Shadow Walker

by Tina Proffitt

  An ominous-sounding crack of thunder sounded in the distance. But it was not close enough to cause her alarm. She could be finished with her owls and well on her way back to Shadow's home before the first drop of rain fell. Distracted by this little conundrum, she quickly scooped up as many pellets from the floor of the owl box as she could with one hand and climbed down the pole. At a picnic table close by the field and underneath the protective cover of a few pines, she removed her microscope, her field journal, and her hand tools from her backpack and set to work.

  Checking her watch and taking a sip from her water bottle, she yawned and stretched her tired back that had been hunched over the microscope for the past thirty-five minutes. She returned her equipment to her backpack and set back up the pole for one last check of her owls.

  Her morning had been quite perfect, she mused, not counting on what she was about to find in the owls' nest. Carol was lying on her side, flopping as though she were trying to right herself but could not. Her wing must have somehow been damaged, she thought, but how? There was no blood. No sign of the nest having been tampered with. But Carol was in need of immediate medical attention, the kind only a veterinarian could give her. Bethanie felt helpless. What should she do? Remembering back to her freshman year, she thought the first thing was to remove her from the nest without further injuring her wing. Bethanie removed her own sweatshirt from her backpack and gently wrapped Carol in it to prevent her from flapping her wings. She lifted the small owl from her comfortable nest of miscellaneous digested bones and fur. Very slowly, she began back down the pole one rung at a time, with her precious package tucked under one arm, pausing on each step to be sure the female owl was okay. When she reached the ground, she ever so slowly walked to the barn, cradling the injured owl in both of her arms like an infant.

  Once inside the dark space, she searched for something to carry her in, a cardboard box, or a wooden crate, anything until she spotted one on a low shelf. With one hand, she dumped out the contents of the wooden crate into a pile of hay in the corner. She blinked at the pile of bloodstained shop rags that lay there. They were the very kind her brother, Peter, had been fond of using when he worked on his car’s engine. Made of coarse fabric, they were terrible at absorbing water but great at removing oil from greasy hands.

  Bethanie's first thought was that whoever had slaughtered the deer and hung its body in the barn, must have used these rags to clean up afterward and hidden them away inside this crate. She knew from her horrible experience growing up, seeing a deer corpse hanging from her neighbor's tree, that bleeding an animal was an extremely messy job. That deer, she remembered vividly, had bled from one end of the yard to the other.

  She gently lay Carol inside the box that cradled her just right, not so big that she would roll around inside. The vet's office was less than a mile down the road. She could be there in less than twenty minutes. She was used to walking much further distances. It was not as if she had a choice in the matter since she had no idea where to find Shadow. So with the sweatshirt to act as a cushion, she felt sure that she could get Carol there comfortably before the rain began.

  Shadow switched on the windshield wipers as he drove along State Route 602, pressing the gas a little too hard in an effort to burn away some of the anger he was feeling. His friend, Bobby Blue, down at the police station had admitted that they had no evidence to suspect him right now. It was still a missing person's case. And the only evidence that had been found was the bloodstained hunting knife and hatchet. Neither of which had any distinguishable fingerprints on them. Shadow knew there would not be, since he worked in gloves. They determined that the blood was not human, it was from an animal, obviously, the slaughtered deer left in the barn for them to find. Bobby Blue had suggested that Shadow hang a surveillance camera inside the barn where the evidence had been found, in the hopes that the guilty party would return to the scene of the crime. But Shadow had already considered that after viewing the pictures of Bethanie's owls.

  On his way home, he purchased two trail cameras at Tate's General Store. The trail camera would do the same job as a surveillance camera. He knew plenty of hunters who used them, allowing them to track deer in a certain area before going out. It would snap a picture or video of whatever or whomever was in front of it using infrared motion detectors. And he could mount it out of sight, inside above the entrance. But he would not be tracking deer. He was tracking a madman.

  As he stewed, alone with his thoughts, he slowed the truck to a crawl in the rain as he could barely make out something ahead in the road. As he neared, he could see that it was a person, walking alone and carrying a load. No one, he thought, would be stupid enough to risk life and limb walking this road in the rain with its twists and blind curves. It had barely enough shoulder to call it that, and a drop off that could leave a person seriously hurt. Not to mention that the posted speed limit was thirty-five mph, a fact that seemed to escape most driver's attention, traveling at least fifty-five. And that was soccer moms in their minivans, not even counting the motorcyclists with a death wish or joy riders in sport convertibles.

  He slowed his truck to a crawl, so as not to frighten whomever it was as he passed.

  Bethanie had been wrong about two things, the rain and the road. Its narrow shoulder was proving to be a lot more treacherous, especially when wet, than she had given it credit, and the worn-out souls of her tennis shoes offered her no traction. The drop-off itself into the drainage ditch was about six feet. Somehow it had always seemed shallower when she passed inside the safety of Shadow's pick-up truck. As cars passed by her now, catching her hair in their slipstream, the force nearly knocked her off her feet.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Shadow, who had pulled his truck to a crawl alongside Bethanie, was in shock when he realized the walker was Bethanie. The agitation in his voice was near hysterical. Pulling over to a complete stop, he stepped up behind her, gently lifting her burden from her, but his expression was anything but gentle. “Get in,” he ordered without waiting for her reply.

