or the Texas Aggie research people may have bred him for longevity as well as size and intelligence!
Moral question: were the breeders right to make him thus? There is as much wisdom in that terrible great head as there is ferocity in the sabers of his muzzle. Now the breeders are long dead,
& now it is I who worry…
No sign yet of the turncoat Lufo spoke of. Good! The presence of such an old devil would disturb me as others might quaver before Ba'al. Yet— if one demon has his good side, why not another?
CHAPTER 47
Over the years, said Cleve Hutcherson, the huge private preserve had spread nearly to the Kerr County line. He'd been raised in adjoining Edwards County, and figured the abandoned old Hutcherson place might one day be 'his' range again. The redbone guide spat unerringly, anointing a lizard as it sat sun-stunned on a limestone outcrop. Of the three camera-toting tenderfeet, only Eve appreciated Hutch's little joke on the lizard; and Hutch was a man who liked being appreciated.
That first night in bedrolls, as the mesquite fire dwindled, Hutch had thought the fat gal almost too attentive to his yarns. There was something unsettling about being responsible, in Wild Country, for a city gal whose ass wouldn't fit in a Number Three washtub. Well, at least she didn't go wandering off to get a hock lamed in a prairie-dog hole the way some did. Fact was, she stuck very close to Hutch.
Eve gauged her image carefully. Just because this juice-projecting trailboss was insular, that didn't make him stupid. His stories of raw violence, and his obvious courage in trimming down that pack of wild dogs that surrounded their group, made Evie itch. Here was a man who could handle a six-gun, and presumably a woman, of any caliber.
Since puberty Eve's weakness had been for men of spirit, and of clout. In this country, Cleve Hutcherson's dusty denims were packed with clout. She took genuine delight in counting every scar she could see, and wondered how many more she might tally after the others were asleep, with a smidgin of lobotol in Hutch's coffee. It was now late afternoon, not far from a favorite camp spot Hutch knew. On all but the driest summers the spot boasted a languid'dripping spring', he said; a trickle of water that bled from a limestone bluff and fed a patch of green grass amid the surrounding parched tan countryside.
Animals do not really smell water. Rather, they catch the faint sweet odors of vegetation that prosper in arid regions. The huge omnivore moved toward those scents, now and then balancing on his hindquarters to better test the breezeborne messages. His kind did not often behave that way — but then, in some ways there were no others quite like him; had not been since humans first probed into the Urals.
For the surviving dogs, fleeing from Hutch's firepower and briefly expecting that this lone creature might be their prey, their encounter had been ultimate disaster. Their quarry had not run at first, but waited for the doberman's second slashing pass. He had fed the doberman a flinty forehoof with a projecting dewclaw that ripped out the ribbed roof of the dog's mouth before its jaws could snap shut. But the dog was tasting blood — its own — and did not heed the lesson.
The mixed-breed and the alsatian tried for a hamstring and found that their opponent could leap with any gazelle. Their normal pack attack was to circle and veer, but with only three of them this stratagem had a fatal flaw. The vast bristly ham was not where the mixed-breed expected; instead, a sharp splayed rear hoof the size of a man's relaxed hand exploded into the dog's ribcage, tossing it as easily as the kick of a horse; and this should not have surprised them, for they had faced full-grown horses smaller than this snuffling red-eyed demon.
The mixed-breed stood again, but could not return and collapsed, dying, bleeding from mouth and nostrils. The alsatian whined in impatience and perhaps, a little, in fear. When the doberman started its frontal stalk, its companion eased rearward. Usually if the quarry charged forward, a big healthy dog could blitz from behind to deliver a disabling slash. But when that charge came, it came with such blinding suddenness that neither dog could respond. The doberman wanted a shot at the throat or, failing that, the shoulder. Instead it found a snout tucked nearly to the caliche dirt and two scimitars leveled at its breast and coming on as if rocket-propelled and, scythe-impaled, the fifty-kilo doberman died while carried forward by the endless thundering charge of an animal ten times its bulk.
When the great beast turned at last, the alsatian was fifteen meters in arrears. Alsatians are smart. This one saw the body of its mate dumped like an offering, or a challenge, between predator and prey, and realized that the monster could outrun him, and knew finally which was truly predator, and which was to be the prey.
The alsatian ran anyway, which was not very smart. Nor would he have been smart to attack, nor even to roll over on his back and wag his tail. When death is absolutely certain, perhaps nothing is very smart.
When the victor had fed he began to crave water, not only to slake his thirst but to wash away the blood that splashed his scant bristly coat and his long sloping face. That was when he drifted away from the sunset toward the smell of waterthings.
His trained olfactory bulbs told him there was person-scent near, and man-scent as well.
He knew two persons whom he loved. He had never met a man he liked. A few men had had the good sense to fall down before him, or to feed him, or simply the immobilizing horror to stand rigid and piss themselves when facing him. Most of those still lived to foster the legend of Ba'al.
He still carried a handful of slugs, cicatriced in mounds of muscle, from the deerfly sting of a '22 to the really damaging wallop of big shotgun pellets, fired by men who had chosen the valiant option. Of the valiant ones, very few still lived. Ba'al did not care which category he would meet upwind and now that his bloodlust and his hunger were assuaged he no longer hungered for trouble. But if they stood between him and his water, — meet them he would.
CHAPTER 48
For the first time ever, Eve Simpson gathered firewood. And enjoyed it! She noted for later recording that occasional rain torrents could create momentary freshets — Hutch called them 'gully washers'—that spewed hunks of oak and mesquite and cedar along their paths before drying again. To Hutch it only meant easy pickin's for a showy bonfire, the kind city folks liked, the kind that wasted enough wood for a week of sensible cooking and warming. Well, whatthehell, some tenderfeet had their points. The fat gal, Evie, had slyly offered to sweeten his hardrock coffee with sourmash that night, and he didn't mind if he did. It was against the rules but in by-God Wild Country you could take a few by-God liberties. He would jolly the young couple along with whatever stories they wanted, most of them true, and knew that the fat gal's eyes would gleam with pleasure no matter what he did.
Hutch supervised the camp setup near the dripping spring, letting Evie help, ignoring the way she panted every time she had to squat in readying the bonfire. Poor li'l rich gal, the thing that would most likely make her eyes catch fire was one thing he wasn't about to offer.
Hutch cussed softly at himself for the vagrant moving mental image of himself with her. He wasn't fair, letting himself be revulsed by her when she'd done nothing to provoke it. All the same, he reflected as he brought out the preheated banquet from the modern 'chuckwagon', he mustn't give her any signals she could take amiss. Cleve Hutcherson could imagine nothing more terrifying, more unmanning, than wallowing with Eve Simpson. That was because Hutch was a man with a narrow imagination; an hour after sunset his imagination would be immensely expanded.