“There ain’t never nothing waiting beyond the next hill, Ram, if you’re just going there to sightsee.”
“Well,” Ramsay muttered, “it’s my life, ain’t it?”
“Yep. That’s just what I mean.”
Twilight fetched an expectant hush over the wet wilderness. It seemed to totter on the brink of darkness like a great glassy ball waiting to drop and crash. Then a limpkin wailed its sad sad cry and a flight of night ducks got up from the lake with a batter of spraying wings and took off. After that there was the chuckle and squawk of the herons in the creek.
And suddenly Ramsay was aware of a third human presence. He looked up with a start and saw Coz Tanner standing by a liveoak.
A lanky-limbed, big shouldered man, he could move as daintily or swiftly as a bobcat. He was standing there like a tall petrified man, grinning a plastic grin. That smirk and the deep set of his penetrating eyes gave him a demonic look in the firelight.
Harris looked around at him and stared back for a moment. Then he said, “Well, Coz. How you keeping?”
Tanner made no move, held his fixed grin for a slow count of ten, before he said, “ ’Lo, bastard.”
Ramsay looked at Harris to see if he’d get mad. But he didn’t. He smiled evenly, and said, “Have some coffee.” And when Tanner went on waiting where he was, still with that damn grin, he said:
“Ain’t no sense in bearing a grudge, Coz. I’d warned you often enough about killing gators for their hides, but you had to have it your way. Way I figure it, you sent yourself up.”
“I said bastard,” Tanner said.
“I heard you,” Harris said calmly.
“Mebbe you’d hear me better ifn I said son of a—”
“Get out a here, Tanner!” Ramsay said, and he started to get up. There was a hollow feeling above his solar plexus and the blood was tingling away from his face. He didn’t like fighting — always avoided one if he could — but he couldn’t go on listening to Tanner insult Harris while Harris just sat there and took it.
Tanner crouched, catlike, and his right hand flashed a hunting knife. Ramsay looked at the knife. The blade gleamed, the thin red light from the fire dancing along the edge like blood.
“Sit down, Ram!” Harris’ voice was sharp. “He’s trying to herd me into going at him. Then he’ll make with that fool knife of his and call it self-defense, and you’ll be his witness.” He looked at Tanner again and shook his head.
“Better get along, Coz. Go poach some wild orchids or some more tree snails. Ramsay ain’t goan fight you neither.”
Tanner wagged the blade at Ramsay, insinuatingly.
“I reckon he ain’t at that,” he sneered. He started backing, moving absolutely without sound, as if he were not actually touching the ground. Then the night shut him off, and all they heard was his voice — “I’ll be around, boy.”
Ramsay sat down, feeling the blood rush back to his cheeks. He looked at Harris who was complacently sipping his coffee. There was such a thing as being too passive, he thought. And for the first time he wondered if the patrolman was gutless.
In the heron chuckling dark a godawful outcry ripped across the swamp night. It sounded as if wildcats were being skinned alive. Harris scrambled up, saying, “C’mon! We got us one.”
Holding the.22 in one hand, a flashlight in the other, he led the way through the moony palmettos, heading upstream. It was a puma, a big tan male with a bloody mouth. He was snapping at the steel jaws of the trap in his pain and outrage as he writhed in the weeds like something gone crazy.
The trap had him by the left hind leg and the iron drag hook was pronged in the pindowns, holding him in place. When the beam of light hit him his wild eyes sparked liquid fire and he leaped at Harris like something from a catapult.
Ramsay sprang aside in a frantic jump — but the hook’s chain stopped the cat short in midair and piled him on his back. And then Harris stepped in, pointing the flashlight in the cat’s face, and as the big sleek snarling head started to come up he pulled the trigger and the.22 went pak.
And that was that. Straight through the left eye to the brain.
“My gawd,” Ramsay breathed, and then he started to laugh, from nerves mostly. “And I was wondering if you were gutless!”
Harris smiled, nudging the dead cat with his foot.
“If you can get in a shot like that, it gives you a nice whole hide. Bet Tanner would give his grampa for a skin like this.”
They cut a sapling carrying pole and toted the heavy carcass back to camp, where Harris went to work skinning the big cat.
“Mebbe tomorrow will wind it up,” he said. “Mebbe we’ll get lucky and catch that she painter right off.”
Tomorrow...
Now was the tomorrow that Harris had talked about the night before. And now Ramsay was bending over his knifed body.
Tanner has to be close by, he thought, or he would’ve already hauled Harris’ body into a slough and left it for the gators. He must’ve heard me coming back and hid in the brush.
He broke out in a cold sweat as an almost hysterical terror stole over him. He could feel Tanner watching him. Crawling into the puptent, he pawed wildly through Harris’ gear until he uncovered the.22 pistol. His head jerked up — listening.
Something crackled in the underbush. Animal — or Tanner?
He tried to think rationally. Tanner probably had a gun, but likely he wouldn’t use it unless he had to. Nobody could detect a knife thrust after the gators were through with a body, but a bullet too often left obvious bone damage. And there was a good chance that Tanner didn’t know about the target pistol.
The 22 will keep him away from me, he thought. At least until he decides he has to shoot me.
His best course would be to slip back to the airboat and go for the law. And quick. Tanner might already be creeping up on the tent. Again the hollow feeling came to his solar plexus, and he knew that he was scared. Honestly and completely scared.
He scooted out of the tent like a cat from a bag — expecting the shocking smash of a rifle bullet in the back at every step. Then he was breasting the whipping palmettos and he sprawled into the sand and scrambled under the cover of the avid fronds.
No rifle shot. Nothing. The silence was complete, but ominous too — like a mute monster watching solemnly from the jungle.
He crawled, staying under the palmettos until they petered out. By then he had reached the little footpaths he and Harris had made between the camp and the outer thicket. He started along it, trying to trot quietly as the flowery jungle closed in like the green walls of a narrow hallway.
Cypress roots clutched the edge of the path and fronds touched down every which way, and he didn’t give it a thought when his left foot slashed through one of the crisscrossing creeper vines.
Something instantly started to give and he caught a flicker of motion in the corner of his eye, and he threw himself sideways as a heavy ten foot dead log came crashing across the path.
He looked at the log, at the vine his foot had triggered. It stretched across the path, through a cypress root, and up the side of the log where it had been tied by hand. A deadfall.
He rigged a widowmaker for me, Ramsay thought blankly.
He left the path, plunging into the jungle and scrabbling down to the mucky bank and the looming thicket. He started wading into the ghastly marl, stepping over hoop bushes and clawing his way around the pindowns. The thicket thinned as he approached the log litter where they had left the airboat.