“Yep,” Buster said.
And that was how it started.
Nine men went into the woods.
Myself. Buster Simms. Saul, Lester and John “Old Man” Gordeau. Dr. Harlan McElroy. Arthur Noble. Lawton Butler. The young carpenter Charley Wade.
Three dogs went also.
Lester had these dogs leashed, dogs his father had seen whelped and sold, but had now bought back. Even though he had only worked with them for less than a month, Lester knew these dogs and they knew him. The female, Delilah, was the biggest and best behaved. The boys, Mustard and Shep, had long since tested her and found themselves lower on the rope, so what she did they did.
The Gordeaus had taken these dogs to the Noble place to get their talented noses full of that smell. Their smell. It was strong to the dogs. They hated it and yet they pulled towards it, wanting their masters to extinguish its source. I was sure the dogs knew more about what was in the woods than we did; they had read libraries in the musk and saliva and hair left at the murder scene, and only Delilah’s faith in Lester’s divinity fortified her to drive the other two dogs towards those across the river.
We kept a good pace on the first leg of the journey. We crossed the river pulling the raft across in groups of three. Nobody said it, but all of us sensed that this time was for keeps, and that our hunt would turn around on us if we had not come back across by sundown.
As labyrinthine as those woods were, it was hard for me to see how we would.
We stopped at Magi Rock long enough to drink and to let the animals drink, and then we kept on. Summer was over now and the cool air let us push long and hard without rest. We had left the trail hours ago. None of us knew exactly where we were, but I got the idea that the dogs had been chasing something in circles, or, since we always seemed to be on new terrain, in a sort of broad, lazy spiral.
Looking up, I saw how yellow the trees were above us. Were we on higher ground? It was colder here than in town. Autumn was moving faster here.
It was a little like the Argonne, but for once I was afraid of something besides nonexistent Germans. The fear was almost good this time. There was a reason.
The dogs, who had been pulling us forward with purpose for many hours, were now becoming frantic. Lester had no gloves, so I’m sure even his callused hands were becoming raw from the strength in the leashes.
“Somethin’s close,” he said.
Time slowed down for me as it always did in the moments before some event. I looked down and saw my feet moving towards whatever was out there. One of my boots knocked the top from a mushroom. Sweat trickled in my shirt despite the chilly air. The air smelled clean and good. I opened my mouth to try to hear something besides the baying of the dogs, but I could not.
I marched forward with the rest of them.
Movement in the trees made Saul stop and raise his rifle, and the rest of us raised our weapons, too.
Something in the trees off to the left.
One of them.
I felt a tremor in my hands but willed it to stop. I rested my thumb on the hammer of my pistol.
One of them.
The dogs knew.
I knew, too. Which one of them it was. Knew it as surely as I had known my father was dead that night my telephone rang near midnight.
Where are your pants, my friend?
A flash of red in the trees.
“Show yourself,” Old Man Gordeau croaked next to me, then Buster said it louder.
The red flash again, faded cloth.
Pale yellowish skin.
“Hold your fire,” Buster said. “It’s a little girl.”
I moved sideways to get a better look.
I saw the dress, an old dress, faded nearly pink in places, hung on a small, thin figure standing in the brush fifty yards out.
But it wasn’t a girl. It was a mulatto boy of about thirteen.
The same boy.
The boy with no pants.
The dogs were losing their minds, barking with wide eyes, spittle flying from their mouths.
“God,” I said.
“Come over here to us,” Buster said.
But it didn’t move.
“Watch her,” Old Man Gordeau said, shouting over the dogs.
“I think that’s a boy,” said Charley Wade.
“God,” I said again.
It put its thumb in its mouth like a small child might, but there was no innocence to it.
I found my voice.
“That’s one of them. I’ve seen him.”
Saul raised his rifle.
“What do I do?” he said. “I don’t want to squeeze on no little boy.”
He said this mostly to his father, but his father didn’t answer.
Buster moved towards it, and it moved back. Coy like a little girl. The familiarity of the game raised the hairs on the back of my neck.
The whole party edged forward to catch up with Buster.
When Buster moved forward again, it retreated, keeping its distance exactly.
Calmly.
“Shoot that thing,” Arthur Noble said.
Buster said, “We won’t hurt you. It’s them we want.”
“Didn’t you hear Mr. Nichols? It is one of them. Shoot it!”
“No, Arthur. Not no kid.”
It was at that moment that Delilah yanked her leash out of Lester’s hand, startling him so that the other dogs got free, too.
“Hey!” Lester shouted after them, but it was too late. The three dogs charged hard at the boy. It ran farther into the woods. The dogs ran after it. We began to trot now, too, much slower than the dogs or what they were chasing. Just before the thing in the red dress fell completely out of sight, the dogs caught up with it and dropped it to the ground. I assumed from the thrashing in the ferns and leaves that the dogs were tearing the boy apart.
Then one of the dogs made a sound between a yelp and a scream and ran back towards us. The thing in the red dress was up now and running, far away in the trees.
I could see that it was chasing the other dogs.
Away from the party.
They vanished from sight.
The remaining dog was running towards us, trailing its leash behind it and shivering and crying pathetically. While the rest of us just stared, Lester went to the dog.
“Mustard?” he said, though how he recognized it I did not know.
The dog’s face was covered with blood, its own blood. Its nose had been bitten off, and one eye was out. It sat on its haunches and scooted away from Lester, trying to wag its tail and crying, bobbing its ruined head. Lester knelt to the dog and moved his hands around impotently, wanting to help it but afraid to touch it, just saying “Goodmustardgoodmustardgoodmustard” in a hopeless paternoster.
“Do it, boy,” the elder Gordeau said.
But Lester knelt there, wringing his hands.
So Old Man Gordeau shot the dog.
“Just let me see that goddamned thing again,” Saul said, whiteknuckling his rifle. “Just let me see it.”
He would get his wish.
WE TRUDGED FORWARD, following the tracks of the boy and dogs as best we could. Blood showed on the lighter leaves near the boy’s bare footprint, but soon gave out. Odd drops of blood had fallen here and there, and Lester would have other men stand at them, then rotate forward so the line of travel could be established.
Soon they came to a dip in the land with pooled blood and more torn and stamped-down grass and fallen leaves, and then the dog’s tracks stopped altogether.