James Axler - Forbidden Trespass

“You a hunter, too?” J.B. asked.

“Hunter. Trapper. Fisherman. Gatherer. Bit of whatever I need to be. Come from a long line of mountain men and women, I do.”

“‘Mountain men’?” Doc echoed. “You mean, like the solitary fur trappers and traders from earlier in my— That is, back in the early 1800s?”

Not everyone would have got a reference to such ancient history, but Abe brightened right up. He nodded.

“The very ones,” he said. “I’ve spent time in the Rocks myself, and up in the Dark range. Used to get to rendezvous in Taos each spring, like olden times. That’s where I learned my wilderness chops, from my poppa and momma.”

“Reenactors,” Mildred said, with a certain reflex distaste.

Abe looked at her blankly.

“Guess not,” she said sheepishly. “Your ancestors—culturally, at least— they were reenactors. But I reckon you and your people have been the real deal for decades.”

“Mebbe,” Abe said, clearly not getting her meaning.

Mildred’s smooth brown forehead wrinkled. “Also, how do you even know folks hereabouts are scared of these things? I thought you were a hermit.”

He laughed. “Oh, I am, I am. But that doesn’t mean I spend all my time alone in these woods and karst plains. Even a man like me gets tired now and then of listenin’ to nothin’ but the wind and the brook and the hoot-owl cries. Also I got what you might call a bit of a thirst, although I learned to keep a pretty tight rein on it, after some unfortunate happenin’s at Rendezvous a few years back… Anyhoo, I head in every once in a while to Stenson’s Creek gaudy, trade some pelts or gewgaws I make or trade for elsewhere, for the jack to wet my whistle. Was just in last week. I heard the stories then, mostly in whispers.”

He paused to drink out of a canteen that seemed to be a corked clay pot, carried in a pouch filled with damp moss, evidently to keep it cool.

“Also, sometimes I come across isolated camps of woodcutters and hunters or other folk not too unlike myself, or of travelers. I talk to them, just like I’m talkin’ to you. And they tell stories that are even scarier. And sometimes…”

He shook his head.

“I find a site in some double-lonely and isolated spot that’s deserted, and shows signs of a scuffle. Tracks so blurred up even I can’t identify them. Dead remains of a fire that been kicked asunder. Once or twice a spatter of dried blood on the grass or a berry-bush branch. Signs somethin’ bad happened to the former occupant. Mebbe done by a bear or a painter. But mebbe not.”

After a moment of uncomfortable silence, Ryan said, “So you know these woods.”

“They’re my home.”

“You managed to catch any of these coamers? And why ‘coamers,’ anyway?”

“Second question first,” Abe said. “Dunno. People just allus call them that, when they speak of them, which as I think I indicated, is mostly in whispers.

“As for your first question—nope. No luck there, either.”

“Not track?” Jak asked. He seemed to be studying the stocky man intently. The albino tended to be dismissive of everybody else’s talents in the woods, and compared to him, most humans were as clumsy and oblivious as drunken bears. Even Ryan and his strong right hand, J.B., both of whom were adept woodsmen by most mortal standards.

But the younger man’s red eyes were narrowed and thoughtful. Krysty thought to see at least a glimmer of respect for the self-proclaimed mountain man. She wasn’t sure what Jak was basing his judgment on; he put less stock in words than J. B. Dix, and that was saying plenty. But whatever he saw in this man, it looked genuine to him. Or so she sized it up.

“They don’t leave much sign,” Abe said. “Not even scat. And that looks just like a normal person’s, if tendin’ to be runnier than most. I don’t reckon they get much roughage in their diet. But they’re elusive as puffs of wind, and only rarely much easier to see.”

“Ever chill one?” J.B. asked.

“Had to fire ’em up a couple times. Just in the last month. They never plagued me before, other than I suspect them of raidin’ my snares for squirrels and rabbits and the like. Hit a couple, too, judgin’ by the squallin’ I heard and the blood I found on the leaves nearby. But I couldn’t prove it. I never found a carcass. It seems they take their chills with them as well as wounded.”

“To eat later?” Ricky asked in a tone of eager horror.

The mountain man shrugged. “Seems likely.”

“So even you can’t track them, is what you’re saying?” Mildred said.

Krysty felt a moment’s apprehension that her friend’s usual bluntness—or tactlessness, more closely—might annoy their host, which would be a pity just as the grouse were smelling done. But the man just nodded.

“Not far, anyway. After a few steps it’s like they vanish off the face of the Earth.”

Krysty looked around. Her friends seemed as distressed by the revelation as she was.

“How do you reckon they do that?” Ryan asked. “I doubt they fly. Or use magic.”

“Oh, no,” Abe said, grinning. “They go to ground, like foxes.”

“What do you mean?” Mildred asked.

“I mean when they vanish, I usually find some kind of hole in the ground nearby. No more than a coyote burrow would have for an entrance, commonly. But they’re built on the slim side, and don’t seem like they’d need much room to wiggle through.”

Jak frowned at the revelation. Krysty guessed it was because he himself had not yet spotted the fact.

“They have dens?” Ryan asked.

“Mebbe. But remember this district is peppered with sinkholes like a plank shot with buckshot, and honeycombed by caves beneath. They could have a whole underground empire with roads and villes, for all we know.”

That struck Krysty as fanciful. It surprised her in someone as practical and…earthy as Abe seemed to be. All the same, he seemed pretty sharp, and his kind of life would offer plenty of time for flights of fancy.

“Ever checked?” J.B. asked.

“Do I look like I got a death wish, friend? Also, you’ll notice I’m built more for endurance than agility. If I could fit myself down one of them rabbit holes, I shudder to think what might be waitin’ for me on the other side.”

Krysty’s mind filled with a vision of Blinda’s face—or the raw red concavity where it had been—and she shuddered too.

“Anyhoo,” Abe said, reaching for a spit, “looks as if our dinner’s ready to serve. Now—”

His black eyes got wide, seemingly fixed right on Ryan. He slapped leather with his right hand.

At the same time, Ryan, staring right back, went for his own blaster.

As quick as a pair of diamondback rattlers, the two men drew their weapons, pointed them straight at each other and fired.

“Anything?” Wymie asked.

She stopped to catch her breath and wipe sweat from her brow with a handkerchief. She was used to hard work in the hot sun, but not all this walking up and down hills, bashing brush most of the time.

Her cousin Mance, face streaming sweat from under a bandanna, shook his head. “Not yet, Wymie.”

He sounded worried. She understood. She had started out with nineteen or twenty helpers. The past two days of fruitless searching had whittled them down to a round dozen.

“Should we head back to the Mother Road,” asked Dorden, who to Wymie’s amazement was not one of the ones who had abandoned her, “or keep searching this area?”

She shook her head helplessly. Who knew it would be this complicated, hunting for her sister’s killers?

Because the outlander coldhearts only ever came to Conn’s gaudy house, or rarely to Sinkhole proper by way of it, she reckoned their hideout had to lie somewhere to the west. So they’d started out following the Mother Road, which paralleled Stenson’s Creek away from Sinkhole, to begin her search.