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The Great Beast-Dog

by Dillon Mullenix

November 2010

In the freshly washed down sand from the last storm there are several big prints. Two men crouch down and examine the prints closely.

“What is it?” asked the short one in blue jeans and a sheep wool denim jacket. He tilted his cowboy hat back and reached into his pocket for a cigarette, but the slender one signaled him against it.

“Sorry Jim,” the short one said, frowning. He looked like a dog that had done wrong, and knew it. He looked guilty.

Jim pulled up his jean cut-off shorts, exposing whiter thigh, and then squatted closer to the prints. He put his palm next to one of them on the sand. They were almost his size, big. He shuttered, could it be?

“You think it’s a big lion?” asked the short one.

“No Davey,” sighed Jim, “it’s not even a feline.”

“A what?”

“A cat! Those prints are from a dog, Davey, a big wild one.”

“Like a wolf?”

“No, there aren’t wolves out here, it’s that big coyote half-breed I’ve been after. I know the track. The farmers want him dead.”

“Why?”

“The thing kills goats and pigs, total savage. My kind of animal. My neighbor Bobby Wilson saw a shepherd screwing a coyote on his back-lot of his vineyard last year. I suspect it’s common. All these wild dogs running loose around here. No telling what this one could be mixed with, but I’m gonna get it. I pride myself on it.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Go after him, he ain’t far. These tracks are fresh.”

“Why Jim?”

He didn’t answer, just shook his head, disbelieving of his friends ignorance to everything.

Jim got up and began to move off the trail and into the thick brush. The lilac tore at his skin, leaving white striations, bloodless lacerations, and he moved on, unbothered. Jim didn’t even bother to wear shoes. He never did unless he had to go to work. It was funny watching him when he was shoed, he moved like an impossible to balance penguin. Shifty. But on his bare feet he moved like a coyote himself, up the ravine and over a protrusion of granite. Davey followed him slowly, called out a few times, and was hastily told to “shut the fuck up.”

Jim worked quickly to the top of the ridge. He had with him a good hefty monocular. The valley stretched out bellow him, short bunch grass and shrub oaks. The tree line and small pond are still. No concentric circles today, no prey, no masked death. Davey had not yet come to the peak, but could be heard huffing his way up the steep grade to the knoll where Jim sat perched like a hawk, glassing the swaying blades of dry grasses. The tall blades seemed to undulate like an ocean. A few white birds soared above him, unfamiliar.

“Holy shit,” said wheezing Davey. He almost keeled over when he tried to sit down, and knocked several large rocks over the precipice. They listened to them as they dropped. Heard them crash into the canyon and explode. Davey looked startled, then sacred when he saw Jim giving him a terrible look.

“If you fuck this up, I’ll…memento mori!” Jim snorted.

“Sorry, man,” gulped air-starved Davey. He’d skinned his arm and hand, and it bothered him.

Jim looked back at the valley, the swaying grass, the tall tree perimeter, its impenetrable dark green canopy. The forest was a vacant and plentiful place that both beckoned and warned trespassers. Not a place for the timid. Jim hardly went past the edge, fear of the shadows.

A flash of beige startled him, upsetting his gaze.

Jim sat straight up and set down the monocular.

He found his rifle on the strap across his chest and brought it up swiftly and smoothly, with a precise practiced motion. One would think that he had hunted his whole life, or been born with a gun or something, but he had only recently begun to take blood with modern weapons. Prior to last year he’d only hunted with home-made weapons and stone-age inventions. But this wasn’t his first rifle kill or anything, either; he’d been practicing with earnest since he took the sport up. Every day he killed something.

“Do you see something?” said Davey, mothering his skinned hand and forearm with a dampened bandanna he’d retrieved from his blue fanny pack.

Jim had told Davey to leave the thing at home once, that it made him look silly, out of date, but Davey said the fanny pack was important, and that it had many good uses. It had band-aids in it. Davey reminded Jim of this now, but was hushed by the stoic man with the rifle.

