Ridgeline - Part Thirteen: From the Woods

The brush parted — she heard it, the branches bending and the crack of a limb giving way under something that didn't slow for limbs — and the man's flashlight swung toward the sound and the beam hit something and the something was large and close and the man did the wrong thing. She couldn't see what the wrong thing was because the beam was pointed away from her now, aimed into the laurel, and what she could see was the cone of light bouncing off leaves and bark and the silhouette of the man's back and the silhouette was rigid, locked, the flashlight arm extended toward whatever was in the brush.

He held the light on it. A direct beam. Pointed at whatever was coming through.

The huffing changed. Deeper. A sound that had been approaching became a sound that had arrived and the jaw-popping — the rapid cracking that had carried through the trees — accelerated into something continuous, a percussive rattle that Dana felt in the ground under her legs, vibrating up through the dirt into her body.

The dog lunged.

Not at the thing from the woods. At the man. She heard the claws on the gravel — the scrabbling scrape of an animal launching from three legs — and the dog hit the man low, at the calf or the knee, and the man stumbled and the flashlight swung wild, the beam carving a white arc through the canopy, and for a half-second the trail was lit sideways and she saw the man's legs buckle and the dog's body slide past on the gravel, the rear leg trailing, and then the flashlight was on the ground, the beam aimed at a patch of gravel and nothing else, and the dark was back.

Dana pressed Bree's face into her chest. Sealed the baby's ears with her hands — one palm over each side of the skull, the fingers lacing behind Bree's head, the forearm wound screaming as the muscles engaged. She pressed until Bree's face was flush against her sternum and the baby's breathing was a warm circle on Dana's skin and the sound from the trail ahead was muffled by nothing because Dana's hands were on Bree's ears, not on her own.

The man made a sound. The first sound he'd made all night — not on the trail when he passed her, not during the attack, not on the approach with the flashlight. The first sound. And it wasn't a word. It was a register Dana had never heard from a human throat — high, rising, the pitch of a thing that has understood what is happening to it at the speed the thing is happening. The sound went up and didn't come down.

The huffing became grunting — low, rhythmic, percussive, a sound like a heavy machine cycling. Not roaring. Nothing that sounded like what she'd heard in movies or imagined when she thought of what lived in the woods at night. This was mechanical. A body doing work. The grunting was the sound of effort, of mass applied to a task, and the task made sounds of its own.

Thrashing. Something hitting the ground — a body, or part of a body, connecting with gravel and dirt at a force that carried through the earth into Dana's legs. Then a dragging sound. Then the grunting again. Then a sound she couldn't place — wet, structural, the sound of something being rearranged at a level below the skin. A sound she would not describe to the police or to Scott or to her mother or to anyone who asked because the description would require her to think about what was making it and she was not going to think about what was making it, not now, not later, not ever.

The man's sound stopped.

The stopping was worse than the sound. The sound, while it lasted, had been human — the pitch wrong, the register wrong, but identifiable as a voice, as a person, as the man who had walked toward her with a flashlight and a cord and a mask pulled up over his nose. The voice had been evidence of a living body. The silence was evidence of something else. Dana's body registered the silence as a space that should contain something and didn't. The trail ahead was quiet and the quiet had a weight and the weight was the weight of a thing that had happened that could not be taken back.

The grunting continued. Fifteen seconds. Twenty. The effort sounds — the mechanical cycling of a large body working — and then the grunting slowed and the effort sounds changed and the task was either finished or abandoned and the grunting became huffing and the huffing became breathing and the breathing was heavy and close and the animal that was making it was still on the trail.

Dana held Bree's head against her chest and didn't breathe. Her hands sealed over the baby's ears. Her ribs were a cage of fire. The forearm wound had opened fully under the pressure of holding Bree's skull and the blood was running down her wrist again, warm, steady, dripping onto the baby's onesie. She didn't move. She didn't breathe. She listened.

A huff. Directed — aimed, the way the huffing had been aimed at the man. But this one came from a different angle. Lower. Closer to the ground. The animal was smelling her. Or smelling the blood. Or smelling Bree. The huff came again — a hard exhalation, the air from large lungs pushed through a large nose, and Dana could feel the displacement of air against her skin, the faint warmth of breath that wasn't hers. A third huff. She could hear the nose working — the intake after the exhalation, the rapid sampling — and the body behind the lungs was the body that had just done the thing to the man that the man's silence testified to.

She didn't move. She held Bree and the baby was silent and she held her own breath until the holding became a pain in her chest that joined the rib-pain and she let the breath out through her nose, slowly, trying to make the exhale soundless, trying to make herself a thing the animal would read as dead or empty or not worth the effort.

