Scaring the Crows Read online

  Walking away, the manager had turned back. “Never!” he’d repeated.

  Richard walked close and flopped down beside him. Jacob started to say something, then noticed he was still on the phone.

  “If we go on Tuesday, that will give me two hours’ extra time at work. Four days should be enough to find a decent rental. Yeah, OK. Fly out Tuesday, come back Saturday. Go ahead and book it for the end of the month. And don’t let her get to you, Julie. You don’t need the stress.”

  Jacob said nothing. He sat like a statue on the sand. Finally Richard tapped a button on his phone, folded it up, and put it in his pocket.

  “Sorry about that,” he said.

  “No problem.”

  “There’s lots going on at home right now, what with Julie’s job and the baby coming soon. Insurance issues.”

  “That’s fine. It’s the same for me back in Pittsburgh... Hey, maybe we could wait on dinner for a bit. Let’s walk over to those rocks. To the tidal pools. We could find a few more shells to bring home to our wives.”

  Richard snorted. “Already got eight jars full. Julie says she can’t find anyplace else to put them! I’ll give you whatever I’ve got back at the hotel and you can give them to Susan.”

  Jacob paused, blinked, then said, “Let’s just walk awhile, then.”

  “Been walking all day.”

  “Just to the rocks.”

  “Fine, but my feet hurt.”

  They walked over to the rocks where the waves broke and climbed up on one, sheltered above the spray. Hermit crabs, starfish, mussels and minnows weaved in the ebb and flow of the pools beneath them. Three twelve-year-olds clambered up beside them, headed for a taller boulder. Years had passed since Jacob had climbed up that far: too much risk of a fall, of breaking something, and what was the point, anyway?

  “Hell,” he said, and followed the kids. At the top he stood next to them for a long moment, looking out to sea. A moment later he picked his way down again.

  “Dinner?” he asked.

  “About time,” said Richard.

  * * * * *

  They sat down at an outdoor table at the Sidewalk Café. For ten years it had been a mutual favorite—ever since they started taking their annual “buddy trip” following high school graduation. Through a long decade the restaurant had never looked any different from one year to the next.

  “Remember,” said Jacob, “when you tripped over that dead seal on the beach in the dark one morning? Your foot sank right in!”

  “Look, man, I’m about to eat, OK?”

  Jacob tried again. “Or the second time we came here, right off the plane, and I had five glasses of Merlot, I was so happy to be away from college? Right at that table over there.”

  Richard smiled. “Me and Patrick and Kevin had to carry you back to the hotel.”

  Jacob nodded. “But only after three hours wandering around Santa Monica. The Third Street Promenade. Hey, you remember that Costa Rican girl, how she gyrated those hips? I spent fifteen bucks on that band’s album, just so I could give her the money and see her smile at me.”

  “Did she smile?”

  “Nope!” Jacob chuckled.

  “She was gorgeous,” Richard agreed.

  “Hey, why didn’t we go there this time? To the Promenade?”

  “Jesus, I guess I forgot all about it.”

  “Me too.”

  “We’ve seen it all anyway.”

  A one-armed waiter took their order. Jacob looked toward the ocean. The sun was falling into it so fast he could see it moving.

  “Good view from here,” he said.

  “View of what?” said Richard. He was flipping through his wallet and looking at receipts. “Some of these dinners are tax-deductible,” he murmured.

  “Never mind,” said Jacob.

  “Hey, what time does our flight leave tomorrow?”

  “Noon.”

  “Too bad. I’ll miss sleeping in.”

  “One more chance to walk Venice Pier and go to the Cow’s End for breakfast if we get up early enough.”

  “I doubt that’ll happen. Long flight, long drive after that. I need my sleep.”

  Dinner arrived, they ate, and the plates were taken away. Dessert and decaf coffee followed.

  Richard looked at Jacob for a long moment. “It was a good vacation,” he said, voice suddenly bright.

  “Yes,” said Jacob. “I hate to leave.”

  “It’ll all still be here. It’s not going anywhere.”

  “That’s true,” said Jacob. “You’re right.”

