This would be my death, then. With a gun in my hands, and my prey dead along with me. A decent enough ending for an old shikari like myself. My only regret was that I wouldn’t die on English soil.
I freely admit that the next portion of my account is unreliable. I can report only what I witnessed, or seemed to witness. I settled into a darkness that I fancy was death’s anteroom, but a searing pain pulled me out of it. Someone was turning me over, lifting me up, and I complained bitterly, for death seemed preferable just then to agony. I smelled something musky, animal and pungent. I opened my eyes and looked around as best I could. Someone was carrying me over their shoulder, as easily as I’d carry a child. I looked at this stranger’s back, which seemed to be covered in thick, coarse hair. The ground seemed far away from my face – at least three or four feet too far away, if the person carrying me was a man of ordinary stature. I turned my head and looked into the face of the kidnapped boy, who was slung over this figure’s other shoulder, and gazing at me wide-eyed in fear or wonder.
Words in Fraser’s voice drifted through my mind: There are also tales of the creatures acting to help those lost in the woods, but I don’t much credit those.
I lost consciousness again, and when next I woke, it was to see an immense figure, something like the marriage of a giant and an ape and a hairy carpet, moving around the camp. This creature made the axe-wielding wild man look petite in comparison. The boy sat on a fallen log, chewing a bit of jerky, and when he saw my eyes open, he held out the food to me. But I was still grievously injured and passed out again. I think it was just minutes later that I opened my eyes and saw the back of the immense hairy creature as it departed the camp, taking long and somehow stately strides. Its feet were huge, at least a foot and a half long.
Some time later my consciousness returned properly, and I rasped out a request for water. The boy solemnly brought me a tin cup, and I gulped it down. Once I was able to sit up, I found that my wounded shoulder had been sealed over with mud. (When I eventually saw a doctor, he claimed not to recognise the leaves packed in the wound, but declared me remarkably free of infection.)
I looked at the boy. “What happened?” I asked.
The child shrugged. “You save me. Big man save you.”
“Big man. You mean…”
“Big man.” The boy held his hands apart. “Big feet.” He grinned, and I let out a burst of laughter myself, giddy with the realisation that I might just live after all.
There was a bit of a fuss afterward, of course. When I took the boy to Fraser’s cabin, what passed for the local police were waiting there, someone having seen Newman skulking around before the boy vanished. I professed to know nothing about any of that and spun a tale about going on a hunting trip with Fraser and Newman in search of bears, only to encounter a wild woodsman and this boy. When telling a lie, it’s best to hew closely to the truth, and the wild man had killed my companions, and I had saved the boy, after all. The child said nothing to contradict my account, either because he lacked the sense to understand what had really happened, or out of loyalty to me for rescuing him. He did babble at length about the hairy “big man” who’d rescued us both. When questioned on that subject, I would only shrug and say I’d been injured, and that much of what happened after I dispatched the wild man was a blur.
I remain unsettled in my mind on this matter, I confess. Did one of Fraser’s “big men” carry me to safety and treat my wound? Or was it just a benevolent woodsman, transformed by my battered mind into a figure from Fraser’s fancies? Perhaps I’d carried the boy back to camp myself and slathered my own injury with leaves and mud, in a feverish delirium, and subsequently forgotten? I cannot definitively say. I wish the professor had not died, so I could ask his opinion.
I was obliged to sit in a cell while the authorities investigated my story, but the condition of the bodies they found confirmed my account. The head of the constabulary told me those facts I related earlier about the origins of the wild man. There was some fuss about my being a foreigner, wandering about in the woods so heavily armed, with all those dead bodies in my vicinity. But in the end, it all came to nothing, as the only American citizen among the dead was Newman, who was well known locally and widely despised. The authorities set me free, kept my rifles and invited me to please never return to their state. I assured them that no prohibition had ever made me happier.
I returned to London and vowed that thereafter I would limit my sport to gambling at cards, as, for the first time in my life, the thought of holding a gun was somewhat distasteful to me. It occurs to me now that if I’d held firm to that feeling, I wouldn’t have taken up arms to shoot that fool Adair, and then that cunning fiend of a detective wouldn’t have contrived to capture me, and I wouldn’t be in this cell now. But such reversals of fortune are all part of the sporting man’s life, I suppose, and one never knows: I might have the great detective in my sights again someday, and give these memoirs a happier ending.
A DORMITORY HAUNTING
Jaine Fenn
When recalling women who acquit themselves well in Sherlock Holmes stories, most people think only of Irene Adler. Violet Hunter leaves less of an impression, perhaps because she does not best Holmes, although he does respect her quick and observant mind. Miss Violet Hunter appears in “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”, and my inclination to find out how she fared later in life became a firm decision when I realised that this story takes place within a few miles of where I live. Watson feels Violet Hunter might be a lonely person, with the implication that her intellect could be an impediment in finding a husband. At the end of the story Holmes comments that she ended up as head of a private school in Walsall where she “met with considerable success”. That gave me all I needed: I couldn’t resist having a go at mixing mystery and romance in a tale about an admirable and independent woman.
It is sometimes said – most often by men – that there is no more chaotic mental space than the mind of a girl on the cusp of womanhood. But whilst I have had to deal with my share of confusion, disruption and pigheadedness amongst my charges, the commotion that roused me that late October night was not of the usual kind.
The moon was half-full, hidden intermittently by racing clouds, and the first chill of winter had blown across the hockey fields during the afternoon’s match with St Hilda’s. We had lost, again: perhaps I should encourage Miss Simpson to take her well-earned retirement, but she is popular with the girls, and I pride myself that Rosewood Academy is a place that values pleasure in education above prowess in sport.
Lights had been out for a while, and I was dozing over some paperwork when a faint yet chilling shriek came from above. More cries followed, and I picked up the lamp and left my office, breathing a little hard. The dormitory is on the top floor and I was breathing harder still when I reached it. However, as the other teachers had all retired to bed, I was first upon the scene.
The occupants of the room were in a state of borderline hysteria. The lower school girls were shadowy shapes sitting up in their beds, some with covers drawn to chins; a couple were standing, but leapt back onto their beds when I entered. They had been looking down the length of the great attic room, towards the curtained alcoves where the fifteen senior boarders slept.