Ike Hamill - The Hunting Tree Trilogy

Mike approached and found the tracker studying the bodies of the decapitated bats.

“I thought those would be gone by now,” said Mike, “carried off or something.”

“Nothing’s going to touch these,” said Morris, his voice echoing slightly in the cave’s depths.

“How come?”

“I don’t know,” said Morris. “But I don’t even want to touch them.”

Neither man spoke for a few minutes while Morris shielded his eyes and tried to look into the darkness of the cave.

“Are you going in there?” asked Mike.

“Nope,” said Morris. “Nothing to see.”

“So what do you make of this?” asked Mike.

“Something strange,” said Morris. “Don’t know what yet.”

“Can you tell anything from all this? Any ideas at all?”

Morris turned his gaze to the horizon and then glanced back down to the ground, as if he were watching something move across the landscape. When his eyes touched the edge of the forest, he looked back to Mike. “Your man’s big,” he said.

“Yeah, I thought so. I told you about the footprint, right? It was right over here." Mike crossed to the sandy place and pointed down, but when he looked up, Morris was already headed back for the big rock and the trail back to his truck.

Mike scurried behind him to catch up.

“So, are you going to help me track him?” he asked.

Morris kept walking, but turned his head briefly for his monosyllabic answer. “Yup.”

THEY TOOK SEPARATE CARS all the way to Montville, where they joined up in the parking lot of a shopping mall near the highway. Morris studied several USGS maps in silence for the better part of twenty minutes while he traced his finger between the points of the murders.

“You have a street address on the latest?” he asked Mike.

“No,” said Mike. “They just said Sandham Depot, which is a little suburb north of town here." He pointed to a tight grid of roads edged by railroad tracks. Tight contour lines described the tall hills encompassing the neighborhood.

“We need to go there,” said Morris.

“Let’s go,” said Mike.

Those were the last words either man would speak for an hour. Each time Mike would open his mouth to say something, he would glance at Morris and get the distinct feeling that his conversation would fall on deaf ears. He thought that Morris’s feelings for him were something less than contempt, but perhaps bordered on apathy.

When they reached Sandham Depot, Morris drove his truck up and down several side streets. Mike finally found his tongue.

“What are we looking for?” he asked.

“That,” said Morris.

He parked across the street from a slightly rundown old house with a realtor’s sign in the yard. Mike almost missed the thin strip of yellow tape sealing the front door, but saw it once Morris pointed it out. Pulling down the street a few more car-lengths, they both saw the yellow markers set up in the back yard.

Morris located their position on the map and then repeated his silent finger-tracing until he landed on a point north of their location. He pulled away from the curb and moved through, heading towards the northern ridgeline.

“Shingles,” he pointed.

Mike looked that house in the direction of Morris’s finger, but couldn’t decipher what he was supposed to see.

“I don’t get it,” he said, shaking his head. “Some of them look blacker, is that it?”

“They’re darker because they’re not as weathered,” Morris explained. When Mike still didn’t get it, he explained further—“The ones on top were torn off, there, there, and there." He jabbed his finger at three points leading from the gutter to the roof. “Something climbed that roof quickly.”

“You think our guy scaled that roof?”

“He ran over that house like it was porch stairs,” said Morris.

“Wow,” said Mike.

“Yup,” replied Morris.

THE NEXT PHASE of Morris’s investigation involved driving slowly up Route 203, just east of Snow Pond. Mike fidgeted and sat on his hands. He finally lost his struggle with his own silence.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “How are you going to see anything on this road?”

Morris didn’t answer, but continued to scan the grassy ditch on the side of the road.

“This murder was days ago,” said Mike. “They showed helicopters looking for this guy. He’s long gone. Shouldn’t we be looking like forty miles from here or something?”

Morris shot a look at Mike and then pulled off the road where the shoulder widened slightly. Mike thought that Morris had stopped to address him, but was surprised when Morris simply used the wider patch of road to turn the truck around.

The quiet tracker pointed to the right as they drove south. “Swamp,” he said. Then, a few hundred yards later, he pointed again and said, “Lake.”

Pulling over at the driveway to a camp, he pulled out his laminated map. Tracing his finger around contour lines, he pronounced his judgement. “Chased from here,” he pointed, “he would have fled through here.” His finger showed a path skirting between the swamp and the lake. “You say he’s heading towards the Brunswick dam on the Androscoggin.”

“Yeah, that’s definitely where he was heading. All four of these locations point to it, and that’s where we first used the amplifier. I really do think he must be headed towards that spot,” said Mike.

Morris tapped the map. He thought several moments and then decided—“We have to wait for him to make another move.”

“What? Why?” asked Mike. “I thought you were on his trail.”

“We can’t catch up to him. He’s too fast. And he knows he’s being chased, so he’s changing his course randomly. If you’re right about his destination then we could wait there, but I think it’s best if we wait for him to make another move and then try to guess when he’s going to get there.”

Morris stowed his map, pulled out of the driveway, checked the road behind, and pulled back into the southbound lane.

When he got the truck back up to speed, he spoke without turning towards Mike—“Why are you looking for this thing anyway?”

“Pardon?” asked Mike. Morris’s low, quiet voice was absorbed the ample road noise of the old truck.

“Why track this thing?” Morris asked again.

“Oh,” said Mike. He was startled that he didn’t have an answer at hand and had to think carefully. “I think maybe I had a hand in waking it up,” he said eventually.

This time Morris glanced at Mike before speaking. “You believe that?”

“I guess,” said Mike, sitting back in his seat. He had leaned forward to hear Morris’s question. “I guess I also feel guilty about Gary, and he believed there was something interesting to find in those mountains. I want to prove him right; not that it changes anything.”

Morris nodded. Mike felt like they had made a connection with that answer. He hoped to make Morris genuinely interested in the quest to track down the killer before the taciturn man discovered that Mike didn’t have money to pay him for his services.

“What do you think it is?” asked Mike.

When Morris didn’t answer, Mike wondered if Morris had heard the question.

“Still don’t know,” Morris said. Mike leaned back again, figuring the conversation had concluded, but Morris started talking again. “My grandfather used to talk about an Armless Hunter. He would stalk the night and destroy those who wronged him. He had no eyes or arms—just legs and a neck that ended with a thousand teeth. He was a mortal turned supernatural; immortal.”

“I’ve read about that,” said Mike.

Morris drove another mile before continuing. “These victims are too spread apart, and not connected,” he said. “Doesn’t fit the Armless Hunter.”