The Hunting Tree

by Ike Hamill

  Mike nodded and leaned back. He positioned his hands on the right side of the wheel so he could pull the vehicle left. Barely slowing, Mike tapped the brake pedal as the truck raced towards the stop sign. Melanie turned to look for the monster. As Mike whipped the truck around the turn she saw the hulking dark form zip off into the woods.

  Her heart slowed, as if it were freezing in her chest. “He’s coming,” she said.

  Once they’d safely made the turn, Morris turned to assess how much ground they had lost. “What do you mean?”

  “Through the woods,” said Melanie, “he’s going to cut us off.”

  This proclamation seemed to wake Susan from her stupor. She spun to her left, smacking her hands against the window, trying to peer into the woods passing by. “Faster!” she cried.

  “I’ve got it floored,” Mike yelled.

  Melanie leaned over Davey and joined her daughter at the side window.

  “We’re doing almost seventy now,” said Mike. “I’m certain he can’t go that fast.”

  “Not alone,” said Davey.

  “Do you know where he is?” Melanie turned to her son. “Like before? Can you tell?”

  “He doesn’t want me to know,” said Davey. “And there’s nobody else to see him.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Susan.

  “We’re coming up on the highway,” said Mike.

  “South,” said Morris.

  “Yes, south,” agreed Melanie. “My mother-in-law lives down that way.”

  “Okay, hold on to something,” said Mike. “I don’t want to lose speed.” The SUV had an even harder time with the right turn. The high-speed turn made the vehicle lurch to the side. At the apex of the turn, when Mike was losing confidence that the vehicle’s wheels would stay planted on the pavement, Morris reached over and corrected the position of the steering wheel. He gave a little ground to the radius of the turn but all four tires stayed on pavement.

  Mike merged with the sparse highway traffic and nudged the SUV up to seventy-five before setting the cruise control.

  “Won’t this thing go faster?” asked Melanie.

  “We can’t afford to get pulled over,” said Mike. “And I think this should be fast enough to gain some ground.”

  “What about gas?” asked Melanie.

  “What’s that?” Mike glanced in the rearview mirror.

  “You said we needed gas—how much is left?”

  “Oh,” said Mike. He studied the instruments. “A little less than a quarter tank, whatever that means. Fifty miles, maybe?”

  “We’ll need more,” said Morris. He fished out his cell phone and pulled up his address book.

  “Why? Where are we going?” asked Mike.

  “We’ve got to see my cousins,” said Morris. “They’re the only ones who can help us.”

  “This is crazy,” Susan interjected. “Mom, why are you going along with this. This is all Davey’s fault. Why did you get us into all this crazy stuff?” she shoved her brother. He sat motionless, not reacting to the push.

  “Susan,” said Melanie. “None of this is your brother’s fault.”

  “Whose fault is it then? That thing is chasing him. He’s only been dreaming about it forever,” she asserted.

  In the front seat, Morris connected with his cousin. Melanie hushed her daughter so she could hear the conversation. As Mike drove steadily down the highway, everyone in the car listened in on Morris’s end of the phone call.

  “S’me,” he said when the connection was made. “That giant’s awake,” he said. “I know.” He listened for a long time, Melanie began to wonder if his cousin was still on the line when he talked again. “Maybe hour and a half.” He disconnected the phone.

  Waiting for the call to end first, Susan started up again—“Why do we all have to run away if it only wants him? Let these guys take Davey and we can just go home.”

  “That’s enough.” Melanie shot a look at her daughter. “We’re a family and I intend to keep it that way. Now hush so we can figure out what we’re going to do.” She turned her attention back to the front seat. “Who was that?” she asked Morris.

  “My cousin,” he said.

  “And what was that all about? Does he know about this thing too?” she asked.

  Morris shifted around so he could look to the back seat. He looked down at Davey for a moment before he spoke, but the boy didn’t meet his gaze. “I talked to my cousin about the giant a few days ago. He and his brother know about this kind of stuff. They keep the history of our family. I’ll tell you what they told me. It’s not very much.”

