Outlaw Red

by Jim Kjelgaard

  In the black night Jake reached for his shotgun, loaded with buckshot this time, and for a powerful torch which he had walked twenty miles to buy. The torch, of the newest and latest make, would shoot a dazzling white beam a thousand feet and focus on whatever might be around. The light had cost Jake a great deal of money that he could ill afford to spend, and he had bought it solely to have such a light around if the killer came to his clearing at night.

  Out in the darkness all the sheep were bawling now. Jake heard the patter of running hooves and a sharp thud as some luckless animal flung itself against the corral. But Jake did not hurry. Bitter personal experience had taught him the craft and cunning of the raider. Only a man who was equally crafty and cunning could hope to get a fair shot at it.

  Very slowly, careful not to make a sound, Jake walked to the cabin’s door, lifted the latch, and opened the doer. He had prepared for this, too. The door latch and hinges were kept so well-greased that they could be moved and worked without the slightest squeak.

  A step at a time, knowing exactly where to place his feet so no squeaky or creaking board would betray him, Jake went out onto his covered porch. Only when he stood on the outer edge, where he had ample room to swing his gun without danger of interference, did he stop.

  The corralled sheep were bleating and bawling a nightmarish, discordant medley of terror. Jake brought the shotgun to his shoulder, slipped the safety catch, and with his left hand raised the torch so that its beam would point where the shotgun was pointing. He lighted the torch.

  Dazzling white light stabbed the darkness and held the corral and part of the barn in its brilliant beam. The sheep, still bleating and bawling, had re-treated to one end of the corral and bunched there, as though they would somehow find safety in their very numbers.

  Jake swore under his breath. Careful as he had been, the raider had outwitted him. Probably he had betrayed himself by some unintentional sound too faint for human ears, but loud enough for the keen ears of the night-raiding pirate. In any event, there was nothing in the corral except sheep. Jake crisscrossed the clearing with his torch. He swore again, loudly this time, centered the ivory bead of his shotgun on a running creature that was just leaping into the forest, and pressed the trigger. The shotgun belched its leaden buckshot and Jake pressed the other trigger to shoot the left barrel.

  The shots were fired more in frustration and rage than for any practical reason. Even as he shot the first time, Jake knew that his target was already safe among the trees. Nevertheless there was a faint hope that he might hit something, and Jake fired the second barrel because of that hope.

  He reloaded his shotgun and stood still for a moment, cold fury distorting his face. He had not brought the raider down but he had seen it. For the second time he had seen it.

  It was a big, red dog, doubtless the same that, a few days ago, had come openly into his clearing. At that time, never suspecting that a raider as clever as this one would come in broad daylight, Jake had had his shotgun loaded with bird shot. Mourning doves came into the clearing every evening, and Jake had had a light load because he hoped to get a couple. He knew he had stung the dog with bird shot, but he hadn’t expected to kill it with such a load.

  Obviously it was a bold devil, crafty and fearless, and more than slightly contemptuous of the men from whom it took such a high tribute. Jake felt a cold shiver tremble up his spine. Such a beast, too familiar with men, might not hesitate to kill a man should circumstances demand it. Maybe it had even come back to attack his sheep for revenge. The thought inspired more than a little fear.

  Jake left the porch and lighted his way down to the corral. He played the light over the frightened sheep, then on the trampled floor of the corral. Another explosive oath ripped from his lips. Three sheep lay where they had fallen, their throats sliced cleanly and their blood flowing into dark puddles under the light. A little wind moved their bedraggled wool.

  Fiercely Jake swung back toward the forest. Every Inch of the trees bordering the clearing he searched with the torch while his finger itched on the shotgun’s trigger. Then, finding nothing, he turned to the task at hand. If the dead sheep received prompt attention he could send them to market early tomorrow morning. He himself would not go. There was a score to settle and, as he worked over his murdered stock, Jake swore a solemn oath that he would settle that score.

