They Assume me the devil.
I look down at their bodies, bloodied by my antlers, and I know their thoughts. I know all thoughts in my woods.
They think I am alone, and evil.
Supernatural. Beyond nature. This is not. I am nature, just as man is.
I feast upon their flesh and their souls before continuing the night.
My woods are home to many things. I know them all. I have always known them all.
Jarod stalked silently through the woods. Years of his uncle yelling at him to keep his eyes both up and on the ground - to watch for deer and fallen sticks at the same time - had finally seemed to click in the past few years. There was an art to it, walking with silence in the dense wood of a hardwood forest. Leaves and branches and acorns and rocks covered the forest floor. All made their own noise against the rubber of his leather hunting boots. All could warn the deer and the squirrels and owls of his presence.
He walked with care through them all. Jarod was not a fancy hunter. He carried only a stool and a small cloth for aid as a blind. The rest of his pack contained only the necessities should he kill an animal, and a few snacks. His father hunted in a red and black flannel, sitting on the ground or a fallen log, with an underpowered rifle even so, they had venison every autumn. Jarod could do the same.
He walked these woods with that same rifle. A 30-30, lever action. As a boy, he thought it made him look like a cowboy from the wild west. He hadn't thought of projectile velocity or arc of travel or stopping power or even the weight of the thing. It had been his dad's gun and it made him feel like a cowboy. He loved it. Two years ago, he returned to the rifle. He was done with the fancy metrics, and buying a weapon that could take down a moose at 400 yards. He didn't care for those hunts, and he didn't care for those thoughts.
His father's gun would do just fine.
The trail beneath his feet thinned, and Jarod stopped. It was still dark out, but he saw his breath rise around his face in the thin starlight still above. He was getting hot from walking and needed a break. No good sweating through his clothes, only to have to sit in the cold wet for hours.
The woods were still and quiet. His woods.
His cousin may no longer own the land, but that did not halt his access to it. It only made being quiet more important. He would trespass these trails. There would be no hunt here. There couldn't be. But there was public land, deeper in the woods, beyond the border of the private land he grew up hunting and in an older part of the forest. It was good there. He'd hunted it when he grew older, bolder, and stronger. Strong enough to bring a deer out the miles of trailless woods back to the relative ease of dragging on a trail. It was all he could hunt now.
There was a grunt in the woods. A huff of sharp air like an exasperated sigh. It was ahead and to the north. Jarod grabbed his gun reflexively, but loosened his grip on the rifle in an instant. There was nothing he could do here but watch the deer that made the grunt if he was so lucky to see it.
Minutes passed. Jarod, silent in the darkness, sat atop a stone beside the trail. He was beginning to cool off now, but still refused to move. He'd see that deer even if he couldn't hunt it. His patience was rewarded. A small reflection appeared at eye height from behind thicker brush ahead of Jarod. A wet, black nose reflected the starlight above and followed by the face of a deer. Jarod saw it was a small fork buck as it walked out into the clearing. No more than two years old, the young buck walked with the wary confidence of a male on the tail end of the rut. These were his woods too, though he still carried some of the skittishness of when his fur held spots.
Jarod loved this. He sat still and silent, watching the young animal gingerly step through the woods. Over downed logs and silently through the leaves, it moved. It would stop, nuzzle with its nose against the ground, then find the acorn it was looking for and eat. Jarod still had plenty of time before first light. He did not need to move yet. No sense spooking the animal.
He sat and he watched it, and it made the morning good.
As the deer left his sight, Jarod sat a little while longer, letting the animal truly get out of the area before he stood and walked once more. The chill had set into his muscles and his bones. He felt it in his joints most of all. It was a surprise that his knees didn't creak with each step, but he could get up and move and warm himself with walking once more.
The wood's familiarity was waning as Jarod walked further in the darkness. Trail thinning as he went. When his cousin owned the land, he had only allowed tractors on the trails, and those rarely, so the paths did not go far or last long before being overgrown. As Jarod worked his way through the dim predawn, the trail beneath his feet got thinner and thinner until it was nothing more than the hint of a trail. It may be a game trail. The deer did use the tractor trails of the land. They were the freeways of the forest, but up ahead, even the path of the animals thinned and disbursed.
This was good. No one had been this deep in the land in a long time. Here is where the great deer hid, the monster bucks and the does that had free rein to raise their fawns. This was the genuine wood, the deepest part beyond men and beyond ownership of the land. The forest may be public here, but that public did not use it. It seemed no one used it.
