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.
Chapter 21
Rose walked out of the master bathroom and down the hall, stopping just for a moment to linger in the doorway to the girls’ bedroom. It was the first night in six years, since their first child had been born, that she had been separated from either of the girls. John bounded through the kitchen and began climbing the hardwood staircase to the master bedroom.
“You ready?” he asked as he glanced at his watch. “Dinner starts in half an hour.” Before Rose could answer, John looked up at her to see that she was ready. “Wow,” John said, stopping on the third step from the top. “You look— breathtaking.”
Rose tilted her head to her left shoulder slightly, just enough that her ebony hair flipped off her ear in a flirtatious way. She swept it back behind her ear with her right hand. “Thanks Johnny. It’s so quiet without the girls here.”
“Now, now,” John said. “You don’t want to change your mind, do you? Just a little R & R, me and you on the beach of a secluded Bahamas island.”
“Of course not,” she said, and smiled at John as he passed and walked to the bedroom to finish dressing.
The truth was that Rose would have been happy to stay home. The trip was John’s idea, one to which she eagerly agreed, but not because she wanted to be away from the girls. She knew the stresses that John had in his job, the relentless pressure he was under to keep customers, to win customers, to find and keep employees. Even with all the success of WallCloud, John often spoke of the pressure in managing cash flow. Rose didn’t understand the details the way John did, but she wasn’t ignorant of business finance. She knew that the business could be profitable on paper and still have trouble paying its bills at the same time, the result of having to pay money out before receiving payments from customers. When the business was stable and not growing, managing cash flow was pretty easy, John had always said. But the past few months had seen rapid growth.