The big boar was nervous. The rest of the herd was busy shoving their snouts into the ground. But the boar kept surveying the area, ears twitching, the big ridge hairs on its spine sticking straight up. Tillman Davis crouched behind a stand of mountain laurel about thirty yards out from the nearest animal, his arrow nocked, the bow ready to draw, his heart beating fast. But he couldn’t move. Not without the boar catching the flash of motion.
Tillman had been tracking the herd for a couple of weeks. There were eleven of them—smart, fast, and mean, with sharp eyes and noses that rivaled any animal on four feet. Like a lot of feral hogs in the area, their bloodstock ran mostly to Russian wild hog. Same thick dark hair, same little ears, same aggressive temperament, same three-inch tusks.
The biggest male probably weighed close to five hundred pounds. Hogs were considered to be nuisance animals, not wild game. No hunting season, no bag limit. Nobody cared if they lived or died. A herd over in Bledsoe County had atta yaaaa D‡cked and disemboweled a child. They had been eating the kid alive before Grandma got her shotgun and started shooting. The little boy survived, but he was never the same after that.
If Tillman had been hunting the hogs with a gun, it would have been no big thing to take a couple of them. He’d figured out their feeding patterns, so he knew he could track them down easy enough. But he wanted to take the alpha boar with a bow. And to do that, he had to fool eleven snouts and twenty-two eyes. And once he’d made the shot, he needed to get away without ending up like the kid from Bledsoe County.
Thirty-two, thirty-three yards to the target. A hell of a long shot. He wasn’t shooting with a high-tech compound bow like most hunters used. This was a longbow that he’d made himself from yew, the same wood used by the English longbowmen who’d won the battles at Crécy and Agincourt. It was powerful but finicky. No peep sights, no counterweights, no carbon fiber arrows—just a stick and a string and a homemade arrow.
Tillman could feel his heart beating, a sloshing noise in his ears that seemed so loud that surely the hogs could hear it.
He breathed in slowly and concentrated on becoming invisible. Not that he believed he could actually become invisible. But he did believe it was possible to transport your mind so far from the moment that you gave off no signal of your presence—no motion, no sound, nothing that would attract attention. And in so doing you simply blended into the vegetation. He had done it in the jungles of Mohan, guerrilla fighters walking within ten or fifteen feet of him when he stood in plain sight—almost in plain sight anyway—and not seeing him.
His predatory focus on the boar dissipated and his mind spread out like ripples on a pond, taking in everything around him—the sharp tang of hickory and the softer smell of oak, the patch of warmth on his cheek as a shaft of sunlight found his face, the black tangle of bare tree limbs against the pale sky, the barely audible breeze-rustle of the few tenacious dry leaves that still clung to the branches overhead. And still there was the boar: every hair visible and sharp, every twitch of ear and snout, every exhaled breath.
Tillman was not one to give much credit to joy. But this, surely, was as close to joy as he had ever come.
His was not a life that had been exactly filled with pleasure. His father had murdered his mother and then shot himself when Tillman was sixteen, leaving behind a bankruptcy that stripped Tillman and his brother Gideon of every possession they owned. Then Tillman had fought in the army, seen friends die in distant places, uncared for by the people whose interests they served. After that, he had lived thanklessly in the jungles of Southeast Asia, prosecuting a minor CIA war. The failures of that war had ultimately resulted in Tillman being made into a sacrificial goat, serving two years in prison for mistakes that were not of his own making. Never a husband, never a father, no real relationships of any consequence other than the fraught and distant relationship with his own younger brother.
Come to me. Tillman closed his eyes and concentrated on the boar. Come to me, brother. The boar was getting old, scars visible on the armored plate of callus across its chest, muzzle rimmed with white bristles, a big chip out of its left tusk. It might have another few years in it yet, but it had sired its offspring, had ruled its small patch of woods—and maybe now was its time to return to its source. Hunter and hunted, ng Ñ€†arrow and flesh—these were things that were meant for each other, ends of a never-ending circle.
Sometimes Tillman wished he could have said the same for himself, that he could have taken a bullet back in that fight on the oil rig, the one that had drawn a curtain on his career. But he had been spared that—if spared was the right word. In the midst of his greatest failure, Gideon had come to his aid, saved his life, sparing him from drawing the circle neatly closed.
Every day the shame and pointlessness of his life pressed down on Tillman like a massive weight. He cooked his stew, he grew his corn and beans and turnips and carrots on his rocky little plot of land, he trapped his rabbits and hunted deer, he read his books, he tried fitfully and with little success to teach himself how to play bluegrass banjo. But on most days, it felt like a pathetic waste of time.
But there was still this. There was still the hunt.
For a moment the hog looked down. Tillman drew in one smooth stroke. There was a feeling of rightness that told him if he released now, his arrow would find its mark.
But just as his fingers loosened on the bowstring, he heard a loud noise behind him, a car gunning its motor on the dirt road that led up to his house. He couldn’t see it through the dense mountain foliage, but he could hear it.
The hog, startled at the noise, dropped to its haunches, as though prepared for an attack. As a result the once-perfectly aimed arrow caught it high, passing just above the lungs and heart, just to the left of the spine. It was still a certain kill. But not a quick one.
The car rattled on up the trail, the noise fading.
Goddamn it, Tillman thought. Who’s the asshole in the car?
But he didn’t have time to think about the question any further: The hog screamed, a primal noise of anguish and rage, then tore straight toward Tillman. There was no time for a second shot, no time to nock a second arrow, draw, fire.
The boar was running crazily. The arrow still protruded from its body, just inches from its tail. The big backstrap muscle running down the spine must have been ruined. But still, somehow, the pig found the will to attack.
No time to run, no time to climb a tree. The big boar would be on him in seconds. Tillman flung the bow to the ground, drew his knife. It was the same knife he’d carried for years, through the jungles of Southeast Asia and across the arid mountains of Afghanistan. He kept it sharp enough to shave with, and it had been with him for so long that now it felt like an extension of his hand.
The pig’s tiny, red-rimmed eyes were full of malice. There was none of that brotherhood-of-ancient-warriors shit there now. It just wanted to kill him, and rip his flesh with its tusks. A thin runnel of drool ran down one of its tusks.
It struck Tillman as ironic that after having been in gunfights on three continents, he might end up getting killed by a pig.
He grinned. “All right, you old bastard,” he said. “If that’s how it is . . .”
It charged straight at Tillman. Because of its wound, it couldn’t maintain a straight course and veered offtrack, just far enough to the left that Tillman waem"Ñ€†s able to sidestep and slash with the knife. The blade sliced deeply across the pig’s chest.
It was only after the blade sliced deep into the pig’s hide that Tillman realized he’d made a mistake. Wild boars develop a thick plate of callus several inches thick across their chests to absorb the tusks of rival hogs. So though the blade just sliced into the chest plate, the pig seemed to barely notice the wound.