The Spirit Read online

Page 3


  “Take your time,” said Curtis, puffing his pipe.

  The rush of the river drowned the sound of Nicolson’s steps as he picked his way upriver. He flashed his light over the tortured ground, then found a cut in the river bank, between two birches, with a fairly clear field of fire.

  He was settling down when his light crossed a birch from which a huge crescent of bark had been torn loose. He found the fragments on the ground. The inner layers had been scraped away by huge teeth that left gouges in the wood.

  This was too much for a joke. Nicolson was beginning to believe the Bigfoot idea. He wondered if he ought to tell Curtis, and decided not to. Jason was obviously right; the thing was primarily a vegetarian that forced itself to eat meat. Why else would it have gone to all that trouble with the tree?

  The helicopter and Land Rover were parked together in the knee-­high meadow grass. It was a moonless but not starless night. Jason and Hill advanced a little way out of the forest and lay down in the grass. Jason adjusted his sight and pointed his rifle toward the vehicles.

  As his night vision cleared, Jason saw what appeared to be a large tumor on the side of the Land Rover. The tumor resolved itself into a person, whose head projected a foot above the roof.

  Jason’s throat felt dry. He heard a sharp intake of breath from Dennis Hill. Jason’s head was just about level with the roof, and he was six foot one. That meant their visitor was at least seven feet tall. Jason strained his eyes until tears formed, trying to see details. It was fifty feet away.

  “Christ almighty,” breathed Hill. “Look at it!”

  “I’m looking, I’m looking.”

  The intruder was roughly pear-­shaped, with long cranelike arms reaching down to its calves. The shoulders sloped downward. Something was not quite right about its head. The hair was looser than Jason would have expected, and longer, too, almost shoulder-­length.

  Jason pushed the rifle to his shoulder and quietly cocked it. He sighted down the barrel, centering the notch on the beast’s chest. A droplet of sweat stung his eye. He wiped it and aimed again.

  The giant stepped back from the Land Rover and became very still. The head jerked. Then the wind bore down a detestable smell of sweat and excrement.

  It knows we’re here, Jason thought.

  “Will you shoot, dammit?” snarled Hill.

  The giant whistled. Like a marmot, Jason realized in astonishment.

  Hill jumped to his feet. Jason squeezed the trigger. The flash split the night, and the explosion continued in the form of a snarling hound that burst out of the trees and clamped its fangs around Jason’s arm. He saw the dart splash over the helicopter.

  Jason shook the frenzied animal to the ground, and it promptly attacked Hill, giving Jason time to trigger off two more darts, but the giant was heading for the woods in a humped, loping stride that swallowed great chunks of ground. The dog turned back to Jason, jumping with glowing eyes and yellowed, saliva-­ribboned fangs for his throat.

  Jason shouted while beating off the animal, “Nicolson, it’s headed for you!”

  Hill smashed his light against the dog’s head. It dropped to the ground, a small mutt with a Doberman’s fury. The agile little body tore off toward the woods as Jason fired tranquilizer bursts that splashed on the ground around it.

  To Curtis it sounded as if a tank battle had erupted into the field and spilled full-­tilt into the timbers. It was the snarling of the dog that got him to his feet, pipe dropping from his mouth. It was headed for the upriver bend, to the thicket of broken branches where his friend Nicolson waited. Jason and Hill were shouting, in full pursuit.

  Curtis cocked his rifle and switched on his flashlight. “George?” he cried.

  A gunshot sounded from the bed. It was followed by a short, choked-­off scream, then the wild, turbulent thrashing of water fading upriver.

  Curtis called out, “George?” again, and again got silence for an answer. He swept the woods with his light. Probably George had turned his ankle and cried out.

  Curtis walked toward the river bend. He heard Jason and Hill’s voices and he was relieved. Nicolson was all right; they wouldn’t be talking so loudly if he were not. Tragedy always silences people.

  By chance he flashed his light into the river. It crossed a whitish object bobbing like a melon around the bend. Dead eyes looked at Curtis from under strands of wet plastered hair. His friend Nicolson’s head looked at him upside down.

