Lost in the Dark Unchanted Forest. John R. Erickson

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СКАЧАТЬ seen a bobcat on this ranch in years. Number Four, this track was made by an exceptionally large boar coon.

      “Number Five, I’m betting he’s still hiding on the ranch; and Number Six, our primary mission on tonight’s patrol will be to search him out and throw him off the place before he gets into some serious mischief.”

      “You mean . . .”

      “Exactly. Prepare for combat, Drover. Catch all the sleep you can between now and dark. I have a feeling we’ll need it.”

      He sniffed at the track. “It sure doesn’t look like a coon track to me.”

      “Stick with what you do best, son. Sleep. I’ll get you up at 2100 hours.”

      At precisely 2100 hours I awakened Drover and we began what turned out to be one of the most dangerous patrols of my career. It began in a fairly routine manner, with us checking out the saddle shed, the medicine shed, the sick pen, the front lot, and the side lot.

      Nothing. And yet . . .

      Maybe I have a sick sense, a sixth sense, that is, about these things, a still small voice that warns me when something isn’t right. It was trying to warn me when I headed for the feed barn.

      We stopped in front of the door and I dropped my voice to a whisper. “Drover, my hunch tells me that our friend the coon is in the feed barn. Chances are that he has busted into a sack of horse feed and he’s eating the corn and molasses out of it. I’ll go in first.”

      “I hear that.”

      “We’ll hold you in reserve just outside the door. If things get bad, I may have to call you in. Come on, let’s move out.”

      I slipped up to the door. This is the one that’s warped at the bottom, you might recall, which allowed me to wiggle the top half of my body inside without committing the bottom half. Once in that position, I did a scan and . . .

      I wiggled outside again, leaned my back against the side of the shed, and laughed. I couldn’t help it. It was just too good to be true.

      Drover watched me with a puzzled expression. “What’s so funny?”

      “You won’t believe this. We have just been handed the best ornery prank of the year. You know who that is in there? Not a coon, Drover, but Pete the Barncat!”

      “Pete? Are you sure?”

      “He must be looking for mice, see. He’s got his front-end on the ground and his hind-end up in the air and his head between two bales of hay. He thinks he’s all alone in the world, and when I go crashing in there and jump right in the middle of him, he’ll think he’s been attacked by a big boar coon!”

      “Sounds pretty good . . . if it is Pete.”

      “Of course it’s Pete. Don’t you think I know the scent of a cat?”

      “Yeah, but . . .”

      “The place reeks of cat. Why, he couldn’t smell any cattier if he’d been living in the wild for the last six months.”

      “Hank?”

      “Hush. The time has come. Stand by for a barrel of laughs, because I’m fixing to let the cat out of the bag.”

      “Yeah, but which cat?”

      I slipped through the door again, all the way this time. A few arrows of moonlight were coming through the cracks in the roof, just enough so that I could make a visual confirmation of my original nosatory data. Everything checked out. We had us a cat cornered, fellers, and the fun was about to begin.

      I took a big gulp of air, leaped through the air, and yelled, “Watch out for the boar coon, Pete!”

      I had reached the apex of my dive and had begun my downward arc when I noticed . . . hmmm, Pete’s tail had been shortened. And come to think of it, his coat had changed colors—white with dark spots—and . . . by George, he looked bigger than I . . . real big, almost the size of a . . . HUH?

      Holy smokes, do you realize how big and tough bobcats are? They’re terrible! I wouldn’t jump on a bobcat for all the bones in Texas, and yet . . .

      I tried to make some mid-course corrections, began moving my front feet in a dog paddle mode, but it was too late. I straddled him, fellers, landed right in the middle of his back.

      You think a bobcat can’t buck? Think again. He throwed an arch in his back and blew me right out of my rigging. I went straight up in the air, hit my head on a ceiling joist, and started back down. But before I hit the ground, this giant maniac of a cat slapped me across the mouth with a paw that was about the size of a T-bone steak.

      That sent me flying in a different direction, south this time, until I came to the south wall, and at that point I came to a sudden stop and dropped in a heap on the floor.

      I was seeing stars and checkers and little pink elephants with umbrellas, but that didn’t keep me from getting a real good look at the monster cat: big, mean, ugly, ferocious. Your ordinary bobcat is about two or three times the size of your ordinary barncat. This guy was two or three times the size of your ordinary bobcat.

      I’d seen him before, at a distance. His name was Sinister the Bobcat. He was a cold-blooded professional killer with a rap sheet as long as your leg, and I had definitely made a big mistake.

      “Drover, I don’t want to alarm you, but at this moment I am trapped in the feed barn with a gigantic bobcat.”

      “Oh my gosh! Then J.T. was right about the tracks!”

      “I wouldn’t put it exactly that way, but the point is that our main column is surrounded. It’s time to bring up the reserves.” I heard the swish of something moving through the air at a high rate of speed, then silence. “Drover? Drover!”

      The runt had abandoned me. Sinister took a step in my direction, his long white teeth glowing in the darkness.

      “Hi there, you’re Sinister the Bobcat, I believe. We haven’t met, but I . . . you probably won’t believe this, but I came in here looking for a cousin of yours, Pete the . . . yes sir, old Pete and I have been friends for . . . obviously you’re not Pete and I probably ought to be . . .”

      He took another step towards me, and I could tell at a glance that he didn’t want to talk about his kinfolks.

      “Now Sinister, I’ve always figgered that there’s a middle ground between surrender and annihilation, and if you’d care to discuss . . . ”

      Sinister wasn’t a talker. I knew that the in­stant he knocked me back up into the rafters. Coming down, I tried to latch onto one of the ceiling joists but couldn’t quite hang on. I headed for the floor again, but never reached it because Sinister caught me under the chin with a roundhouse right that sent me flying south again, only this one knocked me through the window, thank goodness.

      There was an explosion of glass and I woke up, draped over one of the lower branches of an elm tree. I climbed out of the tree and tested my wobbly legs. I still had all four of ’em.

      I СКАЧАТЬ