Ancient Enemy

by Michael McBride

  I understood why he hadn’t told me, though. Without seeing firsthand what these things were capable of doing, there was no way I would have believed him. Even looking at all of these trophies wouldn’t have seemed real without having to butcher the carcasses of the animals they’d torn apart, that I’d listened to being slaughtered in the field.

  Maybe he honestly believed he’d killed the last of them. After all, if the pictures were any indication, he’d known they were fighting a war of attrition. Or perhaps he’d simply believed that he would have more time to tell me about it, that the right moment would present itself. It’s not like he was planning to have a stroke. For all I knew, it was the idea of having that conversation with me that had caused the stroke. Or maybe I was just making excuses for him, giving him the benefit of the doubt after taking me in when I would otherwise have had to fend for my alcoholic mother and myself.

  The biggest problem was I hated him for chasing off my father and for bringing me into this situation in the first place. That thought alone was enough to cause me physical pain. I wanted to lash out at him, but each time I imagined doing so, I saw his feeble form underneath the blankets and his terrified eyes staring out at me from inside his prison of failing flesh.

  I watched the sun though the canopy overhead as I rode Yanaba home. It was far closer to the western mountains than I would have liked. I’d lost track of time down there in the darkness and that was the one thing I simply couldn’t get back. There was an inevitability to the setting of the sun and the impending confrontation that drew me onward with a combined feeling of dread and what I could only describe as destiny.

  Yanaba knew her way back to our land, so I let her lead while I used the time to think. To plan. The way I saw it, my first responsibility was to protect my family. I did not want to have to return to this awful place with pictures of a ruined trailer home and two bodies under bloodstained blankets.

  And for the first time I wondered what would happen if none of us survived.

  TWENTY

  I sat at the end of our driveway for several minutes, watching our trailer. The last thing I needed right now was to find my mother waiting for another go-round. I had neither the time nor the patience. I didn’t have to check the clock to know that I was running out of time. The sun would set in maybe five hours and I needed to spend them wisely. I would waste roughly an hour and a half of it traveling to the entrance to their underground warrens, which didn’t leave me very much time for any kind of concerted hunt. And the thought of crawling around in utter darkness in search of creatures with lethal horns on their heads and who navigated the passages using senses I didn’t possess was terrifying. When I went in there, I had to be prepared to bring the entire mountain down on my head if I had to, if for no other reason than because I was the only one left.

  I thought back to all of the hunting trips I’d taken with my grandfather, to all of the times he’d tried to show me the old ways and I’d rolled my eyes because I was sitting there with a rifle in my lap. He’d shown me how to make snares for animals, first for small ones, and then for large. And despite my obvious lack of enthusiasm, he’d demonstrated how to do so in painstaking detail. Over and over again until I was old enough to blame it on his dawning senility and wise enough to humor an old man. But it had never been about passing down the traditions I cared so little about or sharing a facet of his life that was no longer relevant in the modern world, had it? Even then he had been training me for just this moment and I hadn’t even suspected it.

  The safest thing would be to get my mother and grandfather out of there, just load them in the truck and drive, but where would we go? We had no money, no way of earning any, and it was only a matter of time before my grandfather died. I feared moving him at all would be more strain than his body could physically take, but what was the alternative? Leave him in that flimsy trailer to be butchered if I failed? And what about my mother? She hadn’t left that trailer, let alone that couch, for longer than it took to go to into town in as long as I could remember. There was only one thing I could think to do to keep them safe.

  I recalled the picture of the houses with their broken windows and doors and prayed for a miracle.

  I was going to have to be quick. More than that, though, I was going to have to be perfect. Any mistakes and the people I loved most would pay for them. I reminded myself that I was only implementing a Plan B and that it would only be necessary if Plan A failed, and if that happened, likely no countermeasures I put into place would be sufficient anyway. It came down to me needing to do what the generations before me had done, and even I wouldn’t have taken the odds on my chances.

  I gathered the wood I would need from the stables and allowed Yanaba to graze with her mother while I worked. I wished I could leave her behind, but, regrettably, I was going to need her speed if I was going to make it to Fewkes Canyon with enough sunlight left in the sky to do what needed to be done.

  The chicken coop and the goat pen were still locked up tight. A walk around the perimeter of each confirmed there were no glaring holes in either structure, although neither would hold up to any kind of assault. I could hear the does inside bleating for relief from their engorged udders and felt badly when I walked away without easing their suffering. There simply wasn’t the time.

  I boarded up the holes where Yanaba had struck the wall with her hooves and carried the remainder of the wood I was going to need to the trailer, where I leaned it against the siding. I left the hammer and nails on the railing of the deck, within easy reach of the door when I came out, and stood there with the knob in my hand, wondering if this would be the last time I would ever do so. I listened for the creaking of floorboards or the sound of voices from the television, anything to betray my mother’s location inside and her state of consciousness, but couldn’t hear a blasted thing over my heart pounding in my ears.

