There was no question of making a fire to cook the meat once he had caught it. Malcolm carried no matches, and a fire would surely attract the men. At first he had to force himself to gag down the raw meat, still warm from the living blood, but he learned. Before long, to his surprise, he liked it best that way.
The days stretched out, one indistinguishable from the next. During the nights he continued his aimless travels. Once he circled back to where the village of Drago had been. Nothing was left but ashes. Everything gone. Everyone dead. Malcolm never went back again.
And yet Malcolm sensed he was not alone. They were out there somewhere, others of his kind, running and hiding just as he was. He longed to find them, join them, but he did not know how. Sometimes in the night he could hear the howling. And he cried.
The nights grew colder. During the days it rained often. Malcolm learned to make a more sturdy shelter of evergreen boughs, overlapping them so the needles pointed downward and formed a runoff for the rainwater. He sat cramped for long, cold hours in his shelters, hugging his knees and shivering.
There were fewer men in the forest hunting him now. The danger was not as great, but it was still there. As the scent of the men grew fainter, Malcolm grew careless.
His misstep came on a stormy evening as he searched along the trail for the makings of a shelter. He was hurrying, hunched against the rain. Still, had Malcolm been alert as he normally was, it would never have happened. Before him on the trail was a patch of ground covered with leaves. He should have seen that the leaves lay in an unnatural pattern. But this time he did not look before he stepped.
For a moment he did not know what had happened to him. There was a frightful crunching sound and searing pain shot up through his right leg. He fell heavily to the ground. The pain tore at him like fiery claws. On sheer instinct he tried to scramble to his feet, but the leg would not bear his weight. And something was holding it. Something heavy.
When he looked down, there below the tattered end of his pant leg he saw the steel jaws gripping his ankle. The flesh of his lower leg was shredded, and pinkish-white shards of bone jabbed out through skin. Blood seeped into the cracked leather of his shoe. He tried to move his foot. The grinding sound was almost worse than the new flash of pain. He fainted.
The night was an endless agony with long, dark periods of tortured dreams and stretches of consciousness during which he tried to rip his foot free of the steel trap. Clouds rolled down from the mountains and opened in great torrents of icy rain. Thunder boomed and echoed in the hills. Lightning streaked the sky where it was visible through the treetops.
Malcolm thrashed about on the ground in delirium. While his mind whirled, strange things happened to his body. Once he brought his hands to his face and in a blaze of lightning he saw the pads and claws of an animal. Or did he dream that? Reality blurred as the pain took possession of him.
The storm thundered and crashed through the night, then faded. The dawn was bleak and damp. A steady rain continued to fall. Malcolm awoke slowly in a fever, and for an instant he did not know where he was nor how he had come there. He should be in a warm bed, not out freezing in the forest. Then the pain hit him again, clearing his mind, and the memory of the terrible night came back. He shifted his position and the steel jaws ripped his flesh. The trap. He remembered the trap. But he forgot everything else when he looked up and saw the giant.
Well, maybe not a giant, but a big, big man. From Malcolm's point of view, lying there on the trail, the man loomed like a mountain. The wild beard and the hair that hung to his shoulders were a dark, fierce shade of red. One of his hands could have covered both of the boy's. His chest and shoulders were massive as granite. He wore tough, ragged jeans and a buckskin jacket. Even through his pain Malcolm felt fear, sensing the immense power in the big man's body. Then he saw the giant's eyes. They were brown and bright and immeasurably kind.
The giant knelt beside him. Malcolm saw the brown eyes narrow with reflected pain when he looked at the ruined ankle. When Malcolm tried to sit up, the giant pressed a strong, gentle hand on his forehead and eased him back down.
"You sure got yourself into a fix, son." The bass voice rumbled up from the deep caverns of the giant's chest. "You'd best lie still while I have a look."
He moved with uncommon grace for a man of his great size. He was careful to shield the ankle from Malcolm's eyes with his body as he examined it.
"Son of a bitch," the big man rumbled. "Steel teeth, double spring. These mothers are illegal."
Malcolm winced as the big man's hand touched his foot. "Easy, pardner. I know it hurts, but the first thing we've got to do is get this thing off you. It's going to hurt even more in a minute when I pry it loose, but there's no easy way to do it." He turned his head and the kind brown eyes looked down into Malcolm's. "How about it? Can you stand a little more hurt right now?"
Malcolm nodded.
"Good boy. Close your eyes for a minute. Close 'em real tight. Think about the happiest time you ever had."
Malcolm closed his eyes. He tried very hard to think of a happy time, as the big man had told him. But no thoughts would come. Only a blackness with fire and screams of the dying.
There was a loud metallic crack and another fiery shot of pain in his ankle. Malcolm's eyes snapped open. The big man knelt beside him now, holding the cruel steel trap in both hands.
"This is what grabbed you, son," he said. "Damned foul contraption." Then, as the muscles in his arms and shoulders bulged, he twisted the trap like the jaws of a shark until the end of a spring popped loose with a loud twang. He tossed the broken trap into the brush and returned his attention to the boy.
"You okay?"
Malcolm nodded, blinking back the tears. He was afraid to trust his voice, not wanting to show weakness before the big man.
"Ready to take a walk?"
Malcolm looked down helplessly at the mangled ankle. It was free now of the steel jaws, but the torn flesh had turned a puffy blue-black shade. The foot pointed down and back at an impossible angle.
The big man again shifted his body to cut off Malcolm's view of the ruined ankle. "Oh, I'll do the walking," he said. "It's going to jostle you a little bit, but we've got to get you out of here." He slipped his powerful arms beneath the boy and scooped him up as easily as though he'd been stuffed with feathers. The big man rose effortlessly to his feet and started along the trail.
"Feel like talking?" he said.
Malcolm tried, but the best he could do was a small whimpering sound.
"Don't blame you," said the man. "I'll do the talking, then. I'm accustomed to that. And you can listen. That'll be a rare treat for me. Have to talk to myself most of the time."
The big man strode easily through the brush, carrying Malcolm in such a way as to minimize movement of his ruined ankle. The rhythm of the man's pace lulled the boy into a semidoze. When he spoke, the big man's rumbling voice was comforting.
"My name is Jones," he said. "There used to be more to it, but I figure that doesn't matter, seeing as I'm the only one living out here, and not likely to be confused with anybody else. The folks in town know who Jones is. The crazy hermit, some say. The last of the hippies. Nature Boy. I couldn't care less what they call me, just so they leave me alone. And they do. I've been living out here almost twenty years. Never have trouble with people. If you never see them, you can't have trouble with them."
They continued for several minutes in silence before Jones spoke again. "Well, I do see a few people now and again. Hikers. Bird watchers. Lost kids sometimes. Hunters I have nothing to do with. When the animals start shooting back, then maybe I'll talk to hunters. Mostly I meet youngsters out backpacking. They remind me a little of myself back in the sixties. They're not as serious about things as my generation, maybe. More interested in getting a good job than banning the bomb, but I guess you can't blame them. It was a lot easier to get angry about a war if they were liable to draft you to go fight it.