Winter Run Read online

  When the first thaw set in and it was easier to get around, the dogs killed two grown sheep at the Joneses in broad daylight while the family was in the village shopping. A few days after the sheep were killed, I heard the dogs barking on the run over the ridge behind the rock. It wasn’t the long, drawn-out note of the coonhounds; this sound was sharp and hoarse and staccato. I could see Bat on the other hill, with her big ears cocked, listening to them also. In the mist rising from the thaw, she looked all gray and weathered, like a ghost watching over the land.

  The first dog, a tan longhaired bitch, came down the ridge, mute, and crouched beneath the overhang of the rock. Then a doe came into sight, panting and weaving from side to side, her tongue hanging out—exhausted. The three dogs behind her were trotting, but still a little cautious. The tan bitch shot out from beside the rock and grabbed the doe by the tongue as she went by, slamming into her sideways. Down they went and the other three piled on top. The doe let out a long bleat as the dogs growled and struggled with her.

  I crossed the creek on a game trail and edged my way up the bank for a closer look. When the tan bitch raised her head and saw me, unlike most animals, she locked her yellow eyes onto mine for a second. Then she rose up a little, pulled back her lips, and snarled from down low in her chest. She scared the hell out of me, for a fact. I jumped back across the creek and ran down the lane and up the hill to Silver Hill, looking for Matthew.

  He was milking. When I ran into the little barn and smelled the cow and heard her chewing and the milk swishing in the bucket, I came to my senses and blurted out what had happened. Matthew sat on the little stool, his hands on the cow’s teats. As I told the story, he gripped the teats harder and harder until the cow flinched. That was all he showed, sitting there in his own quietness, his leather baseball cap pushed back from his broad forehead.

  When he finished milking, we got into the pickup and drove down to our lane with the single-barrel 12-gauge resting on the seat and floorboards between us.

  “We’ve got to kill them!” I said. “Just like they killed the doe—don’t we?”

  “We’ll see,” he said. “Ain’t much chance we can get around downwind without them seeing us. And, anyway, the son-of-a-bitches probably won’t stay. Just kill and go after eating a little gut.” It was the first time I’d ever seen him really angry or heard him use bad language.

  At the turn, he stopped the truck. We crossed the creeks and eased our way along in the shelter of the bank until we were close to the rock. Suddenly, he jumped up the bank, pulled back the hammer, and fired at the tan bitch before I realized that the dogs were still there, growling and tugging at the carcass. He hit her—knocked her down for a second—but she didn’t squeal like you would have thought a dog would. All she did was let out a sharp little bark, and all four were gone before he could reload.

  We stood there for a moment, silent, staring at the ripped open doe. Then he said, “C’mon, Charlie, we got to skin out this deer, and I need you to help me.”

  When we were finished, we loaded up the carcass and the hide and drove the half mile to the village and pulled into the parking lot, with the dirty snow piled all around. The potbelly in the store was glowing and people were talking before they went home. Matthew told the story of me and the doe, while everyone nodded approval.

  Then Fred Henry spoke up. “It’s the snow what done it, Matthew. What with not being able to get around the farm much less go hunting. But now it’s eased up, and we got to kill ’em. You know about the sheep. Now listen to what happened to me night before last.” Fred became declamatory.

  “Well, there I was, sitting, looking out the window, listening to the radio, and the moon full, and me just looking into the moonlight. And all of a sudden the cow in my back pasture throwed up her head and took off with her calf just flying and me wondering what the devil’s going on.

  “Then I seen the dogs. They come across from my back fence. I got the gun and headed for the pasture. But when that tan bitch seen me, she give out with that little bark you talked about and the whole bunch throwed up their heads and were gone. But they come back in the night, because the next morning that calf was laying dead in the middle of a patch of churned up snow.

