Soon afterward it came into view, still grasping its wounded arm. It moved slowly and heavily, turning its head every once in a while and looking back, then stopped altogether, removed its hand from the wound, and stared at it for a long time. All the arm below was red with blood.
There was something grotesque about it, and as he lay there following its movements with his gun, he was gripped by a hatred that he hadn’t felt since the time he’d found a vipers’ nest in the forest near the town, the plaited and contorted snakes’ bodies, the flat heads, the black eyes, the flickering tongues; it had all filled him with such disgust that he’d killed every one of them. He’d thrown rock after rock, until they were completely covered. Then he’d waited, and when, slowly, they’d begun to come slithering out between the stones, he’d pelted them again and again until they were all dead.
He felt the same revulsion at the sight of this humanoid creature walking by the river’s edge, and suddenly he couldn’t abide the thought of delaying a moment longer.
He shifted slightly to lie more comfortably, aimed for the middle of the chest, and fired. The creature, which had been alarmed by his small movement, had hardly managed to look up toward the fallen tree before the shot struck it in the breast. It fell backward, then half rose; he fired once more, but struck it in the thigh this time, and the creature looked up at the tree again, clearly confused, looked down at its chest, which was covered in blood.
It took a few steps toward the river.
The next shot hit it in the head, and it fell forward, rolled down the slope, and stopped at the water’s edge. But so strong was the current that in only a matter of seconds it had drawn the dead body around like a branch, and, turning slowly, it glided out into the river and disappeared.
But the hatred of the young man who’d fired hadn’t evaporated. Just as with the snakes, all he wanted to do was kill more of them as he rose and went down to the place where the bullets had found their mark.
The blood on the ground was strangely thin. He crouched down and dipped his finger in it, licked his finger. It tasted like human blood. But it hadn’t been a human being, of that he was certain.
He went up to the top again, stood there awhile looking down the river for signs of the corpse, but the surface was shiny and smooth, and he took himself back to the camp. When he got there, the other two were sitting in front of the fire as if nothing had happened.
They looked up at him inquiringly, but didn’t speak. All they knew was that he’d suddenly frightened them to their feet with a loud shout, rushed to the fire, snatched the gun, and fired wildly into the forest. Then he’d shouted something they didn’t catch, before vanishing in the trees. A while later they had heard a shot, followed by another, and then another.
And now he was back.
Both of them were a bit afraid of him, that was why they didn’t say anything, they tried to behave as if nothing had happened, and were fearful lest their voices betray them. Often during the latter half of the winter they’d caught him staring at them with an expression it was difficult not to interpret as hateful. The condition wasn’t unknown, it occasionally happened that people couldn’t take the pressure of an overwintering, there were those who’d killed their companions under conditions similar to those they’d been living under recently, or at least had been suspected of doing so when they returned to the town alone and didn’t have any very satisfactory explanation for what had happened to the others. You could see it in their eyes.
And wasn’t there a strange gleam in the eyes of this man whom they’d considered a friend until only a few months ago?
Indeed there was.
And so they nodded earnestly when he told them what he’d seen. A white giant, you say, you shot him in the arm, did you, and then you tricked him, ran straight on while he followed the river, and then you shot him three times?
It was rather too convenient that he was the only person who’d seen this behemoth, just as it was rather too convenient that the body had subsequently been taken by the river, but they said nothing, just nodded and went along with him, until two weeks later they arrived back in the town they’d left more than six months earlier, and then, finally freed from his company, they could laugh at the whole story.
But not everyone who heard it laughed. Only a few days later a couple of men traveled up to the rapids where the bears had fished, they searched the entire area, but found nothing, not so much as a footprint. If there had been Nephilim there, there weren’t any now.
Five years passed. Then the events at the rapids were repeated. The location was different, and there were two men not three, otherwise the circumstances were the same. Two hunters had made camp by a lake, in the evening they sat by their fire talking, and one of them went down to wash before they turned in for the night. But instead of going directly up again, he walked along the shore for some distance. They had hung the roe deer they’d shot up in a tree there, and when he happened to turn toward the fire, he saw that a figure was standing among the trees only a few yards away from it. He knew at once what it must be, shouted a warning to his friend, and saw the Nephilim vanish into the forest.
Having discussed what to do for a while, they decided to follow it. It was around midsummer, the night was light and mild, and both were experienced hunters and could pursue a quarry for several days if necessary.
They caught sight of it for the first time on the other side of a meadow a few hours later. The range was extreme, but one of them put his gun to his shoulder and shot anyway. To their surprise they found blood on the ground when they stopped on the other side. If it was injured, it would be only a matter of time before they caught up with it, and they went on with raised spirits. Toward morning they saw it again. It was running down a wooded hillside not more than a hundred yards away from them, but as the landscape down below was flat and clear of vegetation apart from the odd tussock of grass, and covered by gravel and sand from the spring floods, they decided to hold their fire until it had got some way across.
Certain of their prey, they climbed down the hillside at their leisure. They had seen traces of blood all the way, it was clearly bleeding like a stuck pig, and they found it strange that it had managed to keep them at bay for as long as it had.
When they stopped at the forest’s edge and scanned the plain, they saw nothing. The fact that it had just kept running forward all the time, clearly hoping to shake them off by pure stamina, even though it was badly injured, had made them assume that they were dealing with a simple creature, a kind of manlike animal. Now they had to revise their assumption.
They looked at one another. If it wasn’t on the plain, it must be somewhere in the vicinity.
They went back up the way they’d come. The traces of blood ceased roughly at the place they’d spotted it. Perhaps it had calculated that they would react as they did, perhaps it was fortuitous. But having minutely inspected the forest floor, they worked out that it must have stanched the bleeding, taken some steps to the side and hidden behind a fallen tree, watched them pass a few yards away, waited until they were out of hearing, and run up the hillside again.
But this was the only cunning it displayed. For the rest of the day and into the evening it survived by pure strength. The half mile it had gained by its simple ruse, it managed to keep, but when they saw it had begun to bleed again, they knew that it was only a matter of hours before they had it.
It was almost exactly twenty-four hours from the time they first saw the creature until it lay dead at their feet.
It sat waiting for them. It was propped up against a tree trunk, quite motionless, and looking straight ahead when they came crashing through the forest.