In that regard, Sam Snead was like all the others who shared his mountain, living in tiny log cabins or in caves they’d stolen from the black bears and made into homes.
Sam was typical in all ways except one.
For Sam was the only one on the mountain who had a pet fox.
He’d named the fox Felix because, really, what else would one expect a fox pup to be called?
And of course there was a story behind the name, and the fox itself.
A story Sam mostly kept to himself.
Not because it was a secret, necessarily.
But rather because there were precious few people on the mountain to tell the story to.
His friend and nearest neighbor Jake, who lived a bit farther north on the same path, knew the story.
And so did a few hikers and campers who’d stumbled across Sam and Felix while they were out hunting or fishing.
But that was about it.
The story of Felix the fox began when Sam noticed a female who frequented his camp looking for scraps began looking rather portly.
The female had always struck him as rather small, probably the runt of her litter, and being pregnant made her look exceedingly odd given her small frame.
As she got farther and farther along she developed a rather ungainly waddle, and he worried she might not be able to run from one of the many predators who inhabited the woods with them.
Then one day he found her, alone in the woods and near death.
Chapter 50
The fox wasn’t mauled, or even attacked by another animal.
Rather, she was spent and appeared to be bleeding internally.
The pregnancy and birth of her very first litter was too much for her.
Her tiny body just couldn’t take the stress.
She looked at Sam as she lay dying, and didn’t resist his efforts to pet her.
It was as though she knew her time was drawing near and viewed Sam as the animal… the only animal perhaps… who could give her offspring a fighting chance to survive her.
Sam had seen where she made her nest beneath a wild blackberry bush.
As she lived out her last hours he went in search of the pups and sure enough he found them.
Six of them.
Five lay dead, more than likely stillborn judging from the mucus which still covered their faces.
The sixth lay softly whimpering, trying his best through still-closed eyes to find the mother he instinctively knew was out there somewhere.
Everything Sam knew about nursing a newborn fox pup could be balanced on the tip of his pinky with a lot of real estate left over.
But he knew he had to try.
He cupped the tiny creature in the palm of his hand and took him home, where he made a bed for him with a couple of worn socks.
The fox’s first meals were fish oil Sam got from cutting open a salmon and crushing the meat with the butt of his knife.
He took to it famously, sucking it down as though he was starving. And in fact, he had been.
Gradually Sam weaned him off his liquid diet by putting more and more of the fish meat into the oil.
Within a week Felix was eating a regular diet of raw fish, and went from that to whatever meat scraps Sam had left over from his hunting and trapping.
Because he never lived in the wild long enough to go feral, Felix was as tame as any child’s puppy.
A puppy with a very long nose and a very bushy tail, but a puppy nonetheless.
Now that he was an adult, Felix had the freedom his long-lost mother once had.
Sam sometimes worried about Felix as he spent his days roaming through the forest. After all, there weren’t just bears out there.
There were wolves, wolverines, bobcats and the occasional mountain lion.
Still, Felix managed to survive an occasional encounter with a stronger beast. His left ear was notched now and his back bore a couple of scars, but he was no worse for wear.
And he managed to make it home every night to yelp outside Sam’s cabin door to be let in.
He was even housebroken and did his business outside each night before taking his sleeping place on the bearskin rug in front of Sam’s fireplace.
Foxes don’t know volcanoes from pine cones, and Sam wasn’t going to tell his four-legged friend that Yellowstone was getting ready to blow.
As Sam saw it, they were a team. He and Felix lived together and would die together.
And what Felix didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
Well, actually that wasn’t true.
The Yellowstone blast would kill them both. But it would be quick and likely painless.
Not a bad way to die, in the grand scheme of things.
That was Sam’s plan, anyway.
But it changed.
Felix wasn’t himself these days.
He seemed moody of late, sometimes refusing to get up from his rug to go outside, or even to eat from his scrap bowl.
He was listless and uncaring about the things which used to give him pleasure.
Three days before Sam tried to coax his little buddy into going outside when the fox snapped at him.
He actually got a piece of Sam’s hand.
Bit him hard enough to draw blood.
Oh, he didn’t hold on for long.
He seemed to sense immediately he’d crossed a line which should never have been crossed.
But by then it was far too late to apologize, and “I’m sorry” isn’t in a fox’s vocabulary anyway.
He released Sam’s hand even as Sam yelped, then ran out the door and disappeared into the forest.
Sam wasn’t worried about rabies.
Felix hadn’t been exhibiting any of the tell-tale signs: the walking unsteady or in circles, the foaming at the edges of his mouth.
No, Sam wasn’t concerned about rabies.
He figured he was going to die pretty soon anyway, he might as well go out rabid.
And even if the volcano eruption wasn’t imminent, he wasn’t the type to seek medical treatment anyway.