  Mike kept his eyes pegged to the road, but his attention was focused on the deep-voiced man in the passenger seat. In the back, Melanie leaned forward, ready to absorb any information. Her daughter looked out the window and pretended not to listen. Davey appeared to be deep in thought.

  “I’m not much of a storyteller, but what my cousin said was something like this,” he said. “A hundred generations ago, ancestors of my blood lived just south of here. They were just beginning to stay settled year-round, instead of moving with the seasons. They lived simply. The families farther north were always slightly more advanced. They built better shelters and made better pottery.

  “The runners came early for the summer gathering one year. This would have been between four and five thousand years ago, but it’s impossible to know for sure. Nobody kept track of the years until much later. When the runners showed up, lots of people thought another war party was coming, but they came to warn of a different threat. The message was about a giant killer, moving amongst the families and murdering the sick and weak. The runner gathered a pledge from my ancestors—we would all help dispose of the monster in an unprecedented cooperative effort.”

  “I don’t see what any of this has to do…” Melanie began.

  Morris silenced her objection by simply raising a finger. He spoke slowly—“Hundreds and hundreds of the most skilled hunters and warriors from every family within traveling distance gathered to form this mob. I heard about the chase when I was a kid, when we’d pester my great uncle into telling us a story. Even when I was young I understood the hyperbole inherent in the tale. His stories were always full of talking rabbits and enormous flying turtles. But when Mike and I started to track this beast from the cave in New Hampshire where it must have slept through the years, I couldn’t ignore the similarities to my uncle’s story.”

  Mike stole a glance at his passenger, the normally silent Morris. He wondered if Morris had ever strung that many words together before in his life. The answer seemed obvious—this type of long-winded explanation was like a hundred-year storm for Morris: he might not talk ever again.

  “So you’re suggesting that thing slept for millennia and then woke up to hunt my son?” Her arm, protectively around Davey, drew him in close.

  “Yes ma’am,” said Morris.

  “That’s just absurd,” she said. “I can’t explain what I saw running behind the truck earlier, but nothing can live for five thousand years.”

  “I never took my uncle’s stories as gospel, but sometimes his explanations made more sense than anyone else’s. In this case, he probably would have told you that the thing that woke up was a Tsi-noo. That’s something that used to be human, but its heart got replaced with ice when it lost its soul. According to him, those things could last forever because they weren’t really still alive.” He lowered his voice and leaned further between the seats. “They eat souls for their strength.”

  Behind the wheel, Mike shuddered and checked his mirrors. The highway was nearly empty.

  “But there’s another thing my uncle never talked about. It wasn’t one of his stories—it belonged to the grandmothers. They talked about the man who created himself, but sometimes it was a woman. Depending on who you talked to, that thing was the father or mother of everything. Not that I’m saying the thing that chased us through your neighborhood was that type of god, but I think its strength comes from t
he same well.”

  Melanie’s skepticism had been worn away by Morris’s persistence. She found herself leaning forward to hear the details. When Morris paused, Melanie noticed that even her angry daughter now hung on every word.

  “I’ll tell you what I mean—when we’d get together for the big family gatherings, we kids all slept together outside in sleeping bags, or under a big tent if it was raining. We’d run around all day long, but still couldn’t get to sleep at night. Kids would be whispering and playing jokes all night long. So one of the adults would tell us about the stages of the night. It was a way of scaring us into quieting down.”

  Beside her, pressed against her side, Melanie felt her son take in a large breath. She had assumed that he was in deep shock, and was barely processing the world around him. Now she wondered if perhaps he was in some sort of trance. When she remembered the pill, his behavior made more sense. Its intended effect was to relieve anxiety, but detachment was a common side-effect.

  “In the first stage of the night, the Stage of Possibilities, the rules of the world would change,” Morris continued. “That’s when your imagination could actually take legs and turn into something real; something with claws. I always thought that the man who created himself, Odzihozo, probably came forward in that Stage of the night. All the kids knew they’d better get to sleep before the Stage when anything was possible, or they’d end up calling forth something that could hunt.”

