Day 17

“I think that we should go take a look,” said Hugo.
“First we need to go see Olaf.”
The suburbs turned to small one and two horse ranches, then to farms and larger ranches. They passed Erickson’s place. Hugo looked down the drive. He could see where the house must be, but it lay just over a rise, in the middle down behind some cottonwoods. Hugo wondered about the horse, and why and how he had gotten mixed up in such a thing.
“Do you ever feel like you are out of sync with the rest of the world?” Hugo asked.
Bonanza turned and looked at him. “That’s why you are here, boy,” he said.
Hugo stared at him as they turned down Bonanza and Olaf’s drive. What does that mean, Hugo thought. He finished his beer as they pulled up at Olaf’s place. Bonanza didn’t park at the house, but pulled around to the barn. Olaf’s barn was built in a much more traditional style, with [traditional style] barn roof, painted red with whit trim. The first floor, Hugo could see, had recently been cleaned. Beside the barn sat a large pile of manure and the back-hoe that had mucked it out. Hugo felt glad that he hadn’t had to do the work, even with the machine. The hay door stood open on the second floor. Hugo could see Olaf had filled it full for the coming winter.
Bonanza stepped out the truck, taking a new beer with him. Olaf was no where to be seen. “Where are we supposed to meet him?” Hugo asked.
Bonanza vaguely grunted and pointed with his beer to the southwest. “He doesn’t know we are coming,” he said.
Hugo shrugged, took another beer from himself and followed Bonanza. The Big Mountain shown off to the southeast, newly covered with snow. Hugo always looked for the first covering. From his house, he couldn’t see the mountain, and yesterday the clouds still lingered over its peaks. Hugo remembered spending time up there with Mandy, skiing and hiking. He wondered where she might be this morning. Best not to think about her, he thought. Bonanza headed off in what seemed like a random direction. The track led almost directly south, and the house sat to the north. Hugo didn’t see anything interesting out this way, but silently follow taking in the rocks and stones that had never been taken from the fields. The grass had been cut low by the cows on Olaf’s place, at least this part of it. He looked around and wondered where they might be now. Down south, I guess, he thought. Though that didn’t really make sense because of the attacks.
He shrugged to himself and continued on. A flock of gulls stood in their way. The gulls lived year round in McLoughlin, subsisting on farm chaff and waste. He knew that they loved the planting season, when the farmers turned up the soil exposing grubs and worms. They loved haying and harvesting time, too, as the swather cut down the rodents as indiscriminately as the plants. Today, they appeared to be waiting for the next meal to show up. The sat silently in the sun, not really preening, no where to go, and all day to get there. Bonanza walked directly toward them. They parted as he came to them, but didn’t fly away. Those that had taken to the air, quickly landed not far from where they had been sitting. Dr. Bonanza didn’t seem to notice them.
The gulls seemed to be particularly watching Hugo. None of them lifted off as he neared, but walked out of the way, if he came too close. Hugo thought this a little strange, but tried to ignore it. He looked back at them after he had passed. He looked up toward the barn and saw that someone followed them. He assumed that it must be Olaf. “Olaf’s coming,” he said.
Bonanza stopped an turned. He waved a quick wave, then continued on. “He knows where we are headed,” he said.
Hugo thought about asking again where they were going, but gave it up as hopeless. He tried to enjoy the morning, but soon felt dread overtaking him. He thought about all that Mrs. McGregor had been saying, and all that Bonanza had said --and not said. He tried to shrug it off, but instead looked back at Olaf. He walked quicker than Bonanza and Hugo. Hugo thought that Dr. Bonanza’s limp seemed to be particularly obvious today. He finished his beer, then smashed the can and put it in his pocket. He didn’t think it proper to simply toss away the can on someone else’s property.
After almost a quarter mile, Hugo could see that they were approaching what looked like a hut, partially sunk into the ground. Bonanza led them to the north end --it ran north to south. The building looked very old. Rocks and rubble had been piled up along each side. He has seen such buildings before, but not very many of them still existed in the McLoughlin area. This one ran for about ninety feet and looked to be about thirty wide. Bonanza stopped and turned to Hugo as he reached the door. He stood with his hand on the worn wooden handle. “We’ll just wait for Olaf, since he seems to want to join us today,” he said.
Hugo turned to see that Olaf had almost reached them. He waved to Hugo as he walked up. “I didn’t expect to see you out here so soon,” he said to Dr. Bonanza.
“Yes, well. Things seem to be progressing rather quickly, now, don’t they?”
Hugo looked from one to the other. He didn’t have time to ask any questions, as Bonanza pulled the door open and stepped into the gloom. It smelled of slow decay and fecund earth. Light came from the cracks that had formed in the roof and walls from years of little use. It took a moment for Hugo’s eyes to adjust to the darkness. “Is this an old potato barn?” he asked while he waited. He could hear Bonanza shuffling around in the gloom, but couldn’t see what he might be doing.
Bonanza grunted assent. Hugo knew that at the turn of the century, the farmers in McLoughlin had gotten the idea that they could farm potatoes out on the flats. But, with the government keeping the price of potatoes artificially low, it made more sense, at least for the small farmer, to change over to cherries or livestock. Olaf, had chosen the latter.
Bonanza lit an oil lantern and Hugo could see around the interior of the barn.

Day 16

***
After a few minutes of haranguing, Hugo asked if Mrs. McGregor would like to come in for some tea. She wore a light blue flowered housecoat over a blouse of indeterminate age and color and a pair of denim plus-fours.
She considered for a moment, then nodded her head. Hugo moved out of the way and let her in. She walked to the kitchen and sat at the table. “I’m glad to see that you finally let your cat in,” she said, stroking the cat down its length.
Hugo put a pan of water on the stove --he didn’t have a tea pot-- and rummaged through the cupboard looking for the tea. “It’s not my cat,” he said.
“That’s neither here nor there,” replied Mrs. McGregor. If Hugo had been looking, he might have seen her wink at the cat, and maybe the cat wink back.
Hugo emerged from the cupboard with two boxes of tea. “Which would you prefer, Lemon, or Earl Grey?” he asked.
“I brought my own,” said Mrs. McGregor, reaching into a pocket in her housecoat, and returning with a packet of tea. “I didn’t think that you probably had any tea.” Her grimace softened and she almost smiled at him.
Hugo found mugs in another cupboard and poured the hot water. He chose Earl Grey for himself. As he turned he looked out the window at the Backyard Neighbors. The father did the dishes, and one of the children sat at the kitchen table doing homework. He put the mug down in front of Mrs. McGregor and took the seat adjacent. “What’s new in the neighborhood, Mrs. McGregor?”
Her lack of frown turned into one. “I’ll tell you what’s new,” she said. She opened the packet of tea and dipped the bag into the water. “You came home awfully late last night. And I don’t think that you listened to what the Shargugh was saying. And... And, that woman is nothing but trouble.” She harrumphed as she got the last phrase out.
Hugo’s eyebrows rose. He looked at her with mild surprise. “Um, I’m sorry Mrs. McGregor. I didn’t mean for Maya and I to disturb you last night.” A memory of seeing someone very much like Mrs. McGregor in the bar came to the forefront of his mind. He opened his mouth to say something about it, when she cut him off.
“That’s not what is important. I will only say one more thing about her right now: she is trouble, and now she has her hooks in you, so you had better watch out.” She looked him straight in the eye. Hugo tried not to blink, but his eyes began to water and he looked at his mug of tea. “What is important is that you pay attention when people are talking to you.”
Hugo looked up at her. “I’m trying to pay attention, Mrs. McGregor,” he said, abashed.
“Not me. Though you should listen to me as well. I’m talking about the Shargugh. Didn’t you hear that something is happening that he can’t control? His land, this land, here, has come under some kind of attack. Some kind of evil is roaming around out there and he can’t do anything about it.”
Hugo stared at her. What is she talking about? He thought. Some evil? “Are you talking about the animals that have been killed?” he asked, clawing his way back into the conversation.
“Of course that is what I’m talking about,” Mrs. McGregor slammed her fist down on the table. Hugo jumped, and the cat jumped to the floor.
Hugo tried to recollect what Shargugh had said when they met outside and the whole city seemed to be swaying. All that he could remember was another person standing in the shadows a little way off. “What does Shargugh have to do with all this?” he asked
“He has everything to do with it, dear.” Mrs. McGregor bent down and scooped the cat onto her lap. It began to purr as she stroked its back. All the while, the cat stared at Hugo. He felt a bit unnerved all this staring going on.
“Josie seems to like you,” he said.
She scoffed. “What kind of name is that, Josie? This cat is a male. Don’t you recognize testicles when you see them?” She turned the cat around. Hugo stared, shocked that Mrs. McGregor had said “testicles”.
“I didn’t know,” he stammered. “I didn’t look. She…he had just come in and I didn’t want to pick him up. I thought that he might be scared…or something.”
“His name is Hermes.”
“Okay.” Hugo reached out his hand and scratched Hermes between the ears. “Wait. Why are you calling him “the” Shargugh? I thought that his name is just Shargugh.”
She stared at him as though he had just appeared in front of her, ignorant as the day he was born. “This is his land,” she said, slowly so as to make her self understood. “He protects it.” She opened her eyes wide, then frowned to make her point more clear.
Hugo nodded like he knew what she was talking about. “Okay,” he said. “He owns the land…”
“Of course he doesn’t own it. If you aren’t going to listen to what I’m saying, then I might as well leave,” she made to stand.
Hugo put his hand on her arm. “Wait. I’m sorry,” he quickly said. “I’m just trying to understand.”
She sat back down. “Sometimes,” she said, “it seems like you are being stupid on purpose.” He looked at his mug again. “You young people don’t know anything these days. All you know is what they teach you in school, and what you see on TV. Though I notice that you don’t have one.” She smiled slightly and continued. “The Shargugh takes care of the land. McLoughlin happens to be inside…” The doorbell rang cutting her off.
“Excuse me,” Hugo said, getting up.
“That’ll be Dr. Bonanza, here with pressing news, no doubt.”
Hugo started down the hall toward the front door. He looked back at Mrs. McGregor, realizing that he didn’t really know her at all.
He opened the door. There stood Bonanza.
“Let’s go,” he said. He turned toward his truck which idled in the street.
“Mrs. McGregor’s here,” Hugo said.
Mrs. McGregor padded up behind him. “I’m just leaving,” she said. She pushed passed Hugo and nodded to Dr. Bonanza. “Mario,” she said
Bonanza nodded back. “Esmeralda,” he said.
Hugo stared from one to the other. Hermes rubbed against his leg and he looked down. Hermes followed Mrs. McGregor with his gaze. Hugo looked up, but only after Mrs. McGregor gave Hermes a look that meant that he should stay. “Thank you for the tea, dear,” she said to Hugo as she walked to her house. Hugo felt confused, and somehow on the outside of all that was going on.
“Get your coat,” Bonanza said.
Hugo looked at him as though seeing him for the first time. “Mario?” he asked.
Bonanza pointed a finger at Hugo, then deflated. “Just get your coat,” he said. “We have to go.”
Hugo went back in and rummaged through his room, looking for a coat. He tried to predict what the weather might do, in the hopes of choosing the correct garment. After a few moments of searching and reflection, he gave it up and took raincoat and a quilted flannel shirt, red and black. Layering, he thought. That should take care of it.
Hermes stood in the doorway looking at him questioningly. “Do you want to go out or stay in?” Hugo asked. “I don’t know if I have anything for cats.” He hurried into the kitchen and rummaged through the pantry. “Tuna!” Hugo exclaimed. He opened the can and put it on the floor. Hermes sat down near the table and looked at him. “Well, go ahead,” Hugo said, pointing at the open can. Hermes looked at him impassively. “What?” Hugo asked. He snapped his fingers. “Water,” he said. He picked up the milk bowl [fix above?], rinsed it and filled it with water. He placed the dish beside the open can of tuna. Hermes walked to the can and began to eat. Hugo scratched him on the neck and walked down the hall to his open doorway.
Bonanza sat in the driver’s seat, looking toward Mrs. McGregor’s house.
Hugo opened the passenger-side door and climbed in. “Where are we off to?” he said.


