“She was snapping her jaws at us, warning us to go away. There’s probably a litter up there.”
“Litter same as smaller?”
I laughed, but it was a nervous laugh. The yellow tusks sticking out of the pig’s mouth were at least twelve inches long. Okay, two. But the dogs had been lucky.
Dogs?
We both heard it at the same time-a long, melodious baying sound from the ridge behind and above us. Then another dog joined in. The pack was coming to the sound of our gunfire.
“Rock and roll,” I said, and slid down the pine tree in a shower of sticky bark and outraged pine beetles.
Forsaking any semblance of caution, we grabbed our gear and took off down the slope to the brook. Greenberg slapped his side and turned around to go back and retrieve the gun he’d left in the grass. I waited anxiously on the other side, trying to wipe pine pitch off my hands. I reloaded the rifle, and then we were off again, trotting right along the edge of the firebreak to make better time. From the sounds of it, there were even more dogs behind us now and they were onto a solid scent. The shepherds were ranging out ahead again, occasionally looking behind to see where that dog pack was.
“That dead pig will slow them up for a few minutes,” I said, trying not to puff. We were climbing again, and the branch-littered ground made for rough going.
“Can we make it to the lake before they catch up?” Greenberg asked. He seemed to be doing just fine physically, without any signs of being out of breath. Of course, he wasn’t carrying as much gear as I was. That had to be it.
“If the men keep the dogs with them, on tracking leads, then we can beat them. If they turn them loose, I don’t know. We get over this spine, it’s all downhill from there.”
“That’s good,” Greenberg said.
Actually it wasn’t. The slope was much steeper going down, and my thighs were burning within a few minutes of starting down that hillside. The footing on Rockslide Mountain was loose shale, rocks, and tufted grass, and I felt as if I were falling forward more than running down the hill. Greenberg started to slow down, as I had thought he might. It was always much harder to go down than up. The dogs weren’t doing too much better. Frack lost his balance and tumbled for ten yards before getting back up, and then he did it again. Behind us the noise of the dog pack seemed louder, but I kept telling myself it was just the acoustics caused by the rock walls above us. The bad news was that it didn’t sound like the dead pig had slowed anyone down.
We finally reached the bottom, which was a jumble of large boulders in front of a tangled pile of winter-killed pine trees. The line of debris stretched hundreds of feet in both directions along the base of the mountain. Greenberg collapsed in front of a big rock.
“Fuck it,” he gasped. “You were right-my legs are done. We’ve got a pretty good field of fire here. Those dogs show up, let’s waste ’em.”
I glanced down at Greenberg’s. 45; lovely weapon though it was, the pursuing dogs would have to be at our throats for pistols to do any good, especially shooting uphill. I dropped my gear and picked a suitable rock for rifle work. The shepherds flopped down in the woods beyond the debris field, panting heavily. The sounds of baying hounds echoed clearly now from within the trees up above our position. I shook my canteen, but it was empty. Somehow the top had come off in the big scramble down the slope. I yelled a command at the shepherds to put them into a long down.
The afternoon shadows were deepening fast down here, but there was plenty of light for the Leupold scope. I attached the rifle’s arm sling, contracted my body into a sitting position behind the rock, and pointed the rifle up in the direction of all the noise. I began to scan the edge of the trees from which we had escaped. I had enough ammo to thin out the pack leaders and hopefully convince the followers to stop and talk things over.
“There they are,” Greenberg said. “Swing right.”
I traversed the rifle and saw the first three dogs clearing the edge of the forest and coming down the hill in our direction. I lined up on the biggest one and squeezed off a single shot at about two hundred yards. At first I thought I’d missed, but then the dog tumbled down the hillside in a hail of dust and gravel and lay still. The rest kept coming, and there were more appearing at the edge of the woods. I set up on one running in another pod of three and dropped that one, too. The dog nearest to that one looked over its shoulder but never broke stride. Greenberg was crouching over his rock, watching.
“Get under cover,” I said to Greenberg while stuffing more rounds into the magazine. “The handlers will have rifles.”
Greenberg dropped and then crawled on his stomach to the rock behind which I was hiding. He began sweeping the ridge with his binoculars, looking for the men behind the dogs. I fired again and swore when I saw dirt fly. I dropped a third one, a through-and-through lengthwise, and this one died hard, screaming as it rolled down the hill. That stopped the ones behind it, and I took the opportunity to shoot one more before the pack finally scattered. But the lead wave, now down to three truly ugly dogs, was inside of a hundred yards away and coming strong.
Greenberg was sitting alongside me now. He had his. 45 out, waiting calmly. I dropped one of the final three, which somersaulted into a twitching heap. The other two were at forty yards, still coming fast, teeth clearly visible, ropes of drool flying.
“I’ve got one round left,” I said.
“I’ve got the world’s supply,” Greenberg said, brandishing a spare magazine. “You keep the ones up the hill honest.”
I steadied the rifle back up to where the rest of the dog pack was milling around, not willing to run by the one gut-shot dog that was still screaming on the hillside. I sighted in on one especially big dog and dropped it with a hindquarters shot. It went down with enough drama to convince the rest of the pack to withdraw into the woods. I lifted my eye from the scope in time to see Greenberg sighting carefully from a two-handed grip right between the two oncoming dogs, whose growls were now audible. At the last minute, he fired, right and then left, shooting both dogs through-and-through. They tumbled into a single bleeding heap about ten feet in front of them, too badly hurt to scream.
I swung the scope back up the hill, looking for signs of humans in the tree line. There was a big boom next to my right ear as Greenberg dispatched one of the wounded dogs, which had begun to crawl toward us. When I looked back up the hill I thought I saw a face in the trees.
“Down!” I yelled, and we both ducked behind our rock just as a bullet blasted a spray of granite bits all over us. Three more rounds came down the hill, each one placed right where our two faces had been seconds before.
“Those the usual warning shots?” Greenberg asked with a grin, and I shook my head.
We executed a high-speed slither into the tangle of downed trees. When we came out the other side, I whistled up the dogs and we took off running again, keeping well into the woods, which by now were deep in shadow. We could no longer see the firebreak lane, but I knew in which direction the lake was and, by this juncture, all slopes headed down would end up in the water. There was no more shooting from up on the ridge. I was hoping that the dog pack had decided that we were definitely bad juju. We jogged for fifteen minutes and then took a breather. My thighs were hurting again, and I was glad for the momentary respite.
Until a huge dog came out of the woods from our right and lunged at my face. I ducked the snapping jaws by throwing myself backward hard enough to crack my head on the ground. The dog went over my head, landing in a heap, but then whirled around, jaws agape, only to be nailed by Frack, who seized it by the throat with a huge roar. The two dogs went down in a blurred tangle of feet, teeth, and flying hair. The attacking dog was bigger than Frack, but the shepherd had a death grip on its throat and it was already suffocating. Frick came by in a blur, went over a log, and attacked a second dog head-on, biting the attacker’s right front leg off at the elbow and sending the amputee screaming back up the hill with Frick in hot pursuit, the dog’s leg still in her mouth. Greenberg shot a third dog that had slid to a stop when Frick attacked, and then a fourth in midair as it launched itself over our position. I felt helpless without a close-in gun, but somehow I’d managed to get my knife out and was back-to-back with Greenberg.