The Hunter From the Woods

by Robert R. McCammon

  “Go ahead. I’ll just bleed some and wait for the RAF to arrive. As you say, they’ll see the smoke and come looking.”

  “I didn’t mean your air force will come looking,” Gantt said. “You’re too far from your base and you’re off the regular patrol route. I’m talking about the Dahlasiffa. The Death Stalkers. You have heard of them, yes?”

  Michael had heard rumors. Supposedly the Dahlasiffa was a warlike tribe of scavengers who stripped corpses of anything valuable after a battle. They knocked out gold and silver teeth, took money, watches, medals, helmets, boots, and it was speculated they were likely stockpiling rifles, pistols and grenades to use against enemy tribes. Michael had never seen a Dahlasiffa or met anyone who’d seen one, but the word at HQ in Cairo was that the Dahlasiffa not only stripped corpses but also made short work of the wounded.

  “They’re real enough,” Gantt said. “They usually travel in packs of six or seven. We’re in their territory. They’ll see the smoke and they’ll come looking to strip corpses. And they won’t care who’s wearing what uniform, either, or how close to being a corpse you are. They’ll finish that job. What’s the brand of your watch?”

  “Rolex.”

  “Breitling.” Gantt showed Michael the watch on a brown leather band on his wrist. “I intend to keep it, and my arm. Shall we go?”

  Michael thought about it, but not for very long. The Lysander, burned to its metal framework, cast no shade. The world was made up of yellow sand, black rock and white glaring sun. It was a furnace. He stood up.

  “Carry your bag,” Gantt told him. “And…oh, yes… I have your nice straight razor in my pocket, if you’re wondering. I’ll carry the canteen. But you should put those clothes back in your bag, as well. They might be useful.”

  Michael did what he suggested.

  “Your left arm’s broken?” the flyer asked.

  “Possibly. Whatever, it’s not working.” Michael had already considered his situation regarding a change to wolf form and tearing this man into pieces even the Dahlasiffa could not loot. The problem was, he couldn’t run on all fours. He couldn’t leap to avoid a bullet. So in this particular instance he had more power on two legs, as a man.

  Gantt nodded. “Bind it up,” he said, as he once again cast his gaze along the horizon.

  Michael spent a moment getting the dark blue collar scarf tied around his neck and then forcing the arm into it. The pain made him growl deep in his throat. When he was done, fresh sweat stood out on his face. He picked up the kitbag, moving as slowly as a hobbled old man.

  “Go!” Gantt pointed to the west. “This way!”

  It was no surprise to Michael that Rolfe Gantt, the German Messerschmitt ace who since the beginning of his career in the 1939 invasion of Poland had shot down forty-six enemy planes—and now added four more credits to that number—wished to head toward the German lines instead of toward the British in Cairo. Michael was more versed in the ground war but he’d certainly heard and read of Gantt’s prowess. There were other Luftwaffe aces in North Africa, among them Richard Thess and Franz Ubevelder, but it was Rolfe Gantt who’d appeared on the cover of last month’s German Signal magazine, standing with his arms crossed and a wide grin on his face in front of the black-tailed 109.

  Michael walked, carrying the kitbag. Gantt held the pistol on him for a while, but then lowered it to save his arm strength.

  Michael knew exactly what Gantt wanted: to find a German patrol or outpost as soon as possible, to give up his prisoner and maybe get a truck ride back to his airfield.

  Then it was off to a POW camp for Michael Gallatin, and it would be a very long war for a caged lycanthrope.

  They crossed a landscape that seemed to have no beginning and no end. It was a world apart in its solitude, its merciless fury, its silence but for the hissing of a sudden wind that brought a further blast of heat and a scatter of sand thrown into the eyes.

