Hunting Season (11 page)

Catcalls died. Anna could feel their insecurity. These were Saturday night hunters, crazed by darkness and power and playing at predators. By day they probably checked groceries at the Piggly-Wiggly or pumped gas. "Turn it off," Anna said again. Into the new-won silence came the sibilant sound of a whispered conference followed by a hooting laugh that sounded, to Anna's hyper-extended ears, both relieved and exultant. A thick voice said, "You can't shoot us. We don't plan to hurt you none."

"Leastways it ain't gonna hurt
much,"
came another voice. Laughter followed. Crude remarks. Boots pushing through duff. Mob courage was reasserting. Voices—only three—Anna's mind took note even as she fought down panic. Sexual remarks, sneering, inarticulate whoops melded into a cacophony of pack hatred. The lights began to converge on her.

"Stay back," Anna yelled. "I don't want to shoot anybody tonight."

"She ain't gonna shoot," said the speaker, the holder of the spotlight. "She can't. It's the law. We ain't threatening her life."

A whoop from the left and the lights moved closer. Taking careful aim, Anna pulled the trigger. Noise and light and breaking glass shattered as the spotlight exploded into a thousand pieces. A man screamed, high and wild like a hawk shot on the wing.

The ring around Anna fragmented. Lights spun, men shouted. Cloaked in chaos, Anna fled into the black of the woods behind her.

Hat-blind from the spotlight, she stumbled and fell in a parody of countless film heroines destined to be run down by the villain.

The part of her mind that was never off-duty noted the yells of the men. "The bitch shot at me." "You said she couldn't..." "Shut the tuck up." "Fucking bitch." Then, with a baying of the hounds of hell, they came after her.

5

 For a nightmare's eternity, Anna ran, fell, stumbled, noted without feeling the banging of her knees and elbows, the rip of thorny branches across her face and forearms. Her Sig-Sauer was still in her hand and she used it like a club, bashing through foliage that seemed sentient, closing around her trying to trap and hold. The six-cell flashlight had been dropped when she'd pulled her weapon, and she fought on in a darkness so complete she was choked with it.

Bit by bit her night vision returned and with it came a hopeful smattering of gray to her left: the meadow with its pooling of light from moon and stars.

Too far. The hounds were closing in. The pitch of their baying rose in the excitement of the chase. The cut of flashlight beams slashed green from a glut of oak hydrangea to her right. They'd not yet seen her, but only followed the racket she made.

Forcing down the panicked need for flight, she made herself stop. The crash of hoots and the guttural yells would cover small sounds. Quick as a burrowing fox, Anna dove for the ground. Crushing herself into the scratchy embrace of a
drying shrub, she pulled leaves and needles up over her as best she could. Curled in a
ball, elbows touching knees, shoulders hunched, she raised her gun up to eye level and waited. A snake in the grass. Like a snake, her blood grew cold, her eyes narrowed, and a snake's ethics took over. If her pursuers came too close, she would strike. If they passed by, she would let them live.

For half a minute, the crashing came on: three flashlights jabbing through the trunks and creepers. Anna counted them by the lights. Their voices had melded into one hurting cry of many notes. Lying as she was, coiled half under a bush covered imperfectly with leaves, she felt as exposed as if she stood naked on an empty stage.

She banished the urge to run and steadied the nine-millimeter.

The advance of lights slowed, then stopped. The hullabaloo of sound lost volume and separated into voices.

"Listen," one said, a rasping pant. A man unused to having to chase down his prey.

"I don't hear anything."

"What're we chasin' now?" Another man spoke and a part of Anna's mind registered a need to laugh at the sudden bewilderment in his voice, but this totally human response didn't make it past the cold and snaky heart of her.

"Shit."

"Listen."

"She's gone to ground." The rasping panting voice. He was the leader then.

Gone to ground.
They were hunters.

Anna'd forgotten that and she felt a chill. She'd never been hunted by hunters before, men who prided themselves on knowing where the scared and helpless went to hide. These men would not long be fooled by the dark and a few hastily raked-together leaves.