  Shattered into complete psychic numbness, Curtis sat heavily on the rocks, keeping his light on the grisly object until it disappeared downstream.

  “Curtis!”

  Jason slapped him hard a second time. Curtis weakly waved away the next blow.

  “Easy on him, Jason,” murmured Hill.

  Jason and Hill wrestled Curtis to his feet, where he adjusted his glasses and lurched forward as if about to walk into the water.

  “He’s coming round,” said Jason. “Let’s get him up to the camp.”

  They drag-­walked him to the dead fire and seated him on a bedroll. Jason gathered the rifles and levered out the tranquilizer darts, replacing them with bullets. He shoved one into Hill’s hands. “Go start up the helicopter,” he said.

  Confused by the headless form of Nicolson, which refused to leave his mind, Hill said, “What for?”

  “The copter has spotlights! We’ve got to catch that thing before he gets too far away. I’ll stay on the ground. We can back each other up.” Jason tore apart the packs, searching for walkie-­talkies. He tossed one to Hill and kept the other for himself. “Understand? We’re going to kill that thing! Understand?” he shouted into the pilot’s face, as though he took Nicolson’s death personally.

  Curtis looked numbly from the rifle Jason had dropped into his lap to the trees. “George . . .” he began in an incoherent mutter.

  “That’s right, Curtis!” cried Jason. “For George. That thing’s a man-­killer, and we’re going to get him. On your feet!”

  The dog’s distant mournful howl threaded through the sentinel trees, freezing them into a marbled tableau of watchfulness.

  “Where’d that dog come from?” whispered Hill.

  “Scavenger. He eats what the ape doesn’t. They’re moving south. If the copter scares the dog, I can follow the barking.”

  “No!” said Curtis, galvanized by the howl to full furious possession of himself. “Not south. He went up the river. I heard him! Follow the river!”

  Jason did not look at Nicolson’s body as he splashed up the river. He forced himself to forget that it had been his decision not to arm themselves with bullets.

  His light picked up a print under three inches of water, pressed deep into the silt of the river bottom. The current was eroding it. The ape was running through water to cover his tracks.

  Just ahead of him the copter’s light frosted the trees. Hill flew so close to treetop level that his rotor downwash bowed the tips and showered pine needles, twigs, and chunks of bark to the ground, some of which lodged in Jason’s collar. The splintered shadows cast by the spotlights moved with the copter’s passage. Branches became clutching hands that reached for Jason’s clothes.

  He distanced himself from the river so the racketing roar of the machine did not fill his ears. He heard the dog barking in the trees. They had left the water for dry land. Jason shouted into the walkie-­talkie, “Hill? Go on ahead about half a mile and swing back this way. Try herding them toward me.”

  “Will do.”

  The copter gained altitude; then the motor changed to a hum a mile or so ahead as it began swinging in wide arcs from left to right. Jason leaned against a fir and listened hard. The dog’s howling had stopped. Without it Jason was not sure which direction they moved.

  They quartered the woods for a careful half-­hour, Jason moving slowly through the brush. We’ve lost them. He despaired and pou
nded his fist against bark. They had changed direction all right. They were headed for deeper woods.

  In the copter, Hill could hardly recognize the gun nut with brush-­fire eyes as Roy Curtis, the shy, short man too afraid of heights to venture from the Land Rover. Curtis leaned halfway out of the bubble, one hand gripping the rubber rail, the other pointing the cocked rifle downward.

  “Get inside!” Hill cried over the roar of the rotors. Curtis answered with a laser glare from his bloodshot eyes, comically distended by thick glasses. He thought only of his friend, Nicolson.

  Ground zero was the treetop level. Hill danced the controls so close that pine tips grazed the belly. He watched his landing lights skim the bristly branches.

  Curtis screamed and thumped the bubble. He jabbed the gun at the ground. “Back!” he shouted. “Back!”

  Hill backed the copter up. Down below was the dog, jumping up and down at the copter in a space between the trees. Curtis fired bullets which spurted pine needles up around the animal. Something stepped out of the trees but was driven back by an explosion of bark next to its hairy arm.

