The Shape-Shifter. Chapter One, A Close Run Thing. Louis Shalako.

 

 

 

Chapter One

 

A close-run thing…

 

 

The baying pack of frenzied dogs kept on the scent. Straining at the leash, their barks rang out on the still evening air, reverberating softly before being absorbed by the softly-falling December snow and surrounding cedars. Underfoot, wet leaves and mossy debris would hold the scent yet suck up the noise of his passing.

The big cat paused, sniffing the air. He cautiously padded across a shallow stream, knowing that this barrier was not enough to keep them at bay. He kept moving, aware of the stabbing beams of flashlights and the strident voices of men with guns, pitched high in excitement and suspense. The calls rang out all around him, hitting his eardrums from all sides. They were getting closer, but the need to out-think them far outweighed the need for speed. The cougar slunk under every barrier to their progress he could find. He went under low-hanging boughs and squeezed through crevices in the rock-strewn slope, occasionally changing tactics by climbing up some craggy boulder.  He soon realized it would not be enough. At every turn, they got a little closer, and he had no choice but to keep the wind at his back. To lead them into the wind would be fatal. He couldn’t afford to trade minute for minute with all of those pursuers. A minute of life was all he had to work with. To die here would be the ultimate expression of futility. With several parties of dogs and hunters, they would inevitably tire him out and run him into the ground. There was nowhere to run, no place to hide. They would get him either way. While the big cat had a good turn of speed when necessary, he was not a running animal in any sense of the word, and climbing a tree would just mean his death.

He knew that. There were no cliffs that they would not scale, no caves or crevices that they would not enter, no river that they would not eventually cross. They had radios and cell phones. They had trucks and guns. They were intelligent. He couldn’t deny it, even if it was a sick and furtive, sneaky and dishonest kind of thinking on their part. There was no recourse, no appeal, no tribunal to overturn the decision. There was no law out here in the dark of night. The dogs were running him in shifts, and his lungs sobbed for breath and life. Despite his superb fitness, his heart felt like it would explode out of his chest.

Finally he could run no more. The road up ahead wouldn’t slow them down, and it offered no refuge to the quarry. He was out of options. Suddenly his heart leapt, having recognized this place. All he needed was a moment out of time, as the baying of the hounds changed to a different note. Maybe the dogs had caught a whiff of his desperation.

The big cat was home, as good a place as any to die.

Jeff McCabe and Harry Morden held up, catching each other’s eyes for a second.

Grinning in excitement and triumph, their hearts raced in exhilaration, with boozy breath stinging their nostrils, sharpening the senses and making the air crisp and clean.

“Let ‘em off?” asked Harry in excitement. “He can’t get out of there.”

He beckoned at a crusty bank of snow, with an impressively clear set of wide, fat tracks going up and over into the thickest of the woods. Hardened by the cycle of melt and freeze, the broken crust spoke of a big, heavy, predatory feline.

“Now, that’s what I call a fuckin’ panther,” said Harry, his lungs up around his throat. “For sure.”

He was finding it hard to get enough oxygen.

It was true. The cat’s tracks indicated entry into a small box canyon where a noisy stream issued from a cleft in the rocks, falling in a series of shelves and waterfalls to the valley below. The two, having hunted together for some years, knew the place well.

There were fifteen-metre cliffs ringing it. Good drinking water, they used to camp up there when they were kids. Up through the narrow cleft in the valley wall, the back end of it couldn’t be more than two hundred metres away.

A crashing of dry branches, which stuck off the trunks of jack pines and black spruce all around them, announced the arrival of Slick Wilson and Ted Hiltz, their pack straining at the leash. Jeff pointed off to his left. With the heavy, twelve-volt sealed-beam flashlight tugging on his already aching arm, he probed the darkness, looking for the green gleam of the cat’s eyes.

“Get on over there,” he called, pointing.

No need for stealth, as he reached for his push-to-talk radio, clipped onto his broad leather belt, stitched in Navajo patterns, with its three-inch golden belt buckle. Harry hung onto the dogs for dear life.

“You guys up there, he’s in the bag, just you boys fan out along the rim,” he ordered. “No one shoots until I give the word.”

The radio crackled harshly in some incoherent response, all of them talking at once, and he winced at the hellish squeal. The hysterical yelps of the hounds contributed to the chorus from hell, making it hard to hear himself think. The sounds of Jim Nesbitt and Hank Murgatroyd pulling their packs back from the rim came over the still evening air.

He grinned. Them dogs sure sounded mad. Left to themselves, he wondered if they would jump off the edge in their rage.

The boys were slipping the leashes, each holding a pair of dogs back by the collar and sheer force of will. Knowing what came next, the trembling hounds moaned and whimpered, straining and pulling at the hands that held them. Their eyes rolled in desperate fury, moist and with plenty of white around the edges from all the excitement.

“All right now,” he waited for silence on the radio, and then pressed the button again. “Take it nice and slow, and don’t run out in front of your partner’s gun,” he instructed. “We’re gonna loose ‘em now.”

He nodded at Harry and Slick, and Teddy, faces taut and eyes wide in adrenalin. Jeff looked them over and nodded.

“Go get ‘im,” yelled Slick, and they all let go of the collars, un-slinging their guns off their shoulders, and spreading out in a row.

The dogs pelted into the trees, looking like specters until the branches bent and folded and swung back into place. The progress of the dogs up the hill could by traced by following the yelps and yaps, picturing the terrain in one’s mind’s eye. They all stood staring into the brush, black and cold. Two of them had lights, two of them were ready to shoot, that was the drill. Jeff McCabe was the leader by self-appointment and mutual consent.

“The girls surely don’t lack for enthusiasm,” quipped Hiltz, holding up the .273 to sweep the area. One little snick and the bolt was cocked. The glare of the lights made his pudgy face a mean and ugly thing to see.

Jeff grinned at his thoughts. Hiltzy was a homely son of a bitch, but he had a heart of gold. As for McCabe, his life was like something out of a movie sometimes.

 

END

 

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Image: stolen in the night

 

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