"Let's go home," one said. Anna was pleased to hear the fear she'd been suffering creep into his words.

Co
home,
she prayed silently.

"What now?" another asked. A time of quiet followed, broken only by the shuffling of feet and the crisp sounds dry winter scrub made near Anna's ears where crushed branches struggled to reassert themselves.

"Lights." Then in a whisper, hissed loud and commanding. one by one the flashlights were switched off. A wave of fear and disorientation swept over Anna as the beacons pinpointing her pursuers vanished. She thought to scramble free of the bushes and run, but she knew she'd never make it. Had she had a tail with rattles, the clatter would have given her away. As it was, she waited in stillness, listening so hard she felt as if her ears grew out to wave around above her on stalks.

The hunters were conferring: murmurs, whispers, an occasional sharp and shining note of dissent but no words.

"Okay then," was shouted. "Fan out." Laughter followed, but it was hollow and nervous, not the full-throated baying glee of before. Something had changed. Perhaps the knowledge that one or more of them were going to die. At least that's what Anna hoped.

Flashlights were turned back on. Boots pushed through the undergrowth. A few mildly obscene catcalls were attempted, but they were half-hearted. The tenor had changed.

"Look both high and low," the leader said distinctly. "She coulda treed herself."

The lights separated and began moving more purposefully toward Anna's makeshift den.

This was it then. A cool and amoral calm settled over her. Breath and heart slowed perceptibly. Her mind cleared, leaving a cold, watchful place where heated thoughts had recently clamored. Time changed. It seemed she had leisure for idle contemplations.

Soon, she suspected, she would be taking a life. The thought bothered her not at all. The aftermath, the justification, the investigation, the paperwork that ensued when a ranger was forced to use her weapon was of greater concern than breaking whatever the hell commandment "thou shalt not kill" was.

Early on, before she'd run, one of the men had said she could not shoot them because they didn't intend to hurt her. Proper use of force was pounded into modern federal law enforcement. The rule was the officer could only go one level higher in the force continuum than his attacker. If the villain used fists, the officer could graduate to a baton. Only when the attacker evinced a clear and present danger to the life of the officer or the lives of others would the officer be justified in using deadly force. Why had these guys known that? Was one a policeman, a highway patrolman, sheriff's deputy?

Anna smiled a mean little smile. Her mind flashed back to her training at FLETC, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia. She'd been the only woman in a class of twenty-eight, the only woman and, by at least thirty pounds, the smallest. Mike Hurly, a man from the Tennessee Valley Authority, had been the biggest, close to six foot three and weighing in at two-ninety-three.

Instructor after instructor used Anna and Mike as examples of the sliding scale of lethal threat. Who could use fists and batons and pepper spray and bullets and when. Mike, being a monolith of a man, could not legally claim he feared for his life till his assailant at least pulled a knife.

The consensus was the diminutive Anna could pretty much kill anybody anytime if they were taller than an eight-year-old and threatened her with anything more substantial than a ripe banana and still legally claim she'd feared for her life.

Yelling stopped; lights spread out. Anna's brain focused sharply. In stillness more frightening than the shouting, she could hear each shuffling step, each grunt and muttered expletive. She fancied she could even hear them breathing, the serrated panting breaths of excited dogs. The stabbing of the lights, wild during the running, became purposeful, scraping high and low, raking through the woods to where she lay. The thick chest of the leader was thrown into faint silhouette by the man behind him, careless of his flashlight. Anna lined the two iridescent green dots on her gun sight, one to cither side of center mass, and breathed in. As she exhaled she began a slow, even trigger pull.

Before her finger reached the point of no return, the black silence of the trees behind the stalkers was cut through with a shout. A familiar voice yelling. "Break it up. Barth go around to the left." A fourth light careened down on the backs of the hunters. "You there. Drop your weapons. Drop them." Hesitantly the men began to turn, not throwing down but at least lowering their rifles.

For the briefest of instants Anna thought she would fire anyway, kill because she could, because she wanted to. God or conscience or sanity stopped her, and she backed the pressure off the trigger.