  Hill rose a few feet to spread the light wider. “Jason, Curtis is shooting at it. Get your ass down here!”

  Jason ran through the woods, ignoring the roots tearing at his feet and the branches that slashed across his face. The copter swayed in midair, seemingly supported by the hard-­edged beams of the landing lights. He heard gunfire above the motor. The dog was barking again. By coming up from the rear, he would have both in his sights within minutes.

  One of Hill’s shots echoed from the east. Now that was peculiar. Jason did not remember any cliffs or mountains that way. After a moment he heard the echo again.

  Curtis shouted, “I saw it! There’s something wrong with its head.”

  “What?” bellowed Hill, shifting the engine pitch.

  “I said there’s something wrong with—” The motor drowned out Curtis’s words. He leaned out farther and watched for it.

  Something hit the rear stabilizer with a violence that sent a shudder through the fuselage. The stick jerked out of Hill’s hand, and the foot controls came up of their own accord.

  Trees whirled and tilted below as if they were on a carousel dislodged from its axis. He had lost control of the rear rotor, and without that a copter will rotate in the direction of its rotor spin with an accelerating force that whirls the pilot into unconsciousness. Hill gathered the flailing controls and tried to still them. He managed to keep the belly flat as the trees rushed up to embrace them.

  Just before the crash he realized that Curtis had been flung out of the bubble like a dust mote flicked from a window ledge.

  The first shock threw him against the dashboard. Then came the endless bumpy, reverberating fall in a shower of wood, branches whipped to pieces by the rotors. Bough after bough, layer after layer as bark tumbled down on top of the machine.

  What was left of the copter swayed ten feet above the ground. Benumbed at still being alive, Hill grasped his rifle, unhooked the seat belt, and dropped the remaining distance to his feet.

  Jason had watched the crash from an outcropping of boulder in a clearing. First came a metallic snap, then the screeching rhythmic clatter of something caught in the rear blades. He screamed into the walkie-­talkie, but knew Hill had his hands too full to speak.

  The copter spiraled down to the trees half a mile away and disappeared when the lights went out. Then he heard it hit with a swishing crackle, as if a huge bird were settling into its nest. The crash seemed to go on forever before dribbling off in a rush of falling branches.

  “Hill? Hill?” he said tensely into the walkie-­talkie.

  Horror seeped through Jason at the howl of canine triumph rising from the woods. It was running for the wreck, well ahead of him. The horror propelled Jason as he ran off the rocks into the trees again. It rose from his legs to form an ache in his chest where his breath tore out in deep gasps. The dog and his master would get to the copter before him, and, failing the sudden appearance of wings on his shoulders, there was absolutely nothing Jason could do about it.

  Hill was on his hands and knees, trying to clear his head. Blood dripped to the ground from a gash in his scalp. When he heard the dog coming, he poked around the bush for his rifle.

  The ground was covered by chunks of clumsily chopped pine. Gasoline dripped in acrid streams from the copter into the springy loam. Hill was in a hollow lipped on all sides by trees.

  The walkie-­talkie was gone. No matter. He didn’t need help for this one. He had a good rifle and a steady hand. Even better, he had a good position, with a maximum range of fifteen feet on all sides. He had drilled beer cans with a pistol at that range without even aiming.

  With a final woof, the dog sprang over the hollow edge and growled at him between pants. Its tongue lolled over its jaws. Hill shot at it, just missing, and the dog’s courage vanished. It scrambled out of the hollow again.

  Hill waited for the larger shadow to appear, his rifle muzzle probing along the edge of the hollow.

  With a screech of aluminum and crunch of foliage, the helicopter was pulled out of the trees behind him. Hill whirled around. He got off one shot as the rock caught him squarely in the forehead. His last thought was a hope that Jason would take the shot as a warning.

  Jason was fast approaching the wreck when the shot brought him to a full stop. “Hill? Curtis?” he said tensely into the walkie-­talkie.

  The dog was whining. Jason heard the loam being thrashed around. The copter was only twenty yards ahead of him, but he was in a quandary. That single shot could have killed the thing. Hill was an experienced hunter who knew better than to waste ammunition. Nevertheless, wouldn’t he have emptied his rifle into it?

