we didn’t,” Mildred said sourly.
“It does fit observable facts,” Doc said. “The few we have been able to observe.”
“Reckon we need to talk,” Abe said. “Let’s find us a place to palaver. Say, I’m a feeling mite peckish. What do you say we go to one of my campsites and chow down while we do it.”
“Won’t say no,” Ryan said, but he had a wary furrow to his brow as he said it.
He was wondering what was in it for the strange man they’d run into. And they all had learned a hundred times over, in the Deathlands, if you didn’t know what somebody had coming out of a given interaction, that usually meant it was coming straight out of your hide.
* * *
“FOLKS’RE SCARED, HEREABOUTS,” Abe said. “They don’t rightly know of what—shadows dimly seen at dusk, strange cries in the dark. Rumors of people disappearin’ out in the woods in the dark of the night. But I reckon I do know.”
“Suppose you tell us why you think we’re hunting these coamers of yours?” Ryan asked as he seated himself next to Krysty, where she hunkered down across from a small, nearly invisible dry brush fire from their peculiar host.
“I know hunters when I clap eyes on ’em, I reckon you’ll allow,” Abe said. “But you show no interest in the wildlife, other than to keep eyes skinned for ones as might be dangerous. You’re huntin’ man or mutie, or something close to one or the other.”
Abe’s camp was nestled in a bare-dirt hollow among sandstone boulders at the crest of a low rise, surrounded by brush and stunted trees. Krysty thought it a sweet spot, giving the option of surveilling the surrounding area from a height without spotlighting the fact you were there. It was already cool here, or cool for the Pennyrile, shaded at this spot from the low sun’s slanting rays. The smell of a brace of ruffed grouse roasting on sticks over the little fire was tantalizing.
“So what are these coamers, anyway?” Mildred asked. “Man or mutie?”
“Ghosts,” he said, and laughed at their expressions. “I don’t mean the spirits of chills. I mean they appear and disappear sudden-like, and seem to leave no traces at all, as if they had no more substance than smoke. But they got substance, right enough. They eat, they bleed, they die. And they chill, with their long white claws and those double-big jaws of theirs, more like a dog’s than a person’s.”
“Or a baboon’s,” Mildred suggested.
“That sounds consistent with the description, yes,” Doc agreed. Mildred seemed surprised; usually the two would argue over whether the sun was coming up or going down at high noon on a cloudless day. “I have heard the term ‘dog ape’ in connection with the beasts.”
The hermit shook his head. “Dunno nothin’ about those. But I seen ’em. Just glimpses, mind, over the years. But I seen the bones they’ve cracked in those jaws and the carcasses of beasts they chilled for meat.”
“They known to eat humans?” Ryan asked.
“Other than dead ones,” Mildred added.
Abe shrugged. “Mostly I hear tell of them digging up chills and eatin’ those. Prefer ’em fresh-buried. But they ain’t what you’d call picky.”
He sighed and dropped his gaze to the flames. His hand reached out to turn over first one, then the other plump game-bird carcass on their willow-wand spits. It looked to Krysty as if he did that by pure muscle memory, no conscious thought or intention involved.
“But like I say, there’s…stories,” Abe said. “Tales of folks out wanderin’ the woods at night by they lonesome, who never come back, and are never heard from anymore. The Pennyrile’s a big, wild place, with plenty of dense brush and caves and sinkholes. Lotta ways for a body to go missin’, if you catch my drift.”
“I don’t,” Mildred said. “Does anybody?”
“Ever hear of them attacking a camp or house?” Krysty asked.
“No. But they been getting’ pretty bold this season.”
“Why didn’t the people in Stenson’s Creek gaudy think to blame them first,” Ricky began, “instead of—”
“Yeah,” Ryan said, just emphatically enough to shut off the youth from blurting any more. “Never heard mention of them before now.”
Ricky’s dark eyes got big, and his cheeks flushed. Ryan couldn’t stop him wearing his heart on his sleeve. Fortunately their host seemed too preoccupied to notice.
Ricky’s close friend Jak shot him a wicked grin, half-sympathy, half-derision. Ryan had ordered the albino to sit in with them to learn whatever the woodsman had to impart. Jak had complied unwillingly, since he considered this with reason to be enemy territory, and that it was therefore even more urgent than usual that he be on patrol for danger. But he obeyed Ryan, as he generally did. Krysty suspected Jak understood the wisdom of Ryan’s wishes in this case, unlikely though he was to ever admit it.
“Like I say,” Abe went on, “they come and go. Like, from generation to generation. They seem to resurge every generation or two. Most of the settled folk, in the villes and such, forget about them, or think they’re just made-up stuff. But the oldies, out in the hills—they know. They remember. And this year—well, they seem to be gettin’ more aggressive than ever.”
“What about you?” Krysty asked. “How do you manage to survive?”
Abe grinned with strong, surprisingly white teeth.
“I’m reckoned by some a fair shot with a blaster, hand or long.” He patted the flintlock rifle he’d laid by his side on a coyote-skin cover.
Krysty shot a sidelong look to Mildred. The other woman nodded. She was clearly impressed; good shots rarely claimed to be, in her day or this one.
“You a hunter, too?” J.B. asked.
“Hunter. Trapper. Fisherman. Gatherer. Bit of whatever I need to be. Come from a long line of mountain men and women, I do.”
“‘Mountain men’?” Doc echoed. “You mean, like the solitary fur trappers and traders from earlier in my— That is, back in the early 1800s?”
Not everyone would have got a reference to such ancient history, but Abe brightened right up. He nodded.
“The very ones,” he said. “I’ve spent time in the Rocks myself, and up in the Dark range. Used to get to rendezvous in Taos each spring, like olden times. That’s where I learned my wilderness chops, from my poppa and momma.”
“Reenactors,” Mildred said, with a certain reflex distaste.
Abe looked at her blankly.
“Guess not,” she said sheepishly. “Your ancestors—culturally, at least—they were reenactors. But I reckon you and your people have been the real deal for decades.”
“Mebbe,” Abe said, clearly not getting her meaning.
Mildred’s smooth brown forehead wrinkled. “Also, how do you even know folks hereabouts are scared of these things? I thought you were a hermit.”
He laughed. “Oh, I am, I am. But that doesn’t mean I spend all my time alone in these woods and karst plains. Even a man like me gets tired now and then of listenin’ to nothin’ but the wind and the brook and the hoot-owl cries. Also I got what you might call a bit of a thirst, although I learned to keep a pretty tight rein on it, after some unfortunate happenin’s at Rendezvous a few years back… Anyhoo, I head in every once in a while to Stenson’s Creek gaudy, trade some pelts or gewgaws I make or trade for elsewhere, for the jack to wet my whistle. Was just in last week. I heard the stories then, mostly in whispers.”
He paused to drink out of a canteen that seemed to be a corked clay pot, carried