings had been no more than fleeting glimpses. But now the face stayed on, hanging in the bush, the softness of the moonlight highlighting the details of the face, making each whisker stand out clearly. And this was the first time, I was sure, that I had actually seen the whiskers. Previously, I had gotten impressions of them, but had never really seen them.
Entranced and frightened, but more entranced than frightened, and with all thoughts of a fox knocked out of my mind, I moved forward slowly, the gun at ready, although now I knew I would not use it. I was close now, closer, something told me, than I should be, but I took another step, and on that step I stumbled or seemed to stumble.
When I recovered from the stumble, the rose bush was no longer there, and neither was the hen house. I stood on a little slope that was covered with short grass and moss, and up the hill a ways was a clump of birch. It was no longer night; the sun was shining, but with little warmth. The cat face was gone.
From behind me I heard a shuffling, thumping sound, and I pivoted around. The thumping, shuffling thing stood ten feet tall. It had gleaming tusks, and a long trunk hanging down between the tusks was swinging slowly from side to side like a pendulum. The thing was only a matter of a dozen feet away and coming straight toward me.
I ran. I went up that slope like a scared rabbit. If I hadn’t run, sure as hell that mastodon would have run over me. He paid no attention to me; he didn’t flick a glance at me. He just went shuffling along, for all his bulk stepping daintily and with deliberate precision.
A mastodon, I told myself. For the love of Christ, a mastodon!
My mind seemed to catch and stay upon the word—a mastodon, a mastodon, a mastodon—there was room for nothing else, just that one repeating word. Backed against the clump of birch, I stood transfixed, the stuck needle of my mind repeating that one word, while the beast went shuffling across the landscape, turning now to head downhill toward the river.
First, it had been Bowser, I thought, yelping home with a Folsom in his rump, and now it was me. I had somehow traveled, ridiculous as it might seem, the selfsame trail as Bowser.
Here I stood, I thought, a ridiculous figure dressed in pajama pants and a pair of worn slippers, clutching a shotgun in my hand.
A time tunnel had brought me here—or a time road or a time path, whatever one might call it—and that goddamn Catface was mixed up in my predicament somehow, as, undoubtedly, he’d been mixed up in the time traveling that Bowser had done. The funny thing was that there had been no sign of the time path, nothing to warn me that I was putting a foot upon it. What kind of sign, I wondered, would a man look for—a sort of shimmer in the air, perhaps, although I was sure there had been no shimmer.
And while I was thinking of that, I thought of something else. When I had reached this place, I should have marked it so that I’d have at least a fighting chance of getting back into my own time again. Although, I told myself, that probably wasn’t as simple as it sounded—just marking the place where you came out might not mark the path. Nonetheless any chance of marking the spot now was gone. I had run scared, and with reason, when I’d seen the mastodon. Now there was no way I could find the original spot.
I comforted myself by thinking that Bowser had traveled in the past and had come back. So it was not impossible, I told myself, for a person to get back. If Bowser could get back, so could I. Although the moment that I thought of that, I was not too sure. Bowser might have a way to smell out a time tunnel that no man could ever have.
Just standing there and worrying about it, however, would not solve the problem, would not give the answer. If I couldn’t find the road back to the present, I might have to stay a while, and I told myself I’d better take a look around.
Looking in the direction the mastodon had gone, I saw a herd of mastodons, a mile or so away, four adults and a calf. The mastodon that had almost run over me clumped steadily to join them.
Pleistocene, I told myself, but how deep into the Pleistocene, I had no way of knowing.
While the lay of the land remained unchanged, it had a vastly different look, for there were no forests. Instead, there was a stretch of grassland that looked somewhat like a tundra, dotted here and there with clumps of birches and some evergreens, while along the river, I could make out misty yellow willows.