  For one brief, hysterical moment, Bethanie considered refusing him. He was the one who had left her alone this morning. Who did he think he was ordering her around? But as she struggled to keep the crate steady, teetering on the edge of the country road, she looked up into the dark sky overhead and quickly regained her sanity, realizing her pride would only hurt Carol in the long run. Her bruised ego would have to take a back seat for now.

  “What happened to her?” Shadow asked indicating the owl as he slowly eased the truck back onto the slick road. He had slammed the truck’s door after situating Bethanie and her burden into the dry cab of the truck but concern was written all over his expression now as he peered inside the crate.

  “I don't know. I found her like this.” Her voice was full of anxiety as she draped a protective arm across the open crate resting on the seat between them.

  Shadow clenched the steering wheel to keep from saying anything more that he might regret. Bethanie had only been doing the what she could for her injured owl. He silently berated himself for having left her all alone, knowing that something like this, or worse, could happen. Glancing over at her pitiful shoes she had been walking the gravel shoulder in, he cursed her family for not caring for her. Then seeing her big toe poking out of the front of her wet sneaker nearly did him in. It was all he could do not to scream out his frustration and drive off the side of the road in a rage. He cursed.

  Covering Carol with a spare towel he kept in his truck, they entered the waiting room of the Willow Creek Animal Hospital. Horses whinnied from out back of the building while inside the sterile smelling reception room, a pot-bellied pig sprawled out obviously cooling himself on the ceramic tile floor, a cat carrier full of white bunnies waited quietly, and a Blood Hound howled intermittently in its sleep.

  Bethanie spoke briefly to a blonde receptionist with multiple piercings in her face, sitting at the u-shaped desk in the center of the room. And before she
knew it a doctor's assistant, wearing scrubs, came from the back immediately, taking the crate from Bethanie's trembling hands, promising to be back right back.

  It all happened so fast; Bethanie scarcely knew what to do with herself. Shadow placed a hand around Bethanie's waist and led her to two hard-backed chairs in the corner of the room and next to a window where two blue parakeets chirped from their cage.

  “Where were you this morning?” Her annoyance at being left alone was quickly turning to rage. Whether she liked it or not, she had no one else to turn to but him.

  “I had some things to take care of.”

  “Like what kind of things?” She resented his cryptic answer and found it impossible to keep the icy chill from her voice. Rain was depressing, and that always put her on edge.

  Shadow looked into her eyes, wanting to tell her. But out of concern for her safety, he said nothing, but grinned at her. A sexy smile that made her suddenly feel weak inside and to which she made the mistake of smiling back, unable to stay angry at him. That she resented even more, and scowled, staring down at her hands resting in her lap.

  Shadow could not help but chuckle at her reaction to him, but inside, he was worried about her. She looked pale beneath her facade of anger. To calm his own increasing nerves, he took a deep breath and hooking a finger beneath her chin, said softly, “Can you trust me?”

  She searched his eyes, and like all other times before, she found sincerity in them. She did trust him. And without liking it, she needed him. She reached up for his hand, needing the comfort and reassurance of his touch, with a surprising intensity.

  He covered her hand with his, swallowing up her small hand. “You've done all you can do. Now, we relax and wait.”

  Bethanie looked into his steely blue eyes and wondered how she would be able to relax not with the way he made her feel inside. A boom of thunder sounded outside. “I can't.” She shook her head.

  Shadow sensed her agitation. “Tell me about what your plans are once you join the Barn Owl Conservatory. Are you going to start wanting kippers for breakfast?”

  She laughed and shook her head, taking a deep breath, knowing that he meant to distract her. “There's some exciting research on hearing being done with the owls there right now,” Bethanie began, feeling relieved now to be talking about something besides the injury she was helpless to fix. “I hope to be a part of it.”

  “Tell me about it,” Shadow prodded, sensing her need to talk.

  “What a barn owl lacks in vision they more than make up for in their sense of hearing. In fact, one of the most dangerous places for the barn owls to nest, because they hunt within a one-mile radius of their nests, is near any kind of road. More barn owls are killed every year by flying into oncoming traffic than any other way. But, because of their heart-shaped faces, barn owls have excellent hearing. Sounds are channeled into their inner ears, which sit just behind their eyes, and travel more effectively to the brain than if they had ear tufts on the tops of their heads as other owls do.”

  “I see.” Shadow turned in his seat to face her. He still held onto her hand, and when she hesitated, he nodded. “Go on.”

  “Well,” Bethanie said as she looked down at Shadow's much larger hand covering hers and a warm feeling spread throughout her body, making it hard for her to concentrate, “research is showing that we can learn a lot about how our brains process sounds by looking at the barn owl. In particular, a barn owl is adept at not only hearing the quietest brush of leaves on the ground, but at knowing where that sound is coming from. They have a spatial sense of hearing, much like humans, only much more adapted to their purpose, which is, of course, to find their food, a one and a half ounce vole, hiding in eight inches of grass hundreds of feet away in near total darkness and still manage to catch their prey. There are some who suspect that if we know more about how our brains respond to sound, we can discover why it is that it becomes more difficult to learn a foreign language as we age.”

