The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  He put his hands to his broad chest and felt a flannel shirt and his fishing vest. It was the one he’d been wearing in that picture with the two trout and the big smile, taken the first time he’d come to Idaho.

  He felt his face as he walked. His beard was still scraggly on his chin. He reached up and felt the big lump on his forehead, the one he’d gotten when he’d butted his way through a jammed cabin door, out of a burning airplane, his second plane crash in two days seven years before.

  His hat was the big-billed marlin cap from the days of Cuba and Bimini and Key West, back when everything was good: the writing, the hunting and fishing, the wives, the booze.

  He remembered that morning in Idaho when he was in his bathrobe, just back from the hospital, and both the house and the shotgun had been still and cool.

  Now he was walking down the hill toward the ruckus in town, dressed in odds and ends of his old clothing. It was a fine spring morning in the mountains half a world away.

  * * *

  Many houses stood with doors open, all the people now at the town square. Still, the pealing of the bells echoed off the surrounding peaks.

  From way off to the left he could hear the small flat bells of cattle being driven toward him, and the shouts of the people who herded them.

  A woman came from a house and ran past him without a glance, toward the milling people and voices ahead.

  A child looked down at him from one of the high third-story windows, the ones you sometimes had to climb out of in the winter if you wanted to go outside at all.

  He was winded from the half-mile walk into town.

  The crowd stood looking toward the church doors, perhaps three hundred people in all, men, women, a few of the children.

  The bells stopped ringing, slowed their swings, stopped in the high steeple. The doors opened up, and the priest and bürgermeister came out onto the broad steps.

  The crowd waited.

  “There he is,” said the priest.

  Heads turned, the crowd parted, and they opened a path for him to the steps. He walked up to the priest and the mayor.

  “Ernst,” said the bürgermeister. “We’re so glad you came.”

  “I’m a little confused,” he heard himself say.

  “The Wild Man?” said the priest. “He’s come down into the villages again. He killed two more last night and carried off a ram three men couldn’t lift. Didn’t you get our cablegram?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “We sent for you to come hunt him for us. Some townspeople remembered you from the Weimar days, how you hunted and skied here. You’re the only man for the job. This Wild Man is more dangerous than any before has ever been.”

  Ernst looked around at the crowd. “I used to hunt in the old days, and ski. I can’t do either anymore. It’s all gone, all run out on me.”

  It hurt him to say those things aloud, words he had said over and over to himself for the last two years, but which he had told only two people in the world before.

  The faces in the crowd were tense, waiting for him or the official to say something, anything.

  “Ernst!” pleaded the bürgermeister, “you are the only man who can do it. He has already killed Brunig, the great wolf hunter from Axburg. We are devastated.”

  Ernst shook his head slowly. It was no use. He could not pretend to himself or these people. He would be less than useless. They would put a faith in him when he knew better than to put any hopes in himself.

  “Besides,” said the young priest, “someone has come to help you do this great thing.”

  Somebody moved in the crowd, stepped forward. It was a withered old black man, dressed in a loincloth and khaki shirt. On its sleeve was a shoulder patch of the Rangers of the Ngorongoro Crater Park, and from the left pocket hung the string of a tobacco pouch.

  “Bwana,” he said, with a gap-toothed smile.

  Ernst had not seen him in thirty years. It was Mgoro, his gunbearer from that first time in Africa.

  “Mgoro,” he said, taking the old man’s hands and wrists, shaking them.

  He turned to the officials.

  “If he’s come all this way, I guess we’ll have to hunt this Wild Man together,” said Ernst. He smiled uneasily.

  The people cheered, the priest said a prayer of thanksgiving, and the mayor took him and Mgoro inside his house.

  * * *

  Later they took them to a home on the south side of town. The house looked as if a howitzer shell had hit one corner of it. Ernst saw that it wasn’t exploded. The thin wall of an outbuilding had been pulled off, and a window clawed out from what had been a child’s bedroom.

