by Steve Haynes
They hike. She doesn’t know for how long. Two hours, maybe. Or more. Time is counted by her steps, and her breaths. An endless procession. Only the dog breaks the repetition. Like yesterday it acts as their scout, darting ahead or to the sides, before racing back to rejoin them. Sometimes it goes far enough that she loses it completely in the mist. At one point, she realizes she hasn’t seen it for a while.
‘Vargas . . .’ she says.
From up ahead comes a ferocious yapping, and the dog reappears. It streaks towards them, wild-eyed, trailing trickles of urine in the snow. Its tail is straight back between its legs. Vargas shouts at it, cuffs it, then holds his palm up for them to halt.
Nicole’s rifle is already in her hands, even though she can’t remember reaching for it. When she moves to slide her finger on the trigger, she finds that her glove gets in the way. She shakes it off, discards it in the snow. Through her inner glove she can feel the chill of the gunstock. She is not shaking. Her hands are steady.
‘We can’t kill it,’ she says, mostly to herself.
Vargas is clumsily removing his rifle from his back. The dog crouches at his side, ears flat back on its head. The mist seems to have thickened, pressing in on them. Nicole looks first one way, then the other. She sees nothing, hears nothing. They are floating in a void. In front of her, Vargas finally has his rifle ready. He turns unsteadily, looking beleaguered and bewildered. She will always remember his face in that moment. Pure terror. As if he’s been struck suddenly, inexplicably blind.
‘I can’t see fuck all,’ Sam whispers.
She glances behind her; he is fiddling with his glasses, trying to de-fog them. As she turns back, she hears a whispering sound, and a section of mist seems to shift, morph, as if it’s taking shape and coming alive. Then Vargas is gone. Just gone. Off to the left there is a splash of snow; kicked up by the impact of man and animal. The dog is barking insanely; Sam is shouting behind her. She raises the rifle, sights along it, and hesitates. The two figures are tangled together, thrashing around. In the flurry of white, the fury, it’s difficult to tell them apart and she doesn’t know what to shoot at, doesn’t know what to kill. Then it rears and roars, draws back as if to attack again, and as it plunges down she fires, once, the report resonating right through her body.
Then Sam shouts: ‘There!’
His rifle patters, unleashing a drumroll burst. Around the mass of flesh and fur she sees the impact of the bullets – churning up snow.
‘Hold it!’ she screams. ‘Vargas is under it!’
Sam stops firing, the echoes fading away like thunder. Then the only sound is the dog, yapping in panic. Right next to it, directly in front of her, is an empty pair of snowshoes. Vargas was snatched right out of them.
‘I didn’t even see it happen,’ Sam says.
Holding their rifles ready, they shuffle forward. A big furrow has been ploughed in the snow where the animal landed with him. As they approach, she sees that it is not quite as big in length as she expected. But it is broad, especially in the haunches. Its thick hind legs are splayed out behind it, and it is slumped on its right side. In that position, lying limp and lifeless, it looks harmless as a stuffed animal.
‘Is it . . .?’
‘I think so.’
The fur coat is bloody, riddled with holes. There is blood, too, in the surrounding snow. Beneath it is Vargas. Both man and beast are still, as if they’ve fallen asleep together. A peaceful repose, of predator and prey. Nicole drops her rifle, kneels and shakes him, shouts his name. No response. But he’s breathing.
It’s only when she and Sam try to shift the animal off him that they see how oddly the two are interlocked. The cat’s mouth is wide open, hungering for him. The barrel of Vargas’s rifle is wedged sideways between the animal’s jaws, and its extended cuspids are resting up against his abdomen. As far as she can tell he’s not injured there. It looks as if, when it attacked, he turned his rifle sideways in defence, submitting to the animal rather than trying to kill it – which is probably what saved his life.
