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The hunter Liam Michaels lies wounded, bleeding in the forests of the Canaan mountains.  For him, the world is a bloody sky of red beneath which he can’t move. 

The surprised shooter Ian Lambert stands above him, persecuted by his past.  For him, there’s only thoughts of how long he must now track the crippled buck. 

Sarah Michaels, disillusioned with her marriage, has decided to cross the line.  For her, taking off the ring means giving up the fairy tale.

Watching over all, the Lord of the Forest and keeper of the paths is witness and protector.

With brutal force, the truth of Liam’s nature is thrust on him in the form of a buck’s head, bleeding, dripping, and hollow.  He is to see what it feels like to now be the prey.  What he does with a second chance will redefine love and life.

With the guile of wolves, the war has come to claim him but Lambert takes what he wants and he wants Sarah.  But wanting her will only bring death.

As the long winter bends and folds into the spring of day, Sarah makes a discovery that questions second chances.  Fearing hope has fled through the gap in the fence and into the Forest beyond, she is unaware of what follows her in.

The Wild Hunt is coming, savage enough to sweep mortals into the Otherworld.  Liam, Lambert, and Sarah are prey for the riders of the storm, and stand in their path.  As whispers of Cernunnos gather in the name of Herne the hunter, The Cervine is speaking like the sound of roots breaking soil, bringing the message that it is faith to love.

excerpt

the Stillness of the Rabbits

*

Chapter 1

The silence of the trees was like the first time Liam had ever dated.  It held a sweet breathlessness of waiting, a nervous thrum of the fingers, and a promise that couldn’t be explained, not even by the persistent patience of the forest creatures.  If it weren’t for the leaves, absolutely nothing moved.  Where the fisher should be hunting for birds, there was only pockets of undisturbed branches.  Where keen eyes should have spotted lazy spirals that funneled in the sky for hawks, gray clouds of canvas tilted the day with repetition.  It was autumn, and there was an uneasy bedding of the year.  The slimmest of silk could not have approximated the dusting of snow that had fallen last night.  

At such an altitude, the rudeness of the snow was not at odds with the flushed patches of red and gold.  The Canaan mountains lifted feral teeth to guard the southern valley.  On its floor, broad swaths of green carpeted over all; valley, wetland and serrated slope.  Beneath a suffocation of green, the Blackwater grumbled over ageless stones, singing of how the soft slippers of Summer were wont to leave too early.  But Liam hadn’t eyes to serve pristine, his purpose restraining his focus.  He was mountain born though would have lived inside the city if it weren’t for its people.  They were a sufferance made possible only by copious amounts of alcohol.

Liam’s father had taken the lash of independence to him early, sharpening the boy’s acceptance of living in the shadow of the woods.  The town of Davis clung with old roots to the Monongahela plateau which once attracted loggers and mills, trains and adventurers.  Now, it nestled in its guttering glory, a candle all but wicked out in favor of modern cultural relevance.  Liam eschewed his father’s ways but only because time had left Davis too soon, had skipped heartbeats when the old man had passed.  

The Canaan valley area spread groping roots in the form of slopes which ground gravel beneath timeless feet.  Up here, modern man would vomit his arrogance trying to drink from primordial’s keg.  There was breath this high up, a chance to carve a real dignity, hostile though it might be.  Morgantown was the nearest tract of land that could call itself a city and it lay 30 miles northwest as the hawk flies, and many more if you went by road.  The census unveiled over seven hundred families in Davis and Liam perforce knew most.  Small towns had a nasty habit of making its residents feel even smaller and Liam was only too aware of this.  Not living in town was his childish way of rebelling.

Liam pierced the lifting veils of mist, glad it was finally clearing.  Fog made hunting more difficult; if you couldn’t see, that meant your prey held the advantage.  A calloused hand slid along synthetic bow strings, an imperceptible hum as accompaniment.  Liam wondered what his Welsh forebears would have thought if they could have entertained the Duke of York with compound bows instead of those wound with deer gut.  The irony wasn’t wasted on Liam; his prey was a buck and the heart song of envious rumor.