  “The undertaker,” said the mayor, “is sewing the arms and legs back on. His mother heard him scream and came down to see what was wrong. They found her half a kilometre from here. When the Wild Man got through with her, he tossed her down and picked up the sheep.

  “We tried to follow his trail earlier this morning. He must live in the caves on the other side of the mountain. We lost his trail in the rocks.”

  Ernst studied the tracks in the dirt of the outbuilding, light going in, sunken and heavy-laden coming out with the woman. They were huge, oddly-shaped, missing one of the toes on the left foot. But they were still the prints of a giant barefoot man.

  “I’ll hunt him,” said Ernst, “if you’ll put some men up by that barn on the edge of town. I don’t want him running near there.” He looked down, eyes not meeting those of the bürgermeister.

  “We can put some men there with shotguns,” said the priest. “I doubt he’ll go close with the smell of many men there. If you want us to.”

  “Yes. Yes, I do want that.”

  “Let’s go see to your guns, then,” said the mayor.

  * * *

  “We have a few small bore rifles and shotguns for the men of the village,” said the priest, “but these are the heaviest. We saved them for you.”

  Ernst took his glasses out of his pocket, noticing they were the new bifocals he’d gotten for reading after those plane crashes in ’54. He looked the weapons over.

  One was a Weatherby .575 bolt action, three-shot magazine with a tooled stock and an 8X scope. He worked the bolt; smooth, but still a bolt action.

  “Scope comes off, eh, bwana?” asked Mgoro.

  “Yes. And check the shells close.”

  The second was an eight-gauge shotgun, its shells the size of small sticks of dynamite. Ernst looked in the boxes, pulled out a handful each of rifle slugs and 00 shot. He put the slugs in the left bottom pocket of his fishing vest, the shotshells in the right.

  The third was an ancient wheel-lock boar gun. Its inlaid silver and gilt work had once been as bright and intricate as the rigging on a clipper ship, but was now faded and worn. Part of the wooden foregrip that had run the length of the barrel was missing. Its muzzle was the size of the exhaust pipe on a GMC truck.

  “We shall have to check this thing very well,” said Ernst.

  “That gun was old when Kilimanjaro was a termite mound,” said Mgoro.

  Ernst smiled. “Perhaps,” he said. “I’d also like a pistol each for Mgoro and me,” he said to the mayor. “Anything, even .22’s.

  “And now, while Mgoro goes over these guns, I’d like to read. Do you have books? I used to have to bring my own when I came for the skiing.”

  “At the parish house,” said the priest. “Many books, on many things.”

  “Good.”

  * * *

  He sat at the desk where the priest wrote his sermons, and he read in the books again about the Wild Men.

  Always, when he had been young and just writing, they had thought he was a simple writer, communicating his experience with short declarative sentences for the simple ideas he had.

  Maybe that was so, but he had always read a lot, and knew more than he let on. The Indian-talk thing had first been a pose, then a defense, and at the last, a curse.

  He had known of the Wild Men for a long time
. There used to be spring festivals in Germany and France, and in the Pyrénées, in which men dressed in hairy costumes and covered themselves with leaves and carried huge clubs in a shuffling dance.

  In Brueghel’s painting, The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, one of his low-perspective canvases full of the contradictions of carnival, you can see a Wild Man play going on in the upper left corner, the Wild Man player looking like a walking cabbage with a full head of shaggy hair.

  The Wild Men—feral men, abandoned children who grew up in solitary savagery, or men who went mad—became hirsute. Lichens and moss grew on their bodies. They were the outlaws who haunted the dreams of the Middle Ages. All that was inside the village or the manor house was Godmade and good, everything outside was a snare of the devil.

  More than the wolf or the bear, the serf feared the Wild Man, the unchained human without conscience who came to take what he wanted, when he wanted.

