“Unless there’s a dozen of them,” I said. I grabbed my bag, my rifle, and the now-collapsed telescope and headed down the hill. When I got to what I judged to be fifty yards down the slope from where the shepherds had crossed, I slung the rifle, slipped into the pack, took a deep breath, and bolted out into the fire lane, jinking right and then left but really pumping it, trying to accelerate as I ran to make it as hard as possible for a long rifle to set up on me. I blasted through some scrub pines and into the welcome gloom of the pine forest on the other side and stopped. I bent over to catch my breath and listened for any gunfire. Moments later, Greenberg came pushing through the undergrowth, followed by the shepherds. I gave them a stern look; technically they should have remained in place.
“My fault,” Greenberg said. “Once I got across, I told them to come on, and they were only too willing.”
The shepherds sat down in front of me and tried not to look too guilty. “What do you think?” Greenberg asked. “We clear?”
“There aren’t any more open firebreaks to cross,” I said, scanning the slopes above and the tree line on the other side. The sun was farther down in the sky, so the shadows along the eastern slopes of Book Mountain were lengthening. “We’ve got four, maybe five more miles to go, across that next big slope. Then down five, six hundred feet in elevation to the lake. Then we’re in the clear.”
“I remember the up phase of that,” Greenberg said. “Down sounds better.”
I gathered my gear. “Actually,” I said, “down is harder. Be on the lookout for some good walking sticks.”
We headed southwest through the pines, keeping close enough to see the firebreak from time to time to make sure we remained on course. The dogs ranged ahead, crisscrossing our line of advance, ears up and noses down. We went as fast as we could without making too much noise, and I began to feel slightly more confident about our chances of getting back to the lake without a confrontation with the black hats. After that, things would get interesting, I thought. Especially when we reported what we’d seen that woman do to the child.
Then the shepherds froze in their tracks and stared into the woods ahead.
I made a sound and dropped to the ground immediately. Greenberg, fifteen feet to my left, followed my lead. We were on a downslope section of the hillside, still within the dense pine stands, and we had been approaching a narrow brook that had carved a rocky V down the face of the hill. On the other side were more trees, but these were a mixture of pines and thin hardwoods, which provided even denser cover. I hissed through my teeth, and the dogs turned around and came back to me. I snapped them into a long down and then carefully, slowly, unslung the rifle. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Greenberg inching over toward a large pine to get some cover between himself and whatever was on the other side of that creek. I had dropped next to a flat, moss-covered rock, which gave me about a foot and a half of protection. For now, I thought, we were in decent defensive position, although when we crossed that brook, any shooters at the top of the V would be in even better position.
The slope facing us went back uphill at a fairly steep angle. I chambered a round, slipped the safety off, and then began to scan the forest on the other side through the Leupold VX-III scope, looking for anything out of place. Greenberg was doing the same thing with his binoculars, and he had his SIG. 45 out on a rock beside him. I realized that there could be someone approaching from behind us, but trusted the dogs to detect that problem. They’d hear footfalls and twigs breaking long before we humans would.
So what was over there? A deer? A bear? Or some of Grinny’s crew with an armful of shotguns? I lay on my side and began to methodically traverse the barrel of the rifle degree by degree, studying the scope picture for anything that didn’t look like a tree trunk or a boulder. The scope wasn’t as powerful as the telescope, but if I suddenly saw a man aiming a gun in our direction, I wanted to be able to shoot first.
The first puffs of the late afternoon breeze were stirring leaves across the way, and the pines were making that sweet whistling sound above us as their tops bent to welcome the cooler air coming down from the higher slopes. While my left eye studied the scope picture, my right eye saw that both shepherds were still interested in something across the way. Their ears were erect and not moving. I kept looking, tree by tree, across one line of elevation, and then back, slightly higher. There were no bird sounds other than what sounded like a large woodpecker working on something across the way. I kept searching the tree line, studying the shadows and the bushes, the reticles of the scope seeming to drill into the greenery. I was looking for a face, a hat, the glint of steel, eyes.
Eyes?
I steadied the scope and centered on a gleaming reddish eye looking back at me. My finger came off the trigger guard and settled on the trigger. I cleared my throat quietly, and Greenberg looked over at me. Seeing the rifle steadied, Greenberg swung his binoculars around, trying to locate the target. For an instant I lost it, and then the bushes moved slightly and I saw it again-a single red eye, surrounded by what looked like a black Brillo pad. The woods were silent except for the clatter of the woodpecker. I pulled the butt of the rifle in tight.
“Animal,” I whispered.
“What kind?” Greenberg asked. The shepherds were still down, but they sensed our excitement and were leaning forward.
“Can’t-” I began, and then I fired, almost involuntarily, as a four-hundred-pound black boar exploded out of the bushes in front of us and charged down the hillside in our general direction, grunting and growling and coming down like a four-legged avalanche, knocking down bushes and small trees and coming faster than I had ever seen any pig move. The shepherds launched forward, barking furiously.
“Tree!” I yelled to Greenberg, as I slung my rifle and leaped into the lower branches of the nearest pine tree. Greenberg did the same, and we both scrambled as high as we could get, dislodging a hail of dead branches, pine needles, and a few thousand startled insects as we pushed our heads up through the dense foliage. The furious pig blasted right past the shepherds and headlong into the tree Greenberg had climbed, shaking it from roots to tip and almost dislodging the scrambling DEA agent.
I swung around my own sticky trunk, unlimbered the rifle, and tried to get a shot, but by now the shepherds were circling the beast, barking and snapping, while the pig got down on its haunches and circled with them, tearing up great gouts of dirt and pine needles with its hooves while making a continuous roaring sound. I finally got a shot and fired down into the pig’s back, but the monster merely grunted once and kept circling. It lunged at Frick, who barely escaped being disemboweled by a whipping tusk, but the move allowed Frack to get a jaw-full of the pig’s right hind leg. The dog backed hard, pulling the squealing pig right off its feet. As it tried to bend around to get at the shepherd, Frick closed her jaws over the pig’s snout and began to pull back in the other direction. The pig thrashed hard enough to flail the two shepherds like furry rags, but the moment gave me a second shot. This time I aimed for the back of its head and the pig collapsed instantly. The two shepherds continued to pull and snarl until they finally heard me calling them off. The pig’s stubby legs twitched uncontrollably for about a minute and then it expired with a long, wet gasp that sprayed a flat cone of bright red blood onto the pine needles.
I swallowed hard and looked over at Greenberg, who was staring down at the black, hairy body below. His face was white as we watched the two shepherds sniffing around the body.
“What the fuck is that thing?” he asked.
“Wild pig,” I said. “I should have recognized the warning she was giving-remember the woodpecker sounds?”
Greenberg nodded, not taking his eyes off the pig, as if to make very sure that the thing was really dead.