It had been last week; some tourist came hieing back from a trek through the Refuge with a story of an eight-foot apparition.  Despite too many rounds of drink, the hiker would not recant a rack of fourteen tines.  Liam recalled scoffing, filling his tankard with spumes of foam as he snickered in derision.  How could one trust a person whose whole idea of a deer started and ended with Bambi?  And true to form, the locals dubbed this deer ‘the Bambi King’, anointing the beast as if he were the fish that always got away.  Still, something about the story seeped past Liam’s typically dismissive sneers as he’d finished the night drowned in Jack and Coke.  The next morning burst upon his head in painful ways, but couldn’t touch the aura such a buck had instilled.

The whips of dogwood were a blister of color among densely pocketed ferns.  The roughness of the red pine’s bark against his back was purposeful; having made the circuit, an old game path was visible below but only through a very narrow window between the trees.  It would only serve for one shot and the tree wouldn’t let him drift off too easily.

Liam’s breath tore at the veiling mist as it retreated.  He knew the sun must be struggling to thrust its fingers through an overcast which had lasted almost a week.  It was one of those overcasts which seemed to linger like a bad argument, rasping at nerves and fears.  And Liam had plenty of fears but like most men, he kept them to himself.  A private man, he had been taught to solve his own problems and didn’t need anybody’s help.  In a most complex way, the simplicity Liam worshipped was what made up the red stone of the mountain and he was merely one pebble rolling.

Lately, too often it was the silence of the forest which ensnared him like a rabbit; it made a man think, often more than he should.  Liam found he lost focus, something he often preached against.  Idle thoughts, random musings, ideas women might entertain; these were his snares, lately, and it made him spit.  As the swirl of confusion leapt like shallow rapids, it contextualized itself in the penetrating green of the rhododendron all around him.  He’d chosen his hide for just such a reason.

Running a hand along a jaw rimmed with the coal-dust of a beard, his mind twisted and went down a tangent.  There’s always trouble with women, so his father once said.  Hunting with his son from an early age, Cade Llewellen Michaels had passed along all the sage advice of his Welsh forebears.  Liam Robert Michaels was the end result in a long line of Welsh princes, or so his father had told him.  Liam had always liked the allusion but figured his father for a con artist.  It brought a smile, nonetheless.  

He found he missed his old man, surprisingly.  Proverbially larger than life, his father was insinuated within the bulwarks that made up post-WWII Davis, West Virginia.  There’d been much opportunity for those looking for it back then.  Entering the country in ’47 and being smitten by the sweet summer sun of a woman, Lynn Kennison of Roanoke, Cade made this tract of the Monongahela his own.  So full of hemlocks and spruce, the forested slopes reminded the Welsh miner too much of home; Liam supposed it was only natural.  

But his mother had passed when Liam was sixteen, leaving the boy to be raised by a man whose roots were held by old country earth.  Twenty-five years ago, but Liam still remembered seeing his mother’s closed eyes and her refusal to ever open them again.  The old man had played a melancholy Welsh tune on the crwth, pronounced ‘crowd’, which seemed to go on forever, long after Cade had put the rosined bow away… 

Liam kept the old stringed-instrument in its wooden box beneath the bed.  He could play it, if he had to, but even though Sarah often asked, he would lie and profess ignorance.

Sarah.  Sarah Jesse, actually, but her name hardly lingered on his lips lately.  Four years into marriage, their relationship was like the bark which grew over a cut tree limb; a scabrous seal growing at odds with original intent.  Though he saw the path below, it was only peripheral as the image of Sarah beached themselves on the shores of his attention.  His feelings for her were like holding up a conch shell; he could hear the sound, knew it was supposed to be the ocean, but too often believed it was just the beating of his heart.  

His father would have said that marriage was like a bag of potatoes and the hard lumps in the bottom corners of the burlap were still potatoes even though you couldn’t see them.  Hard lumps; of these, Liam knew well.  The spur of motivation for this hunt, the trigger on the gun of his rumor, lay in the last argument he’d had with Sarah.  

