“My apologies, good sir,” Dr. Landscomb said. He didn’t look sorry to Luke Honey.
“Oh, dear.” Lord Bullard lurched to his feet and made for the woods, hands to his belly.
The Texans guffawed and hooted, although the mood sobered when the wolf howled again and was answered by two more of its pack.
Mr. Williams scowled, cocked his big revolver and fired into the air. The report was queerly muffled and its echo died immediately.
“That’ll learn ’em,” Mr. Briggs said, exaggerating his drawl.
“Time for shut eye, boys,” Mr. Williams said. Shortly the men began to yawn and turned in, grumbling and joshing as they spread their blankets on the floor of the lean-to.
Luke Honey made a pillow of the horse blanket. He jacked the bolt action and chambered a round in his Mauser Gewher 98, a rifle he’d won from an Austrian diplomat in Nairobi. The gun was powerful enough to stop most things that went on four legs and it gave him comfort. He slept.
The mist swirled heavy as soup and the fire had dwindled to coals when he woke. Branches crackled and a black shape, the girth of a bison or a full grown rhino, moved between shadows. It stopped and twisted an incomprehensibly configured head to survey the camp. The beast huffed and continued into the brush. Luke Honey remained motionless, breath caught in his throat. The huff had sounded like a chuckle. And for an instant, the lush, shrill wheedle of panpipes drifted through the wood. Far out amid the folds of the savanna, a lion coughed. A hyena barked its lunatic bark, and much closer.
Luke Honey started and his eyes popped open and he couldn’t tell the world from the dream.
Lord Bullard spent much of the predawn hours hunkered in the bushes, but by daybreak he’d pulled himself together, albeit white-faced and shaken. Mr. Wesley’s condition, on the other hand, appeared to have worsened. He didn’t speak during breakfast and sat like a lump, chin on his chest.
“Poor bastard looks like hell warmed over,” Mr. Williams said. He dressed in long johns and gun belt. He sipped coffee from a tin cup. A cigarette fumed in his left hand. “You might’ve done him in.”
Luke Honey rolled a cigarette and lighted it. He nodded. “I saw a fight in a hostel in Cape Town between a Scottish dragoon and a big Spaniard. The dragoon carried a rifle and gave the Spaniard a butt stroke to the midsection. The Spaniard laughed, drew his gun and shot the Scot right through his head. The Spaniard died four days later. Bust a rib and it punctures the insides. Starts a bleed.”
“He probably should call it a day.”
“Landscomb’s a sawbones. He isn’t blind. Guess I’ll leave it to him.”
“Been hankerin’ to ask you, friend — how did you end up on the list? This is a mighty exclusive event. My pappy knew the Lubbock Wellocs before I was born. Took me sixteen years to get an invite here. And a bribe or two.”
“Lubbock Wellocs?”
“Yep. Wellocs are everywhere. More of them than you shake a stick at — Nevada, Indiana, Massachusetts. Buncha foreign states too. Their granddads threw a wide loop, as my pappy used to say.”
“My parents lived east of here. Over the mountains. Dad had some cousins in Ransom Hollow. They visited occasionally. I was a kid and I only heard bits and pieces… the men all got liquored up and told tall tales. I heard about the stag, decided I’d drill it when I got older.”
“Here you are, sure enough. Why? I know you don’t give a whit about the rifle. Or the money.”
“How do you figure?”
“The look in your eyes, boy. You’re afraid. A man like you is afraid, I take stock.”
“I’ve known some fearless men. Hunted lions with them. A few of those gents forgot that Mother Nature is more of a killer than we humans will ever be and wound up getting chomped. She wants our blood, our bones, our goddamned guts. Fear is healthy.”
“Sure as hell is. Except, there’s something in you besides fear. Ain’t that right? I swear you got the weird look some guys get who play with fire. I knew this vaquero who loved to ride his pony along the canyon edge. By close, I mean rocks crumbling under its hooves and falling into nothingness. I ask myself, what’s here in these woods for you? Maybe I don’t want any part of it.”
“I reckon we all heard the same story about Mr. Blackwood. Same one my Daddy and his cousins chewed over the fire.”
“Sweet Jesus, boy. You don’t believe that cart load of manure Welloc and his crony been shovelin’? Okay then. I’ve got a whopper for you. These paths form a miles wide pattern if you see ’em from a plane. World’s biggest pentagram carved out of the countryside. Hear that one?”
Luke Honey smiled dryly and crushed the butt of his cigarette underfoot.
Mr. Williams poured out the dregs of his coffee. He hooked his thumbs in his belt. “My uncle Greg came here for the hunt in ’16. They sent him home in a fancy box. The Black Ram Lodge is first class all the way.”
“Stag get him?”
The rancher threw back his head and laughed. He grabbed Luke Honey’s arm. There were tears in his eyes. “Oh, you are a card, kid. You really do buy into that mumbo-jumbo horse pucky. Greg spotted a huge buck moving through the woods and tried to plug it from the saddle. His horse threw him and he split his head on a rock. Damned fool.”
“In other words, the stag got him.”
Mr. Williams squeezed Luke Honey’s shoulder. Then he slackened his grip and laughed again. “Yeah, maybe you’re on to something. My pappy liked to say this family is cursed. We sure had our share of untimely deaths.”
The party split again, Dr. Landscomb and the British following Scobie and the dogs; Mr. Welloc, Luke Honey and the Texans proceeding along a parallel trail. Nobody was interested in the lesser game; all were intent upon tracking down Blackwood’s Baby.
They entered the deepest, darkest part of the forest. The trees were huge and ribboned with moss and creepers and fungi. Scant light penetrated the canopy, yet brambles hemmed the path. The fog persisted.
Luke Honey had been an avid reader since childhood. Robert Louis Stevenson, M.R. James, and Ambrose Bierce had gotten him through many a miserable night in the tarpaper shack his father built. He thought of the fairy tale books at his aunt’s house. Musty books with wooden covers and woodblock illustrations that raised the hair on his head. The evil stepmother made to dance in red hot iron shoes at Snow White’s garden wedding while the dwarves hunched like fiends. Hansel and Gretel lost in a vast, endless wood, the eyes of a thousand demons glittering in the shadows. The forest in the book was not so different from the one he found himself riding through.
At noon, they stopped to take a cold lunch from their own saddlebags as this was beyond the range of the lodge staff. Arlen trotted from the forest, dodgy and feral as a fox, to report Scobie picked up the trail and was hoping to soon drive the stag itself from hiding. Dr. Landscomb and the British were in hot pursuit.
“Damn,” Mr. Williams said.
“Aw, now that limey’s going to do the honors,” Mr. Briggs said. “I wanted that rifle.”
“Everybody wants that rifle,” Mr. McEvoy said.
Mr. Williams clapped his hands together. “Let’s mount up, muchachos. Maybe we’ll get lucky and our friends will miss their opening.”
“The quarry is elusive,” Mr. Liam Welloc said. “Anything is possible.”
The men kicked their ponies to a brisk trot and gave chase.
An hour later, all hell broke loose.
The path crossed a plank bridge and continued upstream along the cut bank of a fast moving stream. Dogs barked and howled and the shouts of men echoed from the trees. A heavy rifle boomed twice. No sooner had Luke Honey and his companions entered a large clearing with a lagoon fed by a waterfall, did he spy Lord Bullard and Mr. Wesley afoot, rifles aimed at the trees. Dr. Landscomb stood to one side, hands tight on the bridle of his pony. Dead and dying dogs were strewn everywhere. A pair of surviving mastiffs yapped and snarled, muzzles slathered in foam, as Scobie wrenched mightily at their leashes.