Beware the River

by Kitty Margo

  He had carried buckets of water from the river in the blazing sun to water those pumpkins! And he gave most of them to needy children who otherwise wouldn’t have a jack o lantern for Halloween. I couldn’t just lay here while some wild animal destroyed his entire crop.

  I climbed down from my top bunk, almost losing my balance, when my foot accidentally slipped into the multiple folds of James’s ample stomach. My slightly overweight friend swatted at my foot like it was a fly, rolled to the other side, mumbled a few choice words, and continued snoring without missing a beat.

  As I moved to the window, all was quiet and I thought maybe I had imagined the noise or perhaps even dreamed it. I looked toward the pumpkin patch and didn’t see anything. Glancing toward the river I saw movement among the rocks. It looked like a cow. That must have been the noise I heard. Was she ever lost! There weren’t any cow pastures around for miles. There were two large dairy farms in the area, but I had never known the cows to get loose and travel this far from their barn.

  If I left her free to roam the countryside she would probably return to the pumpkin patch for a midnight pumpkin vine snack, leaving it in ruins. I couldn’t let that happen. The only logical thing to do was tie her to one of the cabin stilts to keep her from doing any more damage to the crop. I would let Grandpa decide what to do with the cow in the morning. All I wanted was to tie the blasted animal up and go back to bed, go back to sleep, and wake up in the morning and spend the day fishing.

  I grabbed a rope from the balcony and, as my luck would have it, a cloud passed directly over the moon leaving me to stumble blindly down the path toward the river. It was so dark that I could hardly see how to put one foot in front of the other. This was insane! I had to be crazy to be out rambling around the riverbank in the middle of the night. And why hadn’t I grabbed a flashlight?

  Well, because the moon had been shining bright as day when I had looked out the window. Unfortunately it wasn’t now and snakes and who knows what else come out at night and I had never been the bravest of souls even in broad daylight.

  But, man it was dark. I could barely see how to climb down the steep riverbank myself. If the moon didn’t come back out soon how would I ever lead a cow up the slippery slope? I breathed a sigh of relief thinking my problem solved when the clouds parted and the moon once again illuminated the dark night.

  Was I ever wrong!

  It only took two seconds to realize that my problem was definitely not solved?

  No way!

  This was not really happening!

  It couldn’t be!

  I had to be seeing things!

  I was having a nightmare and I would soon wake up!

  “No freaking way!”

  Far from eliminating my problem the moon had only brought it into sharper focus. How could I have been so stupid! I should have known! I mean was I brain dead or what? A preschooler could have figured this one out! I had no doubt that I was about to pay dearly for my stupidity and lack of reasoning skills.

  You know how they say your life flashes before your eyes when you are faced with a life changing event? It’s true.

  I saw myself riding my little red bicycle with training wheels through the mud puddles in Grandpa’s garden at four years old.

  I relived the day I caught a forty-pound large mouthed bass, when I was eight that I had mounted to hang on the wall.

  I remembered getting my first BB gun and going bird hunting behind the house.

  I recalled the first time I saw Megan Cobb talking with some girls in the hall at elementary school.

  Then I came back to the present and what I saw caused my mouth to open for a bloodcurdling scream, but nothing came out. My mouth was as dry as if I had just eaten a bowl of cornbread and milk without the milk. All was quiet as I stood face to face with the enormous creature and we stared each other dead in the eye.

  And the creature was not a cow!

  Chapter 8

  It was the buffalo from the painting! And he was monstrous! And standing right in front of me! We stood eye to eye and from head to tail the creature probably measured six feet in length and had to weigh at least a ton. And he had me cornered! Now that he had gone to all this trouble to get me where he wanted me, what would he do to me?

  As if to answer my question he raised his flat face and his wide set eyes stared directly into mine. The same eyes that had skewered me from the painting! It was then that I noticed the two sharp pointed horns curving out from his head and took an involuntary step backward.

  As I watched him, almost paralyzed with fear, a breeze ruffled the soft fur of the brown shaggy robe that covered him from head to hoof. Again I opened my mouth to scream for help, but all that came out were horrified little puffs of air. Nothing like the great blasts of fog that filled the dewy night air when the buffalo breathed.