Chapter 23

Bonanza didn’t answer at first. He turned the truck around and headed back out to the highway. As they turned south, he said, “What did Mrs. McGregor have to say?”
Hugo looked at Bonanza, and then back out the windshield. “I’m not really sure,” he said. “She was saying some pretty weird stuff about Shargugh, like he owned the land--” he mentally cringed. “Not that he owned it, but that he took care of it, or something.”
Bonanza nodded faintly. Hugo continued, “And that I should listen better when people are talking. Sorry about last night. I don’t know how I got so drunk. I just needed to go home.” He remembered talking with the night-man at the market. “Say, did you hear something about a horse being killed yesterday?”
Bonanza looked at him, but said nothing.
“I stopped at the market on the way home and was talking with the guy there. He said that some horse got killed and was torn up pretty bad. Is that where we’re going?”
They drove in silence for a few moments, then Bonanza said, “I took a look at the horse last night. They had it hauled to Dean McLosky’s, the vet. It didn’t have a brain, just like my sheep.” Bonanza looked grim. “We’re going to talk with Olaf. I think that he has something that we might need.”
The stopped off at the gas station for more fuel and beer.
“Hello, Dr. Bonanza,” said Joe as they pushed through the door.
Bonanza nodded and headed to the beer cooler.
At the register, Joe said, “Did you hear about that horse? It was out at the Erickson place. They’re just down the road from you, aren’t they?”
Dr. Bonanza grunted assent. “What else have you heard, Joe?”
“Oh, this and that. People say that there’s something funny going on out down south. Out on the flats.”
“Up on the slope a little too,” Bonanza said as he paid the bill. He left the beer for Hugo to carry again.
In the truck, Hugo broke out a beer for himself and one for Bonanza. Hugo pictured where Erickson’s place was located; he had seen the mailbox on the way to the refuge on the previous day. Just down the road from Bonanza’s drive about a mile and a half. Closer toward town, he thought.
“I can see what you are thinking,” Bonanza said. “They found it not that far from where my sheep got killed. It was down there at the south end of his property. He butts up against the national forest instead of the refuge.”
“Did you know that a dead mountain lion was found up by Two Rabbit Lake a few days ago,” Hugo asked.
Bonanza looked at Hugo as he drove. “No,” he said. The drove in silence for a while.

Day 15

Chapter 21

Hugo walked home. He had a trick for crossing streets when he was drunk like this: he would stop, wait for a second, then look up and down the street to make sure that no cars were coming. Usually he made it across fine, but every now and then he would make a slight misjudgment and then there would be a close call. Luckily, most of his walk traversed the South Side Addition, ninety nine percent residential, and so close calls happened infrequently.
When he neared the Third Street Market, he thought about not going in, but thought that he might buy some food. He felt hungry.
He dreaded the conversation that he would have to have with the checker. Hopefully it would not be the same woman with whom he had spoken earlier: that hadn’t gone well, and being this far gone would not make things better. He opened the door and walked in. The bells jingled. He glanced at the counter and felt relief. The woman had been replaced by a young man, and he spoke with a pair of teen-agers. Hugo hurried to the back and found the half case of beer. Then he shopped for some food. A box of crackers, some bread, a hunk of cheese. He brought it all to the counter.
The man looked at him, then began checking out his groceries. “Did you hear about what happened to that horse?” The man asked in a casual tone.
“Mm, no,” replied Hugo.
“It was on TV,” the man said indicating the TV behind Hugo. It had returned sometime during the day, apparently.
“What happened?” Hugo felt his tongue thicken with so many syllables.
“Something killed this horse out on one of those farms. Tore the heck out of it. I never seen anything like it. That’ll be fifteen thirty five.”
“Is it in the paper?” Hugo asked, pointing outside.
The checker shrugged as he handed back the change. “I don’t know.”
Hugo pocketed the change, not bothering to put the bills in his wallet. He picked up his beer and food and headed out the door.
Outside, he fished through his pocket and found change for the paper-box. He tucked the paper under his arm, and gazed at the sky. The stars shone brightly, and more so when he left the light of the store. A breeze had come up. It blew from the north. Usually the wind only blew from the west. Hugo didn’t really think about it. He made his way toward home.
As he neared his house, he noticed that Mrs. McGregor’s blinds were drawn, and that all the lights seemed to be on. In front of his a strange car sat. He wondered about it, but stranger things had happened in his neighborhood on a Saturday night.
As he neared it, however, a person stepped out of the driver’s side. He slowed and tried to see who might be coming toward him. Actually, he realized, the person had merely walked to the back bumper and seemed to be waiting for him. Hugo though that it might be a woman, but still he could not be sure. Suddenly he wished that he had a weapon, and had not drank so much, though he felt much more sober right now.
As he neared the person, she said, “Hello, Sailor.”
“Hello,” he said, still unsure who it might be.
“I brought some beer,” she said, holding up a six pack of bottles.
Slowly, he came up to her. Maya smiled at him. He felt a wave of relief. A familiar face. “Maya,” he said. “You scared me. I didn’t expect anyone to be parked outside of my house.”
“I thought that you might like some company. You were hurried out of the bar quite quickly by that little man, Bonanza.”
“Come on in.” Hugo found his keys and opened the front door. Through all this conversation, he never questioned how she knew where he lived, or that he had only met her and talked for five minutes just that night. Neither did he see the curtains at Mrs. McGregor’s house flick as he let the two of them in.
***
Hugo led Maya into the kitchen and unpacked his bags on the table. “I bought some sandwich makings, if you’re hungry” he said to her. He looked at the beer. Well, Bonanza will enjoy it anyway, he thought. He opened one of the I.P.A.s for her, then opened a lager for himself. He started to pull out a chair for himself, when he stopped. “Why don’t we go sit in the front room. I can start a fire.”
“That would be nice,” she said.
Hugo led the way to the front room. He placed his beer and the paper on his reading table, and turned on the reading light. He indicated that Maya should sit on the sofa, and busied himself with preparing the fire. He pulled out the classifieds, scanning them quickly, looking for anything of interest. He crumpled the whole section up and stuffed it in the fireplace.
Instead of sitting down Maya looked at the books lining the wall. “You sure have a lot of books,” she said. “Didn’t you write a book, Hugo?”
Hugo smiled inwardly. It seemed that everyone knew about his book. “I need to go get the wood,” he said. “Make yourself at home.”
He walked to the back porch. As he put his hand on the doorknob to go outside, he looked at the beer sitting on the table. He stopped and stared at it. The slowly he looked back down the hall toward the front room. What the hell is going on? He thought. How does she know so much about me?
“Can I give you a hand,” Maya called.
“No…no, I can get it fine,” Hugo replied. It’s alright. He told himself. She’s probably some stalker, occult freak. We can talk for a little while, then I will tell her that I need to go to bed so that I can get up early. He pulled open the door, and glanced over his shoulder again. Maya appeared to still be in the front room. He stepped out and picked up an armload of wood. He looked to the backyard neighbor’s house, but they had already gone to bed: the house was dark. He kicked the door carefully shut, after he stepped through, then slowly walked back to the front room.
“Here we go,” he said, feeling completely sober now. Maya sat on the couch, a book in her hands. She faced the fire, so all that Hugo only saw the back of her head and her shoulders. She looked beautiful. Hugo felt frightened.
He busied himself with the fire, stood and found a book of matches on the mantle. He squatted down and lit the fire. As it caught, shadows danced around the room. He turned, picked up his beer, and looked at Maya. She seemed to be enthralled with the book that she read. He couldn’t see the title; she held it so that the light from the lamp shone over her shoulder. Hugo repressed the urge to bash her over the head with the lamp and call the police. Instead he walked around the coffee table and sat down at the opposite end of the couch. She had taken off her shoes, placing one leg up on the couch and the other underneath her. He shrugged and took off his own boots. He noticed that the book happened to be Beowulf.
After a few moments when Maya didn’t say anything, he stood up and put another log on the fire. He picked up the paper and took it back to the couch. Maya still read the book, while Hugo scanned the paper. He opened the front section: war, crime, politics. He opened up the sports and read about the local teams. He read a profile of Hedlund’s women’s basketball star center. He looked for the local news and found the section missing. He looked under the ads, then back through the front section to see if they had stuck there. Gone. “I didn’t get a local news section in my paper,” he said out loud.
“Were you looking for something in particular?” asked Maya.
Hugo felt guarded and lied, “No.”
“Have you read this?” she asked, holding up the book.
“It’s one of my favorites,” he said. “I did a translation from a Middle English text in college.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Impressive.’
Hugo shrugged, “Not impressive enough to get it published.”
“Have you read the [author’s name] translation?”
“I have it, if you want to look at it.” He stood up and searched the shelves, coming back after a moment. He handed her the book. Their hands touched and he tried not to be attracted to her, but couldn’t help it. She’s beautiful, and she knows about Beowulf. How many other women will I meet in McLoughlin who have even heard about Beowulf?
As he sat down, she put her feet on the floor and moved closer to him so that they could both look at the copy together. She brought the first copy with her so that they could compare the two, if they wanted. “I’ve always felt a terrible sorrow for Grendl’s mother.”
Hugo nodded, “That is part of the tragedy that makes the poem personal, if not epic. Everyone can sympathize with a lost family member.”
“It really is horrible, though, isn’t it? I mean all the blood and muck and violence.”
“I suppose so,” he said. “It has been awhile since I have read it. I think the last time was just after college. Actually, then, I liked all the violence.” He thumbed through the book and found a particularly bloody part:
[insert bloody part here]
“Oo, that’s too horrible,” she said, leaning into him as he read.
He felt the blood come to his face; he felt warm all over.
As he finished, she looked up at him. He so desperately wanted to kiss her, and he felt that she wanted to be kissed. It’s all a trick, somehow, he thought. She is a horrible stalker and I will wake up with my arm ripped off. He kissed her anyway.


