Robert Calder - The Dogs

He tried to think, but specific inquiry seemed hollow and broader reflection was not possible alone, in the night, atop such a colossus.

The mountain's philosophy was mass, its existence stone. All else was fragile and transient.

Somewhere, Orph was on the mountain with him. He knew that. He felt the animal. Rationality would have called that a phantom construct of his desire. But the mountain dwarfed rationality into the meaningless frenzy of a sporing lichen. Orph was with him. They were drawing nearer.

It was time to sleep.

Orph dozed fitfully, ears erect and turning toward creaks and snaps, rustles and little scurries across the leaves, nostrils a-twitch. He opened his eyes frequently and rose to walk about in search of the flesh of the menace that stalked the night. The black and spotted raised their heads to watch him.

Orph stood on a bluff from which the mountain swooped long and unevenly down to the valley. Far, far below he saw a thin ribbon circling off to either side to disappear behind the shoulders of the mountain. Now and then little dots of greater brightness moved slowly along the ribbon. Once or twice he heard a tiny blare of sound that was a horn, and the muffled, indistinct whisper of something like a human voice that was a bullhorn.

Rising from the valley on occasional drafts was a great, nearly solid cloud of human scent, streaked round and through with the fire of savagery, of blood hunt It was not to be fought; it was to be fled.

Colonel Mulcahey's tie was loose, his sleeves rolled up. His cheeks were stub bled and they itched. His eyes were bloodshot. He'd drunk too much coffee and his stomach was sour. But he'd done it, the big map tacked to the wall of the communications trailer, his command center, was flagged the way he wanted it. The disparate and initially disorganized elements had been welded into a single coordinated force, liaison was smooth and fast, the mobile commissaries had got hot coffee and cold breakfast to everyone, the ammunition had been issued, and platoon leaders were standing by their walkie-talkies. He'd caught his second wind, and now he felt better. It was an hour after dawn.

A trooper opened the door. "Choppers coming, Colonel."

Mulcahey went outside, blinking in the fresh air. He hadn't realized how smoke-filled the trailer had become through the night. He ordered it ventilated.

Three helicopters were floating toward them through the deep notch between a pair of mountains to the south. The sound of their rotors became audible-whackatawhackatawhackata-then filled his ears, and the helicopters were hovering over the treetops across the road, downdrafts whipping branches about and billowing clouds of dust and stinging pieces of grit.

The men around the trailer put their hands over their faces and turned their backs.

Mulcahey went back in and spoke to the pilots over the radio. He went to the window and watched a helicopter soar off to either flank and disappear around the mountain. The one remaining passed directly overhead and moved 300 yards up the slope in front of the waiting police and guard line.

The radioman waited in his chair.

"All right," Mulcahey said, "move them out."

"Command to all units. Signal green. I repeat. Command to all units.

Signal green."

Around the base of the mountain, like a noose being tightened up a cone, Mulcahey's forces stepped forward and began to climb.

The scent broke over them in heightening waves. The black and the spotted trembled, watching Orph move back and forth across the bluff.

At last he spun, unable to resist the jangling alarms of his cells any longer, and they rushed to meet him with sweeping tails.

Orph leapt over the poles of the scrambled deadfall and thrust his head into the small mouth of the burrow. He roared at the two pups. They cowered back and mewled.

He struck into the woods with the black and the spotted.

They ran with their heads high and tails flowing back, circling to gain the far slope, where there would be the hard bulk of the mountain between them and the men, where they could flee down the side to the valley, and up other mountains, until the air was cleansed of men and their slaughter.

But the scent, which was nearly palpable now, stayed always at their side, edging them higher, and it channeled across their path, and they were unable to plunge through it, it was there, always, in front of them, and grudgingly Orph gave way to its relentlessness and turned higher, to find and top the thickness and come down its other side.

Several times, as the morning passed, a strident thing in the air approached them, and Orph led them to cover and they crouched looking upward even though they could not see and waited until the racket thinned to nothingness, and then they ran again.

By midday, Mulcahey's forces were halfway up. The ring was shrinking and thickening. Soon he'd begin ordering units to drop out at staggered intervals, so he wouldn't lose efficiency to density.

Clearing logistics problems along the way had taxed him and finally begun to drain his reserve strength, but he knew he could keep his mind clear and stay on his feet until sunset, when the circle would be closed. Not one sighting had been reported, and he couldn't prevent an infiltration of unease, but his conviction and confidence remained firm.

In the early afternoon he consented to see the reporters, consented in the service of his own morale.

The sun was falling down meridian. Bauer didn't have his watch. He guessed it to be around three-thirty, four o'clock.

Standing on a high jut of rock and looking down through the rifle's scope at its highest magnification, he could see small figures beating their way slowly upward. He reckoned they'd reach the top in two hours.

He walked back off the jut and sat at the bottom of the thirty-foot spine of bald rock that was the crest of the mountain. The ground around him was stoney and what grass grew there was tough and rasp-edged and sere. In a semicircle, at a distance of a hundred yards or less, was the end of the treeline: twisted, water-starved trees, hideous and awesome in the frantic intensity of their survival.

Bauer sat with the rifle across his knees.

His body was still, but within, he convulsed and sickened under the chaotic turbulence that flung Orph back and forth across the mountain, drawing him ever nearer.

The racketing came upon them when they were clawing up a barren ridge.

Orph scrambled the last few feet and raced into cover, the black at his side.

The spotted dog fell and slid halfway down the ridge. It stopped against a boulder and lunged upward again.

"Contact! Contact!" the radioman shouted.

Mulcahey threw a switch that sent the signal through the general speaker. "-on the top, running now, into-"

"This is Mulcahey," the colonel interrupted. "Identify yourself." "-a stand of… This is Abel Bird, Colonel."

"Give me your coordinates." The pilot did. Mulcahey said, "Where is he now?"

"We're coming up on brush growth, maybe fifteen hundred square feet, he made it in there, he's out of sight now."

Mulcahey paused, then said, "Get right over the top. Go down as low as you can. Hold there. Jockey back and forth if you have to. Beat him out with your downdraft and take him when he breaks. If he won't break, keep your position until the ground forces reach you, and pour some fire in there."

The pilot moved his two-man open-doored craft over the brush. The trooper seat belted next to him carried a 12-gauge riot gun. The downdraft whipped the brush around.

Crouched in the black shadow of a layered rock ledge, Orph and the black watched the helicopter lash the brush around and raise a storm of dust and leaves. Orph pricked his ears and creased his brow. His teeth showed. The black hugged the ground, ears against his skull and eyes squinted.