Randy Thigpen had arrived. Anna'd given up on him, then forgotten he existed. Once before she'd called him for backup, and he'd quietly gone back to the ranger station and left her to deal as best she could. Randy'd come through. Barth, Anna knew, wasn't on duty. Randy was showing some imagination.

"Drop your weapons," he called again, and Anna whispered hallelujah.

The hunters stopped. Lights flashed. "Run," someone shouted and, with rebel yells that sounded, to Anna's jaded consciousness, more gleeful than disappointed, her attackers fled in all directions, the woods snapping and groaning with the violence of their passage. One of them laughed, high and wild, ending in a hoot. The crunching of their flight faded. Night's quiet flowed back into the woods. Still Anna did not move.

She felt as elemental as the dirt and leaf litter she'd cloaked herself in.

"Anna?" Randy called. She could see him now in the faint backwash of his light. The underside of the absurd mustache glowed orange and the dull gleam of his badge proclaimed him an honorable man. Still Anna stayed where she was, watching him come.

Finally he stopped not more than three feet from where she'd curled down into the forest floor. "Anna?"

In his face she read only concern, a deep fear for her safety. Mollified, she said, "I'm here."

Randy shrieked like a schoolgirl presented with a snake, stumbled sideways and fell on his most ample feature.

Uncoiling herself, Anna brushed the leaf litter from her trousers and hair. Her right hand still gripped the semi-automatic pistol.

Hit with the sudden loss of dignity, Randy's concern turned to irritation. "Jesus!" he said. "What the hell were you playing at? There were three of them armed with hunting rifles. What would you of done if they'd found you?"

"Killed them all."

By the weak and moving light Anna saw the muscles of his face freeze then twitch back to life again as his brain rejected—or assimilated—her violence.

"Jesus," he said again and, using a downed log for a lever, hoisted his considerable bulk into a standing position. "Don't they have such a thing as due process back wherever the hell you claim to come from? Those boys were just having some fun with you. They never meant you no harm."

"I was just going to have some fun with them," Anna said. The snake that had come to possess her soul had not yet fully let go.

Thigpen turned his light on her face. She didn't blink or look away. "Jesus," he called on his savior a third time. "You give me the creeps, you know that? Let's get out of here. I'll walk you to your car."

"No."

Randy stared at her a moment. "Okay," he said uncertainly. "Meet me at the Mt. Locust Ranger Station."

"Port Gibson." Anna needed the familiar around her, the things of her everyday life to bring her back from the wild and dangerous place the snake had taken her. Thigpen must have gleaned something from her voice; he didn't argue.

"Port Gibson then."

Both waited. Neither moved. "You want my light?" he asked finally.

"No."

Anna stayed where she was and watched him go, a lumbering, overfed zoo bear, ill at ease in the forests of the night. When she could no longer see or hear him, she reholstered her weapon. The faint glow of the meadow beckoned, and she walked toward it. Adrenaline began to be reabsorbed. The scales of the snake fell from her eyes and she saw herself so small, so alone, so hunted. She noted without any recognition of fear that her knees were weak and her hands shaking.

By the time she reached her patrol car the fit had passed, leaving in its wake exhaustion so deep she wondered if she could drive the twenty minutes to the Port Gibson Ranger Station without falling asleep at the wheel. This day was not the longest Anna had ever lived through, but it was definitely in the running.

As she traveled the moonlit peace of the Trace, scraps of the last eighteen hours floated behind her eyes: herself in a red dress and high heels, the colored lights of dead saints dyeing her married/priest/sheriff/ lover's blond hair, Doyce Barnette, bruised and stripped and beached like an incongruous walrus on Grandma Polly's bed, Doyce's brother with his big teeth, his unctuous charm and his tiny model coffins, Mama Barnette carrying a shotgun and glaring with ancient evil eyes, men with daubed faces and raucous laughter chasing her through woods so choked with life that every step was an effort, the Garden of Gethsemane, the painting of the last supper on Mama's stair landing, Paul intoning "till death do us part." Mismatched images of violence and guns and God made the South a strange land and Anna a stranger in it.