Phantom Pain

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 cellphone and his GPS system, his digital oestrus bleat call and human scent killer and $600 rifle and pretend he is Daniel Boone, out on the knife-edge of danger, deep in the uncharted wilderness. But a man couldn’t get lost out there if he tried. That’s why Jack quit hunting long ago, even before he got sick. Because you simply can’t get lost and where’s the excitement and pleasure in that?

‘You know,’ Ray says, jabbing his finger at the window, ‘they say one of these cats will follow you. Read about a man out in Colorado got followed for twenty miles. They’re just curious, though. Worst thing you can do is run. You run, then, well, kiss it goodbye. Get your jugular torn right out. If you know one’s behind you, you just got to keep your cool, keep going on your business.’

Jack gives the clock a good long look, but Ray keeps going.

‘Ten 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.’

‘Tell that to my ex-wife, then,’ Jack says, turning away. ‘She seems to think we should put a cosy little wicker basket and a scratching post out for it.’

Ray snorts. ‘People just don’t understand. What we have here, what we’ve got on our hands, is a monster.’

***

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 sound of a woman whose child has been wrenched from her arms, who is now watching, helplessly, as the last breath is choked out of it.

***

That no one in Highland City has heard such a night-ripping scream is one of the many points 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 had found a way to creep around the pain and part the curtains of a dream. Suddenly he was wide awake, terrified. What was that? What the hell was that?

But what with the painkillers he was still on. And the awful nights’ sleep he’s been having. Of course there’s 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.

***

Ray Blevins buys a number-four steel bear trap with a two-foot drag chain and hauls a dead calf halfway up the hillside behind the filling station and when word gets out about it, all hell breaks loose. We need to take action, men start saying. For the safety of our women and children. Before something happens that we all regret.

Some Rotarians get together and invest in night-vision goggles and go out every midnight with an arsenal of rifles and don’t come home until sunrise. Jack shakes his head and wonders how soon before someone gets himself shot. Whatever that thing might turn out to be, he thinks, why not just leave it the hell in peace? Every third customer who comes in asks if Jack will mount the cat for him if he bags it. And Jack, weary, counters with the oldest joke in the book: ‘Sure, Bud. Two for one and we’ll do your ex-wife too.’ They slap him on the back, sending a tide of pain down his spine. ‘Good one, Jack!’ they all say.

***

One morning Ronnie grabs a pencil from Jack’s workbench, draws something on the back of an envelope and thrusts it in front of Jack. He’s breathing through his nose, his glasses slipped down, his flabby face trembling. ‘I seen it,’ he says. ‘Out on the road last night. I seen it! Scared the shit out of me. Nearly wrecked.’

Jack squints at the picture: a primitive cave painting, a child’s crayon drawing. ‘You saw a water buffalo?’

Ronnie stares at him. He hits the paper with the end of the pencil. ‘The cougar. Last night, around eleven. I was leaving Sullivan’s. I caught it in my high beams, coming around that bend. It was there on the shoulder. Then it just disappeared into the trees. I pulled over but it was long gone.’

‘You don’t say.’

Jack considers the drawing again. It reminds him of the first couple of mounts Ronnie has attempted himself, a coon and a pintail duck: graceless, stiff, hastily and sloppily done. You have to lose yourself in the work, Jack has always believed. At some point in the process, even for a few minutes – and it sounds like a bunch of hocus-pocus – you have to let the animal lead you. After all, it’s not clay or paint or iron you’re working with. What you’re working with has, up until recently, been a living, breathing thing; for a dozen years or more has been blinking, snorting, sleeping, grazing, scanning the horizon. You have to respect that. You have to get in touch with that, if you want to come close to reproducing it.

‘Believe it now?’ Ronnie says, striking the paper with the pencil.

‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ Jack says, feeling suddenly depressed. He’s ready to go home, lie down on the couch, fry up a pork chop. To hell with his new diet.

‘That bitch is mine,’ Ronnie says, as if Jack has suggested otherwise. ‘That son of a bitch is all mine.’