Davis was now basically a tourist destination.  Whereas once it milled the rough hegemony of loggers, it now fed the dreams of the city-imprisoned elite, the skiing royalty, or the ‘green wannabes’ that worshipped more hiking and bike trails, preferring their cause to other ways of saving humanity.  Liam smirked beneath the rhododendron’s shade; every month at least one poor fool got himself lost in the bowels of the Canaan, forcing the Sheriff to take his dogs up the mountain.  Perhaps that alone justified the office though, Liam thought.  

It was a love hate relationship, though, and with the economy sliding, the lack of tourists had even made Liam less disparaging.  There had been precious few this past summer needing a canoe guide and his small business languished in dry dock.  But he was a loner and the lack of clients gave him more time for his self indulgence; hunting, video games, and drinking.  Sometimes, he even drank in town; then, he had more friends than Sarah thought he needed.  Words grew restless like ferns molting from the earth whenever he recalled how Sarah tried so hard to change him.  At 42 though, Liam had the book of his life pretty well footnoted.  He just didn’t see the need to change.

As if cracking like mud too long beneath an African sun, the layered sea of green in front of him shifted, the thin trace of snow having passed into a silver sheen limning boughs and limbs.  The gentle coolness of the arrow’s shaft slid against his cheek, a fletching of black and white near his ear.  It might be the deer but he highly doubted it; they’d be on the path below.  It seemed to radiate from the undergrowth all about him, a strange absence of sound that suddenly reminded him of waiting.  For what, though, he couldn’t guess.  

Unable to hold his breath that long, he found himself losing focus again and falling back into the echo of Sarah’s words.  She never seemed happy, as if she’d been expecting something different.  Well, he could keep score too, if he wanted, but usually he did so in his head and announced himself the argument’s winner.  Why couldn’t she see reason?  

The talk, when he admitted to listening to it, was that he’d been a bachelor too long, that it would take a good woman to ‘fix’ him.  Liam just sneered and waved his hand dismissively in the air; wasn’t much sense in listening to gossip and fools.  He wasn’t that old and she not that young.   Father had been right; there’s always trouble with women.  

His father had lived in the age of need, in a time where a man was the breadwinner, when the job defined and validated.  That wasn’t true today, and lost between his father’s world and the new emergence of self-sufficiency, the role his father had shown him had evaporated.  Liam was trying to  suck marrow from dead bones.  His blood had been replaced with synthetics and no one had told him.  Sarah just couldn’t understand how her job at the hospital emasculated him.  Still, he had to admit that it was mainly her work that covered his lack when it came to paying the bills.  The mist swirled in an undercurrent that too closely resembled his belligerence.

It was a season since the laurel had burst their mystery out in fragrant white, when the air had a swelling promise of long days of June.  Work had been steady then, but as autumn tucked away summer, his canoes stayed conspicuously dry in their rack.  The rainbows and brookies were still there though, and perhaps he’d end this idiotic hunt tomorrow and lay up fishing on the high side of the Blackwater.

Having entered the forest from within the Refuge’s fringe, any posting of hunting regulations was lost on him.  He wouldn’t have paid much attention even if he’d seen them.  The land belonged to his father and passed on to him.  Let the government put up boundaries and fences, he didn’t care.  Up here, the rules were often defined by the one holding the gun. The tourists held guns, sometimes, but he didn’t take them too seriously.  Still, he got a kick out of seeing all the bright and shiny new hunting paraphernalia the big city boys brought with them, all with their high spirits and expectations.  Which, he reminded himself, usually only prospered in the bottom of Davis’ bars, in the whiskey bottles and cans of Bud.  How many went home empty handed but full of self-propagandizing stories of the trophy bucks they saw in the distance?  Too many.  And of those that get their buck, too many relied on the locals in town to butcher the animal for them.  Some didn’t even know how long to let their kill cure.  Once, Liam had tried working as a hunting guide as he was a natural having grown up around the Blackwater.  But, once was enough; those that came from beyond Davis were even worse than the inhabitants.  Pretentious, vacuous, weekend warriors of a breed his Welsh descendants use to roll over.  Liam didn’t care how these thoughts made him look; the others didn’t need to be here, and were only using Davis.  But then, he liked to deny Davis’ need to use them in return.  