The local clinic is a low brick structure that was once a military barracks, a remnant of the first cold war. The walls and ceilings are encrusted with green paint that is flaking off in palm-sized patches. Vargas has been assigned a private room near the rear of the building, on the recovery ward. When Nicole walks in, the blinds are closed and Vargas is sleeping. He has a neck brace on – from whiplash, apparently – and both his forearms are wrapped in bandages. Several ribs were broken, too, but overall his injuries were relatively light. At the sound of her footsteps, he jerks awake – tugging on the wires attached to his hairy chest, nearly pulling over the heart-rate monitor.
Then he sees her, and sighs. ‘Is you.’
She holds her hands up, fingers curled like sets of claws. ‘Bad dreams?’
He laughs, weakly, then starts coughing. It goes on a long time and ends with him clearing his throat. He spits into a tissue, folds it up carefully, and tucks it away.
She asks, ‘Have you had that cough checked out?’
‘Is nothing. Is fine.’
She shakes her head, crosses to the window, and throws open the blinds – letting in a wash of wan light. He shields his eyes and blinks back the brightness.
‘So,’ he says, his voice still hoarse. ‘You save me, Sam says.’
She nods. As it turned out, it was her bullet – that first one – which killed it.
‘Somebody had to. It was you or it.’
He tilts his head and squints at her. ‘Maybe you wish you have missed?’
‘My bosses do. I’ve been on the phone with them all morning.’
‘You are in trouble?’
‘I’ve been temporarily relieved of my position.’ When he just stares at her, she’s not sure if he understands, so she adds: ‘I’ve been suspended. Fired, basically.’
‘Is so stupid,’ he says. ‘They will save a tiger instead of me.’
‘It was more than a tiger.’
‘Is very true,’ he says. ‘So fast. So powerful.’ He holds up one hand, and smacks it with the other, acting out the attack in pantomime. ‘Like that. You saw?’
‘Yes – incredible.’
‘And the teeth. This long!’ He extends his arms to demonstrate, looking as excited as his son. ‘It was – how do you call it? Sword-tooth? Like a sword-tooth?’
She smiles. ‘A sabre-tooth. Not quite. But it was similar.’
‘It looks at me, you know.’ He holds two fingers up to his eyes. ‘There. Like that. It sees into me. It came for me. To tell me things. You understand?’
She nods. She is standing over him, hands clasped, gazing down; light from the window casts a cross on his bed. Something about the situation – their postures, the setting, the solemnity – makes her feel like an abbess, taking his confession.
‘What did it tell you?’ she asks.
He looks down into his lap, and plucks at the sheet tucked across his abdomen. ‘That time – it is running out. For us, for it, for everything.’ He glances once at her, almost timidly. ‘Is hard to say in English. You must learn Russian. Then I tell you.’
‘It’s a deal.’
He yawns, looking like a tiger himself. ‘You leave now?’
‘I have a train to catch,’ she says.
‘Go then – go back to your city. Is safer there, no?’
She reaches over to clasp his hand. He winces, and when she lets go he shakes it out – pretending that she’s hurt him. ‘You are too strong,’ he says, ‘for a woman.’
In the doorway, as she’s leaving, she meets his wife and son coming in. The woman – Anya – glances at her, sniffs, and brushes by, almost as if she blames Nicole for her husband’s condition. Little Nicholas gets tugged along behind his mother, but he manages to look back at Nicole, raising his bad arm to wave good-bye.
Nicol
e lingers in the hallway to watch as they converge on Vargas. His son scrambles onto the bed; his wife wraps him up in her arms. She is scolding him and crying at the same time. He murmurs to her in their language, the tones gentle and reassuring. Before they notice her spying, Nicole turns and walks quietly away.
Out front, Sam is waiting in Vargas’s truck, ready to take her to the station. He honks twice when he sees her. The dog is in its usual position on the front seat, and the radio is turned up high – blasting out scratchy Russian rock.
‘You fixed his stereo,’ she says.
‘Just a loose wire. I think he broke it on purpose.’