  Ernst was reading Bernheimer’s book again, and another on Wild Man symbolism in the art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. All they agreed upon was that there had been Wild Men and that they had been used in decorative arts and were the basis of spring festivals. All this Ernst remembered from his earlier reading.

  He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose, felt again the bump above his eye.

  What was the Wild Man? he asked himself. This thing of the woods and crags—it’s nothing but man unfettered, unrestrained by law and civilization. Primitive, savage man. Rousseau was wrong—let man go and he turns not into the Noble Savage but into pure chaos, the chaos of Vico, of the totem fathers. Even Freud was wrong about that—the totem fathers, if they were Wild Men, would never compete with their offspring. They would eat them at birth, like Kronos.

  What about this Wild Man, then? Where did he stay during the day? On what did he live when not raiding the towns? How do you find him, hunt him?

  Ernst went back to the books. He found no answers there.

  * * *

  Mgoro said, “We are ready.”

  It was dusk. The sun had fallen behind the mountains. What warmth the day had had evaporated almost instantly. Ernst had taken a short nap. He had wakened feeling older and more tired than he had for years, worse than he had felt after the shock therapy in the hospital, where you woke not knowing where you were or who you were.

  The other men had gone to places around the village, posted in the outlying structures, within sight and sound of each other, with clear fields of vision and fire toward the looming mountains.

  Four others, with him and Mgoro, set out in the direction the Wild Man had taken that morning. They showed Ernst the rocky ground where the misshapen footprints ended.

  “He’ll be up and moving already,” said Ernst. “Are the dogs ready?”

  “They’re coming now,” said the bürgermeister. Back down the trail they heard men moving toward them. “Are we to try to drive him out with them?”

  “No,” said Ernst. “That’s what he’ll be expecting. I only want him to think about them. The most likely place he’ll be is the caves?”

  “Yes, on the other side of this mountain. It’s very rocky there.”

  “Take the dogs over that way, then. Make as much noise as you can, and keep them at it all night, if need be. If they come across his spoor, so much the better. It would be good if they could be made to bark.”

  Three hounds and a Rotweiler bounded up, straining at their leashes, whimpering with excitement. The man holding them doffed his cap to the bürgermeister.

  “Ernst would like to know if you can make the dogs howl all night, Rudolf.”

  The man put a small whistle to his mouth and blew a soundless note. The four dogs began to bark and whine as if a stag had stepped on them.

  Ernst laughed for the first time in months.

  “That will do nicely,” he said. “If they don’t find anything, blow on that every quarter hour. Good luck.”

  The dogs, Rudolf, the bürgermeister, and the others started up the long trail that would take them around the mountain. Night was closing in.

  “Where you think he is?” asked Mgoro.

  “Back down a quarter-mile,” said Ernst, “is where we should wait. He’ll either pass us coming down, or back on the way up if they spot him in the village.”

  “I think so too,” said Mgoro. “Though this is man, not lion or leopard.”

  “I have to keep telling myself that,” said Ernst.

  “Moon come up pretty soon,” said Mgoro. “Damn mountains too high, or already be moonlight.”

  “It’s the full moon that does it maybe,” said Ernst. “Drives them to come into the towns.”

  “You think he crazy man? From last war?”

  “The bürgermeister said this is the first Wild Man attack since before the war, from before that paper-hanging sonofabitch took over.”

  Mgoro wrapped a blanket around himself, the shotgun, and wheel-lock. Ernst carried the Weatherby across his arm. It was already getting heavy.

  The outline of the mountains turned silvery with the light from the rising, still unseen moon.

  Then from up the side of the mountain, the dogs began to bark.

  * * *

  Nothing happened after they reached the ravine where they would wait. The dogs barked, farther and farther away, their cries carried on the still, cool air of the valley.

  Lights were on in the town below. Ernst was too far away to see the men standing guard in the village itself, or what was happening in the church where most of the women and children waited.