In Liam’s sight, he owned the lands about his mountain home.  From his low-rise cabin of fieldstone and timber, the forest was a short stone’s throw away.  The pathways had been there since before Liam’s family had settled in Davis and the Canaan Valley area.  From the time he was young, there had only been the ways of the wilderness and Cade Michaels had been thorough.

From these same paths, Liam found solace melting into the undergrowth.  He knew where the rabbits lay in silence hoping to avoid the bobcats by remaining absolutely still.  He knew where the wild boars cut the earth with their tusks and hooves in a search for mushrooms and tubers.  When the pheasants were running, Liam knew where to look.  He knew the thickets they liked and could imitate their strange cackle.  The forest had always been permeable to him and he to it.  

Liam knew the leaping of the deer, of their ability to glide through a forest at full speed.  He’d lain in his mother’s garden and watched as they leaped over him when she chased them away.  It wasn’t long before Cade erected taller fencing.  He once wondered at the deer’s intrusion of human life, but turned the question around and had even less of an answer.  The intricacies of such a thought would wind Liam up for hours and helped pass the stall of time that happened when he fished or hunted.  Poaching was something the outsiders did, not Liam.  His father had always hunted deer, putting venison on the table regularly.  How could that be poaching?  Thoughts that the others would soon be invading his forest formed a knot of resentment that scattered his thoughts like a covey of quail.

The mystery buck was said to stand eight feet at the withers, to have a double mat of breast fur and be three-toe cloven.  There were fourteen tines to the rack and of course, the eyes of Hell!  Liam shook his head in disgust.  The largest buck Liam had ever seen was a 225 pointer, a buck that weighed in at 200 pounds and was five foot at the shoulder.  It had been shot more than a decade ago down in Pocahontas county near Marlinton.  The story ran for a few years and the local guides liked to claim it was one of their deer that had wandered south.

Liam slid what was left of a Hershey bar into his mouth.  It was getting late and the chance of spotting anything was fading with the fog.  Thoughts of exchanging his bow for a pole took root.

He’d been fishing with bait-less hooks for Sarah, like his line was out there but she wasn’t seeing it, let alone interested.  Hard to explain, though he was sure if he gave Sarah an opening, she’d be only too glad to let him know where she thought the problem was.  It seemed very difficult to concentrate on that spot on the path between the trees, especially when nothing ever seemed to change.

Like the mists which had kept early morning company, the veils of green beneath him parted.  Leading the way, three doe slipped into the silence of the rabbits. Liam raised his bow even as they entered his window.  The black and white fletching poised near his ear.  The arrow fought to erupt when the rumor came true.

The legend had overestimated; the animal stood closer to six feet at the shoulder, challenging an elk’s height.  It’s bearing earned it the name imperial  as the intricacy of horn cleared the lower branches.  But Liam wasn’t looking to count, not yet.  His attention was drawn to a burly chest and muscular hinds.  From the ancient scars, there was little wonder as to how it had survived so long.  The buck’s ears and nose showed a wariness Liam envied.  Between the animal’s eyes, a blaze of white streaked forward, lending evidence to its urban legend.  Every trophy buck kill ever told would shed its skin on the flight of Liam’s arrow.

Then all was terribly wrong.  Branches dipped where no wind had been blowing and suddenly, his sightline was blocked.  He didn’t have a clear shot.  The chillness of the breeze touched his skin and he panicked.  Without thinking, he folded out from the tree which had been his shadow, and swung his bow around deftly.  The soft hiss of an arrow leaving held the echo of countless hunts before.

At the same time, Liam felt a brief lunge of force, felt the inescapable push from behind that unbelievably pulled him back.  With staggered balance, he stood in the void of time.  Then he noticed red burgeon through his hunting jacket.  Suddenly weak, he couldn’t stop himself from falling like a sack of potatoes.  It was then pain staggered in, a pain that filled his head and turned the ground beneath him into grinds of powdered stars, all sharply illuminated and approaching way too fast.  As if denial had delayed it, the muted sound of a wasp swept past him as he lay.  Dazed, he felt the warm flush of blood seeping down his sleeve.