He never sought out a doctor when the head flew off his axe three years before and cut part of his foot off.
He never sought out a doctor when that badger fought him for the fish he was pulling out of the creek and Sam was left scratched up and bloody.
He never went for medicine when he came down with pneumonia the previous winter.
No, he doubted Felix had rabies, but if he did it didn’t really matter that much.
Truth be told, Sam was temperamental as well, and had his days when he snapped at Felix.
Not with his teeth, for humans don’t do that sort of thing.
Not often, anyway.
But there was a time or two when Felix got underfoot in the tiny cabin and Sam yelled at him or sent him flying with his boot.
In Sam’s mind, Felix had every right to be as moody and grouchy as his human friend, even to the point of sinking his teeth into Sam’s flesh.
Sam had gone into the forest to coax his friend back, to tell him there were no hard feelings.
That they could still be friends and roommates.
But he couldn’t find him.
Chapter 51
If it had just been Felix’s biting and then deserting him Sam might have just written it off as bad luck.
But there was more than that.
The same day Felix disappeared into the forest Sam went out to check his traps.
He did so twice a day every time he had traps out.
Over the years he’d had several “what the heck?” moments when working his traps.
Occasionally he’d find traps that had been tripped, and no prey to be found.
Usually by rabbits or squirrels who so desperately wanted to avoid Sam’s stew pot they managed to work their way free.
A couple of times he found nothing but a foot. In such cases the trap didn’t spring in time to catch and break the back of the animal’s neck.
In such cases, the trap typical
ly snapped the animal’s foot instead and startled it so badly it ripped off the foot in its quest to get away.
Sadly, the escape wasn’t permanent, as animals injured in such a manner typically didn’t get far.
The combination of a gaping wound and an elevated pulse rate usually caused it to bleed out within minutes.
Over the years he’d come across bones instead of carcasses when hungry and very attentive buzzards beat him to his kill.
Once he came across a grizzly bear devouring his rabbit. The bear looked at him angrily when his meal was interrupted.
Sam told the monster of a beast, “That’s okay. You go ahead, I’ll get the next one,” before slipping away into the woods.
Yes, Sam had seen some odd things over the years while working his traps.
But nothing like what he saw on this particular day.
On this particular day he inspected two of his traps, laid across his favorite game trail.
They were rabbit traps, both of them.
In one of them, though, he didn’t find a dead rabbit.
He found a dying wolf.
The wolf had run himself almost to death, and when Sam got to him was in the last throes of life.
He lay upon the ground, pitifully looking up at Sam, but didn’t have anything left in him to attack or to run.
His tongue hung limply from his mouth.
Sam didn’t have a clue what made the wolf run so hard and for so long.
It wasn’t uncommon for a sick or weakened wolf to run from a bear if he felt he was outmatched and doomed.
It wasn’t uncommon for a wolf to run hard and fast when chasing a rabbit.
And it certainly wasn’t unusual for a wolf to trip a rabbit trap.
Typically it broke his foot and pissed him off, but he’d be able to free himself and limp to safety.
In all the years he’d been trapping he’d never seen a wolf so frightened and so tired he just lay down and died when he got his foot stuck in a rabbit trap.
But that wasn’t the only thing.
At another of his traps a quarter mile away a rabbit lay dead in two very distinct pieces.
Decapitated.
It took Sam a few minutes of head-scratching and thinking before he finally figured this one out.
He finally determined that when the trap sprung the rabbit had his head turned to one side.
Instead of breaking his neck instantly it trapped his head.
But he was apparently still alive, and in his desperation to free himself he kicked wildly with his hind legs.
A rabbit’s hind legs are extremely powerful. They have to be to enable him to run so fast.
In this case, one final and desperate kick from his hind legs generated enough energy to tear his head off his body.
He instantly fell dead, in two different pieces.
It must have been quite a spectacle, and a highly illogical scenario.
But it was the only thing that made sense, given the proximity of the rabbit’s head and body.
All of that was enough to put Sam on edge and made him wonder what in the world was going on.
But that was nothing compared with what he’d see the following day.
Sam was a man who wasn’t quite finicky in his eating habits.
No mountain man could be picky, because a mountain man’s world is one where he eats what comes along, or what he can catch or shoot.
A man who only eats venison, for example, might do well for awhile. But sometimes Sam went months without seeing a whitetail suitable for taking, and for which he had a good shot.
If he was a man who only ate venison he’d have starved to death long before.
So no, Sam wasn’t finicky in that he insisted on eating only certain types of meat.
However, he was like most other people in that he had his likes and dislikes and preferred certain types of foods over others.
Specifically, he loved the rainbow trout and the catfish he pulled out of the slow-moving stream a couple hundred yards north of his cabin.
