where his left leg should be, the way thenurses showed him. When that does nothing to calm the pain, he lurches out of bed and finds the heaviest book in the house. When that doesnât work, he flings it across the room, pounds the mattress, and bites the pillow. His leg. Sometimes he has a panicky thought that they gave it to Jeanne, in a jar, like a tonsil. And that she has it up there in the house, with all his things: his old records and taxidermy videos, the suit he wore at their wedding, his .22, and his motherâs Bible. All those other things he would have said twenty years ago were essential but had proven after all not to be.
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Ray Blevins finds a dead fawn under his tree stand, all ripped to hell, half-buried in the leaves like something is planning to return for it. He comes up to the shop for no other reason than to tell this story to Jack. Ray is one that Jack has a hard time finding any respect for. One of the big talkers who needs a dozen technological gadgets to bring down a measly spike buck, who wants to go out there on a Saturday morning with his cell phone and his GPS system, his digital estrus bleat caller and human scent killer and eight-hundred-dollar rifle, and pretend he is Daniel Boone, out on the knife-edge of danger, deep in the uncharted wilderness. But a man couldnât get lost out there if he tried. Thatâs why Jack quit hunting long ago, even before he got sickâbecause you simply canât get lost anymoreâand whereâs the excitement and danger and pleasure in that? Even if your GPS broke and your cell phone fell in the mud, if you didnât run into another yahoo doingthe same thing ten yards down the hill then you could just follow the sound of the highway, find the gas station, and call your wife.
âYou know,â Ray says, jabbing his finger at the window. âThey say one of these cats will follow you. Read about a man out in Colorado got followed for twenty miles. Theyâre just curious, though. Worst thing you can do is run. You run, well, then, kiss it good-bye. Get your jugular torn right out. If you know oneâs behind you, you just got to keep your cool, keep going on about your business.â
Jack gives the clock a good long look, but Ray keeps going.
âTen feet. Ten feet, they can pounce from a standstill. Tell that to your kid on his walk to school in the morning. Tell that to these people who think we should let this thing be.â
âTell that to my ex-wife, then,â Jack says, turning away. âShe seems to think we should put a cozy little wicker basket and a scratching post out for it.â
Ray snorts. âPeople just donât understand. What we have here, what weâve got on our hands is a monster .â
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Those who have heard it say the call of a mountain lion is like the scream of a woman, more chilling, more hopeless, than anything you will hear in your life. The scream of a woman whose child has been wrenched from her arms and who is now watching, helplessly, as the last breath is choked out of it.
The fact that no one in Highland City has heard such a night-ripping scream is one of the many points that Jack constantly brings up in support of finding another explanation. What he does not tell anyone, not even Jeanne, is the sound that he himself heard one night, a week ago, at the moment he found a way to creep around the pain and part the curtains of a dream. Suddenly he was wide awake, heart pounding, terrified, thinking, What was that? What the hell was that?
But what with the painkillers he was still on. And the awful nightsâ sleep heâs been having. Of course thereâs an explanation. It was nothing more than a terrible hallucination. And yet for the past week he has kept the television on all night, the volume turned up loud. Just for company.
Kenny Peabody buys a number 41/2 steel bear trap with a double-pronged drag hook on an eight-foot chain and hauls a dead calf