Liam lay on the ground not unlike the oak leaves already there in crimson glory.

the Stillness of the Rabbits

*

Chapter 2

The bluing from the barrel of Lambert’s rifle ebbed and flowed as reflections in the hollows beneath his cheeks.  Around him, the forest shadows were a subterranean thrum of palpitation.  His eyes became inscrutably dark, as if coal awaiting its spark.  Tangled beyond his experience, the trail fed itself to the delta of trees.  Again the cold metal touched his face; a comfortable familiarity exuded.  The silencer was shorn from his own hand, a piece of art in Lambert’s mind, not just something functional.  He wasn’t the first to use one, but one of the few in the Virginia area to do so.  The machinist in him would have it no other way and he’d taken almost perverse pleasure in drawing down the metal.  Screwed to his Remington, he blended with the silent killers of the Monongahela.

Olive canvas held broad, dark strokes of camouflage all over his body.  The season hadn’t officially started yet and he need not be afflicted by the Sheriff and his laws.  Still, he didn’t take such chances unless it was worth it; the way the current rumor had flown, it was more than promising.  

As dark as crow feathers, his long hair also held the same oily sheen, flowing to his shoulder in ragged ringlets that framed black pearl eyes.  Rare and exotic, the dark brows fed the pockets of shadow of his face, racing like an Alice Cooper portrait in the rain.  Clean shaven this morning, already the dark glaze of stubble leached at his facial hollows, drawing breath.  He’d never cut any teeth on his pale, thin lips over any smile that was genuine.

Hardly dried, memories pulsed like a sentient evil, formed themselves into curious acts that had begun when he was eight.  And hardly dried were the skins of squirrels that randomly found themselves pinned to neighboring front doors.  He’d stay just out of sight and watch the reactions, always with his thin lips pressed firmly.  Curious how others reacted to death, he once mused, and even more so when torture was involved.  

As he’d passed from teenager to manhood, he’d grown into his dark allure of childhood with fearsome force.  But with the dark attraction, which women found inexplicably attractive, he also groomed a clever mind, full of surprising twists of intelligence.  He’d not fooled the Sheriff, though; the man had his kind tagged and bagged but so far, was too quick to trap.  Ian Lambert wasn’t just a black sheep, he was the veritable wolf in black sheep clothing.  

Sheriff Burrows wasn’t someone from which you wanted attention.  He’d been on the edge of jail only once; the time that coed from Petersburg had gone missing.  The bars were grim reminders of the coldness in his heart and he still felt their shape in his hands; almost like curling his hand around the Remington’s barrel.  Odd that such an idea hadn’t already occurred to him.  The search had lasted the week and when it was all said and done, there had been no words between him and the Sheriff.  But the dark expectancy each had given the other never backed down from its certain future.  

He hadn’t said a word as the police clerk returned his hunting knife, truck keys, leather coat and dog tags, sliding it all beneath the iron grillwork of the detention window.  Slipping the black finished, dark silenced ID tags back around his neck, even then there’d been no smile on his lips.  If Lambert had looked though, he’d have seen the Sheriff’s frown as he recognized the color’s significance; they were commando tags.  But Lambert had felt the Sheriff’s eyes and knew it would only take opportunity until the gauntlet was picked up.

There was a lull between one breath and the next, an almost audible measure the dark-eyed hunter didn’t miss; it was the sudden shift of wind that alerts prey that a hunter is near.  The moment passed and nested inside the idle thought of how long he’d been tracking this quarry.  

It was a night when the sky raced with red, when dusk was bloodied into night and savaged by the ensuing depth of dark.  It was his keen eyes that had plucked the image from between the hemlocks, standing near the Blackwater’s edge, its eyes mirroring the red sky as their gazes locked.  Almost ran his Silverado off the rough gravel road, he did.  This causeway to Hendricks in the south was necessary; didn’t want anyone to see what he would be hauling back near the midnight hour.  There were few on such a path at night as most forsook the slower route for the longer but faster US-219 to the north.  

The river was dark, almost black, hence its name, but Lambert knew the color was imbued from the toxins which the hemlocks dropped into the rush of current every year.  Its dark gleam behind the huge buck more fully defined the animal’s stature, creating a 3D effect found with better lenses.  