  The last sliver of sun slipped beneath the distant waves. Red and gold light disappeared in an instant, leaving the terrace in blue darkness. The waiter with one arm came around to each table with lit candles.

  “Hey,” said Richard, that artificial brightness still in his voice, “I think you’re right. We should eat at the Cow’s End tomorrow morning.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “And what about the Promenade tonight?”

  “I think—“

  Richard’s phone rang. “It’s Julie again,” he said. “I’ll be right back.” He got up and left the restaurant.

  Jacob paid the bill. Then he, too, got up and left. He walked past the candlelit tables, passed Richard’s voice talking distantly to a distant place, and into the darkness of the now-empty beach. He took a deep breath. Sea air filled his lungs. He listened carefully. Seagulls cried over the crash of waves. Behind him, all over Venice Beach, streetlights blinked on. Further down the boardwalk a group of teenagers laughed, a cloud of cigarette smoke billowing back in their wake.

  He pulled out his cell phone. He dialed a number.

  After three rings, someone picked up on the other end two thousand miles away.

  “Hello, Susan?” he said. “Yes. Oh, I miss you too. Like you wouldn’t believe. No, not since we talked this morning. Me too. Sure. We get in at eight. How’s the baby?”

  The Hunt

  Biting wind whipped among the trunks of black trees, and branches, snow-laden, cracked to fall about the two young men as they pulled on hand-rolled cigarettes, loaded rifles under their arms. The slivers of sky they could see above the brittle canopy were deep gray. Moonlight reflected off clouds and spread bleak, shifting illumination across the land. Snow—incessant, pervasive—collected on the brims of their hats and in the cuffs of their trousers.

  “Whittaker’s field is only an easy half-mile off,” said Samuel Holt, flicking the stub of his cigarette away. They watched as it tumbled through the air and came to rest hissing in the ice-crisped pine needles. The orange glow of the tip burned low, then out.

  “Easy? Damned if that’ll be an easy walk,” said Arthur Hughes.

  Samuel struck a match, and for a brief moment they stared at one another’s pale, wide-eyed faces in the spluttering, abused light. A violent spat of wind plucked the match from his fingertips and blew out the flame in midair.

  “Arthur, I swear you’ve seen a haunt. If you could see yourself like I see you, I doubt you’d argue the point.”

  “I don’t need a ghost to scare me more. I guess this about caps it.”

  The woods ran up a gentle hill over Still Creek, then on, wilderness, for over thirty miles. People got lost and died in such woods. Arthur knew they were still within three miles of town, but in the dark and the cold and the snow, he wished they were out in Whittaker’s field now, not a half-mile slog from it.

  “Your father going to meet us by the oak?” Samuel asked, raising his voice above the crying wind.

  “Said he would. Listen to that howl. It’s getting bad again.”

  Samuel, always the better ear for such things, socked his arm.

  “Wait.”

  They listened.

  “The wind…”

  “No, not the wind,” Samuel muttered. “Not the wind.”

  Arthur cursed and fumbled for the mining lantern at his side, touched the butt of his smoke to the wick, and shut the trap. A dull,
faint glow took hold of the tallow and pushed back the night around them. In the distance, gunshots, then screams, superseded the howls that were not wind.

  “They’re flushing our way!” Samuel hissed.

  “Should we make for Whittaker’s field? I don’t know if Pop’ll still be there if—”

  “That’d be moving away from them. We don’t want to move away from them.”

  Arthur tugged the glove off his right hand with his teeth and stuffed it into a woolen coat pocket. The cold, naked flesh of his hand and fingers found fast reassurance around the colder wood of his rifle, and he grasped it until his knuckles went bloodless.

  The cacophony grew clearer. Soon Arthur could make out faint lights coming down the hill. “They veering off?” he asked, pointing.

  Samuel nodded. “Now we make for Whittaker’s. They’re driving them out into the open.”

  They ran until Arthur thought his lungs would bleed. He was a fine runner and he knew it, but the cold, the snow, the hill, the trees, the bushes and rocks all fought to take his air, fight his legs, slow him down, trip him up, and by the time the pale field opened up before them, the baying and the howling and the shouts and lanterns now very close and growing closer, he was just about spent.