  “Impressive.” Shadow nodded, enjoying the light in Bethanie's eyes as she spoke of her passion. When she looked down again, he kissed her eyelids slowly hovering there and breathing her in. When he spoke again, his voice was a whisper. “And how is it exactly that you count the number of mice and voles an owl eats?”

  Bethanie’s mind blanked when Shadow so unexpectedly kissed her. She cleared her throat before she attempted to speak, fearing her voice would betray her. “Because they swallow their prey whole. We can identify the regurgitated parts of the rodents found in the owl's pellets. A rat, for instance, is recognizable by its large skull, an inch and a half long, and by the space between their front incisors, which are orange, called a diastema. A mouse on the other hand, does not have that space between its front teeth, and its skull size is smaller, just a little over an inch long. And you can tell the difference between a mole and shrew by the shape of their skull. A mole has a triangular shaped skull and a shrew does not.” When she had finished her impromptu lecture, Bethanie blushed. She knew what he was doing, trying to distract her. And she felt grateful to him for it.

  This was more than Shadow had ever wanted to know about rodents. To him, they were pests, and all he knew was that he hated what they did to his fields every year. And those moles in particular ate up most of the valuable aerating earthworms in his fields while simultaneously destroying the grass.

  But when Bethanie had started work with her owls, things began to change for the better. And not just out in the field. Since he had first laid eyes on her, things had changed for the better. He gave her hand a squeeze, winking at her to let her know that it was going to be okay. Bethanie had brought innocence into his life. Something that he very much needed, because he had suspected that it did not exist anymore, that a harsh world had beaten out of people, or had simply been forgotten, like a toy from childhood. But there she was, trusting and disarming at the same time, and he could not remember what his life had been like before he met her. And he could not have her, he reminded himself. He dropped her hand abruptly, causing Bethanie to fear she had irritated him. And suddenly he was very, very angry at the world.

  By the time Shadow and Bethanie got back into his pick-up truck after waiting an hour at the veterinarian's office to finally be told that Carol would have to be kept overnight for observation, the rain had stopped.

  Shadow was still in fuming. His mood had not altered since their conversation had ended, and helping her into the truck, he slammed her door harder than he meant to.

  “What's this?” Bethanie asked when Shadow was seated next to her in the cab. “It looks like the trail camera we use to watch over the owls.”

  “It is. But its purpose is much different. It's going inside the barn.”

  “You mean for surveillance?”

  “Yeah, you could call it that.”

  “So this is what you were doing this morning. Are you planning to conduct your own investigation?”

  Shadow did not answer, just gave a terse nod of his head and pointed the truck towards home.

  “There's something you should see in the barn. Something I found in the barn this morning when I was looking for the crate to put Carol in. I forgot all about it until just now.”

  “There,” she said, sliding the large barn door open. She pointed to the spot in the corner where she had dumped out the contents of the crate. But nothing was there. Not a single bloody, shop rag was there. “I don't understand. It was just a little more than an hour ago.”

  Shadow scoped out the entire barn for some sign of the rags but found nothing. Without concrete evidence of some kind, they would have nothing to report to the police.

  “We need to call the police,” Bethanie said, her voice laced with fear, “Someone knows that I found them and has taken them.”

  “I've already been to the police. The blood on the hunting knife was definitely not human. As far as they're concerned, this is still a missing persons case. They don't give credence to the skinwalker. According to them, it's just a pra
nk.”

  “I know it's not a prank. I can feel it. Someone hid those rags probably because they contain real evidence.” Bethanie was trying to stay ahead of her panic by focusing on what she could do about it.

  “It's time we did a little police work of our own.” If someone were watching them, then he would find out who it was with the surveillance camera. He grabbed her hand, surprising her with his urgency, and they left the barn. “I'm going to need you're help,” he said, facing her once they were outside of the barn. “We're going to need a trap. And that's where you come in. Since trapping animals is right up your alley. But we're trapping something much larger than voles this time.”

  “What do want me to do?” Bethanie found it hard to keep the anticipation from her voice. This would be first time anyone had ever needed her for anything, other than cooking or cleaning up after her brothers and sisters.

  He retrieved the bag containing the trail camera from his truck. “The skinwalker's going to get his pretty little picture taken the next time he steps foot into my barn, and then we'll take the picture to the police before he even knows what happened.”

  With Bethanie's help positioning the camera, Shadow chose the perfect spot to hang it completely out of sight above the double doors. Once he liked the position, Bethanie climbed down from the ladder to allow him to hang the camera in place. Anyone entering and leaving the barn from now on would get their photo taken. Not forgetting to camouflage it, above it he loosely draped the hem of the American flag that hung from the loft's ceiling, being careful not to cover the infrared sensor or the lens.

  “Now what?” Bethanie asked as she stood on the bottom rung of the ladder to keep it steady as Shadow climbed down.

  “Now, we bait the trap online. Because I'm betting those missing girls have personal web pages, it shouldn't be hard to find out who their friends are and question them.”