As if blown out like a candle though, the buck was left to be a burned imprint on Lambert’s mind, tall and rangy, dressed for the rutting season with the last rays of the day torching its rack of horn.   Nothing remained but the sound of Blackwater crests drowning their submerged tragedies.  

Taking his rifle from the cab, Lambert lacerated the ground beneath the hemlocks with his gaze,  casting for prints, fully intending a deadly follow up.  But as silk on corn, though strung thickly at the beginning point, once pulled and torn, the fragility of the trail dissipated until only kernels of hardened ground remained.  Elusive is the word Lambert saw defined, something ascribed to himself.

As he slipped through the undergrowth, furtive was the watchword now.  He massaged the memory though; it had become a masturbation of desire, it was the gasoline of fervor for his hunting.  Each year in the fall he devoted a full two weeks to finding that buck, but it was as if the animal were a ghost, a phantom that defied substantive evidence.  Only rumors fed the mill now, but at least this one held running stains of credence.  It had been sighted less than a week ago, was purported to exude a silver sheen to its fur, to possess the sprue of white that resembled a cross on its forehead beneath the mighty rack.  Every trophy buck carried a rack that was a hunter’s wet dream for his wall.  Lambert was no different in that regard, but this beast was now part of a personal vendetta, though no challenge had ever been officially issued.  Just that one moment of locked eyes on a long ago night while traveling past in his truck. 

Lambert was remembering the mark; it was this that had reflected the day’s last sunlight.

Weekend warriors would soon invade his forest from the lowlands, from the small towns surrounding the Monongahela National Forest which Davis fronted, and from urban monstrosities like Morgantown, Richmond, and Pittsburgh.  They’d come and infiltrate the slopes and wetlands of the valley, chasing his prey to higher ground or burying it deep in thickets of immobility.  They’d come in their flush of orange to stalk bait dumps of corn and carrots.  They’d fill the forest up with their clatter and clutter.  Shots would ring out and he’d fear the strafe of AC130s again, as if still holding up behind blasted concrete walls on a recon of Sarajevo.  Lightning behind his eyes flushed that memory, stamping it back into his subconscious, back to the place he’d buried it.  The hunters would come, they’d rip at the fabric of the forest veil about which most city dwellers knew nothing.  They’d come and spend time peering through binoculars and sights, and even more time through the bottom of their beer glasses.  The rumors would circulate, drawing more hunters to areas he wanted for his own.  Most of the time, such rumors were pure entertainment, spoken and dissipated like foam on beer.  Most of the time.  But not this time as others started to recall the specifics of past sightings, correlating them to this new teasing whisper.  The bar-heads were running rampant, even though he’d circulated his own rumor, that of diseased turkeys on the eastern slopes.  Few dared hunt in such areas, and fewer when they knew Lambert was in the area.  But they’d drink with him, as if understanding that his blood flowed with the same gin percentage as theirs.  He privately dismissed such fools but also understood them; in the mountains, there wasn’t much else to do but work, eat and drink.  The difference was, when he drank, he had a purpose; it wasn’t to escape reality, it was to validate it.

There was an uncanny feeling, this morning, it was as if the trees slept.  Not like the feeling winter gave, no, it was a slumber that trembled in the lull before a storm.  Dark had been the rasp of sound as he’d ditched his truck between the trees, off the main track.  Dawn had been the sound as the forest stubbornly refused to relent and let him pass, to find the hidden game trails and natural hunting blinds.  But now, only in the absence of squirrels and rabbits, of the quail and foxes, was there a claim to sound.  It was both profound and threatening, dredging wraiths from graves in Herzegovina. Missing was even a single hawk towering far overhead, glimpsed between the slats in the canopy.  

Accomplished in woodcraft, he slipped over the broken branches and piled leaves silently.  He wasn’t familiar with this tract of the Monongahela because none of the previous rumors had put the buck here.  The trees had transcended from over-thin saplings, resultant growth from decades old fires, to cantankerous columns of ageless trunks that might have seen the turn of the century.  Silver trunks like bony quills of the mountain, struck up through rock in search of daylight, while rafts of pine needles, defied the sun in its reach toward soil.  His passage had transformed from effortless to arduous.  But Lambert welcomed the forest’s shroud; he’d been too open and conspicuous before; he focused on becoming just another shaft in the mountain’s quiver of arrows.  