Chapter 22

The next morning, Maya was gone. Hugo didn’t remember much, but what he did remember made him feel warm again. She hadn’t ripped his arm off in the night and hung it from the rafters. He thought, she’s still probably a stalker. He brushed aside the thought as pure paranoia and busied himself with his morning business. While in the kitchen, when he looked out to check on the back yard neighbors, the cat that Mrs. McGregor had asked him about on the previous day, stood on the wood pile cleaning itself. Hugo looked at it for a second, then shrugged. The cat looked back as if it had been expecting Hugo. When it saw the he had gotten up, it jumped down and walked to the back door, as though it expected to be let in.
Hugo shrugged again, opened the door and let the cat in. It jumped up on the table, and looked at him to see what he would do next. When he did nothing, the cat resumed cleaning itself.
The cat had gray fur, with black stripes. Hugo noticed that its feet were particularly large and attractive, if cat feet can be so. The top of one ear had a notch. Torn out in some back alley brawl, no doubt, Hugo thought. As he looked at it, the cat began to purr.
“Are you hungry?” he asked it. “I don’t have much.” He looked in the refrigerator. He pulled out a carton of milk dubiously. As if by magic, when he opened the top and smelled it, it was still fresh. He poured a bit in a small plate and put it in front of the cat, still on the table. The cat smelled it and then lapped up the milk. Hugo reached out a hand to give the cat a scratch. The cat leaned into his outstretched fingers and purred appreciatively.
“What shall we call you?” he said aloud. Funny how people will talk to animals as though they were little, mute humans.
He had been thinking of the cat as an it, but suddenly assumed that “it” was a female. Why not? He thought. “How about Josie. I’ve always like the name Josie for a cat.” Josie looked up at him, then went back to drinking the milk. He wandered into the front room and was about to relight the fire when there came a knocking at the door. He thought about not answering it, but resented when he thought that someone else did the same to him, so he strode to the door and opened it.
Mrs. McGregor stood on his front porch, hands on hips. She wore a scowl and looked at Hugo disapprovingly.
“Hello, Mrs. McGregor. What can I do for you?”

Day 14

The large man that he had bumped into earlier, stepped in his way, not noticing that Hugo was there. Hugo slowed, losing sight of the couple he wanted to see about. He pushed around another group of college students who happened to be holding drinks with umbrellas in them.
He neared where he thought he had seen Mrs. McGregor. She had left, and so had the man. The table sat empty. Not even glasses or a snack bowl remained. He tried to look closely to see about the possibility of a ring from the glasses, but was bumped from behind. He fell into the booth. He sat there for a second, weariness threatening to overwhelm him. He drank the last of his beer and pushed his way to the bar. He waited patiently as the bartenders mixed drinks and served others who had been waiting. He caught Shirley’s eye and pointed to his empty bottle. She nodded and went to get him another.
When she returned she practically had to shout over the music coming from the back room. “There was someone here looking for you earlier today,” she said.
Hugo stared at her. Who would be looking for him?
“It’ll be three fifty,” she said.
Hugo reached for his wallet. “Who was it?” he asked.
Shirley shrugged. “I didn’t talk to him. One of the waitresses did.”
He handed her four dollars and stared at the mirror in the back bar for a moment, thinking. A man was looking for me, he thought. He wracked his brain trying to imagine who would be looking for him. Why hadn’t they called? I’ve been home. Visions of tough characters straight out of movies rushed through his head. He felt threatened and paranoid. He shook his head and laughed. It was probably a mistake. No one was looking for me, he thought. They probably were looking for someone else. He tried to locate Dr. Bonanza in the mirror, but there were too many glasses and bottles for him to get a good view of anything. He turned, then stopped: three fifty for a bottle of beer? Holly Cow, he thought. No wonder I usually come during happy hour.
He spotted Bonanza. He stood near the back wall, near a phone booth. Hugo felt stupid and turned back to the bar. He squinted up at the list of beers and tried to remember what Bonanza liked. He read through the list, each beer sounding more strange than the last. Finally he settled on one and tried to catch a bartender’s eye. Roger walked past and Hugo put out his hand.
“Could I get a pint of the I.P.A.?” Hugo said. “That’s a lighter beer, right?”
Roger looked at him for a second, “It is lighter in color, if that is what you mean.”
“I’ll take one of those. Please.”
Roger turned, grabbed a glass from the cooler under the taps, and poured the beer, carefully not looking around. When the beer had been poured, he placed the glass in front of Hugo. Hugo paid him and turned once again to find Bonanza. He looked where Bonanza had been, but he had moved.
Hugo scanned the bar. He saw Mandy and the Duck sitting at a table with two other men. The large man with the tattoos seemed to be leaving. That’s one less thing to think about, he thought. Bonanza, however could not be found.
He turned back to the bar, but not before he noticed that a woman looked at him. She stood slightly apart from the group the Hugo assumed that she was with. She didn’t stare directly, and looked back at her companions when she saw his eyes on her. Hugo took a sip of his beer. He turned back to the bar on his stool. Looking into the mirror, he was unsure of what to do. He tried to see the woman in he mirror, but found it to be hopeless. He turned to look at her again and found that she walked toward him. Her dusty blonde hair rested on her shoulders. She wore a black dress with a flower print that was surprisingly modest compared to some of the other attire in the bar right then. She had very little make-up on. Hugo thought of Mandy, then scoffed at himself. He didn’t owe her anything, and who knew what this was all about anyway.
He took a drink of his beer, trying to be nonchalant. Suddenly he felt very tired, and a little bit lonely.
The woman walked up to him. He waited for her to speak. She looked at him, then at his beer, then at the beer still on the bar. She leaned into him so that she could speak without yelling over the music. “You don’t look like you belong here.” She said.
Hugo smiled. “I don’t,” he said. He looked to his right and left: all the other stools were occupied. He stood and indicated his stool. “Would you like to sit down?” he asked.
“How chivalrous,” she said, climbing up. She turned to face him, her right hand on the bar.
“Can I buy you a drink?” he pointed to the beer that he had bought for Bonanza. He glanced over her left shoulder, feeling guilty for giving it away.
She picked up the beer and took a drink, looking at him. “Won’t your friend be upset that I am drinking his beer?”
Hugo glanced around again. He could smell her faintly. He didn’t detect any perfume. “I don’t think he even knows that I bought it for him.” She took another drink and he did the same. They were silent for a moment. Hugo broke eye contact first. He looked at the back bar, then back to the woman. She still looked at him, a slight smile on her lips. He thought that she must be a little older than the rest of the crowd. Maybe she attended Hedlund’s master’s program. He didn’t know what to say next. He rarely talked to strangers. He very rarely talked to nice looking women who approached him.
“My name’s Hugo,” he said finally. He extended a hand. She placed hers in his for only a second. He squeezed it, then she pulled away. She didn’t have any jewelry on her hand, neither rings nor bracelets.
She looked him in the eye, again. Hugo waited; he wanted to turn away. Finally she said, “Maya.” Color rose on her cheeks and he could feel his own becoming rosy.
He felt lost in the wilderness, but persevered. “What brings you to Astor’s?” he asked.
She took another sip of the beer. “Saturday night,” she replied.
The seat behind Maya opened up. Hugo walked over to it and sat down. He glanced over to where Mandy sat. He imagined that she saw Maya talking to him, but she appeared to be involved in her conversation with the Duck. Hugo returned his gaze to Maya.
“What do you do, Hugo?” she asked.
He thought for a moment. What did he do? “I’m a writer,” he said.
She inclined her head, “Really,” she said. “I had picked you out as an alcoholic lay-about.” She sipped her drink again, turning her gaze to the back bar.
Where is this going, he thought. He took another drink of his beer. He caught the eye of one of the bartenders and motioned for another. “Would you like another?” he asked.
“I’ve hardly touched this one,” she said.
He put both arms on the bar and hunched himself over his empty beer bottle. He felt tired again. And a little bit angry about the way this seemed to be playing out. “What do you do?” he asked.
She sipped her drink and looked at the bartenders scurrying around mixing and pouring and taking money. She shrugged. “This and that.”
Shirley placed another beer in front of him. He paid and turned to go, scanning the crowd for Dr. Bonanza once again. Maya put a hand on his arm and leaned into him again, blocking his escape. “I know what you are after,” she said.
He sat back and looked at her, studied her. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“Next will be something more precious than livestock.”
“Excuse me, miss.” Dr. Bonanza pushed his way between them. He looked up at Hugo, grabbing his arm. “Thanks for buying me a beer,” he said to Hugo.
“Bonanza…what?”
Dr. Bonanza grabbed him by the arm and pulled him off the stool. “We gotta’ go,” he said. “We need to talk to Shargugh. I think that he has some information for us. Mrs. McGregor’s here too.”
“Wait,” said Hugo. He looked at Maya, but she had looked away toward where Mandy and the Duck sat. He tried to pull away, but years of holding sheep by the hind foot made Bonanza’s grip unbreakable. “Wait, Bonanza. Wait. Maya has some information, too.” Bonanza dragged Hugo from the bar. Hugo looked back toward where Maya had been, but she had gone.
Dr. Bonanza pulled Hugo outside, still holding his beer. Hugo shook his arm free, and glared at Dr. Bonanza. “What the hell are you doing?” he said.
“Just wait here a minute, he’ll be right back,” said Bonanza.
“Who’ll be right back? Goddamnit, Bonanza. I was talking to Maya.”
“Yes, yes, very pretty girl,” Bonanza said. “I think that she is one to watch out for.” He looked up the block, then down toward the river. Hugo did the same. He didn’t see anyone.
“What the hell does that mean?”
Dr. Bonanza ignored the question and continued to wait. He looked at Hugo’s beer. “Are you going to drink that?” he asked.
Hugo put the beer to his lips, looking down his nose at Bonanza who shrugged and continued to wait. The clouds had broken up, and stars twinkled above them. The temperature had dropped but not unnaturally. Hugo finished the beer and put the empty in a potted plant outside the door of Astor’s. He felt that his head might spin if he were to move too quickly. He looked back at Bonanza, who said: “Here we go.”
He grabbed Hugo’s arm gain and walked across the street toward one of the huge big-leaf maples that lined the block. Shargugh walked out from behind it as they approached.
“What did you find out?” Bonanza asked.
Hugo felt very confused. He knew that the beer was working on his head, but this was more than that. Where the hell did he come from? he thought.
Shargugh looked at the ground, then at the tree. He shuffled his feet and looked up at Dr. Bonanza. “Not much.”
“I thought you said that you have some information for us,” said Bonanza.
Hugo looked from Bonanza to Shargugh and back again. “What info do you have?” he asked; he felt the words slur in his mouth. “What info does he have?”
Bonanza glared at him.
“I can’t get to parts of my land,” pleaded Shargugh. He shook his shaggy beard and looked like he might cry. Hugo stared, his mouth stupidly hanging open. “There is something out there,” Shargugh continued. “It’s not a beast. Not one that has roamed these lands recently at least. Each night, I feel the power of the thing getting stronger, and the power of the land waning. I’m afraid, Doctor.” He looked at Bonanza for help.
Dr. Bonanza softened for a moment. “I don’t know what to do either,” he said.
“What’s this all about,” said Hugo. His words slurred in his mouth again. His head began to swirl. Up the block he could see another figure standing in the shadow of another maple. The lights from a church window lit it from behind and Hugo had no idea who it might be. He blinked and looked again, but the figure had vanished. I’m not thinking right, he thought. That’s better, he thought again. “Listen,” he said out loud.
Both Bonanza and Shargugh looked at him expectantly. Hugo looked back. “Listen,” he said again. “I…have to go home. I’m really tired and I’m not really following this whatever it is.” He looked at Bonanza, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Listen. I’ll just walk home. I’ll be fine. It’s no problem.” He turned to Shargugh, but he couldn’t locate him. “Listen, tell Shargugh that it was nice to see him again. I gotta’ go.”
Hugo stumbled down the block away from Bonanza and the trees. The lights of the city swam before his eyes. He knew the way home: he had taken it many times.