  He glared at me for several seconds and then turned and started slowly walking upriver. Huh? What? After all this, he was leaving? He had tormented me for the better part of two days and now he was just going to turn his back and walk away? I was speechless, unable to make my feet, my voice, or any other part of my body function. Then the beast stopped and patiently turned around to look back at me.

  “What?” When I was at last able to form sensible words I found myself talking to a ghost. And what was worse, I almost expected him to answer.

  After a few minutes of glaring at me the buffalo snorted, tossed his great head upriver, and took a few more steps. He then stopped and turned around to gaze at me with those large charcoal eyes. Thank God, they weren’t blood red at the moment!

  He kept repeating this same movement, but each time with a little more conviction than the time before. “What do you want from me?” I whispered, even more terrified than I had been when a water moccasin had fallen out of a tree and into the boat with Grandpa and me on our last fishing trip.

  For answer he tossed his giant head as if motioning for me to follow him upriver. That couldn’t be what he wanted. I mean, surely the demented creature couldn’t expect me to follow him. Did I really look that crazy? Evidently I did, because when I remained frozen to my spot he seemed to grow extremely annoyed. And, trust me, you don’t ever want to see an extremely annoyed buffalo, especially one that’s in spitting distance.

  He tossed his head wildly, snorting and stomping the ground with his huge hooves. Then he began to paw the riverbed sending rocks and mud flying in all directions. The outraged beast was in a really crappy mood! And he was about to charge! And you can believe I was not waiting around to witness that spectacle.

  As unbelievable as it sounds I shot up that steep riverbank like it was a flight of stairs and raced toward the cabin shrieking like a train whistle with every step. I didn’t slow down until I was inside and leaning against the locked cabin door.

  “Billy!” I fell to my knees beside his bunk wheezing in his ear. “Wake up! He’s here!”

  “Just go to sleep, BJ. Man, why do you keep waking me up?” Billy groaned and rolled over. “I’ll see whatever it is in the morning, I promise.”

  “Billy!” I grabbed a flashlight from the table and shone the beam directly in his face. “Get up! The buffalo is outside!”

  This made him open one eye and scream as the light nearly blinded him. He knocked the flashlight out of his face and yawned. “What buffalo?”

  “The buffalo from the painting, you idiot! Now get up!”

  “BJ, it’s too late for your ghost foolishness tonight!”

  “I’m serious, Billy!” I grabbed his shirt and pulled him to an upright position. “Come and see for yourself if you don’t believe me!”

  He must have realized that he wouldn’t get any sleep until he humored me so he reluctantly climbed out of bed. “Okay, BJ. Show me your ghost. But I’m warning you. This had better be good! I’m starting to get really fed up with all of this buffalo nonsense! This was supposed to be a fun weekend remember, not some childish ghost hunt.”

  He was starting to get fed
up? “How do you think I feel? I’m the one he’s after! I’m the one he’s been trying to kill!” What nerve this guy had! However I didn’t have time to spell out his long list of character flaws at the moment. “Never mind, just follow me. He’s down at the river.”

  “Now I know you’re full of it, BJ.” Billy groaned and fell back on the bed. “I’m not walking all the way down to the river in the middle of the night even to see the ghost of some old dead buffalo. You know snakes and stuff come out at night.”

  “Billy, just get out of the freaking bed! And hurry up!”

  I guess my tone of voice demanded attention for he slowly sat up and began pulling on his shoes. “Okay. Let’s go, so I can prove to you once and for all that the spirit of some ghost buffalo isn’t after you. You better believe that if I get bitten by a snake and die, I will come back and haunt your sorry tail far worse than he ever dreamed of doing.”

  Let him haunt me. I was thoroughly convinced that my life couldn’t get any worse than it was right now. “I’ll take my chances.” He followed me out the door and down the cabin steps. “Please, let him still be there,” I silently prayed. “Please let someone besides me see this poltergeist… ghoul… ghost …apparition…phantom…thing.”

