I pressed my back against the tree and opened my eyes—and in those few seconds they’d adjusted, just a little. I still couldn’t see much of anything, but there were shapes in the shadows now. The tall lines were trees. The quiet and shifty lump in the clearing was the beast that hunted me.
It was a terrible spot I was in.
I knew she knew where I was. But she wasn’t coming for me. Not yet. She was keeping herself all silent; I couldn’t even hear her feathers rustling, or her body twitching. The most that reached my ears was a loud dripping that sounded like soup being ladled slowly onto the ground from a very great height.
I could only pray that it was blood.
A clutch of leaves crunched under one huge foot. A second crunch came up closer to the tree I used to hide myself.
My thoughts were speeding in circles and I could not calm them. She was coming for me, and I had nowhere to hide. I shifted my grip on the axe, because that was all I was holding anymore. Everything else had been taken, or had fallen, or was simply lost. So I clung to that axe with both my hands and I prayed for guidance. I prayed for strength. I prayed for Little Heaster to make it back to camp unharmed.
Her feet were crashing against the earth, like she was lifting them up one at a time and testing them. She was stomping in place, but then she decided she’d had enough of that and she leaped—in just a couple of quick steps she’d be at my tree—and I had barely half a second to think about what to do.
When she was quiet, she was invisible.
When she was running, she was a terror of noise and sharp edges; and I did not need to see her lit up to know where she was coming from.
I turned and ran, and I ran myself smack into another tree within three steps. It hurt like crazy, but it was mostly just my shoulder and it could’ve been worse—it could’ve got me harder in the head, and it could’ve knocked me down. I didn’t go down, but I staggered off to the side and she was right behind me.
She didn’t expect me to cut so hard to the left, but then again, neither did I. Hitting the tree might’ve saved me from her, for just a few moments, so I kept staggering on around. I went behind her, back the way she’d come tearing at me. Her wing cast up a huge gust, a big wind that wasn’t hard enough to blow me down, though it was hard enough to scare me silly. It felt like she was breathing right up against me, whispering into my ears. And all I could do was run, and run blind.
So I tried to think.
Was she hurt so bad that I could climb out of her reach? Ordinarily you don’t think to climb a tree to escape something that flies, but I knew she was hurt. She was really hurt, even if she wasn’t hurt as bad as she’d pretended.
I might try it, as a last resort.
Only as a last resort.
I ducked my head down, partly because it hurt so bad I had to, and partly because I was trying to shield it from the lower branches. And if I were to fall, I’d need to cover it anyway.
Of course, if I were to fall, that’d be pretty much the end of me.
She was moving lop-sided, having to turn herself to follow me between the closer trees. That gave me an idea.
I couldn’t hardly see a thing, but if I could go farther back away from the Road, where the trees were smaller and closer together, I could feel my way along better—and she’d be even more hard-pressed to follow me. It was hard to remember which way to run, while I was trying to remember and trying not to kill myself against another tree trunk at the same time—and all the while, she was back behind me, huffing and puffing and trudging along so close, so fast, that I couldn’t escape the smell of her.
Her beak snapped and I felt a tug and a jab at my back, to the right of my backbone. Hot pain scored down my ribs, right through the buckskin coat.
I didn’t cry out. I didn’t want her to think she’d hurt me.
She slowed me, though. She was biting down because she’d got a mouthful, and she was tugging, trying to pull me back by my coat. She was slashing at me, trying to snag the cut with her pointed face.
All I could do was keep moving. I was pretty sure I was leading her away from the Road, and I was pretty sure there was a gully that ran real deep and sharp alongside where we were cutting. I’d been through this land before, once or twice. I did my best to recall the way the ground was laid out. I did my best to take her far and deep, away from my Road, away from my men.
I didn’t do a real great job of it, but if I must defend myself, it was awful dark and I was being chased by a monster.
I heard voices, somehow over the stomping rush of me running and her chasing. They were folks I recognized, voices I’d heard plenty before, and I had a moment of pure panic when I thought I’d led the damned creature right back into their midst.
Then I realized they were charging towards us. They were following the noise, and I’d told them not to come and help—I’d made them promise not to—but here they came, with fire and lanterns and guns, and axes, and God knew what else.
It made me mad, and that made me run faster, just from the rush of my anger. And by way of being fully truthful, I have to say that it made me feel a little glad, too. That creature was going to kill me if she could catch me. And if she could catch me, she’d keep on catching them, one by one, until she’d eaten the lot of us.
Well. I wasn’t going to have any of that.
She couldn’t have them. I wouldn’t let her.
***
I stumbled.
The fall didn’t take me down the way I expected. It took me down, and down, and farther. I’d found my gully.
She fell after me, spreading her wings and gliding—but not gliding very far. The gully was steeper on the far side. She must’ve been watching me not to notice. She must’ve been following so determined to catch me that it didn’t occur to her to watch where she was going.
She hit the far wall of the gully and tumbled against it.