Day 13

Chapter 19

“Let’s just drive over to Skeleton Cave and see what we can see,” said Bonanza as they left the parking area for Torture Rock.
If they had walked, it would have been about a half mile, but the road wound back down to the marshes, and around the base of another small hill before finally climbing back to the parking area. The road isn’t too bad, but the sun had started to set and by the time they reached the cave, dusk had fallen.
They walked to the entrance of the cave. Skeleton Cave, a lava tube, as are all the caves in the refuge, starts with a series of sink-holes. The first sink-hole up the trail is a very tricky crawl through much breakdown, that exits at the next sink-hole in line. If you find yourself in here, your only recourse is to climb the near vertical walls, or twist your way back through to the first sink-hole.
The third time is the charm. The main trail, which winds its way through some of the most remote parts of the refuge and eventually connects up with the trail system around the Big Mountain, is on the opposite side of the sink-hole from the entrance trail. If you are walking in the dark, as it were, you might easily miss the cutoff for this entrance trail: a small cairn marks the way.
“I don’t know about this,” said Mandy. She held on to Hugo’s hand again.
The clouds covered the moon and stars and the way was very dark. The first part of the trail to the cave is lined with pieces of basalt, and so they found their way easily enough. Then the trail led them through the juniper. At [washout cuts] they had to stop and make sure that they traveled in the right direction. Twice, Bonanza led them off the trail and into stands of juniper before they realized that they had gone wrong. The temperature dropped some more. Hugo wished that he had brought a warmer coat. He berated himself once again for his lack of foresight.
Finally they arrived at the first sink-hole. To their right it opened, darker blackness against the dark ground and sky.
It had been years since Hugo had been here. He knew that you had to know what you were doing in order not to waste a lot of time, but he could not remember what it was. The air grew still and the animals didn’t speak. Hugo kicked a rock over the edge of the pit and listened for it to hit. The sink-hole isn’t very deep, he remembered. What are we doing out here, he thought.
“I think that we ought to go up the trail a little farther,” Dr. Bonanza said.
“Why? I don’t see why,” said Mandy. She had a hard time controlling the fear in her voice.
“It’s okay,” Hugo said to her, squeezing her hand. It seemed so easy to be calm if you are not the one who is most afraid.
Bonanza led them on.
They came to the second sink-hole. Again it lay to their right. Hugo kicked another rock in. They heard rustling in the hole. They all stood motionless, straining to make out what might be down there. A rock clattered of its own accord.
Hugo realized that he had been holding his breath. Just as he let it out came the hoot of an owl in a tree just behind them. All three jumped, Bonanza landed on Hugo’s foot. Hugo pulled it away, tripping Dr. Bonanza. He went down with a thump.
“Oh Jesus,” Mandy said.
“Bonanza,” Hugo almost shouted.
Dr. Bonanza didn’t answer. They waited. Hugo inched forward searching for Bonanza as much with his feet as with his eyes.
“Bonanza,” he called again.
“Dr. Bonanza,” Mandy whispered.
“I’m all right,” Bonanza growled. “When you tripped me, I stepped in this [washout cut] and fell off the trail. Luckily my aim is good and I only landed in the bushes, not down in that goddamn pit.”
“Are you hurt?” asked Mandy, bending down to help Bonanza up.
“I’m fine, I said.” He shook her off and pulled himself upright.
Again, they heard a noise from the pit. Again they froze.
“Something’s down there,” whispered Hugo.
They strained their ears and eyes, but could make out nothing in the darkness.
“It’s nothing,” said Bonanza. “Probably just that goddamn owl.”
All the night animals went silent around them. Hugo could hear his heart beating. Mandy held his hand so tightly that it began to hurt. This brought him back. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.
“Be careful,” Mandy whispered.
Hugo led them out as quickly as he could, making sure as they neared the first sink-hole, not to lead them into it. As they passed it, the night animals resumed their conversations. As they reached the pick-up, Hugo felt that the air temperature had warmed at least ten degrees. He peeled off his jacket as he got in the truck next to Mandy. She handed him a beer, and one to Dr. Bonanza as well. Bonanza put the beer between his legs and steered them back down the entrance road, not bothering to open it until they had driven more than half a mile.
“There was something in that pit,” Hugo said as they passed the road up to Torture Rock.
“Don’t be an idiot,” said Bonanza. “It weren’t nothing but the night animals crawling around. Some weasel was huntin’ kangaroo rats. That’s all it was.” His words didn’t convince any of them.
“Something was down there,” Mandy said. “It got so cold, and the night animals were silent while it moved. And it wasn’t because of us that they were silent. Didn’t you hear when we reached the first sink-hole, they started making noise again.” She shivered and took a drink of beer.
Hugo didn’t know what to think. He had definitely felt that something had been wrong about the whole thing. Why had Bonanza wanted to take them out there in the dark without any lights. Hugo glanced at him in the eerie orange glow from the dash-lights. Dr. Bonanza stared out the windshield watching the road, but with a distant look in his eyes. His nose seemed more hawk-like in the dark, and his eyes took on the orange glow. Now Hugo shivered and took a drink of beer. Snap out of it, he thought. He turned his eyes to the road.
An animal darted into the head lights. It looked at them, green eyes glowing, then bounded off the road. It had been about a hundred yards away.
“What was that?” Hugo asked.
“What was what?” asked Bonanza.
“Didn’t you see it? Some animal. Right in the road up ahead.” Hugo pointed. They neared the spot where the animal had been. Hugo turned to the left and looked out the driver’s side window. Mandy and Bonanza turned to look also. They could see only darkness.
“I don’t think that it was a deer,” said Hugo. “Did you see it?” he asked Mandy.
“I didn’t see it,” she said.
“I don’t know what it was,” said Hugo, his voice rising. “It might have been a deer, but it looked more like a cougar. Or a cougar crossed with a deer.” He started to breath faster.
“Hey, hey,” said Mandy.
“Calm down there, sport,” said Bonanza. “Take a few deep breaths.”
Hugo tried to breathe, to calm himself.
“It’s all right, Hue,” said Mandy. She put her hand on his knee and he leaned into her.
His breathing slowed and he calmed down. “I guess that I just got a little worked up about the whole thing,” he said.
He relaxed and sipped his beer as they exited the refuge.
Dr. Bonanza drove them to Astor’s. It took forty five minutes.


Chapter 20

Astor’s was hopping.
Bonanza looked for a place to park near the entrance, but he had to turn the corner look there. Eventually then found a place three quarters of the way down the block.
As they entered Astor’s, a pair of young women in their early twenties, blonde hair, came out. They smelled of smoke and their hair had been mussed; sweat gathered on their foreheads. They laughed, heads together. The taller of the two said thank you to Hugo who had held the door. They smiled at him. He stared back, mouth slightly open. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“It’s Saturday night,” said Mandy. “Haven’t you ever been here on Saturday?”
Hugo looked at Bonanza. Sure I’ve been here on Saturday, he thought. He looked at his watch: a quarter after ten.
“I guess that we are usually here during happy hour,” he said. Dr. Bonanza slapped him on the back and pushed him through the door.
I’m too old for this, Hugo thought. Inside, the kitchen was closed; the restaurant had been closed off. The bar was open. Behind it were Shirley, Mi…Roger, and another woman whom Hugo was not sure was named Melinda. In front of the bar stood maybe three dozen college students talking, smoking, and drinking. A deep bass thumped from the back room; through the doors he could see people gyrating to the music, lights flashed red, blue, green, and yellow. Hugo stared.
Mandy put her index finger on his chin and closed his mouth. “Haven’t been dancing in a while?” she said.
“I’m too old for this,” he said.
Bonanza pushed his way to the bar and ordered their drinks. Shirley waved to them. Hugo waved back, trying to stay away from the crush of the people. Mandy had been holding his hand. She let go and made her way through the crowd. Hugo followed her with his eyes, then looked to where she was headed. The Duck stood talking to a couple of older men. Probably lawyers, Hugo thought. Mandy walked up to the Duck and hugged him from behind. He turned around and gave her a kiss. They said a few words, then she turned and motioned to Hugo; she called him over. He looked blank for a moment, thinking, Well there goes that.
Bonanza met up with him as he started to walk toward Mandy. He handed him a bottle of beer, keeping the pint of ale for himself, taking another bottle to Mandy. Hugo avoided the jostling people as best as he could. Twice he ran into someone. The first time, when he said excuse me, a lovely young woman turned and smiled at him, then turned back to her conversation. The second time a rather large man with tattoos turned. He did not smile.
When they reached Mandy and the Duck, she talked animatedly about their day. He noticed that her ears were turning pink. He wondered if it was from the heat of being with so many people, or if she were sunburned. He felt his own ear and decided that they were all probably a little sunburned, except Bonanza who apparently spent most of the day outside.
“…and then it just went quiet,” Mandy was saying. “We heard something moving around down in the sink-hole, but we couldn’t see a thing. Then Dr. Bonanza fell…”
“Hugo tripped me,” Bonanza said.
“Well, there was an owl right behind us,” she continued, “up in the tree, and he scared the wits out of us.”
Hugo didn’t really have any interest in hearing the story told to the Duck. He looked around the room. Smoke filled the air, and the lights were turned down low. Hugo wrinkled his nose. Sure, in college he had smoked a bit, just at parties, but these days, the acrid scent burned his throat. Across the room he saw an older woman who looked a lot like Mrs. McGregor. He shook the notion off as absurd. The woman talked with a man with bushy brown hair.
Hugo pushed his way toward where the pair stood. Surely, it isn’t Mrs. McGregor, he thought.