  “Who could sleep if they were that scared?” Melanie asked.

  “Once the extra adrenaline wore off, you’d be asleep before you even knew it. The parents probably figured that the kids would shake in their beds for a while and at least they’d be quiet until they crashed.”

  “That’s so cruel,” commented Melanie.

  “Maybe so, maybe not. If there’s any truth to it, then I think we can figure that’s where our thing came from.” He waved off towards the dark rear-window. “What if that thing was half Tsi-noo and half Odzihozo—the man with no soul that imagined himself into being. That thing would never have a reason to die, unless it was a reason that it believed in.”

  “Odzihozo,” whispered Davey.

  “I think you’re frightening the children,” said Melanie.

  “I wouldn’t doubt it,” said Morris. He pulled back around to the correct side of his seat and settled back.

  “So wait a second.” Mike interrupted the silence. “Why are we going to your cousins’ house again? Do they have some sort of magic or something that’s going to stop this thing?”

  “Nope,” said Morris, “but they’ve got plenty of guns.”

  “Guns?” asked Melanie. “Didn’t you just say that it doesn’t have any reason to die?”

  “I did,” said Morris. “Where reason ends, gunfire starts.”

  “I’m not sure I’m on board with this plan,” said Melanie. “Why don’t we just keep running tonight and get out of range until tomorrow when we can get the authorities to help us.”

  “I feel strongly that we have to act now, tonight, while the creature is tired, maybe even injured, and hasn’t had a chance to rest,” said Morris.

  “But you’re assuming that it will keep chasing us. As far as we know, it has given up,” said Melanie.

  “It only moves at night,” said Morris. “If we make it to dawn and it still hasn’t attacked, then we’ll have all day to try your plan.”

  “Is it true that it only moves at night?” she asked Mike for confirmation.

  “Yeah,” said Mike. “And I have to agree about trying to hit it while it’s tired. I shot it a couple of times and it really did seem to slow it down. I just couldn’t finish the job before it had a chance to…eat.”

  “Well how about you guys do that, and we’ll just keep going south?” asked Melanie.

  “It’s after him.” Morris cocked a thumb over his shoulder without turning around.

  “So we’re going to your cousin’s house to have a big gunfight against the supernatural Methuselah, and you plan to use my nine-year-old son as some kind of bait?” asked Melanie. “I can’t go along with that.”

  “That monster is not going to give up,” said Mike. “Do you know how many people he’s killed already?”

  “Okay, we’ve had enough,” said Melanie. “Even if everything we’ve said here turns out to have some basis in truth, we’re done talking about it in front of my kids. They’re frightened to death already.”

  “We need a plan,” said Mike. “I agree it’s not perfect, but…”

  “Enough,” said Melanie.

  They drove in silence for several miles before the chime from the SUV made most everyone jump. Even Morris pulled away from the noise; Davey was the only one who didn’t flinch.

  “I think that means we’re low on gas,” said Mike. “The little pump light is on, and the needle’s just hovering about empty.” He peered at the gas gauge as if there was a chance of some mistake. They had already driven fifteen miles further than his predicted fifty miles.

  “There’s an exit in a couple of miles,” said Morris.

  Mike shut off the cruise control and let the vehicle’s speed drop a little as they exit neared. He pulled off to a small town built around the intersection of Route 1 and the Interstate. After stopping, Mike turned right and flipped on his turn signal at the first station. He waited for oncoming traffic to clear so he could make his left.

  “Anyone got a card?” he asked.

  “I lost my wallet,” said Melanie.

  “Pull to the next station,” said Morris.

  “How come?” asked Mike. Even though he didn’t have funds to purchase the gas, the price was cheaper at the closer station and he didn’t make a move to pull down the road.

  “Not as much cover,” said Morris. “We’ll be able to spot anything coming.”