He was somewhat of a genius when it came to preparing the fish. Sometimes he’d just brown a filet with a little bit of hot sauce and salt and pepper.
Sometimes he’d cook the fish in bear or deer fat, sautéed in wild onions and peppers he grew in his garden.
Any fish he caught and didn’t need right away was turned into fish jerky, which he snacked on all year round.
The day after he found the dying wolf and the decapitated rabbit he went to that favorite stream to catch a couple good-sized fish.
And he knew he’d never fill another hook from that particular stream again.
Chapter 52
He could smell it long before he got to the stream and the smell puzzled him greatly.
Mountain men develop a great sense of smell over time. They get used to the various scents of the forest each and every day of their lives.
The decaying leaves. The smell of the pines and the firs and a dozen other types of trees and shrubbery.
After a time they can even smell fresh animal droppings from fifty yards away, or the musky scent of deer urine.
After they’ve lived in the forest for several years, as Sam had, they can detect any unnatural smell from great distances.
Deer spook when they smell the scent of a man’s sweat from a hundred yards away.
A man’s sense of smell isn’t so refined.
But a mountain man can smell the smoke of a cigarette from an equal distance.
And the smell of wood burning from even farther away.
This scent was like neither of those.
Rather it smelled astonishingly similar to… a burned match.
He even muttered the word after his nose caught the first scent.
“Sulfur? Now why in hell would it smell like sulfur?”
Ordinarily Felix would be by his side as he made his way to the creek.
But Felix was gone now and might never be back.
So there was no one to hear his words.
He was, in essence, talking to himself.
Another habit mountain men sometimes develop over time.
He was confused.
Burned matches weren’t something one smelled in the woods.
Especially such a strong, almost overpowering scent of them.
The smell grew stronger and stronger as he got closer and closer to his stream.
Finally he rounded a bend in the path and, just as he knew he would, he heard the rushing water.
He never, not in a million years, expected to see what he saw.
Both banks were covered with the fish he loved.
Bobbing up and down on the water.
Dead.
Every last one of them.
The smell of sulfur was almost overpowering.
It was obvious what had killed them and had poisoned his primary water source.
But why? How?
And more importantly, who?
Sam was wise to many of the ways of the world.
He wasn’t well educated. Not when it came to books, anyway.
But he was well seasoned; and he was far from being a stupid man.
As smart was he was, though, he didn’t know a darned thing about volcanoes.
He didn’t know that when they were in the initial stages of an eruption, they followed a predictable pattern.
He didn’t know that one of the things volcanoes always did before they erupted was to open up new vents, or fissures, in the earth above and around them.
In a desperate attempt to vent some of the pressure building in their magma as it pushed forward, cracks formed.
Sometimes superheated air or steam broke through.
In steam form it resembled geysers, spraying hot water dozens of feet into the air.
In dry form it wasn’t so easy to see, but could be heard, for it had the same “roaring” sound a geyser made.
The vents never kept the volcanoes from erupting.
For as much
pressure as they relieved, as much heat as they transferred from the underworld to the atmosphere, it was never enough.
Instead of relieving the pressure and calming the rumblings of the volcano, they merely served as a calling card.
A warning, if you will, of the spectacle that was to come.
Something else these fissures spewed into the atmosphere besides steam and superheated dry air:
Sulfur from beneath the earth’s surface.
Lots and lots of sulfur.
Sam didn’t know any of that.
And he certainly didn’t know that two miles upstream a fissure opened up in the center of his stream.
It shot steam a hundred feet into the air and caused the water to boil.
And the boiling water killed some of the fish, sure.
Most of them, though, were killed by the vast amounts of the sulfur pouring into the water nonstop since the fissure opened two days before.
All this… finding his stream poisoned, probably forever and only a day after finding the wolf and that headless rabbit… made Sam wonder.
He wondered what it was that got into Felix’s mind that made him turn on him.
And whether he’d be infected by the same kind of madness.
He walked back to his cabin, a bit hungry and wondering whether he’d ever taste fish again.
And wondering in other ways about his future as well.
He loved living in the wilderness. He always had.
Until the rangers came along and told him of the pending eruption he’d always assumed he’d die in the woods of old age.
Probably falling victim to a heart attack while trapping or fishing.
Quick and likely painless.
He’d lie dead for a day or two until his body started to rot.
Then his remains would be eaten by a black bear or a gray wolf. Whatever they left behind would be finished off by the buzzards and the worms.
In that way he’d become part of the circle of life.
He’d give back to the forest which had sustained him all those years.
He’d give his body to help sustain other creatures.
At least that was the way he’d always envisioned it working.
This… this was crap… he couldn’t really think of any other way to describe the recent events.
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