Day 12

Chapter 18

Hugo thought about bringing up the stranger’s tracks, but decided that it had just been a coincidence. Other people come up here all the time, he thought. Then he turned around in his seat as they pulled back onto the road and headed toward Torture Rock. The trailhead was deserted. No other cars were parked there, nor had they been, at least Hugo hadn’t seen any other tracks.
“Did you see another person, Dr. Bonanza?” He asked.
“Where? Here? On the trail?” Bonanza replied. “Sure I saw someone, it must have been Mrs. McGregor. She must have disappeared from your house and reappeared up here. She said that she needed to get out into the fresh air.” Bonanza slapped his knee as they bounced along the road.
‘I take it by your sarcasm that you didn’t see anyone.”
“Hugo saw some tracks that overlapped yours. He thinks that a man happened to walk by when we were both off the trail.”
Bonanza thought for a second. “I don’t recon that I saw anyone but you two when you came back after your run up the hill.”
Hugo thought, I suppose that he could have walked all the way out here, but it is a long way for any other trails or parking areas. Hugo let it drop when the other two seemed to lose interest.
“Why don’t we have some lunch when we stop?” Mandy said. “I brought us all some sandwiches.”
“That sounds good,” said Hugo, his mind still on the phantom hiker.
From the trailhead, the road wound around the base of the ridge, skirting the marshes, most of which were still dry in this section of the refuge. They came to a sign that pointed to the right and said Torture Rock. Bonanza signaled, then turned the truck up the grade. The road ended after about a hundred yards in a small parking area. One picnic table sat under a juniper, and a trashcan had been placed next to the trailhead.
As they got out of the pick-up, Hugo scanned for tire tracks and foot prints. One set if tire tracks led in and had parked about where they had parked. Hugo walked to the trail and looked to see if any footprints led down it. They did, but after about twenty yards, they doubled back and veered over to the picnic table which sat about twenty feet to the north of the trail. Hugo followed them and sat down beside Mandy, and across from Dr. Bonanza who ate a sandwich.
Mandy put her hand on Hugo’s leg and asked, “What did you see?”
He tried not to look down at her hand, feeling foolish once again. “Someone was here since the rain. They walked down the trail, but not too far, and then came back to here.” He looked under the table to see if he could find any remnants. He shook his head as he came back up and said: “I’m getting too paranoid.” Mandy passed him a sandwich.
Jut then, a raven called from a perch just above them. All three jumped at how loud and how close the bird had been.
“Jesus,” exclaimed Bonanza.
Hugo looked up. He could see the bird at the top of the juniper looking down at him. “The bird is staring at us,” he said.
Bonanza and Mandy both looked up, but the bird flew away. It circled left as though it planned to land on an adjacent tree, then called again and flew off to the southeast.
Off toward Skeleton Cave, Hugo thought. “Maybe we should follow that raven,” he said out loud.
Dr. Bonanza scoffed. “I’m eatin’ lunch. I ain’t chasin’ after no damn bird.” He eyed Hugo as though he would pounce upon him if the suggestion came up again.
Hugo looked off to the south. He couldn’t see very far. The bushes grew tall and close together, and the ground rose for about forty yards before descending to Skeleton cave. The bird quickly disappeared from sight, flying as with a purpose. As the raven passed, other birds began to chatter in the brush. Hugo recognized bushtits, and juncos, but a third kind of bird flitted about that he hadn’t seen before.
He stood up and walked slowly toward the bushes, shielding his eyes from the sun to have a better look.
As he neared, though he crept as quietly as he could, the birds erupted in a frenzied flock of startled animation. All he could see of the third kind of bird was white on its back. He couldn’t even tell what kind of bird it had been. Then, as he turned back to the table, he almost stepped on a lizard. It looked like a horned toad. I didn’t think that there were any horned toads in the refuge, he thought. He shrugged and walked back to the table. He remembered how horned toads could squirt blood from their eyes when threatened. That really is disgusting, he thought.
They finished up lunch, then walked up to Torture Rock. The rock itself looked a lot like all the other rocks in the area, but, as Hugo had learned on a fourth grade field trip (Mrs. Meyer’s class), it had a grisly legend. Their guide had been a Native American. The local Indians, he had said, believed that before they came to inhabit the area, another people lived there. They sacrificed humans, those that they had captured from neighboring tribes and even people from their own tribe (as if somehow that should be worse). One of his classmates had said they had dug up the dirt around the base of the rock and had found blood four feet down.
Hugo hadn’t believed it, not really, but it was a pretty creepy story.
More recently, in the late 1800s, the Army had camped here when they were trying to roust a renegade band of Indians who had allegedly killed some farm animals that had belonged to the local settlers. As they reached the rock, the walk is only about two hundred feet, there stood a plaque commemorating the event. Nothing about the human sacrifices.
“Nothing here,” grunted Dr. Bonanza. He walked around the rock, then looked back toward the ridge.
Hugo looked more closely. He could imagine the human sacrifices laying here, not very comfortably, he thought. The rock sat about two feet high and four and a half feet long by about a foot and a half wide. It generally pointed north and south, but not quite enough to think it strange, not enough tot think that someone had deliberately moved it. He looked at the ground. No one had been here recently, as far as he could tell, but the ground is quite rocky and so he couldn’t be sure. He bent down to look at a dark patch on the west side of the rock.
Mandy bent over his shoulder. He could smell her. “What is it?” She asked.
“I don’t know,” said Hugo. “It might be blood, but I can’t be sure.” His time at the Forensics lab had taught him that lots of things looked like blood, and that blood could look like a lot of other things.
“Here’s something,” Mandy said. She pointed to a small blob of translucent white in the dirt. She picked it up and handed it to Hugo.
“Wax,” he said.
Bonanza came over and took a look as well. “Not many people would come out to Torture Rock after dark,” he said.
Hugo slowly began to circle the rock, spiraling outward as he had done at the kill site of the deer. About thirty feet out, he found what looked like a deer or rabbit trail. He took it for a little ways until he came to a tree. He circled the tree. Just above head height there were the same three marks tat the had seen on the other tree. He jogged down the trail farther and saw what he had expected to see: the entrance to Skeleton Cave about half a mile away.
He jogged back. After catching his breath, he relayed the information about the symbols and the trail to Skeleton Cave.
Both Mandy and Bonanza wanted to see the marks for themselves and insisted that Hugo lead them to the tree before they made their way to the cave.
“This is starting to get a little weird,” Mandy said as she studied the symbols. “I took some Japanese Literature in college and we studied some of the Kanji [and Hirakana?]. This looks similar, but I don’t recognize anything specific. This one,” she pointed to the middle symbol, “almost looks like it could be “man” or “heaven” or some derivative, but I’m not sure.”
All three stared at the symbols for a time, learning nothing.
“I think that we should head down to the cave and see what we can find,” said Hugo at last.
Mandy looked at the sky. It had turned cloudy again. “It’s getting late,” she said. “It’ll be dark soon.”
Hugo looked at Bonanza. “Well, dark is dark in the cave,” he said.
“I didn’t bring a flashlight,” Hugo said.
“I didn’t either,” said Mandy.
“Well, it’s a good thing that I’m the leader of this here expedition. I got one in the truck,” said Bonanza and headed back up the trail toward the rock. Mandy and Hugo followed. Mandy reached out and held Hugo’s hand. He didn’t pulled away. They walked slowly back to the pick-up.
When they arrived, Bonanza had his head behind the seat, rifling through the empty beer cans, hunting for the flashlight. Hugo imagined that it probably would match the bandana that he had used the previous day. While Bonanza searched, Hugo pulled out a beer for himself, first offering one to Mandy.
“Ah ha!” Bonanza exclaimed pulling out a green 12v flashlight that looked to be at least forty years old. The plastic body had cracked on the side, and was melted on one corner. The blackened handle was greasy from years of use.
Hugo looked at him dubiously. Dr. Bonanza pointed it at Hugo’s chest and pushed the button. Nothing happened. Bonanza shook the light, then pounding on it with his other hand. The light flickered on. “Ah ha!” Dr. Bonanza said again.
He looked at the light, then pointed it back toward Hugo. As Hugo watched, the light dimmed, faded, and then went out.
Bonanza looked at the light, banged with his hand again, then threw it back in the pick-up. He reached across the seat and pulled out a beer for himself. “I guess it needs a new battery,” he said.
“What will we do now?” Mandy asked.
“I guess we’ll head home,” replied Hugo.