  They hadn’t gone very far when it was obvious to Michael that they weren’t going to get very far. His shadow upon the stony hammada was the blackest ink. The sun drove a white-hot spike into his head, he was already craving water and the flies had found them. Found their wounds, to be more exact. First one or two came to feast upon the crusted gashes, and then they summoned others to the banquet. Within thirty minutes of leaving the Lysander’s charred skeleton, Michael was the victim of a moving mass of flies that clung to a cut above his left eye. A score of flies tried to get up his nostrils at the tasty gore he was breathing around. They fastened themselves to his lips and crawled into his mouth, and no amount of head-shaking or slapping them away could keep them from their food. Also, they did have a taste for sweat. Likewise, Rolfe Gantt’s forehead wound was the focal point of a fist-sized clump of flies that writhed and rippled in nearly orgasmic delight to get at what he was made of. They got hold of his split lip and tried to winnow into the fissure, to break it open so more blood would flow. They dashed themselves against his eyes as if to blind him and make him drop. They spun around his head like a dark halo, and settling down into the thick blonde field of his hair they sucked at his scalp for salt.

  Michael spat out a few flies. “The survival manual says the first thing to do is get your head and face covered. Then only to travel at night.”

  “The survival manual doesn’t have Dahlasiffa in it,” Gantt replied. Squinting against the midday glare, he looked back the way they’d come. “We’ll keep going for awhile.” As they walked, he opened the canteen and took a quick drink. The disturbed flies buzzed with indignant anger. “Here,” he said. “One swallow only.”

  Michael took the offered canteen. The water tasted of his laundry soap. He returned the cap to the canteen and the canteen to Gantt, who returned the strap to his shoulder.

  “Keep walking,” Gantt told him, and motioned with the Walther.

  “You’re sure you’ll find anything out there?” The out there Michael referred to was the shimmering wasteland that stretched before them, mile upon empty mile.

  “I have a very good sense of direction.”

  “So do I, but that doesn’t mean you’ll find an outpost before you run out of water.”

  The canteen had held maybe enough for each of them to have two or three more swallows. Flies whirled around Michael’s face and darted at his good eye, trying to get the moisture there. He suddenly decided he’d had enough of this, and if the German ace wanted to shoot him it would be a bullet put to good use. He stopped walking.

  “Go on! Don’t stop!”

  “I’m putting something over my head. And you stop waving that damned gun around. Does it look like I’m in any shape to give you trouble?”

  Gantt had lifted the pistol to take aim at Michael’s battered face. Now he slowly lowered it. “No,” he said, with the hint of a smile. “I suppose not.”

  Michael put the kitbag down amid the stones and knelt beside it. He found his small bottle of Trumper Lime aftershave, thankfully neither broken by a bullet nor the impact, which had enough alcohol in it to heal small razor cuts. It would do as well as anything on wounds suffered in an aircraft crash. Working with one hand, he got the bottle open and splashed liquid on the cut over his eye. It stung like the devil’s own joyjuice, but surely it would do some good. At least the way the flies buzzed meant they didn’t seem to like the smell. He rubbed more of the liquid all over his face and felt small stings from chin to forehead.

  “You English,” said Gantt, with a note of disdain. “That’s why you won’t win this war, you know. You’re too addicted to your comforts and your little…what is that? Aftershave lotion?”

  “That’s right.” Michael screwed the small crown cap back on. “Here.” He threw it to Gantt, who caught it by reflex in his left hand. “The alcohol will help.”

  “I don’t choose to smell like a small British island in the Caribbean,” Gantt answered, but he didn’t throw it back. “Don’t you people take this war seriously?”

  Michael decided to ignore the man. He brou
ght a tan-colored shirt out of the kitbag. Shaking the flies off his wounds, he tore the shirt in a couple of strategic places and began to wrap it around his head and face in his best approximation of a desert tribesman’s keffiyeh. “Take, for example, your tea breaks,” Gantt went on. “Why does everything stop at a certain hour for you people to drink tea? You even stop during an advance to drink tea. Don’t you understand the value of discipline?”

  “I don’t stop for tea breaks,” Michael said as he continued to adjust his head covering, “but I think they are a form of discipline.”

  “You Englishers are children living in a dream world.”

  Michael got the shirt arranged so he had a torn slit he could see through. Otherwise, everything was covered. He tucked in a bit of cloth here and there to make sure it stayed on. “And I suppose you Nazis are living in the real world?”