Her whole body objected to the tumbling. Her wings went one way, her talons were grabbing and clutching at roots that ripped and tore as they failed to hold her weight. I didn’t have to see it. I could hear it. And it was going on right above me.
If I didn’t move quick, she’d roll right back on top of me.
I moved quick. I tripped forward, uphill. I was hoping maybe the force of her rolling would keep her going on down, past me. It might have been a little advantage, but I was ready to grab it. I’d have done anything at all to keep her farther away, and keep her moving in some other direction.
When she landed she let out a squawk, and more wind, and something that squished.
She fell behind me, not by much. She didn’t stay down, either. Slower now, and with a lot more effort by the sounds of things, she pulled herself up and started to crawl up, and out. I heard something strange when she flexed those wings; it wasn’t just the sound of air being shoved by feathers, it was the sound of bones that weren’t holding together very well. It was grinding and rough, like a wooden spoon stirring a bucket full of dry sand.
No matter how well she played possum, I didn’t think she could pretend to be broken. And this time, I gathered it wasn’t any pretending—because this time, she was making a retreat.
Behind me, I heard her struggling to rise.
Above me, at the gully’s edge, I heard my men and I saw the light of their fires.
***
They bore down on her. One of them tripped right over me—didn’t even see me. I understand that they were angry; she’d taken so many of us, and we were most of us friends.
And now they had her, and there were twenty of us and one of her, and she was all busted up.
She made it over the gully wall, mostly because my men had to climb down it and up the other side in order to chase her. I hauled my own self up too, because I wasn’t going to let them go after her without me.
I didn’t realize it until I started trying to follow them, but I’d gotten scuffed up pretty good, myself. I wouldn’t know it until later, but I’d bashed my head open on
that tree and I’d been bleeding all the while I was running from her.
That was all right. It didn’t slow me down too bad.
When I caught up to them, I almost felt sorry for her.
They’d run out of ammunition by the time I reached them, since the guns would only go one round each, at best. The men had their axes swinging, though, and she was ducking out of the way, rolling back and forth, trying to dodge them.
She couldn’t dodge them all.
One by one they struck her, sometimes individually, sometimes in packs. It was like watching wolves take apart a big deer, only better and worse at the same time.
The blows of the axes rained down—and in the dark, beside the gully, I heard the sounds of big bones cracking and wet feathers being beaten. By the light of the torches I saw her curling around herself, folding those wings forward, and I thought it was strange—because they were striking her everyplace. Most things think to cover their heads, and not their lower parts.
***
I had a flash of a thought. A memory of my wife, years before.
She was heavy with our third child, maybe a month or two away from delivering him. Out the front door, she was taking a pair of pails over to the barn to milk the cows, only she stopped just as soon as she got outside. And I heard her say, firm and insistent, “Daniel.”
I got up from the place where I was sitting. Something about the way she said my name said trouble, only she didn’t want to holler. I grabbed my gun and came out to stand beside her, and there was a cat—one of those big mountain cats, strong enough to take down a horse.
It wasn’t a stone’s throw away from her, but it was looking at her square in the face. But before I had time to raise the gun, the cat turned tail and disappeared into the woods. It was just as well. I don’t care to shoot anything I can’t eat, and I never heard of a cat that’d make good stew.
When I was sure the cat was gone, I looked down at my wife and she was whiter than a cloud. She was clutching her belly with one hand, and holding the other one out as if to ward the danger away.
***
The monster shuddered under the blows, and squealed and fumed as they hit her. I didn’t try to call the men off, but for some reason, I didn’t join them, either. I had as much reason as anyone to want her dead. I had as much right as the rest of them to put her down.
Maybe I even had more reason than they did. She’d killed some of them; but they were my responsibility. Maybe I was the one who should’ve passed that final judgment on her.
But I didn’t. I’m not sure why, but I let them do it.
I let them hit her, and cut her, and bang their axes against her until she twitched and went still. Hell, I let them hit her for awhile even after that, because for one thing, they wanted to get it out—how mad they were because of how scared they’d been. And for another thing, me and Little Heaster had seen how she liked to play dead.
I was tired of her playing.
But I did wish it didn’t take her so long to die.
***
Finally, she quit breathing. Finally, she was just a pile of pulp and feathers.
***
Maybe fifty paces away from the gully there was a cave. The whole of that territory is pocked with them, and if you think about it too hard, it’ll make you feel uneasy about walking around, all that hollow earth underneath you.
The cave I knew was hardly a hole in the ground, but I’d seen it before when I’d been passing through. I didn’t care much about poking around in caves, because I don’t like the damp and I don’t like the crowded feeling they give me. I don’t mind the dark, but I don’t like being stuck someplace without any windows.
Between us, we half rolled, half carried the creature’s stinking carcass to the cave’s mouth, and we kicked her inside.
We could’ve left her lying out in the air to rot, I guess, but we didn’t want to smell her. It felt more right—more final, I guess I mean to say—to put her into the ground, even if we weren’t burying her. And we needed real bad to be done with her.
***
Anyway, we had a Road to finish.