Day 10

They hiked without talking for about half an hour. They passed the intersection where the trail looped back on itself. Bonanza lagged behind because of his limp. Hugo thought that probably they wouldn’t be able to find the deer because the rangers would have hauled it away. The ODFG forensics lab would want to get their hands on this one, that was for sure.
Hugo felt winded as they climbed up the trail. It didn’t ascend steeply, but it kept going. I should take better care of myself, he thought. Maybe I’ll start running again. He and Mandy had both been on the cross country team in high school.
“We’re almost there,” Mandy said as she stopped to wait for Hugo. Bonanza couldn’t bee seen through the twists: rock outcroppings made them scramble and the trail often hid behind bushes.
Hugo came up to her, panting. He bent down, putting his hands on his knees to catch his breath. “I’m not…in…very good shape…anymore,” he said. He had never been blazingly fast in high school, but he had been a solid six his senior year in cross country. Since then, really after his second year of college, he had gone down hill. He didn’t have much of a belly, but he had gone soft. Actually, with all the beer that he drank, he was surprised that he wasn’t fatter. Sweat ran down his face, even though the temperature couldn’t have been much above fifty degrees.
“Where’s Dr. Bonanza?” Mandy asked when he stood upright.
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him for about twenty minutes,” Hugo replied. He looked back down the trail, a little worried. He looked off to the south and west. The land rolled more then flattened out into the remnants of an old lakebed. He could see the edge of the refuge, where the farms started up again. He could picture the fences in his mind, though he couldn’t see them from here, keeping the wildlife out. They didn’t really keep anything out, except the occasional person. The deer still jumped the fences, and ate the new shoots, and the kangaroo rats nibbled on the grains. And the newts, and nematodes, and archaia-bacteria [sp?] eating the rocks.
They heard the sound of feet clattering over broken rocks and a grunt from down the trail. The started off again, assuming that the noises had been Dr. Bonanza,
In about a hundred more yards, the came over a little rise and found the top of the ridge. They could see where the trail wound up and then turned back and headed down to their right, back into the bushes and small trees that grew there. Ahead, the national forest rose into the hills. The trees, mostly Douglas fir, grew sparsely here, with may smaller species in between. Hugo thought that this particular hill must have been logged in the not too distant past, and then had re-seeded itself. He knew that the newer policies on re-seeding called for one species only to be replanted, within three years of clear-cut to “promote the diversity, and sustainability of the forest”. Whatever that meant. He knew just what it meant, but it didn’t mesh with what he saw happening on public land.
Mandy pointed down-slope toward a thicket of trees. Hugo wasn’t looking forward to climbing down there. He had convinced himself that there really wasn’t anything to see. They have taken the deer out of here, he thought. All we will see is a pressed place in the grass where the deer had been, if even that.
“Well. I suppose that we should make our way down,” she said. I’ll leave my backpack here so that Dr. Bonanza knows where we are.”
She laid her pack on the ground. Hugo put down his jacket. They scrambled down the hill. The rough ground sometimes gave way under their feet, causing them to slide for a few feet. They used the sage and tree saplings for handholds. As they got closer they could see many footprints and dislodged rocks. Flagging hung from some of the bushes. Hugo’s fears were confirmed as they neared to spot. No deer.
“It was right here,” Mandy said, pointing.
“I thought that probably the rangers would have already taken it out,” Hugo said. “The refuge falls under ODFG jurisdictions having the forensics lab so close, this place would have been crawling with detectives yesterday. I had hoped, though, that maybe they hadn’t walked all over everything and obliterated any sign of what went on.” He looked closely at the ground, making a spiral out, as best he could on the slope. He stared at the ground. A branch scraped across his ear. He was some way from the place where the deer had been killed. He looked up. On the tree there seemed to be claw marks, but very faint. He looked more closely and thought that he could make out three tiny symbols under the marks. He searched around the tree, but didn’t find anything more.
Then, on a whim, he climbed up in the tree. He didn’t know why he did it. The tree stood maybe thirty feet tall. It was Utah juniper, he was pretty sure. Not far up, just above the first set if branches, was the major crotch of the tree. It had three tops. He sat down, straddling one of the up pointing branches, that changed into a top. From where he sat the cold see the kill site just thirty yards away. He struggled to get back up, turned and sat straddling another one of the tops. He could see right up toward Two Rabbit Lake, he was pretty sure. He struggled up again and straddled the third top. He was looking down off the ridge. He could see the road to the right and an outcropping of rock, that was Torture Rock. He looked further up, and saw the opening for Skeleton Cave.
He climbed back down and called out for Mandy to be sure that he was heading in the right direction. She called back and he hurried to her.
“I think that we should visit Torture Rock and Skeleton Cave next,” he said excitedly as he came up.
She looked at him quizzically, then down-slope toward where she though Torture Rock might be: they couldn’t see it from where they stood. “Okay,” she said.
“I found a tree that had some symbols on it. I don’t know why, but I climbed up in it and sat down in the crotch where the three tops start.” He turned and pointed at the tree. “One looked this way, one looked up toward Two Rabbit Lake, and one looked down toward Torture Rock and Skeleton Cave. They were in a line!”
Mandy didn’t quite understand how the crotch of a juniper tree related to a dead deer, but she followed him back up the hill anyway. When they reached the ridgeline, and their things, they had expected to see Bonanza. He wasn’t there.
“That’s odd,” Hugo said as he picked up his coat. “I guess that we should head down the trail and see if we can find him.”
Mandy agreed and they headed back down. Hugo watched for prints on the way down, but didn’t see any for quite some time. Finally, they came to Bonanza’s prints, after three quarters of a mile. As Hugo read the, Bonanza had stopped here, shuffled about a bit, as though he didn’t know what to do next, then headed back down the trail.
“It looks like he went back down,” Hugo said.
They continued on for another quarter mile, when they came to another set of shuffling footprints. Hugo stopped. He hadn’t been paying much attention and almost walked right by. He looked at these and found that they pointed off down-slope, to the south.
“What’s going on?” Hugo asked.
“What is it?” Mandy asked.
“Bonanza has gone off trail right here.”
“Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know.” Hugo felt the panic rise in his gut. He knew that he should follow the prints, but he felt reluctant to do so. He didn’t want to leave Mandy alone on the trail, but he knew that she should stay there incase Hugo had read the tracks wrong and Bonanza came walking by.
“I’ll…go and see what happened to him,” Hugo said reluctantly. “I think that you should stay here incase he comes down the trail.”
“Okay.” She sat down on a rock beside the trail and began rummaging through her backpack.
He stepped off the trail and immediately felt like he was doing the wrong thing. He looked at the sky and it seemed to darken, though it still shone, clear blue. He looked down and concentrated on signs of Bonanza’s passing. He saw a broken twig, low to the ground, and faint footprints that seemed to be heading for a tree.
He reached the tree and looked around it. No Bonanza. The trail doubled back, but angled more to his left. He followed it and ended up back at the trail about sixty yard from where he thought that Mandy must be. The footprints headed off back down the trail again, toward the trail head.
He called to Mandy, but didn’t hear a response. He walked back up the trail, coming around the corner just below Mandy. She wasn’t there.
I knew it! He thought. I shouldn’t have gone off and left her. He started watching for her tracks when he noticed that there was a new set of tracks. He thought that it must be a man from the size of the foot. Why hadn’t heard anything when he was off the trail. The sounds of this new person passing, must have been muffled by the brush, he thought. The new tracks lead to where Mandy had been sitting. They stopped, then went on. Hugo had a hard time finding Mandy’s prints, but finally decided that they went over the side of the ridge to the north.
He quickly followed them as best he could through the brush for about thirty yards.
“Who’s there?” It was Mandy.
“Mandy!” Hugo cried.
“Jesus, Hue. I’m trying to pee. Can I have a little privacy.”
“Sorry, sorry.” He breathed a sigh of relief and headed back to the trail. He walked back up the ridge, around the next corner, but didn’t find the man who had made the tracks. They continued up the trail.
He returned just as Mandy came out of the bushes.
“I think that we should go.” Hugo said as he rejoined her.
“Okay,” she said. “Why did you come crashing through the bushes at me?”
“I’m sorry about that. There is an extra set of prints,” he pointed. “I didn’t know what had happened to you. I think that we should head down,” he said again.
“What about Dr. Bonanza?”
“I followed the trail out to a tree, then back to the trail about a hundred yards down. Apparently he had to pee as well.” He waited for her to go first. “I’ll follow you, just incase.”
“Incase of what?” she asked.
He looked up the trail. “Incase that guy comes back.”
“What guy?” She said. “The guy who is going for a hike out here at the same time that we are?”
“Well, yea.”
“It is the weekend, you know. Other people have done stranger things that go for a hike out in the refuge.”
He grimaced. “I know, but just humor me.”
She shrugged and headed down the trail.
They passed the place where Bonanza’s prints regained the trail. He slowed to have another look and decided that they did indeed head down the trail. His mind wandered back to the other person. It seemed awfully strange that he would pass just as both of them were off the trail. Now he shrugged. I guess that he had to pass us sometime. We just didn’t pass him.


Chapter 17

Hugo watched for anymore strange signs on the trail but didn’t find any. He paid particular attention to the intersection of the loop, but there were no prints at all from that direction.
When they arrived back at the pick-up, Bonanza sat on the tailgate, his legs swining as he drank yet another beer.
“Where they hell have you two been?” Dr. Bonanza asked as they arrived.
“Where have we been?” Hugo said.
“Where have you been?” Mandy interrupted. “We thought that you probably fell off the hill and rolled all the way down to the visitor center.”
Bonanza scoffed. “See anything interesting?” He said.
Hugo had almost forgotten about the tree what with all the other excitement. He told Bonanza about the tree. He didn’t seem too impressed, but assented that they might take a look at Torture rock. “The name sounds promising, at least,” he said.

Day 9

[Brain too tired to write more. Must stop.]

They came up over a rise and then they were at the house. Hugo saw the hand flick the curtain again, and made a move to get out.
Bonanza waved him back. “I won’t be a minute.”
Hugo shrugged and opened another beer. He looked at the garden; he could see pumpkins, tomatoes and peppers. The Three Sisters, he thought. No, wait, that’s corn, beans, and squash.
The sun had crested he hills and began to warm the valley. Hugo looked forward to a warm fall day. He tired of the rain quickly.
A door slammed in the house, and then another. As the third door slammed, Bonanza came running out the back door and down the steps. He totally forgot to limp on the way to the truck.
He threw a paper sack on the seat, jumped in, and gunned the engine. He threw gravel as they headed out the driveway.
“What was that all about,” Hugo asked?
“Don’t worry about it.”
“What is in the sack?”
“That’s for later. Just in case,” said Dr. Bonanza.
***
They had planned to meet Mandy and the Duck at Mandy’s house at 10:30. Hugo looked at his watch as they left Bonanza’s drive: 10:32. Well, they would just have to be late. The drive to town took at least ten minutes, and Mandy lived on the other side.
When they found her house, she was sitting on the steps waiting for them. She wore khaki pants, and a loose sweater. On her head she had a wide brimmed rain hat. Her hair hung in one long braid down her back. She had a backpack and a raincoat on the stoop beside her. As they approached, she stood up and waved to them. Hugo looked at his watch again: ten till.
“Sorry we’re late,” Hugo said as they pulled up.
“That’s okay,” she said. “I was just enjoying the morning, listening to the birds.”
“Where’s the Duck?” asked Bonanza.
“He isn’t feeling well. After you two left last night, we went over to McMichael’s and met some friends. We stayed up way too late.”
“In that case, we might as well all take my truck. Hop in.” He grinned an evil grin at Hugo and climbed back in the truck.
Mandy sat in the middles. They had to shift odds and ends that sat on the seat, but they weren’t crowded on the large bench seat. Hugo, however, felt uncomfortable being this close to Mandy again. When he climbed in, he made sure not to touch her leg with his and tried to keep plenty of room between them. He felt childish and petty, berating himself to act his age and not someone twenty years ago with a crush on the most beautiful girl in school.
Bonanza drove them back out to the highway and turned them south, toward the refuge. Hugo thought that they should probably talk to a ranger, hopefully the ranger who first saw the dead deer, and possibly, whoever found the other one as well. The last he had heard Mike McReedy was working down there. He and Mike had gone to school together, though they had grown apart when Mike went away to college when Hugo had stayed in town. Maybe we will have some luck, he thought.
“Why are you two so interested in a dead deer?” asked Mandy as they got up to speed.
“Well…” began Hugo.
“One of my sheep was killed, too,” said Bonanza with a scowl. He reached into the box of beer and offered one to Mandy. She opened it and looked at Bonanza. Waiting for more.
“Did you call anyone? Fish and Game? The sheriff?”
“Those chuckleheads don’t know their arse from a hole in the ground,” said Dr. Bonanza. “Hugo and me figure that we can solve this one. Don’t we Hugo?”
Hugo nodded.
“Why are you here, Hue.”
He gritted his teeth. He didn’t feel that she had the right to call him that anymore. “Dr. Bonanza’s my friend,” he said.
She looked at him skeptically. “It has to be more than that,” she said flatly.
Hugo thought for a moment. Why am I out here? He thought. Somehow, I am connected to it. “I don’t know.” Hugo said lamely. “I just feel like I should be here doing something. I don’t know…”
She sipped her beer, unconvinced. Hugo looked at Bonanza: he had a wide grin on his face. What the hell is he smiling about? He thought. Takes his mind off of his own tension, I guess.
The drove in silence for a few miles. They passed many farms, that turned to ranches, more spread out, then they were on the refuge. Ponds, some still dry, others partially filled with the recent rain, lined the road. Hugo spotted a few coots and some Canada geese that over-wintered in the valley. He also saw mallards and a couple of late migrating pintails.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve been down here,” Hugo said wistfully.
Bonanza grunted, not having much time for wistfulness.
“We used to come down all the time in college, remember, Hue?” She touched his arm.
Of course he remembered. They had spent hours and hours exploring the trails, through the marshes, and the caves over by the visitor center. Even in high school…even in junior high, he and his friends came down on the weekends and messed around, pretending to be soldiers or explorers or rock climbers. Hugo and Mandy had picnicked, many times, bringing their schoolwork, lying in the sun in the early fall or the spring. Those had been some of his best days. His most cherished.
“I remember,” he said. He noticed that their knees touched. He drank the last of his beer and as he put the empty behind the seat, he moved his knee away. She looked down and then into Hugo’s eyes. She was sad. Her eyes seemed to say, Don’t be like that, but he couldn’t help it. He didn’t want to be her friend, he wanted to grab her and kiss her and take her home with him and he could forget about the broken dreams and the way that things were supposed to work out and who he was and who he wasn’t. He looked down and muttered, “I’m sorry.” He took out another beer.
Mandy looked out the windshield. “It’s right up here, Dr. Bonanza,” she said. “The next left.”
“I know where it is,” Bonanza muttered as he turned up the gravel road. A sign said, Torture Rock and Skeleton Cave. The road drove straight through some ponds on a canal bank, then as it climbed out to of the flat, it began to twist and turn. A few sparse junipers began to grow along the road, but they were stunted.
The road took them for about a mile and a half, when Bonanza pulled off at a trailhead. They got out, Mandy slinging her backpack. Clouds moved in from the west, blocking out the sun. The air stood still. It was cold.
Hugo looked to the north, toward Bonanza’s place, twelve miles distant, or there abouts. He wondered again about what could be killing these animals, wondering if it was capable of killing a person. Best not to think like that, he thought. I’ll scare myself for no reason.
They started off up the trail. The rabbit brush, and the sage were thick. Trees grew sparsely, mostly near the trail. The air grew steadily colder as they ascended. The ground grew rockier, and they left the trees behind. Hugo always found the weather in the refuge to be a little strange. Here, they were almost a hundred feet below where Bonanza’s house sat, but always it seemed colder: the snow lasted longer. Usually the wind blew, as well. But today there wasn’t even a breeze.

