Retrieving the musket, I set off at daylight with the vague idea of driving the Owl-Man off what was left of my precious rabbit. But turning into Deepwood’s narrow lane, I was racked by dread of what might have taken place the night before and what I might stumble into.
At the edge of the greening carriage circle, a trail of dark stains led to an old boxwood where something had lain bleeding. Later it had crawled toward the ruin, moving along a shaded wall under an old lilac choked by vines. From the dung and hoof prints, I pieced the rest together. Blowing horses, torches, and wild shots had flushed the surrounded quarry from the ruin. In the dark, they could not track the blood, having rushed here without dogs. When their quarry crawled into the dense boxwood, they had lost him. They had not persisted, being superstitious and afraid.
The blood trail led around the corner toward the hole in the fallen wall. Creeping forward, picking my way through the winter briars, I struggled to keep the musket barrel disentangled.
The wounded creature was alive inside its hole, that much I knew. I checked my load, I cleared my throat, I took a mighty breath. “Come out,” I croaked. From behind the wall came the slight scrape of something shifting, followed by a dry ratcheting cough like a raccoon. I forced myself to lean and peer inside.
On a charred board by the dead fire lay my hoarfrost rabbit, stiff as furred wood. Behind it, taking shape in the cold shadows, stretched a man’s ragged legs and broken boots. The crusted head, tufts twisted askew, and a swollen black hand more like a talon clutched the heavy bloodstain on the stomach, and there was a sinuous dark stain where blood had probed and found a passage back into burned earth. A road walker, I thought-either that or the skin between patches of crust was black with firesmoke and filth. Black or white, the Owl-Man was surely on the point of death. A broken voice grated something like, “The Coward… Watson.”
The Owl-Man watched me through raw slits in a mask. A rude scar showed where the head had been half-scalped, then sealed with boiling tar, then crowned with feathers. The mask had no expression. Nostrils and lips scarcely emerged from the leprous stubble. Then the mouth hole opened slowly, stretching dry strings of slime between dry broken teeth. A choked gasp: “Finish it.”
The creature’s agony was horrifying, it was unbearable-not bearable! Eons of human agony in millions of cruel acts over the ages had been distilled here in this being, with no hope of relief but the swift mercy of annihilation. But when I raised the musket, put my finger to the trigger, I could not do it. I was blind with tears and only sagged down weakly, trying not to be sick.
In one thrash, the Owl-Man seized the barrel, twisting it in his black claw with the force of spasm and yanking the muzzle to his throat as I fought to pull away. My wrist was clasped in a hornlike hand, and my yell as I pulled back was obliterated by explosion. Because the gun came free with the recoil, I was thrown backwards through the hole in a roil of smoke. The echo died and the thinning smoke wandered away into the deafened woods.
Muffled footfalls-inside my head?-pursuing me down the lane toward the highroad were my first memory of jumping up and running. You git away from me! You git away! I heard my boots ring on the frozen earth, echoing off the rigid trees like rifle shots. What did you-I cried, Why did you-I never-never what? Even years later I did not know what my question might have meant, nor if there had been an answer anywhere. Had I cried out to the Owl-Man or to Cousin Selden? Or to the lost life I would never find again?
Who would come after me? Reloading the musket to defend myself, I stood howling on the county road. To drive the present from my brain, to sink away into the past, into before, I howled to highest heaven but, still deafened by my own musket fire, I could not hear myself.
Yesterday Edgar Artemas Watson, a promising young farmer, had turned into that lane and wandered from his life into dark dreaming. Awakened, he must hurry to Clouds Creek to feed his hogs, let his lost life return, fall into place. Whatever had just happened-had it happened?-must be banished. What could hallucination mean to young pigs starved for slops? With grunting and harfing?
Alone on the highroad in the leaden light, I knew my life had lost its purchase. Like a dark bird disappearing over distant woods, the future had flown away into the past. I hurried onward. I longed to run, and run and run and run, all the way home, but burdened with my father’s heavy musket, I soon slowed, unable to run further.