  When the dressed and skinned sheep were properly hung in the cool night air, Jake stretched out to spend what remained of the night near his corral.

  He awoke with the first glow of morning. Unless he could watch them every minute, he did not dare let the corralled sheep loose to forage for themselves. If they were not safe in the corral, they were in ten times as much danger out in the clearings or in the forest. Jake threw them some hay that he had cut to supply his stock through the bitter winter that lay just ahead, made himself some breakfast, and, with the shotgun under his arm, set off along a foot path.

  Twenty minutes later he was at the clearing of Tobe Miller, his nearest neighbor. Tobe put down his axe and came forward to greet him.

  “Howdy, Jake.”

  “Mornin’, Tobe.”

  Tobe Miller grinned. “What you loaded for? Bear?”

  Jake shook his head. “Dog.”

  “Dog?”

  “That’s right! Red dog nigh as big as a yearlin’ calf! He got three of my sheep last night! I saw him! ‘Tain’t a wolf at all that’s been cuttin’ our stock down!”

  “I’ll be jugged! Could of swore it was a wolf! I run across one of his kills up in the back lands and it sure looked to me like a wolf kill! I poisoned it.”

  “It’s a dog,” Jake said positively. “I saw him. Tobe, we got to kill him or we won’t have nothin’ left!”

  “We got to get him,” Tobe admitted. “But how?”

  “Put every man as can handle a gun into the hills and hunt him down. If we can’t do that, maybe we can run him out.”

  “Might work,” Tobe conceded.

  “It’s got to work. I’m goin’ to see the Prentices, the Carters, and the Aliens. Think Rose would hitch up and take my three sheep into Cottstown for me? They’re butchered and hangin’ near the barn.”

  “I’m sure she would,” Tobe assured him. “I’ll cut into the hills myself as soon as I’ve had somethin’ to eat. I’ll beat the brush up around Forks Valley. Come eat with us?”

  “No thanks. I’ll be gettin’ on.”

  Jake visited the three clearings of which he had spoken, and told his story. At each clearing one or more gaunt hill men, who knew from firsthand experience the difficulty of just earning a living on their rocky, rough farms, listened attentively. These were men who understood completely the seriousness of having a stock killer loose, and they also knew the ways of animals. All agreed to join in the hunt for Sean, and they divided the country so that there was no nearby section which would not be thoroughly covered by at least one expert huntsman.

  Jake hurried back to his own clearing. He knew exactly where he had watched Sean enter the forest last night, and went to that place. The trees and nearby brush were scored and torn where the buckshot had ripped through them, but there was no blood. Jake gave a moment to deep thought.

  He would know how to look for a wolf, but a dog turned outlaw was a different problem. He might be anywhere. There was no hope of tracking on the snowless ground, and therefore the only thing to do was look everywhere.

  Jake swung up a ridge, traveling fast because it was an aspen ridge with few thickets and almost no cover. The raiding dog was very cunning; there was little chance that he would go where he would not find cover. When he came to a brush-grown valley, Jake proceeded more cautiously. He saw five deer, a brood of grouse, numerous rabbits, and even surprised a wild turkey on the ground. But there was no dog or even any dog tracks. That evening Jake returned to his clearing.

  Early the next morning he was out again. He combed every ridge, every valley, and every thicket in the territory assigned to him and st
ill did not see a dog. On the third day he jumped a coyote out of a little draw and brought it down with one shot.

  Nor did the rest come any nearer to bagging a big, red dog, although the Carter men brought in three coyotes and Tobe Miller shot a lynx. Not one hunter had had so much as one look at Sean. On the night of the fourth day, all the hunters gathered at Tobe Miller’s house. Nobody was sure as to what they should do next, but young Price Alien offered a constructive suggestion.

  “Maybe he’s gone,” he said. “It’s all right with me if he has. I can’t afford to lose another calf. If he hasn’t gone, and comes back to kill again, we’ll get him sure when snow flies. Give us a chance to track him, or set a hound pack on his trail on snow so we know where they’re goin’, and he won’t get away.”