  My hand trembled when I turned the knob and opened the door inward with a creaking noise loud enough to wake the dead. At least in my own ears. The shape of my mother stirred beneath the blanket on the couch. I could tell by the lack of smoke rising from the ashtray and the empty bottle beside it that she hadn’t been awake recently, and likely wouldn’t be getting up anytime soon. I felt a pang of guilt. Last night she’d come as close as I’d ever seen to expressing remorse for what had become of our relationship and a genuine willingness to make an effort to try again. And I’d thrown it back in her face. Treated her like the drunk she was instead of the mother she could be. The mother I needed her to be. I was worse than all of the others—the people over in Cortez and even the other members of our tribe in Towaoc—who saw her as the physical embodiment of the stereotype that our once-proud bloodline had become.

  I averted my eyes as I hurried back to my room, where I changed into my long johns and the darkest pair of jeans I could find. I layered long-sleeved shirts under a black hooded sweatshirt and stuffed my gloves into the front pouch. I dumped everything out of my backpack and slung it over my shoulder. Breezed across the living room and into the kitchen, where I removed the sharpest knives from the drawer as quietly as I could, loaded them into the backpack, and left it by the door.

  I stared at my grandfather’s door for several seconds before summoning the courage to open it. His terrified eyes were on me the moment I crossed the threshold, as though he’d been lying there in only the dim light that sneaked through the crack around the window, waiting for me. I sat in the chair beside his bed and took his hand in both of mine. Kissed the back of it.

  “I’m so scared,” I whispered and felt a tear creep from the corner of my eye. I wiped it on my shoulder and looked up at the ceiling. Anywhere other than into his eyes. “But you know that, don’t you? You’ve been where I am now.” I sniffed and looked at the broken shelf on the wall, at the row of relics, minus the key that was still in the pocket of the pants I’d kicked off on my bedroom floor and the rattle outside in Yanaba’s saddlebag. “I wish you could talk to me. Probably not as much
as you do, though.”

  I sighed. The air leaving me made me feel even smaller.

  I could barely see the objects on the shelf in the wan light. The parfleche with paint flaking from the map, the empty ration pouch, the chunk of sandstone with its petroglyph, and—

  I stared at the wooden water jar. It was the lone object up there I hadn’t used. When I looked into my grandfather’s eyes, they again directed me toward the shelf. I walked across the room and took down the jar. Turned it upside down and shook it, but nothing fell out. There didn’t appear to be anything extraordinary about it. The handle was really kind of gross. The horse hair was old and brittle and frayed. The jar itself was carved from cottonwood. Or at least that was my best guess. It was cracked from the fall, but remained largely intact, thanks to the waterproof black resin coating the inside. I tilted it toward the source of the light to better see into it. Leaned closer. Recoiled. The smell. It was like someone had done a lousy job of rinsing it out after peeing in it.

  I glanced at my grandfather. He was watching me from the corner of his eye.

  I thought of the trophy room beneath the ruins of the pit house, of the pictures of the naked creatures with the horns, of the severed heads with the scabrous, irritated skin where their eyelids met. I recalled my revelation that they were essentially blind and must have used their other senses to navigate the darkness. That one of them was smell had never even crossed my mind. They couldn’t see me, but they could hear me. And they could smell me. Even dabbing a little urine behind my ears wouldn’t drastically alter my scent, though. I mean, I didn’t need to fill a jar when I possessed the equipment to just hose myself down.

  I closed my eyes and pictured myself in a dark space, unable to see a thing. A sound, so faint I couldn’t be certain that I’d actually heard anything at all. I waited for a repeat occurrence. There it was again. Still faint. Since I still couldn’t be certain there was anything there, I drew a deep breath through my nose in order to sort through all of the various scents and determine which one of them didn’t belong.

  My eyes snapped open.

  “I need to change my smell.”

  My grandfather closed his eyes and slowly opened them again.

  I tried to think of everything that either lived underground or had the potential to enter the warrens now that the stone no longer covered the hole. Mountain lions and coyotes, for sure. Maybe a bear, but surely most of them were hibernating. Bighorn sheep, deer, and elk were a possibility. As were rodents like rabbits, mice, and bats. But how in the name of God was I supposed to collect the urine of any of them, especially on such short notice? I supposed I could track deer well enough to find their scat and a patch of dirt potentially still damp with urine, but that would take time I didn’t have and surely anything with an even remotely sensitive nose would be able to tell the difference between the scents of old urine and feces and new.

  And then it hit me.

  There was another animal living down there, and I knew exactly how it smelled.

  I set the jar back on the shelf—I didn’t need it for what I had to do—and returned to my grandfather’s bedside. I leaned across his bony frame and wrapped my arms around him. Drew him into an embrace. I leaned my cheek against his and felt the dampness of his tears.

  I wanted to tell him not to worry, that I would be coming right back, but my voice failed me. I had a lump in my throat so large that even if I’d been able to speak without starting to cry, I doubted the words would have been able to squeeze around it. Besides, he knew me well enough to know how I felt about him and everything he’d done for me. The only thing he truly needed to hear me say was the one thing I would have the hardest time saying.

