The smell of the campfire lured them in. The sun set quickly and cast a blanket of inky darkness over the forest. The glow of the fire burned so brightly in the darkness that Hal considered wearing his sunglasses. By the time Ozzie and Tammy arrived he was already in full swing, having begun the party once Rex had shown up. “Well, look what the cats drug in,” Hal exclaimed with a yip as Ozzie strolled into the campsite followed by Tammy.
Hal strummed the guitar, trying to find his voice as if doing vocal warm-ups before a recital. It had been a lazy afternoon for him and he had decided to start drinking early to celebrate the 4th of July, even though it was early October.
“Got any requests, Ozzie?” Hal asked, smiling at his friend. Ozzie walked past the fire, past Hal to his normal spot on the front porch and stood there. Tammy came up with him quietly, softly. Ozzie bowed his head to Tammy, not out of respect, but as an indication that she should take his spot on the porch. She obliged.
Hal watched and noticed Ozzie’s peculiar action as he strummed. “Think I’m gonna find me a love song to sing,” Hal said, sensing the mood.
Tammy lay on the porch and listened to the sounds, but not to Hal’s words. She was happy, which was not unusual for her. But she was also calm and content, where before she had often been restless. That feeling had vanished along with Ozzie’s adolescence, and was replaced with a feeling of belonging to a place and a time. A sense of knowing what she was here for, what she was supposed to do.
Hal stopped long enough to take a swig and pour a drink into the cup he placed on the porch beside Ozzie. Then he slapped the six strings some more and kicked his private party into high gear, the thumper keg now adding the percussion. Ozzie looked down at the medicine that had nursed him back to health. The liquid that had warmed his body and freed his soul, allowing him to forget his past. To move on. He looked at Tammy and saw the life before him. He knew what she wanted. A simple life with children that, he suspected, would arrive sooner rather than later. He, too, wanted that life, would love living freely with her, maybe even close to Hal, although the daily party train that ran through Hal’s camp was beginning to wear on Ozzie. It wasn’t in Ozzie to forget pain and suffering the way that Hal had worked so hard to forget. The moonshine Hal served up offered an initial comfort to Ozzie, but the following sleep was laced with horrid nightmares from which he couldn’t escape. Visions of his mother, of her suffering, both physical and emotional. Her feelings of hopelessness, capitulation, and despair. Her calls to him, beckoning him and pleading for salvation.
Stepping off the porch, Ozzie turned left to walk around the cabin. Tammy raised her head and prepared to rise and follow, but Ozzie jerked his head around and shot Tammy a look. Its meaning was clear to her. She sat back down and stayed on the porch, turning one ear to Hal’s music and the other to the rear of the cabin where Ozzie had headed.
Fifty yards away the cabin silhouetted against the glow of the campfire as Ozzie looked back from Hal’s garden. In that short distance the sound of Hal’s strumming and singing, which was so loud from the porch, was remarkably muffled, having been absorbed by the trees, the forest floor and the darkness. Ozzie listened to the other rhythms of the forest and heard a band of coyotes yelp on the ridge underneath the mountain’s haunting sough. Trees swayed in the breeze and caused distant branches to fall, some crashing with enough force to sound like cannon fire when they snapped. Winds howled in and out of steep ravines and caves, whipping up fallen leaves and incubating screeches that were faded and far away.
And still, cries rang out from high above that sounded like a mother and her baby were shrieking the excruciating howls of separation, their notes of despair rising up and over the treetops and sending a chill down the spine of every forest creature.
Ozzie walked past the garden, past where he had dared venture before and continued into the unforgiving darkness, summoned, he felt, by a force he couldn’t resist. He walked upslope toward the ridge in the pattern of a serpentine curve to increase the coverage of his patrol. He stopped and listened to the sounds of man, hearing Hal’s voice and music play steadily but more dully. Everything sounded as it should at the camp. Continuing his ascent toward the coyotes he had heard up the slope, Ozzie detected that they were now silent. But he felt their presence. Close enough to be a threat to Tammy, to Hal. Especially to Rex.
He reached the ridgeline, only one in the sea of endless, cresting slopes. He stood in the midst of a forest that was as much a familiar sanctuary for wild animals as it was a chilling prison for man. Unaware of Ozzie’s presence, the coyotes had departed, likely scouring the forest floor for a meal from a freshly fallen soldier of nature; a raccoon, possibly, one too weak or weary to carry on. One that had hoped to purchase another sunrise, but found no reserves with which to do so. So it sheltered itself underneath the eave of a moss-covered log for a long slumber, its final prayer to morph into the soil before scavengers discovered and devoured its body, alive. The coyotes walked ahead and away from Ozzie, masquerading as angels intent on answering the fallen soldier’s prayer. Ozzie turned south on the ridge to follow, his pace quickening but not hurried.
The still of the night was suddenly shattered with a deafening and rapid drumming. A ruffled grouse flushed from a mountain laurel just in front of Ozzie and flew past his face, filling the darkness with the resonant thumping of a military helicopter at low altitude. Ozzie stepped back, momentarily startled, and watched the bird ascend the mountain slope. He continued forward, unwavering. Ahead, a band of three coyotes heard the grouse drumming one hundred yards behind. They stopped, the recently anointed alpha male peering back down the ridgeline in the darkness and sensing a familiar smell. The smell of a creature that should have been the feast of a lifetime for him only six weeks before, another solider that should have fallen but somehow didn’t. The male yipped rapidly and began in Ozzie’s direction, his lieutenants close behind.
The yipping and yelping channeled horrible memories of suffering through Ozzie’s ears to his mind. But the pain and physical suffering he was thinking of wasn’t his own. Rather, the memory of the coyote attack reminded him that he had cowered and run. He had run away from the coyotes but had not escaped. He had run away from evil men and had left his mother and brother behind. He had been a child of the forest and fear had controlled him, but now, fear wasn’t the primary emotion that Ozzie felt. It had been eclipsed by new emotions. Shame. Revenge. Rage.
Picking up his pace, Ozzie jogged toward the pack, the alpha male suddenly within sight. The pack leader stopped on the ridgeline as he felt an unfamiliar sensation. He was the one being hunted. The alpha male stood his ground with his mates at his shoulder to convey the appearance of a large predator. Ozzie came to a stop ten yards away and looked down. He saw the alpha male for what he was; a smaller adversary that could do him little harm, weak cronies at his side. As he swung his head from right to left, Ozzie oscillated his jaw, allowing the moon’s rays to reflect through the branches off of his long and razor-sharp tusks for his opponents to fear. With sharpened hooves he pawed the ground, kicking dirt back and making his intention clear. He stood, prepared to defend what was his, but not looking for battle. Unless...
The alpha male lunged forward, charging at Ozzie and intent on extracting revenge for the brothers that fell at his feet the month before. Ozzie’s eyes widened as he saw the three of them coming strong for him along the ridgeline. He quickened his breath, dug his hooves into the earth and sprinted forward, his conscience abandoning him as he prepared to confront all of his monsters, both real and imagined. And he saw and heard them all coming for him. The coyotes, the men, the menacing monster growling up the mountain, the yellow eyes in the blackness and shrieking screams in the middle of the night that tortured and taunted him. In his mind, Ozzie ripped into each and every tormenter, flinging them one by one into the bottomless ravines of death on each side of his ridgeline, towering above them as they fell, their screams fading with them until all had subsided.