  *

  High on a timbered ridge, Sean slept peacefully with his head curled against his silken flank. It was not a haphazard or ill-chosen position, certainly not the sleeping place Sean might have selected a week before. All about him huge pines, their pitch-sticky trunks bare of limbs for thirty feet or more, waved green branches that whispered quietly high above him. Beneath the big trees was a cluster of young pines from two to five feet high and with limbs that grew almost to the needle-littered ground. It was in the small pines that Sean bedded. Nothing on the ground could see him unless he chose to be seen.

  The bed had another advantage. The winds, which were beginning to lose their summery warmth, swirled all about the little pines. Not only was Sean himself well-hidden and sheltered, but the various breezes would bring him warning of anything that might care to seek him out.

  Two hundred yards down the slope, a pair of antlered bucks, half in play and half in earnest, parried and thrust with their antlers. Before very long, when the mating season was fully upon them and the real battle for does began, the same two bucks would battle until the smaller flung himself away, perhaps with a long-tined antler deep in his chest.

  Just over the rim of the slope, rabbits played about, and high in one of the pines a coal-black squirrel jumped from sturdy branch to swaying twig as he practiced new aerial maneuvers. The squirrel, a creature which fascinated Sean, lived in the pines but made long trips to the bordering beeches in order to collect and store his winter’s supply of food.

  Sean twitched in his sleep, aware without awakening that a new creature had come upon the scene and was within scenting distance. It was a black and white heifer, the same one Tobe Miller had been trailing when he found and poisoned the doe’s carcass. For centuries all the heifer’s ancestors had been gentle, barn-abiding creatures that lived and died solely to serve the needs of man. But the seeds of wildness, after a lapse of many generations, had sprouted anew in the heifer. She could stand nothing of restraint, neither four walls nor pasture. Now, wild as any elk and just as crafty, she lived the never-hampered but always-perilous life of a wild creature. But, unlike Sean, she had chosen it voluntarily.

  Suddenly awakened, Sean raised his head and glared suspiciously about. He was annoyed and slightly nervous; even while he slept he thought he knew everything about him, and yet he had been struck on the head by some light object. The Setter glanced up into the nearest pine, hid his irritation, and yawned widely to prove that he had never really been bothered at all.

  Teetering on a limb was Silverwing, the raven. Bigger than a crow, and shaggy instead of sleek, Silverwing had come by his local name because of the three bright, silver feathers that gleamed in his black wing. About to drop another pine cone on Sean’s head, Silverwing chortled and chuckled because the first had been effective. A master of the practical joke, Silverwing knew very well that the first cone had alarmed the big Setter, and he was gleeful about it.

  From off in the forest came three rasping caws and Silverwing flew away as silently as he had come. His mate, having found food, was calling him and she would not eat until he came.

  Sean rose, yawned, and stretched. He looked off in the direction Silverwing had taken, still faintly annoyed. But there were too many things of the present for Sean to concern himself with the past or future.

  That night he had lingered in Jake Busher’s clearing long enough to see Slasher attack the sheep and kill three. Then he had seen the coy-dog’s hasty departure and Jake’s light, and let both serve as a warning to himself. But when he ran from the clearing, with the sound of tearing and thudding buckshot to speed him on his way, Sean had not run very far.

  He had gone to the nearest rabbit thicket, and there he had ambushed and eaten another rabbit. Prowling through the night, he had lain up in a different thicket when daylight came. Twice that day had Jake Busher passed within feet of him without seeing him or even suspecting that he was near. Thus did Sean prove his possession of qualities which no completely wild creature owns.