  Gantt frowned, his eyes darkening. “I’m not a Nazi.” He opened the bottle of aftershave with his teeth and splashed some on the flies that feasted at his forehead wound.

  They lifted up with a noise like little airplanes and flew wildly in search of another landing strip. Gantt winced at the pain but poured some more of the stuff on for good measure. “Never a Nazi,” he continued, as the liquid ran down his face. He glanced quickly up toward the burning orb of the sun, measuring its force upon his skull and his willpower. The flies were already coming back, one by one. He shrugged off the canteen and the parachute pack.

  “What’s your first name?” he asked.

  “Michael.”

  “All right, Michael. I will shoot you if you move in any way in the next two minutes. The bullet will go into your knee, and it will be a crippling shot because I am a very good shot. Then, though I desire to take you back as my prisoner, I will leave you here to die. Do you understand that?”

  Michael nodded. He had no doubt the man would do exactly as he said. It was best to bide his time, to wait for an opportunity, and to seize it when it came. The problem was going to be seizing it with one good arm.

  Gantt removed his shirt and pulled his undershirt up over his face. He positioned it so he could see through the neckhole and his head was covered, and then he put his shirt back on and retrieved the other gear. He recapped the Trumper bottle and slid it in his pack. “Very obedient of you,” he said, “and very smart. You’re a major, I see. But you wear no other insignia. What’s your speciality?”

  “Reconnaissance.”

  “Ah. So you’re used to walking the untrodden path, is that correct?” Gantt motioned with the pistol toward what the Berber tribesmen might call the plain of sorrows. “After you.”

  They went on.

  The sun was their enemy. Scorpions scuttled amid the stones at their feet. The sky was burned white, and the earth the color of ashes. The land broke into ravines and descended nearer to Hell. Sand began to pull at their boots and the dazzle tortured their eyes. The hot wind came up and tore at their makeshift keffiyehs. As he trudged onward, Michael realized only his physical training—and perhaps his supernatural training—was keeping him on his feet. He thought that Rolfe Gantt must be in excellent physical shape too, or maybe it was the sheer force of will that kept Gantt going.

  The wind strengthened and swirled sand before it. Grit stung the eyes like sharp bits of glass. They kept their faces lowered. Michael began to think that the time to act was approaching. One false stumble might do it. One stumble and sidestep and then…what? An elbow to Gantt’s jaw? A knee to the groin? He doubted he would be fast enough to get through the flyer’s guard; after all, Gantt was an expert at recognizing a developing danger, and it was likely he was expecting something right now. But how much longer did Michael dare go before he tried to overpower the man? He didn’t have a lot of strength left and it was ebbing fast in this heat. Damn the arm! he thought angrily.

  If he had full control over his limbs, this scenario would have been finished to his satisfaction hours ago. But no, no…it was pointless to moan over a broken shoulder. He had to try something. He slowed a step.

  “Don’t slow down,” said Gantt, indicating his level of awareness even with sand in his eyes.

  “I need some water.”

  “So do I, but we don’t get any. Not yet.”

  Michael continued to slow his pace and put a small stumble in it for effect. “Water,” he said, calculating inches. If he could manage to knock that gun from Gantt’s hand…but there was the Colt automatic in the man’s waistband. Whatever happened in the next few seconds, it was going to be a dirty, close-run…

  Gantt aimed the pistol at the ground between them and fired. The bullet ricocheted off a stone and screamed away. Then the Walther took steady aim at Michael again.

  “Don’t try what you’re thinking,” said the flyer, his voice unnervingly calm. “You would be much too clumsy. So just keep walking, like a good obedient—”

  He suddenly spun to the right and held the pistol out before him.

  Michael looked in that direction.

  A figure stood up on a slight hill at the edge of the curtains of blowing sand.

  It was a small figure, dressed in dirty clothes that may have once been white. They were really not much more than rags that flapped in the wind. The figure wore a brown keffiyeh and on top of that sat a khaki-colored Scottish Tam O’Shanter cap, which Michael knew was a common headdress among Commonwealth soldiers.