  We hurried down the path to the river without saying a word until we stood on the riverbank, where the full moon revealed that the buffalo was gone. I couldn’t believe it. “He’s gone!” I ran out on the riverbed and looked up and down the river. There was not a trace of the buffalo. I ran to the spot where he had stood and saw where his huge hooves had dug a deep hole in the rock bed. All that was left was a muddy puddle.

  “Perhaps your ghost is invisible.” Billy chuckled at his own senseless humor.

  “Come here and look at this! This is where he was pawing the ground!”

  “Yeah right.” Billy coughed to hide a grin and walked back toward the cabin. “Pawing the ground? What? Was he getting ready to charge?”

  “Listen Billy, I am not making this up!” I was tired of being laughed at and made the butt of his jokes. “Why can’t you just believe me? There was a buffalo right where I am standing now. He was snorting, tossing his head upriver, and tearing the ground up with his huge hooves. It was the buffalo from the painting. And yes, I do believe he was about to charge.”

  “BJ, I would really like to believe you.” Billy breathed a deep sigh and locked the cabin door behind us. “But how could you see a buffalo, even a ghost buffalo, when there were never any buffalo in this area to begin with? Buffalo roamed the plains, remember, the Midwest. We’re not talking Midwestern North Carolina here. Whoever heard of buffalo roaming the east coast?”

  “Of course there were buffalo in North Carolina,” James was quick to inform us. Having finally been awakened by the racket he sat up rubbing his eyes and yawning. Given the opportunity he was only too happy to prove Billy wrong at any time, on any subject. And since he considered himself to be the more intelligent of the three it never even crossed his mind that we might question his knowledge on the subject.

  “How do you know this, James?” I shocked him by asking, all the while wondering how he knew so much when he went to the same school I did? And read the same history books I did. Then again, he probably read all of the words while I tended to skim the boring parts and, admittedly, daydream about Megan Cobb. “How can you be so sure there were buffalo here?”

  “Yeah,” Billy had to add. “Did you think we would believe you just because you won the history bee for three years in a row? That was a fluke and you know it.”

  James didn’t take the bait and start an argument with Billy, he was too anxious to dig into his encyclopedic mind and tell us what he knew about the history of the buffalo, which would undoubtedly be noteworthy. “Why wouldn’t you believe me when you both know I’m right?”

  Although he tried hard not to show it, the obvious doubt in our voices annoyed James to no end. “And also because I have read about it in our history books. The same books, I might add, that the two of you were issued in history class. However, unlike some who shall remain nameless, I occasionally choose to read something other than a comic book.”

  One of Billy’s shoes hit the floor with a loud thud. These words hit home and James knew it. Billy had been collecting comic books since we were in kindergarten and it was a touchy subject with him. “Well, while you are doing all that enlightening reading you better steer clear of horror stories,” Billy jabbed, “because your hiccups could wake the dead.”

  “What do you mean?” James looked puzzled, clearly wondering what Billy was yammering about now. He was in firm denial of his hiccup problem and since James was a hefty kid few people ever brought the subject up in his presence.

  I cut him off, hoping to stop their argument before it got started. “Tell us what you know about the buffalo, James.”

  These were the very words James had been waiting breathlessly to hear. Public speaking being one of his greatest passions in life, he cleared his throat and began. “Contrary to popular belief, there were small herds of buffalo on the east coast. Nothing like the great herds numbering in the hundreds of thousands, or millions, as some historians believe, that roamed the plains. However buffalo were indeed here.”

  Billy realized he was in for yet another of James’s history lectures and snuggled beneath the cover. We were accustomed to these lengthy lessons, which we had daily, covering a range of topics on anything from mallard ducks to sweet potatoes, the North Carolina state vegetable. For once I listened carefully to his every word, eager to learn all I could about this buffalo. Perhaps then I could shed some light on why he had chosen to turn my last days of summer into a nightmare.

  “In the original thirteen colonies, no one even knew what a buffalo was. They had never heard of such an animal. The buffalo roamed plains far to the west of here. Eventually, when men opened paths and came east in wagon trains and began to build settlements, the buffalo followed and were soon thriving.”