  “I forgive you,” I whispered into his ear, and kissed him on his cheek.

  I didn’t look back as I left his room. He’d more than paid for his mistakes. Whatever emotions manifested in his eyes were his alone.

  I stood over my mother and watched her sleep. I wished I could have pictured how she was when the world had still been one of beauty and wonder for her. For as much as it had hurt me to lose a father I barely remembered now, it must have hurt a thousand times worse to lose a spouse. Too bad I had been a cruel reminder of her loss instead of the good times. Maybe we could still find our way back to them if I returned.

  I brushed aside her sweaty bangs and kissed her forehead. She shuffled and flopped away from me so that she faced deeper into the couch. I pulled her blanket up over her shoulder and turned up the TV so she wouldn’t hear all the noise I was about to make outside.

  Her cell phone was on the coffee table beside the ashtray. I removed the battery, dropped it to the floor, and kicked it under the couch. She’d eventually find it, but hopefully by then I’d be here to help her. We’d stopped paying for the landline long ago, so that cell was her only lifeline to the outside world.

  I returned to the kitchen, grabbed my backpack, and surveyed my home one last time. It might not have been much, but we’d been a family here. And I could think of nothing else worth dying for.

  I closed the front door behind me with the sound of finality and listened to a raucous studio audience shouting down some poor child’s illiterate deadbeat dad before grabbing the hammer and setting to work.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I nailed some old, rusted hinges I found in the stable across the front door, near the knob, so that it couldn’t be opened from either side. It wouldn’t hold forever, but I didn’t need it to. I hammered large scraps of wood across the door until it was completely sealed. From there I boarded up each of the remaining windows. There were a couple of times when I thought I heard my mother moving around inside or calling for me, but after waiting for a few minutes, I was able to resume working. When I was done, I walked in a full circle around the trailer, inspecting it for weaknesses.

  Any of the boards could be pried off with a crowbar, but I’d put so many nails through them and into the siding that I doubted anyone could get their fingertips underneath, let alone far enough to pry off the boards. They could be shoved out from the inside if my mother broke the windows first and wouldn’t hold up to any sort of sustained attack from the outside, but I didn’t intend to allow either to have that kind of time.

  I dug holes underneath each of the windows—maybe sixteen inches in diameter—and as deep as I could get them in the shortest amount of time possible. Drove nails into the ground at the bottom, sharp side up, careful not to dull the points. Jammed sticks into the sides, level with the ground, laid a loop of twine over the top, and brushed dead weeds and snow over the whole works. My grandfather called them apache traps. If anything stepped on them, its foot would fall through the sticks and become trapped in the snare. Right before the nails went straight through the bottom of its foot and out the top. When it jerked its leg out, things really got interesting.

  The twine I used for the snare ran along the ground to the end of the trailer, where it was connected to a toggle trigger I fashioned out of one of the nails. When my prey pulled on the snare and tripped the trigger, it would release the six-foot section of vinyl siding I’d pulled away from underneath the window and bent backward as far as it would go without snapping, like the metal bar of a mousetrap. When it sprung back into place, the knife I’d hammered through the end would scream through the air in an arc roughly four and a half feet above the ground and directly over the hole. It would embed itself into whatever was standing there with the force of a speeding truck.

  The front door was significantly harder to rig since I didn’t have that long, chest-high strip of siding to work with, so I saved it for last. I used the principals of the deer spring snare my grandfather taught me, only modified for game of a different variety.

  I made a large noose out of baling wire and laid it on the deck right in front of the door, on that blasted creaking plank that had betrayed me so many times trying to sneak into the house unnoticed. I rigged the board to another length of wire that stretched up over the eave, acro
ss the roof, and to the bough of the cottonwood I’d sat on while I listened to our sheep being slaughtered. I’d bent it nearly all the way down to the roof, where I rigged it to the old TV antenna with a wooden trigger with a seven-notch. The moment the slightest weight was applied to that board, the pressure would pull the cord, causing the wooden trigger to release the antenna. The branch would spring upward so fast that the noose would bite down into anything inside of it almost instantaneously and with so much force I feared the baling wire would cut straight through flesh and bone alike. If it didn’t, then whatever was unlucky enough to find its ankle snared would be jerked straight up toward the roofline, where I’d hammered the remainder of the knives down through the very edge of the eave at a forty-five degree angle so they jutted downward like icicles from hell.

  I could only imagine its screams as its shredded body was tossed high into the air over the tree. I hoped that imagining it would be all I was able to do. If everything went according to plan, my biggest worry upon returning would be deactivating all of these booby traps without getting myself killed in the process.

  I led Paa back into the stable and locked it up tight. Yanaba stared at her mother through the gaps between the slats. She made no protest. Like I said, there’s a bond between people and their horses for which words alone are insufficient. Surely she sensed that where we were going, there was a chance we might not make it back.