1

Emma Harris’ battered body lay in a pine thicket behind her cabin.  Blood soaked the homespun dress she habitually wore.  Her chestnut hair, usually gathered into a tidy bun, stretched from her skull like a shredded rag.  Crushed fingers grasped the rope handle of her shattered water pail.

Sheriff Hank Lowry doffed his hat and dragged a hand down his walrus moustache.  “Lord have mercy.”

He stooped to study the corpse.

At his side stood the Reverend William Everett Spencer, pale as frost and trembling from boots to brow.  Pinned to his frock coat was a deputy’s star.

William had been leading his Wednesday evening chapel service when Emma’s neighbors had stormed the sanctuary shouting news of her death.  On hastily borrowed horses he and Lowry had galloped into the hills above Grass Flats.

“Biggest hoof marks I ever seen,” Lowry said, fitting both hands over a single track scarring Emma’s dress.

William choked back the bile clogging his throat.  “They’re twice the size of a horse’s.”  He stripped off his clerical collar and mopped his neck.

Lowry scanned the pulverized body.  “I been a lawman thirty years.  Never seen nothing like this.”

Deep lines rutted the sheriff’s cheeks.  Veins knotted his hands.  On his vest dangled a dented star.

A circle of Emma’s neighbors stared at the two men.  Torches and lanterns blanched every face.

William bent to examine Emma’s mashed ribs and mangled arms.  “Could a bison have done this?  Or an elk?”

Lowry’s hands drooped between his knees.  “If’n so, he’s big as a stage coach.  Loco, too.”

“You think it’s rabid?”

“Got to be.  No right-minded animal’d maul a body so savage.”

“Then it may attack anyone.”

Lowry stroked his stubbled chin.  “Them hoof marks,” he said.  “Never come across the like a’fore.”

“A moose, perhaps?”

Lowry shook his head.  “A horned beast would’ve gored her.”

William leaned into the sheriff’s ear.  “We have quite a mess here.  Some puncture wounds may be more apparent with a…closer examination.”

Lowry munched his moustache.  “Reckon we could string up a canvas.  Don’t need these boys watching us poke at her.”  He rose and surveyed the ring of sweating faces.  “Any of you folks get a gander at this critter?”

“I seen it,” said Orville Endicott.  The old miner cradled a shotgun in one arm.  Gray, grizzled whiskers tangled his shirt flannel.

“Go on,” Lowry prompted him.

Orville bobbed his head toward his claim on the next rise.  “I was stewing a possum yonder when my dogs took to howling up a ruckus.  Then my mule started snorting and pawing real scared-like.  Almost broke down the corral fence.  Never seen it so riled.”

Orville’s boots creaked as his weight shifted between them.  “My dogs was whining and crawling under the porch with their tails tucked.  Even the cat run off.  Unnerved me, it did, and I don’t mind telling you.  Took my scattergun down the hill there, thinking I might rouse a wolf or a wildcat.  Poked around the brush some, didn’t find nothing.  Then that smell come over me.”

Lowry’s brow lifted.  “Smell?”

“Like death.  Come rolling through the trees, powerful strong.  Near sick it made me.  The ground shook and I heard something rustling through the scrub at my back.  Then there come a growling like I never heard a’fore.”

“What sort of growling?”

“Hellish as a devil’s laugh,” Orville said.  “Froze me in my tracks.  I don’t scare easy, Sheriff Hank, you know I don’t, but there ain’t man or beast could make such a sound.  I thought Satan hisself was stalking me.”

“So what’d you do?”

“I skedaddled out of there and run back to my stake.”

Droplets beaded the miner’s skin.  Fists clenching his shotgun quaked.

William eyed the man’s whitening knuckles.  “Orville, could it have been a bear?”

“Tarnation, Pastor Will, I know durn well what a bear sounds like, and I know what a bear smells like.  That weren’t no bear.”

“Bears got paws,” Lowry said, mulling the carnage before him.  “This beast’s got hooves.  Big ones.”

“Couldn’t see much from my shack,” Orville said.  “Moon was just coming over the peaks, but I spotted something big wandering the woods.  Seemed to me akin to a dead horse when it’s bloated in the sun and ready to bust open.  I reckon it was ten feet tall at the shoulder, with a neck like a snake.”

Lowry stared at him.

“You heard right,” Orville said.  “Thick as a pine trunk, twisting and squirming all around.  And the rider didn’t look near like a man ought.”

“You seen a rider?”

“Something was on its back.”

Lowry rolled his tongue through his cheek.  “Orville, you sure about that?”

“No, I ain’t.  The thing was gone a’fore I got a good look.  But what I seen was a dead horse with a serpent’s head carrying a circus freak.  Thought I was losing my mind.  Then I got to thinking rustlers or some such.  I was fixing to follow after it when Miss Emma screamed.”

“And you come running.”

“She was yelling her lungs out,” Orville said.  “Whatever beast was mauling her was bellowing savage.  I knew my scattergun wouldn’t do no good against such a critter, but I kept a’coming just the same.  The ruckus stopped a’fore I got to the cabin.  I found Miss Emma lying there like you see her.”

“And nothing of the animal or the rider?”

Tears welled in Orville’s eyes.  “I tried to help her, Sheriff Hank, honest I did.”  He turned away, sniffling.

Pallid faces hovered in the firelight.  Eyes darted back and forth.

William coughed into a fist.  “Did anyone else see the creature?”

“Emma’s sister,” said Henry Holcomb, “she seen it.”

He wagged his lantern up the slope.  William followed his gaze.  Half hidden among the conifers was a cabin belching smoke from a stone chimney.  Amber hues pierced the planks of a shuttered window.

A youth in a slouch hat hammered the planks.  “Miss Elizabeth!”

William recognized Tommy Montag’s voice.  For months the trapper had courted Emma’s sister.  She had confided to William that she liked him very much.

“Come on out, Elizabeth,” Tommy yelled.  “Sheriff Hank and Pastor Will’re here.  You come out, Elizabeth.”

William tramped past the tree stumps scarring the hillside.  A whitewashed cross marked the grave of Emma’s late husband.  His fowler had ruptured on a turkey hunt the previous winter.  The two sisters had taken his passing hard.

Tommy stepped from the window as William approached.  “She won’t come out, Pastor Will.”

William squinted through a crack between the shutter’s boards.  He called through the barricade.  “Miss Prescott, you’re safe now.  Will you open for us?”

A childish whine sounded within the cabin.