The birch trees in the clump next to me were leafed out, but the leaves were small, the immature leaves of spring. On the ground beneath the trees was a carpet of hepaticas, the delicate, many-hued flower that came to bloom shortly after the snow was gone. The hepaticas lent an air of familiarity, almost of identity. In my boyhood, on this very land, I had ranged the woods to bring home in grubby hands great bouquets of the flowers, which my mother would put in a squat brown pitcher, setting it in the middle of the kitchen table. Even from where I stood, it seemed to me that I could smell the exquisite, distinctive, never-to-be-forgotten odor of the tiny flowers.
Spring, I thought, but it was cold for spring. Despite the sun, I was shivering. An ice age, I told myself. Perhaps just a few miles to the north reared the shining ramparts of the glacial front. And here I was, with no more than pajama pants and slippers, and a shotgun in my hand—a shotgun with two shells in its barrels. That was all. That was the sum total. I had no knife, no matches, nothing. I glanced toward the sky and saw that the sun was edging up toward noon. Noon and chilly as it was, it could be freezing by nightfall. A fire, I thought, but I had no way to make a fire. Flint, if I could find some flint. I racked my brain to recall if there was flint to be found in the neighborhood, although even if there were, what could I do with it? Flint struck against flint would produce sparks, but not hot enough to start a fire. Struck against steel, the sparks would be hot enough to start a fire in tinder. The gun was steel, but there wasn’t any flint—for now I remembered that in this area there wasn’t any flint. Perhaps I could take a shell and open it, extracting the shot charge, then pour out some of the powder to be mixed with tinder, and fire the opened shell into the tinder. Theoretically, the burning powder expelled from the barrel would fire the tinder if it was mixed with powder. But what if that didn’t work, I asked myself. And where would I look for tinder? In the heart of a rotten log, if I could find a rotting log and could tear it open to get at the dry, pulpy inner wood. Or bark peeled off a birch tree and shredded finely. Maybe that would work. I wondered whether it would, but could not be certain.
I stood defeated, exhausted with my thinking and the fright that was creeping in. Now, for the first time, I became aware of birds. First the flowers and now the birds. I’d been hearing them all the time, but my brain, roaring wi
th its problems, had rejected them. There was a bluebird perched on a winter-dead stalk. A mullen stalk, perhaps. I tried to remember if the mullen was native or had been imported, in which case, it could not be a mullen stalk. Anyhow, the bird clung to the swaying stalk and sang. A meadowlark leaped from the grass and soared into the air, spraying its trill of excited happiness behind it. In the birch trees, little birds that must have been some sort of sparrow hopped cheeping from branch to branch. The place simply crawled with birds.
The lay of the land, once I had gotten myself oriented, began to look more and more familiar. Naked as it might be, it still was Willow Bend. The river swung out of the north and curved toward the west, then veered east again. All along the bend, the stream was lined with yellow willow trees.
The mastodons were moving off now, down the valley away from me. Other than the mastodons and birds, I could detect no sign of life. But there could be other life, I thought: sabertooth, dire wolf, maybe even cave bear. I could take care of myself for a time, I knew, but only for a time. Once the two shells had been fired, I would be without a weapon, defenseless, the gun no better than a club.
Watching carefully for any sign of life, I walked down the slope toward the river, which I saw was wider and flowing more rapidly than I had ever seen it. Melt water from the glaciers to the north, perhaps.
The misty yellowness of the willows came from pollen-laden pussy willows, great fluffy caterpillars covered with a golden dust. The stream was clear—so clear that I could see the pebbles rolling on the bottom and the flashing shadows of fleeing fish, darting schools of them. Here was food, I told myself. Without a hook or line, I still could weave a net of withelike willow branches, stripping off pieces of the willow bark to hold the woven branches in place. It would be a crude affair and an awkward business, but it could be done; I could weave the net and use it to catch fish. I wondered how raw fish might do as a steady diet and gagged a little at the thought.
If I had to stay here, I told myself, if there was no way of getting back to my own time, then somehow or other, by some hook or crook, I must rediscover fire—fire to keep me warm, fire to cook my food.