There was nothing that a human could add to that eulogy. She didn’t try.
The hog’s body was huge and powerful. Sal tried moving it, walking unsteadily toward the door.
It was exhausting. It moved more or less as she asked—it worked better if she didn’t concentrate too much on how the legs were moving—but the beating of their dead heart did nothing to revive her.
She got them around the corner of the barn. It was dim and noisy with crickets. She could smell turned earth and blood.
Their legs started to shake, and she had to sit down.
This was madness, she thought, trying to keep her thoughts away from Rawhead and not sure if she was succeeding. I’ve trapped us both in this dead body, and for what? Revenge?
A witch should have known better. Now what? Even if I kill that bastard hunter, what then? Lay down and rot until there’s not enough left of the body to hold us here?
It was not a pleasant thought. Even less pleasant was the thought that the hog’s body might rot away and their souls would be left chained to its bones.
Witches generally feel that there’s plenty of work to be done here and now, but I never met one that wasn’t secretly hoping to put their feet up for a while in the afterlife.
Now, though …
Poor sort of friend I am. Silas only killed his body, but I may have made him into a ghost.
You’re a good friend, ma’am, said Rawhead staunchly. Sal realized that he’d been listening to her think the whole time. It would have been embarrassing if he was anybody else. She scuffled their trotters in the dirt.
“Did I hold you back from heaven, Rawhead?”
Doesn’t work like that for us, ma’am. We just go on to the next thing.
“What’s the next thing?” asked Sal. She was exhausted and felt like dying again.
Oh, you know. We go around again. Think I was going to be a bird this time, said Rawhead. All curled up in an egg, with someone tap-tap-tapping on my shell. I like being a bird. It’s good to fly.
Sal wished that she could weep. Their mouth gaped open in distress. “What happened to that bird?”
Won’t hatch, I guess. It happens, ma’am. Don’t worry. It was hard to comfort herself in only one body. Hogs would normally go shoulder to shoulder, lean on one another, but with only one body between them, Rawhead had to settle for leaning against the barn wall and rubbing their jowls against their forelegs. I don’t mind coming back. We’ll die again sooner or later, and I’ll be a different bird.
He paused and added generously, You can come be a bird with me if you like, ma’am. I wouldn’t mind.
Humans are different from hogs in that kindness can break their hearts. Sal moaned through the dead razorback’s throat.
“What the hell is that racket?” yelled a voice from inside the barn.
The boar’s body jerked itself up and made a short bark of surprise before Sal quite realized what she was doing.
It was Paul Silas. Well, who else would it be?
“Damn it,” she muttered, and “Damn it!” said Silas. She heard the distinctive sound of a gun being cocked. It was practically under her ear, on the other side of the wall.
Rawhead wisely took over at this point, backing them into the thicket of dog fennel and Queen Anne’s lace that surrounded the barn. A beam of light came out of the barn, jangling crazily as the hunter carried the lantern. Sal saw the green gleam of spider eyes in the grass as the light moved over it, and a red flash from a whippoorwill blinking in the ditch.
“Who’s there?” shouted Silas. “Who’s sneaking around my—ah, goddamn!”
“Found we were gone,” said Sal silently.
Rawhead sank more deeply into the thicket. The light went flashing by, through the cracks between boards, and lit up the pebbles at the dead hog’s feet.
Silas’s footsteps paused by the empty hook, and then he walked to the mouth of the barn. The whippoorwill flew up and away into the trees.
“You a bear?” asked Silas. “You a bear out there, taking my meat? Or you a man?” He turned in a circle, and Sal saw the rifle outlined against the lantern light.
There’s a whole story people tell when they’re telling the story of Rawhead and Sal. It’s a little bit like Little Red Riding Hood—the hunter says, “My, what big eyes you got!” And Rawhead supposedly says, “The better to see your grave.” And the hunter says, “What a bushy tail you got.” And Rawhead says, “The better to sweep your grave.”
Well, a talking hog is one thing, but I never heard of a hog with a bushy tail. They say he took it off a dead raccoon, but if you can tell me why a boar would need a rotten raccoon tail to kill someone with, I’d dearly love to hear it.
No, what happened was that Silas stood in the circle of lantern light, holding his gun, looking for a bear or a thief, and Sal looked at him and heard his whining voice, and she remembered why she was mad.
That bastard killed Rawhead. He’d killed Rawhead’s friends. In a roundabout way, he’d killed Sal herself.
And Sal remembered other things—the way Silas had treated a woman living alone, the way he’d come sniffing around like a dog after a bone, offering charity and more than charity, even when she’d made it clear she wasn’t interested in the likes of him. She remembered a couple conversations on the porch that she’d rather not have had.
She thought of how those conversations might have gone if she’d been only a woman alone and not a witch. She remembered how they’d almost gone anyway, and a couple of nights spent with the door barred and her own rifle across her lap.
“I believe that man needs killing, Rawhead,” she said.
Yes, ma’am, said Rawhead.
He moved.
The dead heart hammered in their chest, and Sal threw herself on the pain and took it all. When Rawhead charged, he was as quick on his hooves as a living razorback, and that is very quick indeed.
Silas heard the charge and turned. He got the gun halfway to his shoulder and fired.
The impact knocked the dead boar back a step—but only a step. He did not get time for another shot.
Their jaws closed over his thigh. Silas screamed, but not for very long. Humans die easy compared to hogs.
And then there was quiet.
After awhile the crickets started in again. The fireflies spread themselves out under the trees. The lantern guttered and went out.
Sal sighed. She felt ancient. The bullet in the dead boar’s neck burned and she had no way to pick it out.
“Well,” she said. “Well. I guess that’s that.”
Yes, ma’am.
The story that got around was a ghost story, so there’s a proper ghost story end to it. They say Rawhead still rides around on the hunter’s horse, and sometimes his head comes off and he holds it up to scare people with. They say he’s still haunting these hills to this day, one more leftover thing from the old days, like the foundations you find in the woods sometimes, or the bits of barbed wire that turned up rusted in the fields.
But it wasn’t like that, not in the end.
Sal and Rawhead walked. They walked clear back to her house, and that was a long and weary way. Rawhead heaved that dead body up on the porch for the last time and laid it down on the boards.
“Well,” said Sal. She didn’t have any regrets about Silas. She was so tired that regret couldn’t get much foothold. It was more like a list in her head, checking off boxes—die, tick, take revenge, tick, come home, tick.
She felt like she was seeing the world from a long way away. Only Rawhead’s voice was clear in her mind, as if he was standing right at her shoulder. “I … I don’t know what to do now.”