  “They may be just dogs, but they’ve sure God gone bad, and we got to kill ’em, Matthew. I ain’t never in my life seen anything like that tan bitch. She looks at you like she knows more than you do. And now that they can bring down a wild doe, running in a pack, Lord knows what will be next. Trouble is they ain’t scared like they was wild. They just come and kill.”

  When Fred had finished, Matthew turned to Fred’s brother, Luke, who was the older of the brothers and was section foreman on the C & O Railroad. He was tall and looked like a black Paul Bunyan. He wore hunting boots with his trousers tucked in and a stocking cap and a mackinaw. The brothers dressed the same and looked the same, except Fred talked and was short. Luke was quiet and he kept hounds, hounds that would run anything you put them onto.

  “Do you reckon it’s eased up enough to bring the hounds in the morning, Luke?” Matthew asked. “I know where they’re laying up.”

  This revelation turned heads, mine included.

  Luke nodded and Matthew continued, “I’ll get Leonard and Robert. You and Fred bring the hounds. The old summerhouse foundations is where they’re staying when they ain’t hunting. I seen them the other night and tracked them in the snow. You and Fred can walk in with the hounds, and we’ll be at the three crossings; and if you jump them, at least one of us will get a shot most likely. The wind might be wrong, but we got to chance it. Maybe they’ll run the country and not the wind.”

  Then he said to me, “Reckon your daddy would come, Charlie?”

  I said I was sure he would, bursting with pride once again that my Pennsylvania-born father, the virtual foreigner in that land, would be asked to help. He had an out-of-character and uncanny ability with a .22, so when precision shooting with no side effects was required, he was asked. Like the time a bat bothered a lady at evening prayer and Daddy was commissioned to shoot it and not mess up the church. I remember him sitting in the front pew on the Epistle side, dressed in a Sunday suit, waiting while the bat flew around and finally landed under the eave on the dark pine plate. I remember him bringing up the rifle real slow and hitching his body around to make the shot less awkward, hearing his breath ease out, the little crack from the short-short, and the bat falling dead. And I remember wanting to cheer, but being afraid to because we were in church. Yes, I was sure he would come.

  Matthew took me home. My father came to the door and stood there kind of skinny and awkward with the backlight making shadows across his hawk nose and deep-set eyes. He agreed that something had to be done, particularly in the light of the doe being killed. He would be glad to come, and it would be fine to meet at the store at six.

  It was a restless night—probably for my father, too. From the distance of years, I remember him as always completely cool, but it is an unlikely memory.

  The next morning, they were waiting for us around a fire they had built next to the hog-scalding tub at the branch. The hounds were baying in excitement in the hound boxes on the pickups. Besides Luke and Fred and Leonard, there was Robert Paine. He drank some and had done time on the road gang and, as I’ve mentioned before whenever something big happened Robert was always there. And, of course, Matthew, who knew what to do even though he’d never seen such a winter or heard of a pack of wild dogs before. You could see in the firelight the tension etched into their shadowy faces. It had been a long winter.

  Luke and Fred and the hounds headed for the burnt-out summerhouses above Silver Hill where the ridge that ran almost to the village began. Robert and Leonard went to the crossing behind the barn at our house. They put my father halfway down the ridge, above where I had seen the doe killed. Matthew and I would be at the end closest to the village. Matthew had Professor James’s old double-barrel 16-gauge. We crossed the creek and stood next to the roc
k out-cropping at the end of the ridge. We couldn’t actually see my father’s stand, but sound carried well so we would know what was happening if they came our way. There was a rock pile at the other end of the ridge, across the lane from where the summerhouses had been, and that was where the dogs were spending the nights. Luke said later that before the hounds were a hundred yards from the rocks, they put their noses to the ground and began waving their tails, showing that they had caught the scent of the dogs’ night lines. They could see the bloody tracks of the bitch in what was left of the snow. When the hounds started whining and pulling at the leads, the men turned them loose. Almost at once they burst into full cry. Those dogs may have just been dogs, but they sure smelled wild. Luke and Fred looked up to see the quarry crossing the lane in a tight bunch, heading south, up the wind, straight away from us. Two things saved the situation. The first was that they were heading for unfamiliar territory. And the second was old Bat. The dogs had veered a little to the east, and just as it looked like the show was over, or would never start, there came a bellow so loud that Matthew and I heard it at the other end of the ridge. There is nothing on earth that sounds as disgruntled as a pissed-off mule. And old Bat was really pissed.