Day 8

Dr. Bonanza started the pick-up, turned it around and headed to the store. He didn’t stop at the Third Street Market, but took the highway, and stopped at a gas station at the edge of town. He had the man fill it up, and he and Hugo went in to the mini-mart.
“What’s the good word, Joe,” Bonanza said as they entered the mini-mart.
“It’s all good, Bonanza,” Joe said from behind the counter. Dr. Bonanza limped his way to the back of the store, and came out with a twelve pack. He went to the counter and waited for the truck to be done filling.
“I haven’t seen you around lately,” Joe said as they lounged at the counter. He stood about six feet tall, had olive skin, and black hair. He rested his hands on the counter. Hugo thought that he might be Egyptian.
“Well, we been busy,” Dr. Bonanza said. “Have you heard about those dead deer they found down on the refuge?” Hugo shifted his weight to the other foot, trying to act casual.
“I haven’t heard much, just that they found a couple. Why, you heard something?”
Hugo looked at Bonanza, who looked out the window. “I just thought it was strange, two deer showing up dead. One of them was right down by my place, did you know that?”
“I had heard that it was out there somewhere.” The gas computer beeped. Joe rang up the gas and the beer and Bonanza paid the bill. They were about to leave, when Joe said, “There was one thing that old Johnny Meyers said.” Joe continued. “He stops in here sometimes on his way home from work. He said that some of the guys that he works with have been talking that something strange had happened to those deer. He wasn’t sure what it was, but heard that they hadn’t been killed by anything that lives around here…unless maybe it was people.”
“Is that all he said?” blurted out Hugo.
Joe looked at him for a second, then continued, “He also said that he had heard that some ranch animals might be next. Or that they had already been killed.” He looked at Bonanza, and then at Hugo.
“Thanks, Joe,” said Bonanza as the strode out the door, leaving the beer for Hugo to carry.
Hugo hurried into the truck. “Do you think that he knows something that he isn’t telling us?”
Dr. Bonanza started up the truck and scoffed. “Of course he knows something that he isn’t telling us: gas station attendants gossip like old women. He knows more about this and he knows more about a lot of other stuff too. Do I think that he has any more information that will help us out? Hell, I don’t even know what might help us. I don’t even know if we need help.”
He stepped on the gas and pulled out of the station, heading south toward his house. They didn’t take the same route that they had taken on the previous morning, but turned before the drive for Bonanza’s and Olaf’s houses. He explained that they were going to meet Olaf out where the goat had been killed on his place. They came to a barbwire gate. Hugo jumped out, but not enthusiastically. He had no trouble opening the gate and swinging it aside for Bonanza to pull through. Then, to his surprise, he hooked the gate with out drawing blood. He thought of Bonanza’s bandana, smiling inwardly, grateful that he didn’t have a need for it today.
The field that they drove through looked much like Bonanza’s, but it seemed slight different, as all properties do. Maybe the sun shone in a different way, or the angle of the land tilted in another direction, Hugo couldn’t tell. It felt strange that two places that bordered each other should look and feel so different. He felt himself getting weird and so pulled out a can of beer, handing one to Bonanza.
Hugo thought to start a conversation to take his mind from the weirdness, but sipped his beer instead, watching the rocks and grass roll by.
Olaf’s road had been graded more recently than any on Bonanza’s place and so the ride went more quickly and smoothly. They did have to skirt around a couple of soft spots that were filled with water, after the rain of the past few days. The road began to descend and they saw Olaf standing by his truck about a hundred yards ahead. A couple of trees grew off to his left, their right. Hugo thought that they might be elms, but at this distance he was unsure.
As they drew closer, Olaf waved, turned and walked toward the trees. As they neared they saw that the trees stood beside a watering hole, manmade. The trees looked to be alders, not elms. Hugo drank the last drink of his beer and stepped out of the pick-up as Bonanza parked it between Olaf’s and the watering hole.
“Hello, Olaf,” said Bonanza as they came near. “This is my protégé,” he said waving a hand in Hugo’s direction.
Olaf smiled and extended a hand.
After the pleasantries, Olaf said, “That goat, you know, she was one of my best milking goats. I was sorry to lose her.” The walked around the hole toward the farthest tree. Hugo expectantly looked for the carcass, but saw none.
“She was right about here, you know.” Olaf pointed to the base of the tree. Hugo looked, but couldn’t even make out a patch of blood.
“I thought that your goat was still here, Olaf,” Hugo said.
“Oh no,” Olaf shook his head. “I put her in the ground, you know. I didn’t want her to start stinking and get those buzzards down here, you know.”
Hugo looked at Olaf expectantly. “So, the vultures came down then. Had they been at the carcass long?”
“Oh no,” Olaf shook his head again. “There weren’t any buzzards. I thought that was pretty strange, too. But I just put her in the ground and covered her up.” Hugo looked around for a freshly dug goat grave, but couldn’t see any.
“What about flies?”
Olaf shrugged. “I didn’t look around for flies, you know,” he said. “I just put her in the ground.”
Hugo stared impatiently. Dr. Bonanza put out a hand to calm Hugo. “What about the brain, Olaf,” he said.
Olaf looked at Bonanza, then to Hugo, and then back to Bonanza. “I didn’t tell anyone about the brain,” he whispered. “How did you know about that? Was your sheep the same way? I looked in her head and there wasn’t any brain left in there, you know.” He shuddered. “I just put her in the ground.” He inclined his ever so slightly. Hugo followed the line of sight down toward the refuge, down the slope.
“What is this all about, Dr. Bonanza?” Olaf asked.
“We’ll tell ya’ when we find out ourselves,” said Bonanza. He moved back toward the pick-ups. “You want a beer, Olaf.”
“Oh no,” He said. “It’s too early in the day for me.” He looked off in the distance, back toward the houses. “It’s too early.”
“Suit yourself,” said Bonanza. He opened the passenger door, pulling out two, one of which he threw to Hugo. Hugo caught it and gingerly opened it, aiming the opening away from himself. Foam sprayed him anyway. He took a long drink, then looked down the slope toward the refuge. He could see the ridge where Mandy and the Duck had found their deer. He could also see the visitor center from here, the small grass patch out in the front still green from weeks of over-watering by the over-zealous head ranger.
Up toward the ridge, but closer to where they stood, Hugo saw movement, or thought he did. Something moving from one bush to a rock outcropping. It seemed too fast to have actually been there. Too fast to have been an animal. He stood and stared at the point where the movement had been. Nothing. He waited as Bonanza and Olaf talked behind him. He felt tense. Then he felt self-conscious. How long had he been staring at that one place? He couldn’t be sure. It must have been an antelope, or a coyote, he thought. But it sure had moved fast.
Hugo shook his head and turned back to the other two. They hadn’t noticed anything.
Dr. Bonanza finished his beer. “Well, thanks, Olaf,” he said as he climbed into the pick-up.
“Oh it was no problem,” Olaf said.
Hugo climbed in and they drove off as Olaf waved them up back up the road.
“Whatever it was,” said Hugo, “it was definitely the same thing that killed your sheep.”
Bonanza stared out the windshield with a far away look in his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “It seems that way.
Bonanza turned off before the highway, taking a dirt track that looked more like the dirt track that they had taken on the day before from Bonanza’s house. Hugo assumed that Bonanza wanted to stop by his house before they met with Mandy and the Duck, though neither one said anything about it.
They came to another gate. On the other side seemed to be all of Bonanza’s sheep gathered, watching them expectantly. Hugo got out and walked to the gate. Bonanza rolled down his window and shouted to Hugo, “Watch out for them sheep. I got the ram in there and if he decides to come through, all the others will follow and there ain’t nothing that you can do about it.”
Hugo found the ram, it stood about three inches higher at the shoulder than any of the others. The ram looked back, his square pupil not giving any hint to his inclinations. Hugo undid the gate and walked it toward the mass of sheep. Bonanza quickly pulled through and stopped as close to Hugo as he could. The ram stepped toward them, but didn’t try to get past. Hugo sat back in the passenger seat. The sheep watched impassively as they drove up toward the house.
“They always know I’m comin’ when I’m over at Olaf’s. They gather there every time.” Bonanza shook his head. “One time, that goddamn ram ran into me when I was closing the gate. I tried to kick him, but he jumped out of the way before I could get my boot on him. Hit me right in the back, here on the left side,” he pointed at his side and twisted it toward Hugo. Hugo wondered if he was supposed to see anything. He didn’t.
The drove in silence the rest of the way, Bonanza grimacing every now and then. Hugo thought that he probably was remembering all the times that sheep had done him wrong. When Hugo had to tend to the sheep, they had butted him in the back, stepped on his feet, and bit him over and over. Hugo hated his stepmother, believing that she was behind each painful encounter, as though somehow she had taught the sheep to harm him. One time, a ram, smaller than the one that they had just seen, but meaner. Had knocked him down and then when Hugo got up, had knocked him down again.
Hugo imagined that the ram smiled with malice, imagined that it was his stepmother, not the sheep knocking him down. Goddamnit, he hated her. He stood up. The ram charged again. Hugo stepped aside and grabbed the ram around the neck. The tried to break it, believed that he could, though he only weighed fifty pounds. The ram pulled him around the barn and out into the yard, scraping him against the doorway on the way out.
When the ram realized that it was outside it stopped and Hugo dropped to the ground. He expected another charge from the ram, but it apparently had lost interest and wandered to a patch of grass.