  Yet there was more to do.

  “Jesus wept,” gasped Samuel.

  Arthur raised his eyes in time to see the first wolf, dark against the plane of snow, dart in for Mr. Rowling’s hound, flip it over, and rip its throat out in a single, fluid motion. Rowling cursed and fired, and the wolf fell even as the hound let out half a wet yelp and went still. All around the field now the lights of lanterns stood out like candles, enveloping Whittaker’s field in a spluttering, shifting glow.

  The wolf pack, half-starved, driven to desperation by the worst winter in a century, turned to take its stand.

  Ten hours before, in the kitchen back home, Arthur’s father had said, “Only once in a blue moon. All other times they keep to themselves, give or take a sheep. God willing, you won’t see this a second time, even if you live to be an old, old man. The days of wolves killing men will be over after tonight.”

  Yet here, now, was that one time, the night not yet over, and Arthur felt the pulse of fear beat hard in his temples and wrists.

  “Spread out, boys! Don’t want no crossfire. Aim low!” Old Victor Eugene, who had somehow trawled his way through the hunt with his bad leg and weak heart, bellowed, demanded attention, and got it. The pinpricks moved apart.

  Arthur couldn’t count the flitting shadows. The hounds put up a frantic clamor, taut bodies pulling tight against their tethers, squirming and raging, jumping up in front of the lanterns. The men shivered, bodies moved by wind, adrenaline, and other, darker things. The wolves moved on the periphery of his vision, pacing out of the night and back again. The hip lanterns were erratic, disorienting sources of illumination. He felt caught in a nightmare; nothing seemed real.

  “A baker’s dozen,” Samuel muttered.

  “How can you tell?” Arthur had time to ask, and then the wolves came on.

  Later, no one argued that the hunting party was surprised by the sheer vivacity of the wolves during the final attack. The hunt was nine hours old, and for seven the hunters had closely pursued the starving pack with dog and gun. The wolves were exhausted, beleaguered, and dying.

  Yet when they charged, some of the men hardly had time to loose their hounds and raise their rifles. Suddenly the darting forms were no longer on the edge of Arthur’s sight, but far too close and clear.

  They came against the hounds first. For a moment the party could only watch. The animals grunted as they slammed against one other, and for a half-breath of time the wolves fell at bay.

  But the hounds were outnumbered, and some of the wolves, used to fighting, and desperate, struggled with a vigor that left dogs dead in their paths, regained their bearings, and continued the charge.

  “Get ‘em up! Aim! Fire!” someone shouted, and then the pinpricks of light disappeared as rifles exploded like canons across the field. Arthur blinked, eyes dazzled, and raised one hand from his rifle to his right temple.

  “Look out! Arthur!”

  Opening his eyes, Arthur saw the muzzle of Samuel’s rifle flash. The percussion stunned his ears. A wolf, just spitting distance off, shrieked and began to limp away, then turned, disoriented, and plodded slowly toward Samuel again. It did not growl, but its teeth shone bright in a wide, uneven grin, even as Samuel took careful aim and fired a second time.

  Only then did Arthur hear a faster padding on the snow, and smell, through the fumes of powder sulfur and lantern oil, a deep, wild musk.

  He turned. Fear clenched his bowels like a vise.

  And then he was screaming and screaming, and suddenly the screams were no longer of fear but of fury, and everything, dream-like before, became very real. His teeth clacked together in a tight grimace. His hands grasped the rifle in a clenched lock, and when the emaciated wolf leapt at him, hackles raised, dark eyes reflecting deep pools in the spluttering glow of his lantern, Arthur shot from the hip. One of the wolf’s great eyes went darker but lost its depth. A gout of blood exploded out the back of its head and darkened the snow. Its body somersaulted backward, legs and neck already rag-doll limp, and came to rest curled in an untrodden patch of field. The snow darkened around it.

  Still screaming, he saw four-legged motion in the distance, ran forward, and fired again. And again. And once more.

  When, finally, he heard only the clicks of the empty chambers, he flipped the rifle around and caught it by the barrels, ready to club whatever came on. Panting, rasping like a saw in the bitter air, Arthur looked about him wide-eyed, teeth reflecting moonlight.