  “Come down here!” Gantt ordered.

  The figure did not move.

  Gantt glanced quickly at Michael. “Do you know the language?”

  “A little.” He was limited, but he did know a bit from dealing with tribal scouts.

  “Tell him to come down here.”

  Michael spoke the command—Come here—in first Tamazight and then Tuareg Berber. The figure turned and ran and in a few seconds was gone from sight.

  Gantt kept the Walther aimed into the swirling sand for awhile longer before he lowered it. “What do you make of that?” he asked, probably directing the question to himself. When Michael had no reply, the pistol found him once more. “Keep moving. And no more playacting, please. You’re no stumbler.”

  Michael walked forward, with Gantt a few careful paces behind. The lycanthrope had decided to again bide his time, because surely an opportunity was coming. If not, he would find a way to create one before they reached the shadow of an Afrika Korps flag. Behind him, the flyer scanned left and right for more figures in the wind but none emerged.

  Michael figured Gantt must have been spooked by the strange encounter, because a few minutes after the incident the ace said, “Entertain me. Tell me about yourself.”

  “I wouldn’t care to waste my breath.”

  “Fair enough. I’ll tell you about myself, then. Did you know that I’ve shot down…well, it would be fifty planes including the ones today. Fifty. Do you know how many pilots have never shot down even one plane? And here I have fifty chalked up! What do you say about that?”

  “I say you’re walking through the desert, the same as me.”

  “Yes, but there’s a very big difference between our futures. You’ll be a prisoner of war and I’ll be up there again. I belong up there, Michael. It’s where I truly live. Is there a place you truly live?”

  Michael grunted quietly. The hunter from the woods is a very long way from home, he thought. “No particular place,” he replied.

  “I’m sorry for you, then. All men need a place where they truly live. Where their souls and spirits are free. The sky is my place. I find it beautiful, even on a stormy day when the planes are grounded. It is a woman with a thousand faces, all of them exquisite. Are you married, Michael?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither.” He gave a short laugh. “As if I should ever wear such a chain! The first thing a wife would say to me is, don’t fly so high or so fast. And listening to her, and wanting to please her, would kill me as it has killed so many other pilots with…” Gantt searched for the right word. “Attachments,” he finished. He
laughed again, only this time Michael thought it sounded a little forced. “Men like us don’t need attachments, do we?”

  “Men like us?”

  “The risk-takers. The men who must be on the battlefront. Take you, for one. Your reconnaissance work. That puts you at great risk, doesn’t it? And you’re out front, blazing a trail through the mines and tank traps? Don’t tell me you’re simply a desk jockey, because I won’t believe it.”

  “I’m not simply that,” Michael said.

  “A man of action can recognize a man of action,” Gantt told him. “It’s in the way you move. And you’re confident, even now, even with your broken shoulder, that I’ll never get you to that outpost, aren’t you? Even with a pistol at your back, you’re confident. You think I’ll make a mistake you can take advantage of. Yes? And I’m confident that I will not make a mistake. So what does that make us?”

  “Two confident fools in the desert with a couple of swallows of water in a shot-up canteen,” Michael answered.

  “No! It makes us comrades of sorts! Like chess players, you see? Two men of action, reduced to the barest minimum to survive! A challenge, to be overcome.”

  “I think you need some more covering for your head.”

  “Maybe I do, Englisher, but I’ll tell you… I find your confidence in this situation to be very interesting. And entertaining. I’m just waiting to see what you’re going to do to keep yourself out of a POW camp. Because I know you are going to try.”

  “You would,” Michael said.

  “Of course I would! I’d never give up trying. And that’s why we’re comrades of sorts, isn’t it?”

  “If you say so.” A movement to the right caught Michael’s attention. When he looked, he saw across the white plain the small figure in the dirty rags and the khaki tam about a hundred meters away, keeping their pace.

  “Ah, there he is again,” said Gantt. “Now…he’s not a Dahlasiffa scout, or he’d be on a camel. In fact, why isn’t he on a camel? I make him out to be…about four feet six? A small boy, I’m thinking? All alone out here? And why might that be?”