Sam hums along to the tune as they rumble down the highway. The pavement is soaked in slush; the snowbanks at the roadside have shrunk in on themselves. The weather has turned surprisingly mild, almost like a winter chinook back home. They ease past a mud-spattered tractor, and Sam leans forward to turn down the music.
‘Think you’ll have space for those hides?’ he asks.
‘Space for what hides?’
‘The sable. Vargas didn’t tell you?’ He jerks a thumb at the rear window, towards the truck bed; she can see the hides back there stacked under the tarp. ‘He wanted you to have them, as evidence.’
‘I’ll make room,’ she says.
‘Who says a tiger can’t change its stripes, huh?’
‘What about the haul in the shed?’
‘We’ll need time to catalogue it. Could give us some leads in tracking down buyers and suppliers. Think your organization would agree to send us some help?’
The dog whines and nuzzles into her lap, its tail going like a metronome.
‘They might back it,’ she says, idly scratching its ears. ‘But I doubt anybody would be stupid enough to volunteer to work with you assholes.’ She thinks about it for a moment, and then adds, ‘Except maybe me.’
When they both laugh, the dog perks up and cocks its head, as if trying to understand the joke.
ADAM L. G. NEVILL
Pig Thing
Darkness they could taste and smell and feel came inside the house. Peaty and dewy with wet fern, it came in damp and cool as the black earth shielded by the canopy of the mighty Kauri trees, as if rising upwards from the land, rather than descending from a sinking sun. The branches in the forest surrounding the bungalow became skeletal at dusk, before these silhouettes also vanished into the black of a moonless country night. Had they still been living in England, it would have been an evening when bonfires were lit. And to the three children, although these nights were frightening, they had a tinge of enchantment in them too, and were never that bad when their parents were inside the house. But tonight, neither their mother or father had returned from the long garden which the enclosing wilderness of bush tried to reclaim.
Dad had ventured out first, to try and get the car started in a hurry, shortly after nine o’clock. Twenty minutes later, her face long with worry, Mom had gone outside to find him and they had not heard or seen her since.
Before their mom and dad left the house the three children remembered seeing similar expressions on their parent’s faces: when Mom’s younger sister caught cancer and when Dad’s work closed down, just before they all travelled out to New Zealand in the big ship for a fresh start on the day after the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. Tonight their parents had done their best to hide their expressions. But the two brothers, Jack who was nine, and Hector who was ten, knew the family was in trouble.
Together with Lozzy, their four year old sister, Jack and Hector sat in the laundry room of the bungalow with the door shut; where Mom had told them to stay just before she went outside to find their father.
Jack and Lozzy sat with their backs against the freezer. Hector sat closest to the door by the bottles and buckets that Dad used for his homemade wine. They had been in the laundry for so long now, they could no longer smell the detergent and cloves. Only in Lozzy’s eyes was there still some assurance of this situation becoming an adventure with a happy ending, and them all being back together again. They were large brown eyes, still capable of awe when she was told a story. And these eyes now searched Jack’s face. Sandwiched between his sister’s vulnerability and the innocence that he could still recognise in himself, and his older brother’s courage that he admired and tried to copy, Jack found it his task to stop Lozzy crying.
‘What dya reckon, Hector?’ Jack said, as he peered at his brother while trying to stop the quiver on his bottom lip.
Hector’s face was white. ‘We were told to stay here. They are coming back.’
Both Jack and Lozzy felt better for hearing him say that, although the younger brother soon suspected the elder would always refuse to believe their Mom and Dad were not coming back. Like Dad, Hector could deny things, but Jack was more like his Mom and by making their voices go soft he and Mom would sometimes get Dad and Hector to listen.
But no matter how determined anyone’s voice had been earlier that evening, their Dad could not be persuaded to stay inside the house, and had always rubbished their stories about the bush not being right; about there being something living in it, about them seeing something peer in through the windows of the two end bedrooms of the bungalow overlooking the garden and deserted chicken coup. When their dog, Schnapps, disappeared, he said they were all ‘soft’ and still needed to ‘acclimatise’ to the new country. And even when all the chickens vanished one night and only a few feathers and a single yellow foot were left behind in the morning, he still didn’t believe them. But now he did, because he had seen it too. Tonight, the whole family had seen it, together.