  Mgoro sat in his blanket. Ernst leaned against a rock, peering into the dark upper reaches of the ravine. The moonlight had frosted everything silver and gold, with deep shadows. He would have preferred an early, westering moon lighting this side of the mountain. This one was too bright and you had to look into it. Anything could be hiding in the shadowed places. It would be better later, when the moon was overhead, or west.

  The dogs barked again, still farther away. Maybe this moon was best. If they ran anything up on that side, the men over there could see it, too.

  “Bwana,” said Mgoro, sniffing the air. “Snow coming.”

  Ernst breathed deeply, sniffed. He was seized with coughing, quieted himself, choked, coughed again. His eyes stung, tears streamed down his face. He rubbed them away.

  “Damn,” he said. “Can’t smell it yet. How long?”

  “Don’t know this land. One, mebbe two hours away.”

  Just what we need, a spring blizzard, Ernst thought.

  * * *

  An hour passed. Still they had bright moonlight. They heard the sound of the dogs far off. Nothing had come down the ravine. There had been no alarm from the town.

  Ernst’s back was knotted. His weak legs had gone to sleep several times. He’d had to massage them back to stinging life.

  Mgoro sat in his blanket; the gun barrels made him look like a teepee in the moonlight. Ernst had seen him sit motionless for hours this way at waterholes, waiting for eland, wildebeest, lions. He was the best gunbearer Ernst had ever seen.

  Something about Mgoro was gnawing at the back of Ernst’s mind.

  Ernst looked around, back down at the village. There were fewer lights now (the guards had been turning off a few at a time). He looked at the church, and he looked farther across the valley at the huge barn, a blot on the night.

  He looked away, back up the ravine.

  He thought something was wrong, then realized it was the light.

  He looked up. High streaked cirrus raced across the moon. As he watched, it changed to altocumulus and the light dimmed more. A dark, thicker bank slid in under that, blotting the stars to the north.

  In ten minutes the sky was solidly overcast and huge, wet flakes of snow began to fall.

  * * *

  Two hours into the storm, Mgoro sat up, his head turned sideways. Snow already covered the lower part of his blanket, merging with the wet line of melted snow against the upper part
of his body.

  His finger pointed left to the ravine.

  Ernst could barely make out Mgoro, much less anything farther away.

  But they heard it snuffling in the wet air as it went by down the rugged gully.

  They waited. Ernst had eased the safety off the .575. But the sound grew fainter, continued on toward the village.

  For an instant, Ernst smelled something in the air—sweat, dirt, mold, wet leaves, oil?—then it was gone. The thing must have missed their scent altogether.

  The snow swirled down for another ten minutes, then stopped as abruptly as it had begun.

  Another five minutes and the moon was out, bright and to the west, shining down on a transformed world of glass and powder.

  * * *

  The thing had come by close.

  When they turned to look down the ravine they could see the shadowed holes of the footprints leading in a line down toward the town. The end of the tracks was still more than a kilometre from the village. They strained their eyes, then Ernst took out a pair of night binoculars, passed them to Mgoro. He scanned the terrain past where the footprints disappeared near a road.

  He shook his head, handed them back.

  Ernst put them to his eyes. It was too bright to make out anything through the glasses—the snow threw back too much glare, made the shadows too dark.

  “If he decides not to go in, he’ll come back this way,” said Ernst.

  “If we shoot to warn them, he go anywhere,” said Mgoro.

  “If nothing happens in the next hour, we follow his tracks,” said Ernst.

  * * *

  The moon was dropping to the right of the village. Ernst checked his watch. Fifty minutes had passed.

  If they stayed, they had the high ground, command of the terrain. They would be able to see him coming.

  If they tracked him, and the Wild Man got above them, he could wait for them anywhere.

  Do I treat this like stalking a lion, or following an airborne ranger? Ernst asked himself. He moved in place, getting the circulation back in his leg, the one with the busted kneecap and the shrapnel from three wars back.