Page 52 of Fall or Nothing

Hunted

CARTER

A solid bootto the frame rattled the whole bunk and kicked my brain from dead asleep to awake in half a second. Trig stood over me in the dark, already dressed, carrying a flashlight and a burlap sack in his hand.

“Get up. All hands on deck.”

“What time is it?” I croaked, sitting upright.

“Time to move. Jackalopes and wolfagators have been spotted.”

Around the bunkhouse, men pulled on boots and grabbed jackets, hurried and urgent. I didn’t need to be told twice. Jake was already at the door, with two other guys behind him. I got my boots on without a clue what we were in for.

Outside the bunkhouse the cold hit like a wall, the yard lit only by the headlamps the guys had already clicked on. Four ATVs idled at the edge of the equipment path. Trig organized people with the quiet authority of a man who’d run this kind of operation before.

“Carter, you’re with Jake and Pete. Stay tight when wehit the treeline.” He pointed at the woods at the far edge of the property, a dark mass against the darker sky. “They’ll be nesting at the edge. We move in, flush them out, bag what we can before they scatter.”

I climbed in beside Jake. “What exactly are we hunting?”

“Jackalopes and wolfagators.” He said it like this was a fact of ranch life he’d been living with for years. “Nasty things. Get in with the livestock and they can do real damage.”

“What do they look like?”

“You’ll know when you see one.”

Pete, in the back seat, nodded with great seriousness, although I thought I heard him snort, too.

The ATVs moved out in a line, headlamps cutting through the dark. In any other context—Manhattan, say, or the corporate lobby of any building I’d ever walked into—I would have known something was off. But out here in the dead dark of a Montana night with four ATVs, men who all seemed to know exactly what they were doing, some animal part of my brain had decided this was real and was running accordingly.

“Have you done this before?” I asked Jake.

“Many times.”

“Do people get hurt?”

“Occasionally.” He was far too calm for this. “That’s why we move in groups.”

We parked at the treeline and cut the engines. The headlamps went out. My eyes adjusted slowly to the moonlight enough to see shapes: the dark columns of the trees, the clouds of breath of the surrounding men. Trig passed downa stick and a burlap sack. The stick was about the length and weight of a decent baseball bat.

“I’ve never actually hunted,” I said.

The silence that greeted this was absolute.

Trig turned from about ten feet away. “Never heard of a cowboy who hasn’t hunted. Don’t tell me you’re scared.”

“Fuck no.” The low-grade tension that Trig had been producing in me since day one continued.

He held the look for one more second. Then he turned back to the trees. “Gotta stay quiet as we approach the nest. Follow me.”

In the moonlight, I could just make out the other men. Everyone of them looked dead serious. They moved with the tight, focused energy of men who’d done this before and understood the stakes.

I gripped my stick and followed Jake into the trees. The woods at night were a different country entirely. Every snapped twig underfoot sounded catastrophic in the quiet.

We moved in single file, spaced out, the only sounds our own careful footsteps and the distant creak of the trees. I kept my eyes roaming, but I had nothing to anchor to, no profile to look for, no description of the thing I was supposed to be hunting.

Jake raised a fist. We stopped.

Somewhere ahead in the dark came a sound I hadn’t expected: a yowl, then another, then a series of them, low and odd and coming from somewhere in the brush. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end.