Davey had regarded Jim and decided Jim had no business scolding him about fashion, after all he was wearing those shorts, no shoes, dirty feet, dirty big hands, old grey dirty cotton wife-beater, gauged ears and forty-five years old, raisin sun skin, and unshaven shaggy haired mug. He looked like a hillbilly-hippie, maybe serial-killer. He sure looked like a psycho-murderer now, scoping in on something down in the valley.

Davey wondered what Jim was looking at, and sat up to see. He had bad vision and had to squint, and it only helped him see a blur in a sea of blurs. He decided Jim was crazy, looking at nothing. He went back to mothering his wounds, tenderly.

The coyote, big as a small black bear, was moving with great strides across the swaying great grass valley. The wind was coming in from the south, at Jim’s back. The beast was closing on the tree line quickly, that endless stand of cedars and oaks and pines and firs, and the floor quilted in leaves and moss and lichen and boulders and poison oak and thistle, needles, spurs, burs, ledges, streams, wilderness… In there the great-beast would be gone, harder to track.

It was almost a miracle that Jim had seen the animal at all. Hiding in the open. Amongst his own colors only, nothing tall, and he was above average shoulder height, and would have had to crouch to stay down in the grass. More like a lion than a wild coyote-dog. Jim thought maybe there had been a deer down in there too somewhere. No time to check however.

The trigger, cool from the mountain air and early morning frost, shocked Jim’s finger as he touched it to the metal. He drew it back, and then calm and ready put it back in place. Why had he done that? He knew it was going to be cold. It was always was this time of year. Around him the leaves of the deciduous trees were drooping. Greens were fading to orange, red, brown. He settled the sight, brought the hairs in, and then gave them and the charging creature a little space between the working shoulders where Jim intended to insert the hollow-point snugly. In that small space near the spine that shuts the lights out instantaneously, permanently and without struggle. One fast surgery.

Davey, forgetting his injured arm, and found a small tarantula on the ground and picked it up. The spider had long hairy legs and large black abdomen. Its fangs were visible, even to Davey, and when he held the spider up close to his face to get a better inquisitive look, the tarantula jolted free and leaped onto his face. Davey lurched up and stumbled, screamed, clawed at his face, and then fell over a root protruding from the rocky earth.

“…” he stammered, but not a word came forth from the terrified Davey. The will of chance carried him on his path, undisturbed. Fate had him.

Jim made the slow pull of the trigger against the spring to relieve the pressure in the chamber boomed forth into the soft air a projectile travelling faster than sound across the vast open range at the sprinting target hundreds of yards away. The beast-dog moved, its muscles rippling beneath its silken coat. Jaws clenched, ears down, hair up, tail out, legs moving so fast they cannot be focused on… the phantom in the valley, like a great marlin, leaping on the line. Fighting to stay in the deep dark waters, fighting to get back to where it is safe.

The report of the rifle could be heard sounding throughout the valley, up into the highest arches and saddles and quaking ridges on the mountains around the men and beast, the echoing reaching up into the clear cobalt sky.

A plane crossed the sky, a shiny silver dot leaving a white steam trail. Jim lowered the rifle.

Horrified.

He had shot what he had intended, and immediately he regretted it.

For so long, and now it was all over.

The phantom vanished into the darkness and reality present, finally.

In some men it would be too much to bear.

In Jim it was just another day.

All there was left to do was make the hike back with a small memento.

A token.

A talisman.

Dillon Mullenix was born in Los Angeles, but fled for the high desert in 2007 as soon as the winds were right, and from his post in the savage hills he has published several works in such magazines and blogs as: Common Ties, FORTH Magazine, Glass Cases, Seahorse Rodeo Folk Review, Haggard & Halloo, Autumn Letters, and STIR FRY.  He has also been included in three anthologies, one coming out this fall, The Coffee Shop Chronicles (A Word With You Press).  When Dillon is not writing he is watching the clouds roll by, and the surreal heat rise and fall with the leaves. 

Vale. from the land of strange people and coyotes barking in the night