October skies

CHAPTER 34

23 October, 1856

The sun was on the way to its zenith, shining through a gap in the grey sky when he heard the scream. The young man was unsure of the noise at first. Unsure because it was not a sound he normally associated with these woods; a woman’s cry, or a child’s cry in this place was as strange as a bear’s call out on the plains. These wooded peaks were not a place for womenfolk, nor children, nor the old — especially not in the dead of winter.

He heard it again. This time he was certain it was a woman’s cry, not a child’s. The first time had been a sharp shriek of surprise; the second was protracted and drawn out and made the fine downy hair on his forearms rise. The scream endured, a terrible blend of pitiful agony and abject terror, causing him to grimace and adrenaline to instantly flood his body, entreating him to flee like a startled rabbit or stand firm.

A woman.

He heard a third scream, higher pitched this time.

A child.

The young man knew the only women and children in these woods were the ‘white-faces’, the ones that had lost their way in the mountains. Black Feather said their fate was sealed now; none of them would last until the snows melted. If cold and hunger didn’t kill them all, then the dark spirit they had brought into the woods with them would.

His first instinct was to drop the hare that he was gutting, go find Black Feather and the others, and tell them what he’d heard. But the second cry, the child’s cry, alerted some deeper instinct in him. He couldn’t ignore the innocent cry of a child, not even a white-face child.

His thinking went no deeper than that. He dropped the hare, cleaned the blade of his knife with a wipe across his sleeve and strode swiftly in the direction from which the screams had come. He moved with the athletic agility and speed of a young man whose feet knew the terrain well, intuitively judging from the gentle undulations in the snow, where lay the dips, the bumps, the twisted roots that could snap an ankle.

The woman’s scream came again from up ahead.

This time he knew, from the abrupt and gargling way it came to an end, that it would be the woman’s last scream. He made an approximate best guess from which direction it had come, making allowances for the acoustic tricks the forest could play. He redoubled his pace, his feet flicking lightly through the shallowest snow, stone-stepping across the mounds of firm ground, from one boulder to another, vaulting with graceful agility over the fallen limbs of long-dead trees.

Up ahead he glimpsed, between trunks, spears of weak sunlight lancing down into a small glade and he detected, amidst this world of only two colours, virgin white and deep wooded green — an unmissable splash of bright crimson.

He slowed down the pace to ensure his arrival would be in complete silence, darting forward another dozen yards and then abruptly settling to the ground beneath the boughs of a fir tree. Catching his breath in quiet, controlled gasps, he looked out through the needles at the clearing beyond, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

There was a lot of blood.

Too much blood for whoever had lost it to live. That was immediately obvious to him.

Then he saw her.

Stretched over a fallen trunk, he could make out the body of a white-face woman, her dark clothes stained almost black with the blood spilling from her torso. Beside her, curled up in the snow on the ground, was a child, a little girl, hugging her knees and shuddering — convulsive twitches that racked her body in ebbs and flows.

She was alive — her eyes were wide. But he could also see her mind was gone. Shock had rescued her sanity, taken it someplace else.

He scanned the small clearing, looking for a trace of the creature that had done this.

A bear?

It was possible. Although they slept through the winter, Black Feather frequently cautioned that they could be very easily disturbed and enraged.

He noticed the smooth snow was trampled and flattened across the glade and stained dark with splatters and smears of blood.

Three distinct foot profiles — possibly four — mingled across the glade; a child, a woman, a male, and perhaps another. The story he tried reading in the snow was too complicated. But it was clear that a body had been dragged from the clearing whilst bleeding, leaving a trail that disappeared into the foliage on the far side.

An older mind would have advised caution at this point; he should back away and leave this scene behind him. This was the evil spirit Black Feather spoke of — he could sense it, smell it… the white-face evil. Only their evil could be so careless with its bloodletting, so uncontrolled, so savage.

But the young man was alone and too confident and curious to know better. In any case, he couldn’t leave this child — no older than his own sister — to die in the same brutal way as her mother appeared to have done.

The long, crooked blade of his hunting knife balanced ready for use in one hand, his other hand easing out the finely crafted flint-bladed tamahakan tucked into his belt, he rose with one slow, fluid movement and stepped out from beneath the tree into the clearing.

He listened carefully as he moved soundlessly. In the distance, echoing noisily through the forest, activity coming from the white-face camp could be heard. The thak-thak-thak of wood being chopped. A gentle breeze disturbed the snow-laden pine branches overhanging the clearing, and powder snow sifted lightly down with a gentle hiss from one bough to the next.

Approaching the shuddering child and the body splayed across the log, he could see more clearly how much damage had been wrought on the woman’s torso. Several deep gashes had opened her belly exposing ripped organs, and tatters of those same organs were draped out across the bark of the tree trunk. The gashes reminded him of the sort of wound a bear could make with one of its powerful front paws. But looking at the spacing and the length and depth of these gashes, it would have to have been a very large bear.

The girl was only a few feet away from him, shuddering and rocking. She didn’t see him; her eyes and her mind were far away.

He slowly reached one hand towards her, not sure how she would react to his touch.

It was then that he heard it.

A deep rasping of breath coming from the edge of the clearing and circling around beyond sight. In the silence of this sound-insulated glade it was deafening, echoing from all sides, a deep, pulsing, hoarse rattling… like that of a male buffalo, cornered and exhausted at the end of a hunt, blowing foam out of each nostril.

He noticed a long gun on the ground beyond the girl. He knew how these weapons were used, but not how to feed one. There had been no loud thunder before the screams, and he realised the white-face weapon would still be ready to use, still deadly.

The third white-face, the one that had been dragged away, must have dropped it. Which told him something useful about this creature.

It is a very fast creature. The white-face had no time to fire.

The breathing grew quiet now, as if awaiting his next move, daring him to reach out for the weapon and try using it.