The Hunt

 

Unlike what city folk imagined, strange calls were common out here in the country. Deputy David Hawthorne knew it from nearly two decades of experience. He’d seen damn near everything. Bored country teenagers drinking exotic, painful mixtures of gasoline and moonshine, or city kids playing feral on somebody’s property, braying at the moon like so many colorful (and bad) imitations of wolves. Deputy Hawthorne had seen crop circles (and found the drunken perpetrators half asleep in their ragged, wheat-cut lines), stumbled into odd, unnatural conjoining between man and beast that had taken far more patience and even more veterinarians to dislodge. He’d seen the sad too, even if it was rarer. Lonely victims along endless stretches of highway tucked between fog, mountains, and forests, their personal items missing sometimes or tucked neatly nearby. Burned crosses on old properties that made him grit his teeth, thinking of his folks (his daddy was black, and ma an Indian). He’d seen it all. Almost took pride in that, strangely enough, like it prepared him for whatever may come, hoping it would be enough to weather anything and everything which could threaten his people. 

Hawthorne had seen animals, too. Mangled by all sorts of nasty things. Nature was harsh. Lightning could splatter steer, and wolves sometimes came loping down into the valleys under the summer moonlight, all flashing teeth, tearing into anything in pasture. You got used to it, just like everything else. 

This was different. Despite the summer evening heat, David felt himself shiver like somebody had walked across his grave. He was aware of Sarah and Martinez close by, equally silent. Jim Stanford, the man who’d called them out, was nervously pacing back and forth a few feet away, smoking a cigarette that looked like nothing more than an ashy stump. It was his fourth in ten minutes. A shotgun was in his other hand. The man’s eyes couldn’t stay in one place, he looked frightened and anxious, peering back and forth across the nearby trees like something small and fragile. David knew Stanford, everybody did, the old hardened bastard who spent the harsh blizzard winters literally shepherding his herds, gun in hand, like an old prairie legend. The sight of him afraid was unnerving. 

The corpse was worse. 

It was a bull. A prime steer the size of a police cruiser, with angry looking horns, it would’ve been a prize to any rancher who owned it. It had been, anyway— but now, that seemed impossible. David crouched down and gritted his teeth, hand covering his nose as an unrelenting assault of nausea rose in the back of his throat. The animal was obliterated. A wreck of a corpse, with behemoth chunks torn and savaged from its body. The Deputy remembered lightning strikes on unfortunate animals, the way it could explode and zap and instantly vaporize parts of them, how grizzly that had seemed— but this was something else. It was like it had been pulverized. Three limbs were missing, whole muscular legs vanished, wrenched free by what could only have been catastrophic force. The head, too, was gone all the way to the heavy hunched shoulders which as well had been thoroughly punctured. Battered. 

”What the fuck happened to my animal, Deputy?”

Stanford was staring at him. Holding the gun tight to his chest. David almost spoke, but Martinez did first, flashlight throwing illumination over hard, parched earth. 

“Here.” They all crowded to him, looking across the ground. 

There were footprints in the cracked mud. Footprints a grown man could've comfortably lay inside, head to toe. The impressions were as deep as the police vehicles tire tracks. 

Massive, three toed tracks.