  Having escaped for whatever reason, Bat had decided to go a new way and had ambled down the lane toward the lake where the pipe cattle guard was across it so trucks could cross but cows couldn’t. When she got to the cattle guard, she walked right into the thing up to her knees and hocks and was stuck. Being a sensible mule, she didn’t struggle, she bellowed. And that turned the dogs back to the northeast, heading down wind, toward us.

  So with old Bat bellowing and the black and tans throwing their tongues like the end of the world as the hunt became a sight chase, my stomach jerked up into a knot that grew even tighter when we heard shots. Leonard and then Robert had let go with their single-barrel 12-gauges and killed the first two. In spite of the shots, the last two kept running hard downwind rather than risk making the turn back into unfamiliar country. So they went right past my father. The crack of the .22 long rifle hollow point sounded and another one went down.

  This left the last one for Matthew and me, and him with the double barrel. It was the tan bitch. As she rounded the end of the ridge with the hounds in hot pursuit and the winter funneling down to that moment, she looked back and hesitated as if to make sure the whole thing was for real and not just a game and maybe we could go home now. Matthew fired once and this time she didn’t get up.

  As I held on to the sleeve of his old denim coat, trying not to cry and looking back and forth from the bitch to Matthew, I could feel the tension so hot in him I thought for a second he might shoot her again. But as we stood there watching the light go out of her eyes and the blood spreading around her like a snow cone, I felt him ease and saw his eyes change and soften. And when I looked again she was dead.

  The wind had stopped and beneath the leaden winter sky the voice of a single crow filled the echoed silence of the morning. The hounds went over to smell the bitch’s body, to be sure of what it was they had been running. When the others came up, there wasn’t much to be said—running dogs with hounds had a bad feel to it, but at least now they were gone.

  All that was left to do was free old Bat. Matthew and I agreed to meet up at the cattle guard just as soon as he finished milking. We figured she could last that long because it was not her nature to struggle, and she had gotten tired of bellowing. The rescue turned out to be quite a job. What happened was that after the affront of our not coming to get her immediately, when we finally did arrive to save her, she wouldn’t budge. It was one of those soft winter, late mornings with the clouds low and smooth when sound carries and there is no wind and the temperature is about fifty degrees. The hillside was like an auditorium with wonderful acoustics and Matthew and Bat and me as the characters in some comic farce.

  First we pried up two pipes and tried to get her to step out front end first and then the back end. The mule, however, was not interested. She had developed the ability to concentrate all the weight of her nearly thousand-pound bulk in one leg at a time so that not even Matthew’s inordinate strength could budge her. So back to the pry bar we went, and while we were heaving at the next pipe nearest her hindquarters, she turned her huge old head around until her sighted eye was aimed at us. And as if that was not enough to supervise the operation properly, she cocked one ear around to be sure she was taking everything in.

  As we pried with the bar, I began to see the morning’s hunt over and over, and then the scene at the rock when the dogs had killed the doe. And although I am probably imagining it, I seem to remember that the day grew a little colder and the clouds a little closer. And I was glad when Bat finally stepped out of the cattle guard, and we could lead her home and I could walk down the hill to the Corn House and Gretchen’s grilled cheese sandwiches.

  That should have been the end of it. But no one would let it alone. After all the versions of the great dog hunt had been told, and everyone had laughed at Bat’s antics, we still didn’t know where the dogs had come from or how they had lived before they started killing livestock. Or how they had learned to run down wild deer, being just farm dogs. The questions lingered like the dirty snow from the winter the likes of which we had never seen before either.

