Together, we crept to the nearest window and peeked outside warily, careful not to create silhouettes against the ember-glow from the fireplace. Mighty good targets, those would make. And if what we were hearing outside was horses—from a party of the faithful come to root out Gentile squatters, let’s say—targets we could well be.
Our own ponies were stabled in a dilapidated barn about a quarter mile off, and that’s where we directed our squints first. My brother and I were safe enough from bear, puma, or wolf long as we stayed inside, but we couldn’t just cower there while something big and hungry made a midnight snack of our mounts. We might yet have to venture out for a face-to-face with who-knew-what.
There was just enough moonlight to make out a shimmying in the trees near the barn, branches dancing in the half-darkness. The movement was high up—nine or ten feet off the ground. Beyond it, a single star flickered in the nighttime sky.
Only it couldn’t have been a star. It was too low on the horizon, not in the sky at all.
Then I saw the other star—another perfect pinprick of yellow light, right beside the first. And that’s when I knew what they were.
Glowing eyes, at least a foot apart. Eyes that were staring straight at us.
“Sweet Jesus,” I gasped. “If that’s a hoot owl, it’s got a wingspan as wide as Texas.”
“Ain’t no owl,” Old Red growled, and he moved to the door, threw it open, and stepped outside.
I came out behind him, Colt in hand, as he took aim.
The lights jerked downward, then disappeared entirely. There was another rustle of quick movement in the trees, and then…nothing. No eyes, no motion, no sound for the next two minutes.
“Well,” Old Red finally sighed, “we’d best pass the rest of the night out with the horses. Just in case.”
I looked back wistfully at our cozy spots by the fire.
“Can’t we bring ’em in here with us?”
My brother just went inside and started gathering up his bedroll.
We split the hours till dawn into watches, but we needn’t have bothered. You try sleeping with only a few planks of knotty, warped barn wood between you and some monstrous whatsis stalking around in the dark. Not that we ever heard the beast come back. But one visit was more than enough to keep me jumping at every cricket chirp all the way to daybreak.
“Well?” I said as my brother and I finally stepped out into the orange-yellow light of early morning.
“Well, what?”
Old Red moved off toward the trees, eyes down, scanning the ground.
“Well, what was that thing?”
“I have no earthly idea.”
“You got an unearthly one?”
My brother glanced back just long enough to shoot me a scowl. “You know I don’t believe in spooks.”
“Me neither…usually. And last night sure as hell wasn’t usual.”
Old Red knelt and picked a broken branch out of the underbrush. It was maybe three feet long and still studded with fresh, green pine needles. One end was splintered, and in the middle was a notched groove cut into the bark, as if the branch had been torn down by one powerful, clutching claw.
My brother looked up, then pointed at something above him.
A broken stub stuck out from a pine tree a dozen feet up.
“Spooks don’t tear down tree limbs.”
“All right, granted,” I said. “So what does?”
“‘It is a capital mistake to—’”
“Oh, for chrissakes!” I spat. “You wanna make a capital mistake? Quote Sherlock Holmes to me after I spent the night lyin’ around waitin’ to be eaten by the bogeyman.”
Old Red put down the branch and moved farther into the brush. “Ain’t no such thing as…hel-lo.”
He stopped cold.
“What is it?”
“Tracks.”
“What kind?” I asked, already feeling relieved. If it steps with paw, hoof, or foot, my brother’ll know what it is. I’ve seen him identify not just a cow’s breed but its age, weight, and brand from one long stare at the pies it left behind.
“Never seen the likes of this,” Old Red announced. He started off again, still crouching low. “Bogeyman tracks, maybe.”
“Har har. Thanks a lot,” I grumbled, following him into the forest to have a look for myself. I assumed he was guying me…till I laid eyes on those tracks.
There were two footprints pressed into the soft, mossy sod beneath the tree, right where we’d spotted those eyes shining in the night. They were side by side, a right and a left, plain as day. What wasn’t plain, though—not plain at all—was what could have made them.
Whatever it was, it had big pads and claws, like a bear. But there was something stretching from toe to toe, mashing the earth down into little humps. Webbing, it looked like, as one might see on a duck or frog or beaver—a water-critter.
“There’s more over thisaway,” Old Red said. “Coming and going.”
He stopped, but his gaze kept on moving along the forest floor, following a trail I was blind to. Soon he was staring straight into the sun streaming down through the trees.
To the east. Toward the lake.
Old Red started off again.
“Uhhh…shouldn’t we be movin’ along?” I called after him. “Salt Lake City ain’t gonna come to us, y’know.”
“Salt Lake City ain’t goin’ nowhere,” my brother muttered.
I sighed, then started after him—but only after dashing back to the barn to collect the Winchester.
It was a comfort having it at hand, for the deeper we went into the woods, the stronger the feeling grew that we weren’t alone. And we weren’t, of course: There were chipmunks and squirrels and songbirds all around us. But they went on about their business in their usual jumpy, oblivious way, whereas the presence I sensed was steady, quiet, watchful.
And purely imaginary…or so I tried to tell myself.
It wasn’t long before the lake came into view ahead of us. I hadn’t spied much more than the occasional dimple in the sod or trampled twig after the first set of prints, but that changed but good as we approached the shoreline. There were tracks in the bank so deep and well-defined even a bottom-rail, bat-blind sign-reader like myself couldn’t miss them.
One set led one-two, one-two straight into the water.
The other led out of the water.
“You know what I just realized?” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Whatever made them prints…it walk son two feet.”
Old Red shook his head sadly, as if—through my keen powers of observation and deducification—I’d just surmised that mud is brown and water wet.
“You don’t say,” he mumbled.
The tracks ran parallel to a big, rotten cottonwood that looked like it had toppled into the lake a half dozen years before, and my brother stepped up onto the trunk and walked along it, using it as a pier. The water was crystal clear back toward the bank, but the farther out Old Red went, the more it deepened and darkened until you couldn’t see what might be beneath the surface.
The tree dipped under my brother’s weight, tilting farther