The last time I talked to C.L. Greenwood he told me a story that I would carry with me. That was fifteen years ago, but I remember every utterance sitting in his den, listening, by the light of a small lamp inadequate for the space we were in. Just as the lantern he had all those years ago in the woods of a moonless night was not nearly enough. Sixty years had done little, if anything, to diminish the kind of fear that will make blood run cold as gasoline.
It wasn’t a big lantern, but the woods familiar. He could walk them with curious ease the way a blind man evades stationary objects in his own apartment. The trees were more than trees. Grandfatherly figures, memories, sentinels. Moss draped from their limbs like witches hair. Ancient Live Oaks, witness to centuries of people now gone, the noble and the fools, yet the trees remain . There was the tree where he had shot a young spike; the tree he would climb with his first crush, and of course, the tree where a few nights ago his dogs nearly outwitted the smartest coon in Aransas County. This was a coon smarter than two thirds of the City Council, so they were here again, undeterred, and perhaps they’d win this round.
He was still young, not quite a man yet, but confident. The kind of confidence one has that’s not yet left home. His dogs no different. The lantern rendered the young hounds a color seldom found outside an artery. He leaned his gun against the trunk of an oak that four more his size couldn’t stretch around and let the dogs go. They vanished into the ether.
He sat down at the base of that tree and looked up at the low canopy that ventured far in to the dark; far beyond the lanterns glow, like the tentacles of a giant squid dispersed in every direction, a map of millennia, as if the fire of the lantern, and the hunter, were the center of the universe, and beyond that tiny light was nothing.
It was then that he felt the quiet. It had fallen on him there, alone, like a sheet over the recently deceased, and it was heavy. Not a locust, not an owl, nor a dog for that matter. It was the kind of dark that devoured the light, and the kind of silence you could touch.
As quickly as his dogs ran into the night they rejoined him now shivering. The male was urinating uncontrollably. The visceral terror in his dog’s eyes turned him a greenish white usually reserved for a stinking cheese. They tried to hide behind him against the tree and they peered back into the ink from which they had come, but you could not see. It was quiet no more as his heart pounded like timpani, and his dogs whimpered like pups. He stood with lantern in one hand and his rifle in the other and pointed it in the direction they had come but this was of no use as the blanket of the night snuffed out his lantern like a candle between wet finger tips. Nothing was to be seen. Something was there. It was watching him. Whatever was out there deserved to be feared, and it stood between the young man, his dogs, and home.
Home is where he went, one cautious step before another, each dog vying to be the one between his legs. He’d leave a considerable amount of young confidence behind in that thicket because he had respect for what was there, even if he’d never know what it was.
Topic: Strange or Unexplained (Read 15802 times)
