By dawn, the storm had abated.
The wind was still cool and crisp, but only a few flakes of snow drifted from the clear, icy sky. In the Union Pacific Railroad yards in Wolf Creek, it was business as usual. Just before nine a flagman discovered the wreck of the signal shack. Searching around out back, he saw a single blood-encrusted hand jutting up from a snowdrift.
Within the hour, the law was there.
"What you make of it, Doc?" Sheriff Lauters asked. He was rubbing his gloved hands together, anxious to get this done with.
Dr. Perry merely shook his head. His hair was white as the snow, his drooping mustache just touched by a few strands of steel gray. He was a thin, slight man with a bad back. As he crouched by the mutilated body of Abe Runyon, you could see this. His face was screwed tight into a perpetual mask of discomfort. "I don't know, Bill. I just don't know."
"Some kind of animal," the sheriff said. "No man could do this. Maybe a big grizz."
Perry shook his head, wincing. "No." Pause. "No grizzly did this. These bite marks aren't from any bear. None that I've ever come across." He said this with conviction. "I've patched together and buried a lot of men in the mountains after they ran afoul of a hungry grizz. No bear did this."
Lauters looked angry, his pale, bloated face hooking up in a scowl. "Then what for the love of God?" This whole thing smacked of trouble and the sheriff did not like trouble. "Dammit, Doc, I need answers. If there's something on the prowl killing folks, I gotta know. I gotta know what I'm hunting."
"Well it's no bear," Perry said stiffly, staring at the remains.
Abe Runyon was missing his left leg, right hand, and left arm. They hadn't been cut as with an ax or saw, but ripped free. His face had been chewed off, his throat torn out. There was blood everywhere, crystallized in the snow. His body cavity had been hollowed out, the internals nowhere to be found. There was no doubt in either man's mind-Abe Runyon had been devoured, he'd been killed for food.
With Lauters' help, Perry flipped the frozen, stiffened body over. The flannel shirt Runyon had worn beneath his coveralls was shredded. Perry pushed aside a few ragged flaps of it, exposing Runyon's back. There were jagged claw marks extending from his left shoulder blade to his buttocks.
"See this?" Perry said.
He took a pencil from his bag and examined the wound. There were four separate claw ruts here, each ripped into the flesh a good two inches at their deepest point. On the back of the neck there were puncture wounds that Perry knew were teeth marks. They were bigger around then the width of the pencil, and just about as deep.
"No bear has a mouth like that," Perry told the sheriff. "The spacing and arrangement of these teeth are like nothing I've ever come across."
"Shit, Doc," Lauters spat. "Work with me here. Dogs? Wolves? A cougar? Give me something."
Perry shrugged. "No wolf did this. No dog. Not a cat. You know how big this… predator must have been? Jesus." He shook his head, not liking any of it. "Hell, you knew Abe. He wasn't afraid of man nor beast. If it was wolves, they'd have stripped him clean. And he got off five shots from his. 38, so where are the dead ones?"
"Maybe he missed," Lauters suggested.
"He was a crack shot and you know it." Perry stood up stiffly with Lauter's help. "Well, I'll tell you, Bill. No bear did that, no way. Those teeth marks are incredible. The punctures are sunk in four, five inches easy." He looked concerned. "I don't know of anything in these parts that could do this. And I hope to God I never meet it in the flesh."
"You saying we got us a new type of animal?"
Perry just shrugged, refused to speculate.
Lauters spat a stream of tobacco juice into the snow and looked up towards the mountains. He had a nasty feeling things were about to go bad in Wolf Creek.