Page 54 of God’s Country

I follow the scent to a place where the smell of humans is powerful, a place where many of the two-legged creatures have been before. There is that old smell left after departure. But there is a warm, fresh scent as well. I see the human standing, his back to me. Although he is in the dark, I see him perfectly. I pause, take one cautious step. Another. Another. Still, he does not turn. He does not sense my killing presence. In the moment before I attack, I utter a low growl. Now he spins and I see his face. It is the face that has looked back at me from the mirror my whole life. Then I smell his sudden, overwhelming fear, the scent that is most compelling of all, and it drives me forward.

He goes down under the force of my body. He screams, struggles to grasp at me, but my teeth are already sunk deep into his neck. His screams become a gurgle as I tear out his throat. The taste of blood is maddeningly wonderful. I snarl and rip and come away with flesh and cartilage. The human animal struggles fiercely. This fight to hold so desperately to life is a thing of all animals, human or not. It is a battle that fills me with savage purpose.

At last this human goes limp. But as I begin to tear at his stomach and chest, rip out his entrails and organs, the light of life has not completely left his eyes. He stares at me as if begging for compassion, for mercy. But I’m in a frenzy. The blood, the flesh, the viscera of the still living human fills my mouth, satisfying not only my hunger but my soul as well. This is what I am. This is what I was born for. This instinctual beast is the true me.

CHAPTER 31

When I woke, it was dusk and Stan was feeding the fire. He had the Glock slipped under his belt and made sure I saw it when he came over to untie me. “You were having a nightmare,” he said. “Must’ve been a bad one.” When I didn’t reply, he said, “We need to eat.”

Ollie had opted to take only the precious pack into his tent. He left the food canister outside. I quickly located a sealed package of dehydrated mac and cheese and ground beef and set to work. Toward the end of my preparations, maybe aroused by the aroma of cooking food, Ollie emerged from his tent. When he approached us, Stan waved him back and said, “Christ, you smell like a gas station toilet.”

“I want to keep those damn mosquitoes and flies from eating me alive.”

“This will help.” Stan pulled the deet from his pocket and showed it to his brother.

“You bastard,” Ollie said, when he realized his brother’s deception. “I oughta kill you.”

“Take a bath first.”

Ollie lumbered to the edge of the pool, stripped off his clothing, and waded into the water.

“It’s full of muck,” he complained.

“Just get it done,” Stan said.

Ollie dunked himself several times, splashed around, scrubbed at the caked urine-mud on his arms and neck and face, then let himself float a little like a dead whale. When he finally emerged and stepped onto the wild grass that fringed the pool, he looked down and screamed like baby.

“Get them off me! Get them off me!”

A half dozen leeches had attached themselves to his lower legs and hung from his skin like small black snakes. Forgetting the pain in his back, Ollie danced around, kicking as if he could simply dislodge the suckers. Stan made no move to help. In fact, he seemed to be enjoying his brother’s predicament.

“Just pull them off,” I calmly advised.

“I don’t want to touch them! Filthy little buggers.”

I left the fire, where I had the mac and cheese almost ready in the skillet, and walked to where Ollie danced around. “Hold still.” I reached down and, one by one, plucked the leeches from his legs and threw them back into the water. All that was left was a small wound at each site, oozing a little blood.

“Did they give me something?” Ollie asked in a desperate voice. “A disease or anything?”

All in all, leeches are pretty harmless. If they’ve attached themselves for very long, the site can be itchy and, because leeches secrete an enzyme that inhibits clotting, bleeding from the tiny wounds can be difficult to stanch. But throughout history, leeches have been used for medicinal purposes, and they are still being used today. That was something I wasn’t going to tell Ollie.

“Could be,” I said. “May have to consider amputation.”

“Jesus!” Ollie said. Then he caught his brother laughing. “What’s so funny?”

Stan, who was clearly the more scholarly of the two, filled his brother in on the harmless nature of the creatures. “Nothing deadly got inside you and you’ve got plenty of blood left,” he assured Ollie. “And you smell a hundred percent better.”

The leeches hadn’t been on him very long and the wounds hardly bled at all. There was a tube of bacitracin in the first aid kit. I tossed that to Ollie and told him to use it. Then I turned my attention back to preparing our dinner.

We ate in silence. That was partly because we were famished and focused on feeding our faces. But there was a sullen element to Ollie’s silence. He kept eyeing his brother and then me as if we were somehow in a conspiracy against him.

By the time I’d cleaned up from the meal, it was dark.

Ollie smoked a cigar and drank from a bottle of Four Roses he had stashed in his Duluth pack. Stan still looked pretty beat from the day’s journey and sat nodding by the fire.

“Let’s tie this guy up and then you should hit the sack,” Ollie suggested.

Ollie held the Glock on me while Stan did the work of tying me to the tree. Then Stan crawled into his tent. Ollie didn’t go into his yet. He rummaged in the BearVault and came up with a Snickers bar.