  “James, how can you possibly remember all this?” I asked. Heck, sometimes I struggled to remember my multiplication tables.

  “I don’t know. I just do. Anyway, in 1729 Colonel William Byrd made an expedition through North Carolina, and was the first person to ever report seeing buffalo in this area. According to his journal, the animals were gentle creatures, and he and his party left them undisturbed. It wasn’t long before small herds had formed from southwestern New York to southeastern Georgia. The trouble began when settlers discovered that one buffalo could feed an entire settlement for a week. That’s when they began slaughtering the animals one by one. The wild buffalo east of the Appalachians had been destroyed by 1760.”

  “Slaughtered?” I whispered. “Do you suppose that’s why the buffalo came here tonight, out of some sort of twisted revenge? To get even! I never slaughtered anything in my life and why would he haunt me for something that happened over two hundred and fifty years ago anyway? It’s a little late for revenge now, don’t you think?”

  “Here! (hiccup) Please define, specifically, what you mean when you say the buffalo (hiccup) (hiccup) (hiccup) came here, BJ.” Poor James was hiccupping so fast he was about to suffocate himself. Man, it had to be tough going through life never knowing when you would be seized by a humiliating fit of hiccups. Neither Billy nor I mentioned it though.

  Excitement brought on his spells, so I often wondered how he would get through his first date. We felt sorry for him. Billy might throw it in his face if he was really mad at him, but never when James was in the throes of a severe hiccupping fit, such as now.

  James jumped to the floor to pace the room nervously. “Do you (hiccup) mean here, as in the (hiccup) (hiccup) vicinity of the cabin? (hiccup) Did you have another sighting, BJ? (hiccup) Tonight?” (hiccup) (hiccup)

  “I saw him down at the river, James.” I removed my shoes and grabbed a bottle of water out of the cooler. “He was here, so whether either of you believe me or not doesn’t really matter anymore. I’m past the
point of trying to convince anyone.” Turning the bottle up I guzzled it and threw the empty bottle in the trash. “I know what I saw.”

  “You know I believe you, BJ,” James was quick to reassure me. (hiccup) “You know I (hiccup) (hiccup) believe fully in ghosts and the paranormal. I’ve (hiccup) never seen one, but I do know (hiccup) (hiccup) they exist. (hiccup) Tell me everything (hiccup) from the beginning.”

  I repeated every detail of my horrifying encounter with the buffalo. When I finished, James seemed lost in thought for a long time before finally speaking. His hiccups had passed so he had calmed down considerably. “You must be aware that if you saw a ghost, and I believe that you did, he wasn’t simply taking a midnight stroll down by the river. He was here for a reason as I told you before. The only way to end this is to figure out what that reason is.”

  Suddenly, he stopped pacing and turned to look at me. “Did he try to show you anything or lead you anywhere?”

  “Yeah, actually I did think he wanted to me to follow him. He kept tossing his head upriver and getting mad and snorting and pawing the ground. That’s when I got scared and ran back to the cabin. I’m convinced that he was about to charge.”

  “That’s it then! There is something he wants to show you. I knew it!” James walked over to the window and looked down toward the river. “Man, I wish you had followed him.”

  He wished I had followed him? A ghost buffalo? James would have been in a dead faint by the very first snort. “Are you crazy, James? Would you have followed a ghost that had already almost blinded you, deafened you, contemplated drowning you, tried to blow you away in the most violent storm you’ve ever witnessed, crashed through your ceiling and held you by the shirt and tried to pull you back into his lair?”

  “Um…that was your bedroom, BJ,” Billy chuckled. “Not exactly an evil creature’s lair.”

  “Heck no!” James answered truthfully, without pause. “You know I wouldn’t have followed him. I said I wish you had.” James was chicken and didn’t care who knew it. “You must understand that normally when a ghost appears it’s for a very important reason. I mean they just don’t go skipping back and forth through the afterlife for little minor things. He will not rest until you have seen what he came from so far away to show you. You might as well accept that fact and deal with it.”