For months now, the children had been calling it the pig thing: Lozzy’s name for the face at the windows. She saw it first when playing with Schnapps at the bottom of the garden, in the dank shadows where the orchard stopped and the wall of silver ferns and flax began. It had suddenly reared up between the dinosaur legs of two Kauri trees. Never had her mother heard Lozzy make such a fuss: ‘Oh Jesus, Bill. I thought she was being murdered,’ she had said to their Dad, once Lozzy had been taken inside the house and quieted. Up on the hill, east of the bungalow, even the boys, who were putting a better roof on their den, had heard their sister’s cries. Frantic with excitement and fear, they had run home, each carrying a spear made from a bamboo beanpole. That was the day the idea of the pig thing came into their lives. And it had returned. It was no longer a children’s story.
But this was the worst visit, because earlier that evening, as they all sat in the lounge watching television, it had come right on to the sundeck and stood by the barbecue filled with rainwater to look through the glass of the sliding doors, like it was no longer afraid of their Dad. They could tell, because the pig thing had come out of the darkness beyond their brightly lit windows and momentarily reared up on its bony hind legs to display itself, before dropping and quickly moving back into the shadows of the Ponga trees at the side of their property. It could not have been on the deck for more than two seconds, which had stretched into an unbearable and unbreathable time for Jack, but the power in its thin limbs and the human intelligence in its eyes glimpsed through the glass, frightened him more than coming across one of the longfin eels in the creeks would ever have done.
‘Don’t. Oh, Bill don’t. Let’s go together, Bill, with the torch,’ their Mom said to their Dad, once he decided to get the car started.
They were so far from Auckland that had either of the police officers based at the nearest station been available that evening, it would have taken them over an hour to reach the bungalow. Their dad had told their mother what the police operator had told him, after he called them and reported an ‘intruder’, some kind of ‘large animal or something’ trying to get into their house. He couldn’t bring himself to say pig thing to the operator, though that’s what it had been. Lozzy had described it perfectly. Maybe it took a four year old to see it properly. It wasn’t quite an animal, and was certainly
not human, but seemed to have the most dangerous qualities of each in that moment it rose out of darkness, bumped the glass, and then vanished. But the two police officers had been called away to a big fight between rival chapters of bikers on the distant outskirts of the city. With it so close and eager to get inside with his family, because it had looked terribly keen on achieving just that, waiting was not an option even entertained by their father, or open to discussion, after he hung up the phone.
Their nearest neighbours, the Pitchfords, lived on their farm two miles away and hadn’t answered their phone when the children’s dad called them. They were old and had lived in the national reserve since they were both children; had spent the best part of seven decades within the vast cool depths of the bush, before much of the area was cleared for the new migrants. Mr. Pitchford even had hunting rifles as old as the Great War; he’d once shown Jack and Hector, and even let them hold the heavy cumbersome guns that stank of oil.
After the children’s father ended the call, he and their mother had exchanged a look that communicated to Jack the suspicion that the pig thing had already been to visit their neighbours.
Going cold and shuddering all over, Jack believed he might even faint with fear. And all that kept appearing in his mind was the vision of the creature’s long torso pressed against the window, so it’s little brownish teats in the black doggish hair on its belly squished like baby’s fingers on the other side of the glass. The trottery hands had merely touched the pane briefly, but that was sufficient to make it shake in the doorframe. There was nothing inside the house, not a door or piece of furniture, that could be used as a barricade. He knew it. Jack could imagine the splintering of wood and the shattering of glass, followed by his sister’s whimpers, his Dad shouting and his mom’s screams, as it came grunting with hunger and squealing with excitement into their home. He had groaned to himself and kept his eyes shut for a while after the thing disappeared back into the lightless trees. Tried to banish the image of that snouty face and the thin girlish hair that fell about its leathery shoulders.