Then it left.

Brush cracking. Moving away — south, downhill, the crashing getting softer, the branches bending and springing back, and the sound faded the way sounds fade on a ridge, thinning into distance, into layers of forest, into quiet. Something smaller followed — lighter, faster, the same direction.

The crashing thinned. The footsteps thinned. Fainter and fainter, the distance absorbing the sounds the way the dark absorbed the light, until the crashing was indistinguishable from the wind in the laurel and the footsteps were gone.

Quiet.

Not silence — the crickets were still going, the frogs still pulsing from the creek, the canopy still dripping the rain it had absorbed. But the quiet underneath those sounds was different from any quiet Dana had sat in tonight. This quiet had a body in it. The body was forty feet ahead on the trail and the body was not making sounds and the quiet that surrounded the body was the quiet of a thing that had happened and was now over and the world continuing around the shape of it.

She held Bree and didn't move and the quiet pressed against her ears and the crickets went on and the frogs went on and the world went on.

The dog.

She heard it before she registered what she was hearing — a rasping, labored rhythm that came from the gravel six or seven feet to her right. Breathing. The dog's breathing. Not the slow, nasal rhythm from the bonding hours ago. This was shallow and fast and each inhale caught on something and each exhale carried a sound that was air being forced through damaged passages. The ribs heaving. She could hear the heaving — the chest expanding and contracting at a rate that was too fast, the body working too hard for each breath.

She put Bree down.

On the ground, on the dirt at the trail's edge, carefully, the baby on her back in the leaves. Bree's arms went wide — the startle reflex, the body's response to sudden loss of support — and then settled. Bree's mouth opened. No sound came out. The vibration from earlier was gone. The baby lay on the leaves in the dark and breathed and the breathing was shallow and the shallow breathing was the only sound the baby made.

Dana crawled.

Three feet. Her left arm couldn't take weight — the forearm wound buckled under her when she tried and the arm folded and she caught herself on the elbow and used the elbow and the right hand to drag herself across the gravel toward the breathing. The gravel pressed into her knees, her elbow, the exposed skin of her stomach where the t-shirt was torn. The rib wound flared with each drag. She crawled anyway.

The dog's body under her hand. Fur. Wet. The flank rising and falling at the rapid, labored pace she'd heard from three feet away. She could feel the ribs through the coat — not individual ribs but the general cage of them, expanding and contracting, and the left side moved differently from the right, the damaged side catching on the inhale the way Dana's own ribs caught. The dog's body was hot — too hot, the heat of a system running in overdrive, the fever of tissue fighting what the claws had opened.

The dog flinched.

The full-body contraction — the same flinch from the first time she'd stood up near it hours ago, the same flinch from the reach, the shoulders bunching, the weight shifting, the body compressing around its center. But the flinch was slower. The muscles that had fired instantly hours ago now fired in sequence, a ripple rather than a snap, the body's flinch-response degraded by the same injuries that degraded everything else.

It held. The flinch peaked and held and the dog didn't move away because the dog couldn't move away and Dana's hand stayed on its side and the hot fur rose and fell under her palm and the flinch-and-hold resolved into something that wasn't relaxation but was the absence of further contraction. The body accepting the hand because the body had no resources left to reject it.

Dana lay down.

Next to the dog. On the gravel. The sharp edges pressing into her hip and her shoulder and the rib wound sending a continuous flare up her left side. She curled around Bree — reached back and pulled the baby against her stomach, Bree between her body and the ground, and pressed her back against the dog's flank. The dog's heat soaked through her torn t-shirt and into the skin between her shoulder blades. The dog's breathing vibrated against her spine. The dog's heartbeat — fast, irregular, the rhythm of a body in crisis — traveled through the contact point and entered Dana's body and joined her own heartbeat, faster than hers, a syncopation.

Three heartbeats in the dark. Dana's. Bree's. The dog's. Each at its own rate. Each at its own depth. Each powered by a body that was failing in its own specific way — Dana by blood loss and cold, Bree by exhaustion and exposure, the dog by everything the night had done to it. Three heartbeats and the frogs and the crickets and the gravel pressing into Dana's hip and the dog's heat against her back and Bree's small body curled between Dana's stomach and the ground.

The entire night ahead. The dark would last for hours. The three heartbeats would have to last as long as the dark did, and Dana lay on the gravel with her daughter against her stomach and the dog against her spine and listened to the three rhythms and didn't know which one would stop first.