  Nothing else came on. For a moment Arthur was all alone, more alone than he had ever been.

  Samuel started whistling behind him.

  Arthur turned. On first sight Samuel seemed calm, but there was a shake to the tune that came from more than cold, and when he walked forward his gait was jerky, stilted and unnatural.

  “Got a cigarette?”

  “Here.” Arthur dropped the rifle and fished in a coat pocket.

  Samuel cupped his hand across the match Arthur offered him, pulled smoke deep into his lungs, and exhaled a fine, blue cloud from his mouth and nostrils.

  A deep silence fell across Whittaker’s field. To Arthur, the people moving across it seemed somehow diminished. The field itself seemed somehow smaller. The night seemed less dark. The moon seemed less bright.

  Without talking, men moved among the dark, still swellings on the ground, kicking or poking each one. Several of the forms whimpered. Rifle muzzles belched flame. The smell of scorched fur mingled with sulfur on the wind.

  When Arthur and Samuel found Arthur’s father he was sitting on a rock underneath the big oak tree Whittaker never had the heart to cut down.

  “You boys sound?” he asked.

  “Fine, Mr. Hughes,” said Samuel.

  He looked to Arthur. “You?”

  “Fine,” said Arthur.

  Mr. Hughes pulled out a plug of tobacco and bit off a piece. He chewed thoughtfully for a moment, then said, “You boys did good. I saw you. You did good.”

  He stood up and drew them toward him, put his hands on their shoulders, and shook them with gentle but firm earnestness. Arthur could never describe the expression he saw on his father’s face at that moment, but he never forgot it.

  Mr. Hughes then stepped back and sat down heavily on the rock again.

  “They got old Eugene.”

  “What?”

  Mr. Hughes turned and spit at the tree. “Victor Eugene’s dead. Took a bad bite on the shoulder, but Moss Freeman saw the whole thing and thinks it was one part that, two parts heart attack.”

  “He shouldnt’ve been there,” said Samuel. “Someone should’ve made sure he stayed home. He was too old.”

  Mr. Hughes laughed, face grim. “You ever get old Eugene to do anything he didn’t wanna do? If so, y
ou’d make a damn fine lawyer, but I have my doubts you did.”

  “Where’s Dip? Where’s the dog?” Arthur asked.

  “Had to shoot him … I should have let him stay with you. Foolish of me. You needed him more.”

  “No,” said Arthur, voice very soft, “No, I didn’t.”

  Mr. Hughes looked up quickly. He nodded.

  Arthur took a last, long pull at the stub of his cigarette, then turned and spit it from his mouth. He ached with exhaustion.

  “Can we go home now? My feet are about frozen through.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, go on home. But don’t mention Eugene. No one else need know about that until we’ve a chance to talk with his wife first, let her know what happened.”

  As they walked away, Arthur could feel his father’s eyes on his back. When he turned, his father was already walking back across the field to where a group of very quiet men stood in a half-circle around a still form covered by a coat already dusted with snow.

  Samuel walked beside Arthur and neither of them spoke for a long time. Arthur’s lungs felt like half-frozen balloons. His right shoulder ached from the kickback of the rifle. The balls of his knees throbbed and the joints cracked every time he took a step.

  They found the trail at the edge of the forest and soon smelled the wood smoke of chimney fires just as the stench of sulfur began to fade. As the trees thinned, Arthur saw distant lights coming from the windows of homes that promised hot soup and warm beds.

  “This will never happen again,” he said to Samuel, who was huffing along beside him.

  “That’s what your father said.”

  “You don’t believe him?”

  They stopped at the edge of the forest atop a hill overlooking the back yards of the houses on Main Street. The yards and the houses looked small to Arthur. Still Creek seemed far removed even though it was close. He didn’t feel well.

  “I do, but it’s the damndest thing,” said Samuel. “They’re all dead but I don’t feel safe. I wanna look back over my shoulder.”

  “This will never happen again,” Arthur repeated. “They’re all dead. Father said so. We won’t see wolves here again. In the spring they’ll make sure, take the dogs and root out any breeding dens. Any dens at all.”