Early turned later with nothing to show for his efforts.  The silencer remained cold, as cold as the skin against which it pressed.  Lambert had no warmth to impart.  He felt his thoughts grow muddy as the vortex of his desire swelled.  All part of the game though, the moment pitting hunter against prey.  It was a familiar battleground upon which he’d grown up, it was a rite of passage.  But insinuated deep within, the thrill of the kill wasn’t something Lambert ignored, but rather, embraced fully.  It was elemental, a force which assuaged his restless search for significance.  It was a way to claim his place in the world.  The various stuffed paeans to hunting adorning his wall would testify to exactly how high in the world Lambert placed himself. 

Thin lips suppressed something others might think a smile; it was like getting laid or finishing off a whole bottle of Southern Comfort,  but better.  He’d once almost killed a man for finding fault with how long he was taking to field dress a kill.  Most didn’t understand.  Fuck them; they didn’t need to.

There were uneasy truces this time of year and the boundary lines were blurred.  Usual didn’t always happen.  Today seemed one of those times, when the wind could bend every exhalation.

As if held, a last breath released and with it, all the stillness awakened.  Three doe had emerged from the forest and slipped silently onto the path below him, tracking east.  Color fills of the forest dappled the air before his eyes, the emptiness suddenly clouded.  Pushing black locks back behind his ears, Lambert raised the muzzle of his gun and sighted the doe.  Almost, wait...just a moment longer.  It wasn’t his buck but he sighted them nonetheless; the urge to get a shot off had grown with his obsession’s frustration, like a woman with a slit up the side of her skirt...

But another movement stopped him; Lambert started counting.  Eight tines showed before ever the beast’s muzzle came into view.  As if stung by an exploding ember from a campfire, his thoughts raced to find the mark.  And there it was, like a lightning strike.  Eye and sight aligned along the rifle barrel.  His tightly wound muscles released, trigger finger gentle with experience.  The sound of the bullet leaving was like the angry curse of a wasp.  

But something was wrong, the buck suddenly obscured.  What?  How?  He’d had the shot!  Like a single leaf drifting, his view returned, as if an unseen puppeteer had pulled back the curtains.  Lambert saw the bodies fall, one to the earth not more than a hundred yards in front of him, and the other to the path below.  Vicious in his anger, Lambert’s eyes burned for his quarry.  The buck fell to its knees for a moment, thrusting penetrating eyes up the slope and back into his.  An eternity seemed to pass, a memory flamed and cut the air with accusations.  A whirling vortex, unlike anything Lambert had ever known, assaulted his mind, and pressed in on his heart.  It felt like someone was squeezing his spine into his brain.  Unbelievably, he felt pain pass through him, like weeping on the streets of Sarajevo.  But it was just a moment before it shifted like the wind, as if he wasn’t worth the bother.  

The buck, a white and black feathered shaft protruding from it’s chest, staggered back to its feet, lifted its head, bleated once in agony, then fled off the trail.  The doe had already broken and bounded away.  Lambert’s muscles raked off their paralysis and he plunged toward the buck.  Upon reaching the point where the other body had gone down though, he paused.  His need to rush slowed; below, the blood trail was quite clear and he knew he had time.

Gripping a hunting jacket fiercely, Lambert turned over the body of a man.  A slowly expanding circle of red ichor festooned his chest, meshing hunting fabric with flesh.  Lambert’s black pearl eyes barely glanced, instead settling higher and grimly, penetrating the man’s face in an interrogation of sanity; it was Liam Michaels, the Blackwater canoe owner.  Shit.  

The lash of memories raged anew, threatening to unbalance him, but Lambert had long ago given up on anything resembling compassion.  He cursed again, stringing it out to sound like a prayer.  And though it didn’t last, it lasted long enough to be overtaken by the sudden, far away cry of a hawk, another hunter too near the crossroads.  It was then he noticed that the solitary tear on Liam’s face ran red.