“Don’t worry about money,” Nick had told him. “I’ll cover your start-up costs. Won’t cost you a cent. Then, when you get the hams cured in a couple of years, I’ll buy all you produce at seventy dollars per pound.” It seemed to Blake to be an insane amount of money until Nick explained how he sold the delicacy in one-ounce servings at fifteen dollars per ounce. “That’s an affordable luxury for most folks,” Nick had said, “but it works out to $240 per pound!”
Blake’s eyes grew large hearing that as Nick laid out the basic math of what it would mean for Blake. “Two hams per hog, each ham about fifteen pounds, that’s roughly $2,000 per hog. A hundred hogs equals two hundred grand, two hundred hogs is four hundred grand, and so on. And that doesn’t include what you can do with the rest of the pork from the hogs, which we can use, or even the bones.”
“What about the bones?” Blake had asked.
“Well, the people in my country never wasted anything,” Nick said. “They showed respect for the entire animal, so my father would have the bones ground into organic bone meal. He sold it for fertilizer.”
It seemed too good to be true. It was real money, LOTS of money. And he had the perfect environment right behind his house to conduct his illicit, covert operation. An operation that he increasingly convinced himself was legitimate as time went on. He even convinced himself that he had every right to raise animals and sell them live to Nick, just as Nick had suggested, and to cure them for Nick as a friendly service.
What an idiot I’ve been! Blake said, furious with himself. It’s just a stupid ham! Gold, diamonds, caviar, and now a stupid ham for people to obsess over and waste money on!
The movie came to an abrupt end as the filmstrip slapped around one reel, flapping as the reel spun to remind Blake that the movie was over. The highlights of his life were over. And if he didn’t do something to take control, his life was about to be over.
Chapter 20
The afternoon sun began to set, its remaining slivers of light filtering through the fiery autumn leaves as they lost their grips and parachuted to the forest floor. A yellow sassafras leaf pirouetted down from high above, tossing and twirling in the slight breeze until it landed gently on Tammy’s face and covered her left eye. Tammy awoke, shook the leaf from her face, and felt beside her. Ozzie wasn’t there. She sat up, looked around, and saw him standing in the bushes twenty feet away. He was looking off, at nothing it seemed, but deep in concentration. Tammy walked toward him.
Ozzie looked back and gazed at her for a moment, then looked away, continuing his contemplation. His gaze stopped Tammy in her tracks. It wasn’t a spiteful gaze; nor was it a look of love or lust. And it wasn’t the juvenile look she had seen him naïvely cast her way before, the look of wonder and curiosity he had usually worn. No, it was a calm, knowing look, as if he had undergone some sort of metamorphosis. She had slept and Ozzie had been transformed from boy to man, from cub to bear, from pup to alpha male. That she could understand this transformation, sense it from a single, momentary gaze startled her. But there was no question in her mind. She went to sleep more mature, more protective, more in command than Ozzie had been. She awoke with the roles forever reversed.
Looking back, Ozzie summoned Tammy with his eyes to come as he began walking toward Hal’s. Tammy obeyed and walked just behind Ozzie, but not beside him. There was no hurry in his pace, no trepidation in his step. He was as guarded as he was confident, staring only at the trail before him, yet he sensed everything around him. He relied on all his senses to gather information, to sift through it all and tell him what was important.
The smell of the campfire lured them in. The sun set quickly and cast a blanket of inky darkness over the forest. The glow of the fire burned so brightly in the darkness that Hal considered wearing his sunglasses. By the time Ozzie and Tammy arrived he was already in full swing, having begun the party once Rex had shown up. “Well, look what the cats drug in,” Hal exclaimed with a yip as Ozzie strolled into the campsite followed by Tammy.
Hal strummed the guitar, trying to find his voice as if doing vocal warm-ups before a recital. It had been a lazy afternoon for him and he had decided to start drinking early to celebrate the 4th of July, even though it was early October.
