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“I don’t,” Mildred said. “Does anybody?”
“Ever hear of them attacking a camp or house?” Krysty asked.
“No. But they been getting’ pretty bold this season.”
“Why didn’t the people in Stenson’s Creek gaudy think to blame them first,” Ricky began, “instead of—”
“Yeah,” Ryan said, just emphatically enough to shut off the youth from blurting any more. “Never heard mention of them before now.”
Ricky’s dark eyes got big, and his cheeks flushed. Ryan couldn’t stop him wearing his heart on his sleeve. Fortunately their host seemed too preoccupied to notice.
Ricky’s close friend Jak shot him a wicked grin, half-sympathy, half-derision. Ryan had ordered the albino to sit in with them to learn whatever the woodsman had to impart. Jak had complied unwillingly, since he considered this with reason to be enemy territory, and that it was therefore even more urgent than usual that he be on patrol for danger. But he obeyed Ryan, as he generally did. Krysty suspected Jak understood the wisdom of Ryan’s wishes in this case, unlikely though he was to ever admit it.
“Like I say,” Abe went on, “they come and go. Like, from generation to generation. They seem to resurge every generation or two. Most of the settled folk, in the villes and such, forget about them, or think they’re just made-up stuff. But the oldies, out in the hills—they know. They remember. And this year—well, they seem to be gettin’ more aggressive than ever.”
“What about you?” Krysty asked. “How do you manage to survive?”
Abe grinned with strong, surprisingly white teeth.
“I’m reckoned by some a fair shot with a blaster, hand or long.” He patted the flintlock rifle he’d laid by his side on a coyote-skin cover.
Krysty shot a sidelong look to Mildred. The other woman nodded. She was clearly impressed; good shots rarely claimed to be, in her day or this one.
“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 СКАЧАТЬ