  Spring came. Things worked back toward normal. Leonard went around the neighborhood plowing gardens with Bat and, to my disgust, I was back at school. One day when Leonard wasn’t using her, Bat, who was still living at Silver Hill, went for a ramble up the summerhouse lane. My mother saw her going and called the Jameses. Sally, who had the same opinion of Bat as she had of me, reluctantly agreed to find Matthew. Later that morning, he walked up the lane and brought the old mule back.

  When I got home from school that day, I went to find Matthew and see if anything was happening. “C’mon, Charlie, let’s walk up the summerhouse lane. I got something to show you.” Bat was out for the second time that day and we let her come ambling along behind us.

  Halfway up, the lane cut through a bulge in the land, leaving four-foot banks on either side. A dismembered deer carcass lay there, skewed and weathered. You could see tooth marks on the long bones.

  We stood silent for a moment, looking at it, with me holding on to Matthew’s sleeve again with old Bat right behind us, ears cocked.

  “Leonard found a carcass like this over at Joe Stephens’s farm last week. Do you see what happened, Charlie?” he asked.

  But I didn’t, not at first.

  “There was a drift here between the banks,” he said. “They run her up the lane, and when she hit the deep snow, she went down, and they caught her. Just like us, that doe didn’t know nothing about no winter and deep snow. I don’t reckon we’ll ever find out where they come from, but that’s how they learned to run down a deer. It was the snow what taught ’em.”

  And suddenly I could see it in my mind’s eye: the tan bitch waiting at the foot of the lane, taking up the chase as the deer went by; and the other three, winded, beginning to flag; and her barking the sight chase, the deer running hard; and the final surge as the deer hit the drift and went down; the bitch reaching for the throat hold and the other three piling on.

  And then again, the hounds in full cry and Matthew with the double barrel, waiting, as the bitch rounded the little bluff and looked back—to be sure it wasn’t just a game.

  The Mule Dies

  She was very old. Despite Leonard Waits’s insistence that she was thirty-five, most of us agreed that she was in her twenty-fifth year, and no one had ever heard of a mule living to that age before. She had long been a figure of importance. Not only was she the last mule in the area, she was a mule of independent and eccentric mind. As mentioned, even at her advanced age, she refused to stay in a pasture when she got the notion to ramble around. And even though she lived on the professor’s charity, she and Leonard still plowed all the gardens in the neighborhood every spring.

  Her blind eye had long ago turne
d a milky white. As a result, she had a strange way of cocking her head around to get her sighted eye on what she was looking at. She had a curious habit of standing on a hilltop, staring out over the land, unmoving, like an ancient stone marker. Professor James said she was like something you might read about in the Old Testament. But we always took the professor with a grain of salt. After all, he was so eccentric he once told Matthew that he liked the smell of skunk because it made his asthma feel better.

  Bat had been among us for so long that people who were grown and had families could remember giving her an apple or a carrot when they were kids.

  The previous winter, when the four domestic dogs gone wild had killed a doe right in front of Charlie as he was walking in the lane from the store, Charlie’d had the hell scared out of him. We all had.

  Our little village had been snowed in to the point that school had not kept since Thanksgiving and the drifts had piled up ten feet deep in some places. It wasn’t supposed to snow like that in Virginia. We were barely able to do the chores and be sure the cows had paths to get to water. Then came the dogs. It was like an old tale about wolves. But Charlie would tell you at the drop of a hat, and at the top of his voice, that it was no fairy tale that afternoon when he saw the dogs drive the doe up to the rock where the tan bitch was waiting. Certainly no tale when she pulled the doe down by her tongue and the rest piled on and killed her. After that, some families wouldn’t let their children walk to the store alone. It wasn’t until the January thaw that we could deal with the dogs. Matthew Tanner organized the hunt with Luke Henry’s hounds.