XIV
Down Below the Bottom
Uncle John froze like a scared raccoon, when he backed up and ran right into that thing—that whatever-it-was. I saw where he was going and I wanted to stop him, but it was like he couldn’t hear me. There was so much noise, after the guns went off, in that tiny tight space. Maybe it hurt his ears. It hurt mine, too.
His shoulder knocked against the creature and he took a quick gasp like he was going to start hollering.
He didn’t yell. Nothing came out but a wheeze and a cough, because he was scared so bad he couldn’t move at all, not even to breathe. And bless him, he couldn’t even see what he’d smacked up against. At first I thought he was being stupid, not having the good sense to turn around and take a look; but then I figured it was just as well.
If he’d looked over his shoulder, he might’ve turned to stone or salt.
But Jesus, when his lantern spilled the oil—and God Almighty, when the flame licked it up and the light went reaching up to the cave’s ceiling, it was like that beast was some holy thing.
***
My wife’s mother gave her a Bible, one of those old books half as big as a suitcase. Inside it there are pages with paintings on them, showing scenes from the stories. Somewhere towards the back there’s a page from one of the prophet’s dreams about the end of the world.
It’s a picture of wings burned up by the fires of hell, but still lit up with the glory they once knew in Heaven. It’s a fallen angel, I guess—created beautiful and bright, then twisted and scalded by Satan.
***
As the oil burned around it the monster began to shake, trying to fling the flaming droplets away from its body. It scattered the oil. It sprayed the sparkling stuff against the walls where it glowed and dripped, and sizzled against the dampness there.
Behind me, the Manders and my cousin Carlson were scrambling for an exit, but it became real clear real fast that there wasn’t any exit except the way we’d come in—and with that monster standing there, squawking and raging and ready to kill, we surely couldn’t go back.
There was no way out but down.
I was scared as hell by the prospect of going even deeper. I mean, Christ—weren’t we already at the bottom? But there wasn’t any time to think on it. We only had a moment there, while the beast was all sparked up and thrashing, to decide which way we were going to go.
Uncle John was pinned by it, almost. He was up against the cave wall beside the passage that had led us this far. Looking back on it now, maybe I should’ve shoved him past the monster. We maybe could have made it out, just the two of us. We maybe could’ve burst past it and back out into the main room, out into the open air.
But there was just no time.
I could only move in jerks, letting my arms and legs do the thinking for me—because they did it faster.
I grabbed Uncle John by the shoulder and he let out a yelp. I didn’t realize then that he’d been nicked by someone’s gunshot and he was bleeding. In that small cave room with the one way coming in and the one way going out, so much was happening that it was impossible to even see everything at once, much less notice it.
So I took Uncle John and I squeezed his arm real tight, and I yanked him away from the entrance hole and away from that flaming great bird-monster with the huge wings that bucked and jerked.
I pulled him forward, away from the wall. He stumbled after me, not fighting me exactly, but not helping me much, either.
I knew he was only scared and stunned. Yeah, well. We were all scared and stunned, but he was the only one who wasn’t running of his own accord.
I drew him back, farther into the darkness except that it wasn’t as dark as it might’ve been because the others had gone ahead of us, and they had lights. They were charging on back, not picking any real direction except “away, and as fast as we can.”
&nbs
p; I followed them, trying to track the wild swinging of their lights as they held them up, trying to see and trying to run.
Since I had Uncle John’s arm in one hand, I’d had to stuff my pickaxe down into my belt in order to hold both him and my own lantern. His was destroyed against the cave wall, or against the monster, I don’t know which. I saw it happen, and I still couldn’t tell you exactly how it all took place.
Without me, he’d be in the dark, and I was in the semi-dark as long as I stuck with him, because one little flame in a hurricane glass can only do so much underground, and it took me a minute or two of staggering to catch up to the other men.
Those moments between the monster and the Manders are hard to recall, except in pieces. I remember seeing the flames bound off the wet stone shapes; and I remember seeing blood from somewhere, from something, smeared across one of the skinny, pointed columns that dangled from the ceiling.
As far as I could tell, no one had ever cut a road through that cave. No one ever cleaned a path or evened out the walkways, such as they were. A cave is cut by water, or that’s how I understand it, and water doesn’t cut very cleanly. There weren’t any real paths to speak of. There weren’t any handrails or lamps set into the walls.
I thought, This must be what it’s like to be an ant in a hill. Always crawling and climbing, always ducking and scrambling, and there are never any windows.
I banged my legs up real good, and Uncle John did even worse to himself. He tripped over the floor and landed hands-down on the sharp stone spikes that came up from the floor. He let out a sharp, high-pitched squeal with an edge of pain that was high and hard, and more specific than plain old fear.
“Come on,” I told him, tugging him forward. The others were getting ahead of us, and I couldn’t see what was behind us. “Come on.”
“Yes,” he said back to me. I didn’t look behind to see how bad he was hurt, and he didn’t say anything about it. He only made a better effort to move his own legs without me dragging him.