The Indian watched the trees, arrow tightly strung, waiting for the whistle that meant they would walk again.
He continued waiting as night waned and morning appeared in the east. Only then was he certain they were not going to move for a while yet.
5
Jason awoke at six in the morning, sitting in an upright position with the pistol still in his hand. Buck, tied to a tree, was straining at his leash for some ducks that were skimming the surface of the lake.
Washout! Jason examined the apple piles through his binoculars. All of them were untouched. For several horrible seconds he wondered if his reasoning was wrong, if the beast would bypass the lake altogether.
He boiled some water on the stove and made coffee. He turned on his transistor radio and heard a newscast that evaporated his black mood. There had been a break-in at a chicken farm last night, not far from the trailer park. Jason found the farm on his map; it was next to the second of the streams flowing into the lake.
“That’s him, old boy,” said Jason, untying the dog. “They’re headed this way all right. They can’t be any more than four, five miles from us right now.”
The beast would sleep in the daylight. Now might be the time for Jason and Buck to search the swamp and woods for any caves. No point in waiting for night, Jason thought, checking his ammunition, if I can surprise him now.
He and the dog walked the perimeter of the lake, observing stones, willow thickets, and mud flats, until Jason was sure he could find his way around at night.
Then he began an exploration of each of the streams for a distance of one mile from the Little Harrington. Although Buck was firmly leashed to his hand, he kept lunging off in chase of the occasional rabbit and even more occasional squirrel.
By noon the wet, dank trees had become steamy with the sunlight. Gnats whirled around Jason’s perspiring face, and his feet were hot and blistered. His gun hung loose and accessible in its holster. He studied every clump of willow, every maple, every possible place where the giant might be sleeping.
They reached the fifth and final stream around two in the afternoon. Jason sat on the graveled bank and took out a sandwich. He was wet to his hips. As soon as he sat, the mosquitoes charged after him. In between bites he slapped at them. The more he butchered, the more came. He knew better than to get emotional about them.
Buck rumbled, splashed into the stream, and pointed.
“You’re not a bird dog, you stupid mutt.”
Buck’s rumble toned up into a glottal growl.
Water splashed upstream; then an answering growl came. The stream turned to the right, and the view was blocked by clawed roots of a tree. Buck barked loudly, and the answering bark was higher in tone.
Jason dropped the sandwich and kneeled behind a muddy peninsula. He drew his gun as Buck splashed up to the bend. It had been a dark night in Canada, the darkest in his life, but Jason recognized the other dog’s bark as an escaped prisoner never forgets the voice of his betrayer.
The two animals collided once, then faced each other in slow circles, spring-taut at the slightest lapse in protocol for an explosive, blinding, bloody fight.
Other feet were splashing down the stream. Jason felt as if a hollow had opened inside him and was about to swallow his innards. Two feet. It was running!
Now . . . now!
He cocked the pistol and gripped it with both hands. Then the Indian stepped into view, his chest neatly bisected by the sight on his gun.
Seconds after the snarls began filtering through the trees, the Indian was awake and running down the slimy stream. He fitted an arrow to his bow and pulled it taut. The enemy was a big dog, and the conversation between the animals was becoming heated, their rumbles dropping down to the dangerous level which indicates a crucial moment when one or the other decides to fight. The Indian was still plugged with sleep. His feet slipped on the mud, so he ran into the water.
The German shepherd was big enough to make hash of the pup. It backed away from the Indian, snout wrinkled over white fangs, and growled at him. The triangle of rage between man and animals held as the Indian calculated the risk of killing someone’s obviously expensive pet with an arrow.
The Indian whistled the spirit noise. The shepherd broke and ran downstream toward a muddy delta, where he halted and roared at them again. The Indian raised the bow.
The shepherd barked at something concealed behind the mud bank. Probably a frog or a squirrel. His pride was wounded, so he had to prove his courage against some quaking little animal.
His own dog started in pursuit of the stranger with reckless courage. The Indian lowered the bow, grabbed it by the scruff, and cuffed it. “Calm down, you don’t want to get killed over a chipmunk, do you?”
The dog could not calm down. It barked, nipped, and scrabbled furiously in his arms, trying to get down to the mud bank. The animal’s fear was contagious. The Indian felt himself at the muzzle of some nameless danger. Tension braced the woods in invisible bonds. It was not just the shepherd. The Indian felt eyes watching him with keen, baleful intelligence at this very moment.
He carried the dog back upstream to the Sitka spruce against which he had been sleeping. The dog stood guard, nostrils flared. The Indian lay down to resume his sleep.
“Tell him I don’t like this place. Tell him to get away from these rivers, I want to go somewhere else.”
They were futile words. The spirit went exactly where he pleased and did not give a fart about what the Indian thought about it.
Had he seen that dog before? The Indian sensed he had. It must have happened sometime during one of the holes in his memory.
For a full minute Jason had the Army jacket squarely in his sight. One shot would have taken most of the Indian’s chest away. He had circled the body with the muzzle, trying to talk himself into coldbloodedness as the mosquitoes swarmed over his clothes.
After the Indian left, he finally sat upright and uncocked his pistol. He clasped his hands and tensed his forearms while speaking almost apologetically to the shepherd. “Buck, old boy, for a minute there I thought you really did me in.” He strapped the gun into his holster and continued speaking without looking at the wolf face. “Couldn’t do it, old boy. Not like that.”
The Indian was wanted for questioning in Canada. Assault and battery. Murder. Justice was useless unless the recipient was faced with it. A sniper shot from concealment was not a proper execution. Also, it was illegal.
The Indian had changed over the past months. He no longer had a rifle. One did not throw away a perfectly decent pump .30.30 (incredible how details seen for only a millisecond come back later), particularly if one was living in the woods. That was final confirmation for Jason that the Indian was uninterested in hunting the Bigfoot. He was thin—indeed, emaciated. The bow and arrows were handmade, by a careful, time-consuming process. Why had he thrown away the rifle and taken the time to make the bow and arrows?
For the next three hours, Jason and Buck carefully poked through the woods, looking for the resting place of the Bigfoot. Jason watched the dog to see if he picked up a scent but although he remained ferociously tense, there was no sign of a trail. If they found one, Buck might raise hell. He tied the dog to a tree and went into the woods alone.
After several futile hours in the woods, Jason returned to Buck, who was delighted to see him. “It’ll have to be tonight, boy,” said Jason, feeding him another sandwich. “The first lesson for a trapper is patience.”
He replaced the apples with fresh ones. He parked his car deeper in the shrubbery and banked his tent with camouflage brush. By sunset anticipation of nightfall was jangling his nerves. He polished the pistol, oiled the parts, and reloaded again and again.
He had this landscape in the palm of his hand now. Come what may, Jason would know where he was even at night for a radius of a mile in each direction around the lake.