  “We just covered seventy miles in an under an hour,” said Mike. “Even at the fastest we saw him run, we’d have an hour before he caught up, and his average speed is way lower than that.”

  “You’ve underestimated him before,” said Morris. “I’ll pay for the gas, but down at the next station.”

  “Okay, fine,” said Mike. He turned off his signal and pulled away.

  During the conversation, Davey began to move in his seat. He shed his mom’s arm from his shoulders and retrieved her wallet and keys from his back pocket. He straightened in his seat and turned towards his mother.

  She took then and looked into his eyes. “Hey, honey,” she said. “Are you feeling better now? You seemed a little out of it for a while.”

  “Mom,” Davey began, “I’m so sorry about all this.”

  “Oh, honey, no,” she shook her head and blinked back the tears welling in her eyes. “This is not your fault. Don’t ever think that.”

  “It is, though,” said Davey, his voice strangled by emotion. “I can’t even feel where he is anymore. He could be anywhere.”

  “He’s far away.” Melanie smoothed his hair. “We drove away, just like you wanted. Now he can’t get us.” She leaned over and kissed his young forehead. “Right?”

  “Yeah,” said Davey. A troubled look crossed his face.

  “Okay guys.” Melanie addressed the front seat with her new resolution. “We’re getting off here. Thank you for your help, but I’m taking my kids to my mother-in-law’s house.”

  “Thank god,” Susan said.

  Mike had the wheel cranked to the right as he pulled into the Morris-approved gas station, but he slammed on the brakes at the news. “What?” he asked. “The danger is not over. We need to stick together so we can be ready for this thing when it comes.”

  “What you’ve told me so far is that you need Davey so that you can have a chance at fighting this thing. I don’t have any intention of fighting. We’re just going to keep moving. What time is it? Midnight? She’ll be thrilled to hear from me.”

  “Mom,” Davey whispered, “it’s not far enough.”

  “It’s okay honey,” she said pulling in
close to a tight conference with her son and daughter. “We’ll get Grandma’s car and keep moving. In the morning we’ll call the police.”

  Davey and Susan nodded in agreement for the first time that evening.

  “Melanie, please,” said Mike. “You have to listen to me. You don’t know how dangerous this thing is.” Morris reached across the center console and touched Mike’s elbow, but Mike had one more plea—“Please come with us. We’ll help you stay safe.”

  “Thanks, but no,” said Melanie. “Although I appreciate the offer.”

  The SUV flowed with tension as Mike pulled up to the pump and shut off the engine. In the back seat, Melanie organized her children and led them all out her door. In front, Mike sat behind the wheel.

  Morris exited the vehicle, shut his door, and rounded the front to pay for the fuel. Melanie herded her kids towards the small store and had covered ten feet when Mike came trotting after.

  “Wait, Melanie,” he said, holding out his hand. “At least take Ken’s phone. You won’t have to call your mother-in-law collect.”

  In each of her hands Melanie held a child’s hand. She didn’t relinquish her grip to reach for the proffered phone. From his back pocket, Davey produced his mother’s phone. He tapped her on her arm.

  “Thanks, dear,” she said. She let go of his hand to shove the phone in her purse. “We’re all set, thanks,” she said to Mike.

  Mike nodded and walked back to the SUV, leaving Melanie to resume her march to the store. When he got back around to the other side, Morris had already started pumping the gas. Morris watched neither the pump display or the handle, his eyes focused on the empty lot just past the small parking lot.

  “I’ll do that,” said Mike. “You go talk to her. She trusts you more than she trusts me.”

  Morris turned over the pump handle to Mike, but didn’t move towards the store. Instead, he walked to the rear bumper with eyes still riveted to the spot where the glow of the station’s lights ended and the shadows began. “Give her a little time,” he said.

  “I’m not sure we have that much time,” said Mike. “Do you see something out there?”

  “Don’t know,” said Morris. He moved a few feet away from the truck, stepped between the pumps, and shielded his eyes from the glare of the overhead lights. “Probably a deer.”