  Slasher, or any experienced wolf or fox, would have smelled the man coming and slunk out ahead of him without being seen. An inexperienced beast might have waited until Jake was very near, then broken, run, and offered Jake a good shot. But Sean

  had stayed right where he was, never moving at all. None knew better than he that men had great and mysterious powers at their command; what besides man could reach out and injure a thing that he could not personally touch? But when it came to wood

  craft, the keenest man could not compare to the dullest wild creature.

  After that there had been more hunters. Four times had Sean lain without moving while a man who would have taken his life passed less than a stone’s throw away. Not once had he been discovered.

  But the invasion by armed huntsmen had proven too much for Slasher’s hair-trigger nerves. Sean had run across his day-old trail near the head of Forks Valley, and again three miles farther north. Slasher was leaving, at least until the hornets’ nest which he himself had stirred up quieted down and he could safely return.

  Sean left the little pines, walked to the edge of the slope, and felt up-blowing air fresh and cold in his face. Nothing on the hillside had changed except that the sparring bucks had broken apart and gone their separate ways. Sean stopped to snuffle the place where they had been.

  A growing uneasiness and a dismal sense of loneliness sat heavily upon him. Sean had never been born to walk alone. Unlike Slasher, who was entirely self-sufficient and who thought of and needed only himself, Sean alone could never be happy. He needed someone or something to share the lavish love that he had to spare. Hungry, but not caring to hunt, he padded uneasily back and forth on the side of the slope.

  There was a rustling, a cracking of brush, and Tobe Miller’s runaway heifer rose from her bed to look belligerently at him. The runaway, fully aware of her own size and strength, had no intention of hiding from anything as small as a dog. She shook her horns threateningly and made a short little charge. Sean ducked sideways into the brush and loped away from her. He had no quarrel with the heifer. It never occurred to him that he could or should hunt anything so big. He just felt that he would be better off if he avoided her.

  The heifer went back to the thicket to chew her cud and to switch the few flies and gnats that had not yet been driven into hiding or killed by frosts. Sean continued to cast nervously back and forth. He was still hungry, but lack of company provided a more heartfelt ache than lack of food.

  A big buck, its neck faintly swollen as a sign that the rut, or mating season, was about to begin, moved slowly out of his way, then stopped to glare at him. Sean paid no attention.

  Night fell, and the unsatisfied longing within him became more intense. He sat down on a rocky ledge that overlooked a deep valley, thrust his tail straight out behind him, adjusted his front paws, pointed his muzzle at the sky, and wailed his heartbreak to the wilderness.

  Rising to a high crescendo, and dying away in a series of sobbing little noises, his mournful dirge rolled forth. On a faraway hillside a hunting fox paused to listen, and knew the sound for what it was. The fox went on with his hunt. His own mate was safe; somewhere on the hillside and not too far away she was hunt
ing, too. Neither the fox nor his mate could concern themselves with a lone, luckless dog.

  When he had finished his song Sean felt better, and descended to the valley. There a good-sized creek, low from the summer’s drought and not yet replenished by the autumn rains, wove a tenuous way around sun-baked rocks or gathered itself in placid pools. Sean had discovered three days ago that some of the pools, shallow and almost landlocked, contained fat suckers that had no place to go except the length and width of the pool. He had found that he could catch the suckers.

  Unhesitatingly he plunged in, sending a great splash of water high into the air and watching through fading ripples as a school of suckers swam away from him. Sean flung himself on the ripples and snapped at shadowy fish that flitted past on both sides. His jaws found and clamped on a two-pound sucker. He ate.

  After his meal he felt the urge to run, and he lengthened out to fly along the stream bed. His wild race became a sort of mad flight. Heedless of anything save the wind that lashed his face, he left the water course to race straight up a mountain. Though his tongue lolled and he was exercise-warmed, he did not stop to drink.

  Pressed by a great urgency to do or find something, Sean himself was not sure what he sought. He relaxed his run into a mile-eating trot, but hour after hour, stopping for nothing and always traveling in a perfectly straight line, he flew along. The night was half spent when he became aware that he was approaching a human habitation.