“Got any requests, Ozzie?” Hal asked, smiling at his friend. Ozzie walked past the fire, past Hal to his normal spot on the front porch and stood there. Tammy came up with him quietly, softly. Ozzie bowed his head to Tammy, not out of respect, but as an indication that she should take his spot on the porch. She obliged.
Hal watched and noticed Ozzie’s peculiar action as he strummed. “Think I’m gonna find me a love song to sing,” Hal said, sensing the mood.
Tammy lay on the porch and listened to the sounds, but not to Hal’s words. She was happy, which was not unusual for her. But she was also calm and content, where before she had often been restless. That feeling had vanished along with Ozzie’s adolescence, and was replaced with a feeling of belonging to a place and a time. A sense of knowing what she was here for, what she was supposed to do.
Hal stopped long enough to take a swig and pour a drink into the cup he placed on the porch beside Ozzie. Then he slapped the six strings some more and kicked his private party into high gear, the thumper keg now adding the percussion. Ozzie looked down at the medicine that had nursed him back to health. The liquid that had warmed his body and freed his soul, allowing him to forget his past. To move on. He looked at Tammy and saw the life before him. He knew what she wanted. A simple life with children that, he suspected, would arrive sooner rather than later. He, too, wanted that life, would love living freely with her, maybe even close to Hal, although the daily party train that ran through Hal’s camp was beginning to wear on Ozzie. It wasn’t in Ozzie to forget pain and suffering the way that Hal had worked so hard to forget. The moonshine Hal served up offered an initial comfort to Ozzie, but the following sleep was laced with horrid nightmares from which he couldn’t escape. Visions of his mother, of her suffering, both physical and emotional. Her feelings of hopelessness, capitulation, and despair. Her calls to him, beckoning him and pleading for salvation.
Stepping off the porch, Ozzie turned left to walk around the cabin. Tammy raised her head and prepared to rise and follow, but Ozzie jerked his head around and shot Tammy a look. Its meaning was clear to her. She sat back down and stayed on the porch, turning one ear to Hal’s music and the other to the rear of the cabin where Ozzie had headed.
Fifty yards away the cabin silhouetted against the glow of the campfire as Ozzie looked back from Hal’s garden. In that short distance the sound of Hal’s strumming and singing, which was so loud from the porch, was remarkably muffled, having been absorbed by the trees, the forest floor and the darkness. Ozzie listened to the other rhythms of the forest and heard a band of coyotes yelp on the ridge underneath the mountain’s haunting sough. Trees swayed in the breeze and caused distant branches to fall, some crashing with enough force to sound like cannon fire when they snapped. Winds howled in and out of steep ravines and caves, whipping up fallen leaves and incubating screeches that were faded and far away.
And still, cries rang out from high above that sounded like a mother and her baby were shrieking the excruciating howls of separation, their notes of despair rising up and over the treetops and sending a chill down the spine of every forest creature.
Ozzie walked past the garden, past where he had dared venture before and continued into the unforgiving darkness, summoned, he felt, by a force he couldn’t resist. He walked upslope toward the ridge in the pattern of a serpentine curve to increase the coverage of his patrol. He stopped and listened to the sounds of man, hearing Hal’s voice and music play steadily but more dully. Everything sounded as it should at the camp. Continuing his ascent toward the coyotes he had heard up the slope, Ozzie detected that they were now silent. But he felt their presence. Close enough to be a threat to Tammy, to Hal. Especially to Rex.
He reached the ridgeline, only one in the sea of endless, cresting slopes. He stood in the midst of a forest that was as much a familiar sanctuary for wild animals as it was a chilling prison for man. Unaware of Ozzie’s presence, the coyotes had departed, likely scouring the forest floor for a meal from a freshly fallen soldier of nature; a raccoon, possibly, one too weak or weary to carry on. One that had hoped to purchase another sunrise, but found no reserves with which to do so. So it sheltered itself underneath the eave of a moss-covered log for a long slumber, its final prayer to morph into the soil before scavengers discovered and devoured its body, alive. The coyotes walked ahead and away from Ozzie, masquerading as angels intent on answering the fallen soldier’s prayer. Ozzie turned south on the ridge to follow, his pace quickening but not hurried.