  Jason slipped under the thick protective foliage of a spruce. Quietly, so as not to crush any needles, he lay full length over the roots and inched outward until the drooping needles of the tree scratched his neck. He flexed the muscles of his body until the blood sang under his skin.

  The dog emerged from a line of trees ahead, its nose buried in the brush, searching out a new, possibly threatening scent. There was no sign of Hill or Curtis anywhere.

  Jason waited for the other creature, his front sight fixed squarely on the dog, which made irritated little yips. Then the spruce foliage was swept away like a curtain opening and a foot kicked the rifle out of his hands. Another kick, in the ribs, rolled Jason over onto his back.

  In the second before the lazily swinging rifle butt connected with his head, Jason impacted every detail of the stranger into his memory. Above a thin, dirty, corduroy-­trousered leg and a torn Army jacket was an expressionless Indian face with onyx eyes. A leather sack was tied to his waist beside a bowie knife in a handmade sheath. His clothes were torn by thousands of encounters with thorns, and his moccasins were unraveling at the seams. He was young, not past thirty, with black hair as thick as coiled cables tied in a knot in back.

  Even after the rifle butt burst the night into falling galaxies, a small part of Jason’s mind scuttled to a quiet haven, bearing that Indian with it. I’ll remember you, Jason thought, I’ll remember you.

  The dog tore off a mouthful of the white man’s jacket. The Indian drove it off with his rifle. Having just saved his spirit from some kind of disaster by shooting down the helicopter, he did not want the dog interfering.

  He peered at the white man’s motionless form. This could be a test sent by the gods. If so, the body would shimmer into nothingness as soon as he turned away.

  He stirred the hand with his rifle barrel. It was limp. He had hit him solidly with the rifle. Unless the white man was exceptionally hard-­headed, the Indian was sure he was dead. If he were real, that is. A bullet was the only way to be sure. The Indian stepped back, cocking his rifle. He pointed it at Jason’s neck.

  The giant loomed up between the trees and halted some distan
ce away. The Indian’s emotions boiled to a pitch of agonized expectancy. He had not seen it since the first night. Not this closely. Surely he would get his name now. Now . . . now . . .

  Hands clenching and unclenching, the giant waited. Waves of fetidness poured forth from his body. The In­dian’s senses had been honed to a steely edge by weeks of living in the woods, but no eyesight except Owl’s could discern the features of a spirit in woods this deep. His great shovel feet crushed the wood in his path.

  Then, with a hurricane of thrashing branches, the giant slipped sideways between two spruces. The Indian felt the faintest tremor of his passing. Finally the disturbed boughs ceased shaking.

  The Indian took a handful of corn from his medicine bundle and chewed it. “What did I do this time?” His voice was calm.

  The dog’s whimper changed to a growl as its yellow eyes went to the rifle butt. Understanding was a flashbulb that lit up the Indian’s mind.

  “He’s afraid of guns!”

  He set the rifle against a tree. The dog seated itself and wagged its tail. The Indian was amazed. It really was a hell of time to tell him that. “He’s a spirit. Guns can’t hurt spirits. Can they?” The Indian had gotten into the habit of talking to himself.

  Now he recalled that back in the Mission Range the spirit had set down his rock after the Indian had laid the rifle against a tree. The dog spoke the truth. The spirit feared guns.

  To realize after all this time that his rifle had kept his spirit from him was a frustration that would have driven a less stable man to madness. After all, the Indian had been shooting meat for weeks. He sent the dog with portions of his kill to the spirit as offerings. Sometimes the spirit did his own hunting for hours on end before braining his prey with a rock and leaving a headless carcass behind for the dog and Indian. It was the Indian who had wounded that musk ox after a two-­day stalk, and the spirit who had walked off with the lion’s share.

  He scratched the dog’s ears. “We live and learn, eh.” A small victory had been won. A barrier between himself and his spirit had been lifted. Small victories were treasured by the Indian, and this one pleased him so much that he lost interest in whether the white man was real or an apparition.