Day 7

Chapter 14

Hugo had been in love with Mandy since they had attended McLoughlin Valley High together. She was a year older, and had had flowing brown hair. She looked much older now, and tired. She had her arm linked with the Duck as they slowly walked toward Dr. Bonanza and Hugo. She walked with delicate steps and an unhurried air. She had attended Hedlund at the same time as Hugo, and then had even taken some classes together. They had grown close, but not as close as Hugo would have wanted. She met The Duck in an upper level Physics lab, while Hugo had only taken the lecture, a regret that haunted him still, though he really understood that it hadn’t been about the lab.
“Hello, Hue,” Mandy said, touching him on the shoulder. She always called him Hue. He always let her speak first; she always took the initiative. She also always called him Hue. He wondered how she spelled it. He liked to think, somewhat uncharacteristically romantically, that she spelled it the same way he did.
“Hello, Mandy,” he said. He nodded to the Duck, “Duck.”
“Hello, Mandy, hello, Duck,” said Dr. Bonanza. “Sit down, let us buy you some beers. Are you drinking piss, because Hugo is.” Dr. Bonanza cackled as Shirley walked up.
“Hi, you two,” she said. “What can I get you?”
They ordered their drinks and Shirley went off to make them.
“What’s new, Hue?” Shirley said. She sat next to Hugo, and the Duck sat on her left.
The Duck leaned forward, looking at Dr. Bonanza’s empty plate. “Do they have snacks,” he said. “ I love snacks. I’m hungry. Do you want some snacks?” he asked Mandy. He went off to the hors d’oeuvre without waiting for her response. Mandy waited for Hugo to respond to her question and Dr. Bonanza smiled to himself. He knew that Hugo had been infatuated with Mandy for many, many years.
“Not a whole lot,” he said, a little harsher than he had meant.
“I read your book,” she said.
“Really,” he said, incredulous. Allowed himself a small smile, then said, “I didn’t even know that there were three copies in McLoughlin.”
Dr. Bonanza pounced, “There ain’t. She borrowed my copy.” Bonanza cackled again.
Shirley brought the round of drinks and asked Mandy how work had been.
“Oh fine,” replied Mandy. She made a dismissive gesture with her right hand, then placed it on the bar. “Drunks and wife beaters, all of them.” Mandy had become a trial lawyer, a Public Defendant for Cascade County. Shirley left to wait on a couple around the other side of the bar.
“Most of those guys with lunch pails riding their son’s bicycles to work were my doing,” Mandy said, conspiratorially to Hugo and Dr. Bonanza.
“If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime,” Bonanza said.
“I liked your book, Hue,” she said, placing a hand on Hugo’s arm.
The Duck returned with two plates of food. Mandy turned when he arrived, taking her hand away. Hugo didn’t know what to say, so he waited for someone else to speak.
“I just love meatballs,” the Duck said, taking his stool. The didn’t have actual forks or spoons for the hors d’oeuvre so Mandy and the Duck had to eat with toothpicks. On the side, they had potato skins with cheese and bacon.
All four drank and ate in silence for a minute, then Dr. Bonanza said, “Have you two heard anything about these deer killings?” It seemed that he and Hugo had made an unspoken pact that they wouldn’t reveal the livestock killings to anyone just yet.
Mandy looked at them both with wide eyes. “Heard of them,” she said. “Why, we found one of them.”
Hugo looked at her, incredulous again. “Oh my yes,” said the Duck between bites. “We were up, going for a hike, you know. Well…Mandy, you tell it. You are such a better story teller than I.”
Mandy smiled and continued for the Duck, “As the Duck said, we went for a hike. I had the day off and it hadn’t started raining yet, so I said, Why don’t we go down to the refuge and see what we can see? So, we packed up the car and drove down there. We drove around, looking in the ponds to see what birds hadn’t yet migrated when we came to that trail. You know the one, Hue. It goes right up to the National Forest boundary, then loops back.” Hugo knew the trail. He had showed it to Mandy the first semester that he attended Hedlund. Hugo nodded and grunted assent, but resented that Mandy had taken the Duck up there.
The trail wandered among the ponds, then climbed a little ridge before dropping down and returning to the ponds. You wouldn’t find it in Best Hikes in the West, but the ridge overlooked the ponds and you could see all the way to the visitor’s center. The whole trail was about seven miles total.
“Anyway, we took a lunch, and some wine,” she continued. “I like to sit up on the ridge and look down at all the goings on in the refuge, you know,” said the Duck. “It’s just nice.”
“Well, we had had our lunch, and were getting ready to go down when the wind must have changed or something, because there came a rather disgusting smell. The Duck said that something must have died nearby.”
Here, the Duck took over the telling, “I said to Mandy, ‘Mandy, you stay here and I’ll go have a look. So, I carefully dropped off the ridge, to the south, you know, and looked to see what was down there. I hadn’t gone thirty yards when there it was. A dead deer. It looked pretty old, but not too old, if you know what I mean. The hind leg had been removed, and the stomach and guts had all fallen out.” The Duck made a wry face, crinkling his nose. He leaned into the group and said quietly, “It didn’t have any brain.”
Hugo leaned back and thought about what the Duck had said. The Duck looked a little put out that he hadn’t gotten a bigger reaction from either Dr. Bonanza or Hugo. He shrugged and went on, “I called Mandy down to have a look. I poked it a bit while I waited. She thought that it was pretty disgusting, so we left and told the rangers on the way out.” He popped another meatball into his mouth and drank his drink. Hugo hadn’t caught the name of it.
“I asked the ranger what did it, and he shrugged, saying that he wouldn’t be able to tell until he had had a look. I said that it must have been a mountain lion. Buy why would it have taken out the brain?”
Hugo remembered something about migrating raptors that would kill birds as they traveled, only eating the brains, then moving on. But these weren’t passerines, sparrows and juncos, these were good sized mammals. Hugo tried to picture where the kills had been, thinking that maybe something had been migrating. He shook his head thinking how silly that sounded, even to him, and he could come up with farfetched theories when the need arose.
“Do you think that it’s still up there?” Hugo asked. He turned to Bonanza. “If it is, I think that we should go take a look.”
Mandy looked at him. “Why do you want to take a look at a dead deer?” she asked.
Hugo fidgeted a bit, looking at Dr. Bonanza. He decided that he would let them in on what he and Bonanza had been thinking about since the morning. “Well,” he began. “It’s just that Dr. Bonanza here had a sheep killed on his place, out by the refuge.” He didn’t mention the goat on Olaf’s place, nor did he say anything about the cougar up by Two Rabbit Lake.
“Really?” Mandy said.
Bonanza nodded his head, finishing his beer and motioning for another. “It sounds like maybe it were just the same with you deer as it was with my sheep.”
They all fell silent as Shirley delivered more drinks.
“Was the brain missing from your sheep?” She asked quietly.
Bonanza nodded.
“We can take my car,” she said. “We can leave first thing in the morning.”
“Let’s make it more around 9:30,” Dr. Bonanza said. “We got chores to do.”


Chapter 15

Hugo woke up in the middle of the night again. He looked out the windows, half expecting to see Mrs. McGregor out on the front porch with anther cat (or possibly the same one).
When he was satisfied that no one had been creeping around outside, he opened a beer and sat down in his reading chair by the fire that had almost gone out. He threw another log on the fire, but didn’t really believe that it would catch.
He enjoyed the beer and about three chapters of Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn before he nodded off and slept until the sun came up.
***
When he awoke, cold and stiff from sleeping in the chair, he glanced out the front window. As he tipped the empty beer bottle up to catch the last drop, he saw Mrs. McGregor working in her yard. She looked down the street, to the west, then turned her gaze on Hugo’s house. He didn’t think that she would be able to see him, but he waved and pulled up the afghan as he stepped toward the kitchen. She made a movement, but he couldn’t tell if it had been in response to him or not.
He looked in the cupboard and found food. Same for the refrigerator. Then he had a shower, the first in three days. It felt good to get cleaned up. He shaved after his shower, then went to the front room to wait for Dr. Bonanza. Mrs. McGregor still worked in her yard. Hugo read a bit in the Hillerman book, but then put it down.
A knock at the door startled him. He looked out the window, but didn’t see Dr. Bonanza’s truck. He got up and walked to the door. Out of the glass, he saw just the top of Mrs. McGregor’s curly, gray hair.
He opened the door, expecting to see another cat. Her arms hung at her sides. Hugo raised his eyebrows and said, “Hello, Mrs.…” She pushed her way into his house past him. He moved aside, quite taken aback. He had had her over for tea once or twice, but they were not as familiar as this.
“Mrs. McGregor?” Hugo asked.
She glanced in the front room, then the kitchen and finally his bedroom. She shook her head, stopping in the hall, close to the center of the house.
“You don’t know what you are getting into,” She said.
Hugo looked at her.
“I know what’s going on. It happened about forty years ago, just like this.” She looked around, as thought someone else might be listening. “Let the dead bury the dead.” She said. She strode to the door, still standing partially open. “You get to work on your next book,” she admonished, shaking her finger at him. She walked out the door, shutting it behind herself.
Hugo stood open-mouthed, not knowing what to say.
A knock came from the door again. He grabbed for the handle and roughly pulled open. “What was that all about…” he began.
“What was what all about de Naranhas,” Dr. Bonanza said as he came in. “You got any beer in here, I am powerful thirsty this morning.”
Hugo motioned down the hall toward the kitchen, but Bonanza had already opened the refrigerator. Hugo stuck his head out the door looking for Mrs. McGregor. She had disappeared.
When he made it to the kitchen, Dr. Bonanza stood near the sink drinking down one of the lagers that Hugo had purchased the night before. Hugo opened the refrigerator and pulled out one for himself, feeling that he had earned it.
“Did you see Mrs. McGregor?” Hugo asked.
“When? Just now?” Bonanza replied. “I didn’t see no one on your whole street. What? Does everyone sleep late on Saturdays around here?”
Hugo felt the panic start to rise in him again, but he held it in check. He and Bonanza swallowed the last of their beers and went out the front to Bonanza’s pick-up.
“I gotta’ stop by the store on the way out to Olaf’s place,” Dr. Bonanza said as they climbed in the truck. Hugo looked for Mrs. McGregor, but she must have gone inside, or around the back. He scrutinized the front window of her house to see if she were watching them, but couldn’t see anyone.