The still of the night was suddenly shattered with a deafening and rapid drumming. A ruffled grouse flushed from a mountain laurel just in front of Ozzie and flew past his face, filling the darkness with the resonant thumping of a military helicopter at low altitude. Ozzie stepped back, momentarily startled, and watched the bird ascend the mountain slope. He continued forward, unwavering. Ahead, a band of three coyotes heard the grouse drumming one hundred yards behind. They stopped, the recently anointed alpha male peering back down the ridgeline in the darkness and sensing a familiar smell. The smell of a creature that should have been the feast of a lifetime for him only six weeks before, another solider that should have fallen but somehow didn’t. The male yipped rapidly and began in Ozzie’s direction, his lieutenants close behind.
The yipping and yelping channeled horrible memories of suffering through Ozzie’s ears to his mind. But the pain and physical suffering he was thinking of wasn’t his own. Rather, the memory of the coyote attack reminded him that he had cowered and run. He had run away from the coyotes but had not escaped. He had run away from evil men and had left his mother and brother behind. He had been a child of the forest and fear had controlled him, but now, fear wasn’t the primary emotion that Ozzie felt. It had been eclipsed by new emotions. Shame. Revenge. Rage.
Picking up his pace, Ozzie jogged toward the pack, the alpha male suddenly within sight. The pack leader stopped on the ridgeline as he felt an unfamiliar sensation. He was the one being hunted. The alpha male stood his ground with his mates at his shoulder to convey the appearance of a large predator. Ozzie came to a stop ten yards away and looked down. He saw the alpha male for what he was; a smaller adversary that could do him little harm, weak cronies at his side. As he swung his head from right to left, Ozzie oscillated his jaw, allowing the moon’s rays to reflect through the branches off of his long and razor-sharp tusks for his opponents to fear. With sharpened hooves he pawed the ground, kicking dirt back and making his intention clear. He stood, prepared to defend what was his, but not looking for battle. Unless...
The alpha male lunged forward, charging at Ozzie and intent on extracting revenge for the brothers that fell at his feet the month before. Ozzie’s eyes widened as he saw the three of them coming strong for him along the ridgeline. He quickened his breath, dug his hooves into the earth and sprinted forward, his conscience abandoning him as he prepared to confront all of his monsters, both real and imagined. And he saw and heard them all coming for him. The coyotes, the men, the menacing monster growling up the mountain, the yellow eyes in the blackness and shrieking screams in the middle of the night that tortured and taunted him. In his mind, Ozzie ripped into each and every tormenter, flinging them one by one into the bottomless ravines of death on each side of his ridgeline, towering above them as they fell, their screams fading with them until all had subsided.
Ozzie panted and heard only his breath and his pounding heart until his breathing slowed and the forest sounds rose to meet him. The notes were mostly calm and peaceful. Only the singing of distant frogs and crickets that sang their last songs of the Indian summer drowned out the last dying gasps of a trio of coyotes.
He looked to the sky. The full moon still shone its beacon brightly, and guided Ozzie home. As he began his descent to the camp he felt a chill, even though his muscles were flush from battle. A haunting chill as if a change was in the air. As if time was running out for something, someone. He trudged along and thought about his mother, as he lumbered past Hal’s garden and around the front of his cabin. He stood and watched Hal wail. Hal looked, saw three of Ozzie, and smiled at the one in the middle. Tammy raised her head and looked at Ozzie, at the blood that stained his tusks. She called to him with her eyes.
Ozzie stepped up onto the porch, lying down close to Tammy and drifting asleep. For the first time since he had been with Hal, nightmares didn’t chase him. Instead, Ozzie dreamed he was the one atop a mountain, looking over the expansive forest as he commanded the soil to wash away his enemies. To wash away anyone who meant to harm him.