Jarod smiled and continued on. Light was still more than an hour away and he was not yet hot enough to sit once more. The hunt would not begin for a while, and that was ok. He was beyond the years of antsyness and anxiety at the start of the hunt. He was not beyond feeling, but the years have a way of dulling excitement. It was nothing to rush into, but something to savor. Each step may be his last on this land. His land. Each branch avoided underfoot and every mossy step was something special. The woods were close around him, as close as the cold. The dark trees, knotty and mangled, black shadows in the darkness silhouetted against the sky. They were beautiful in their own way. They were not alive to be marveled at, but marvel he did. Jarod loved the trees as he loved the deer. They were all a part of the world here. They all fought the same battle to survive. The cold air made their bones creak as much as his.
Finally, he was warming once more. It was only another half hour of walking, but Jarod felt the heat within his clothes and the want of his body to sweat. He would stop here, though he was uncertain where here was. Jarod was beyond the borders of the land he grew up hunting and beyond the threshold of the trees and paths he knew. He was not nervous that he'd be able to find his way back, but he felt good at the loss of the center. This was new land to hunt. New land, yet so familiar.
Perfection.
So he sat.
As the morning cooled to the coldest part of the night, those moments slight before the coming dawn, a fog coalesced from nothing and descended on the wood. The land before Jarod undulated with rolling changes in grade and slight hills beneath thick trees and vacant brush. the cool white clouds of fog sat in the low points of these burrows between hills, covering the fallen branches and stones of the ground and, though the morning was still dark, brightened the view somewhat. The white wisps of air seemed to have a light of their own, though they only reflected the vestiges of starlight remaining before the dawn crested the horizon to the east.
Jarod shivered, a cold coming over him suddenly. It felt an extension of the fog, of the very atmosphere surrounding the woods where he sat.
As he adjusted his posture, sitting on the small pad he had carried out with him, he froze. Something had moved in the distance as he adjusted. Jarod stopped everything. Nothing moved but his eyes in their sockets, scanning through the horizon of trees and fog. His back was stretched, contorted slightly, as it had been halfway through his movement. He felt it tighten and his leg muscles oddly tense as they held their position. He felt it, but did not acknowledge the feeling. He was frozen.
He was hunting.
His eyes scanned back and forth, up and down the landscape. Their movement alone could tip off a deer, if it was watching close enough, but the chance was so slight he moved them still. His body, however, could not move. That was guaranteed to spook any quarry. He dared not move until he had whatever had entered his vision in his sight. He'd only move when that movement would not scare whatever he had seen.
It was slow agony. Methodical were his eyes, searching in a steady, grid like fashion throughout the landscape. Watching for movement, seeking familiar and out of place shapes. Searching for anything.
Had he only seen a squirrel or a bird? The woods had been so silent since that first deer he had seen hours ago on his hike out.
Jarod's eyes froze as they saw movement in the darkness.
Silhouetted against the grey light of the fog, a hoof stepped out from behind a tree and struck the ground. It made no sound as it did. Jarod followed the light of the black sinuous shape up to the tree it had come from behind and saw no head nor antlers. Quickly, quietly, he untensed his leg and back, settling back into his seat. Comfort washed over the muscles as they relaxed, but he had no time for it. His hand grabbed the rifle he carried and slowly brought it up to his side. He froze once more as a second hoof appeared from behind the tree.
The cover of the canopy where the animal was coming from was thick. Evergreen branches hung low and covered the bulk of the animal as it stepped forward from behind the tree. This didn't annoy Jarod. He was patient and had watched many an animal like this before. The cover was good. It would cover him as well as the animal.
The man risked a look at his watch. Legal shooting would begin in three minutes. He had to wait for the animal to enter a clearing and the time would do. He watched it take another step forward, away from the tree yet under the cover of the branches above. Jarod raised his rifle further and released the first sound he had made since sitting in this spot.
He clicked the safety of the gun off.
The animal stopped.
He saw it, the pause in the step, the hoof halfway between the full stride and the ground. The animal had heard the click, as unnerved by the sudden sound in the silent woods as Jarod would have been.
Jarod thought a small prayer. It was nothing real, no thought to it, but a request to the God he believed in above. Jarod thought nothing of the request as he put little stake in getting a response. God didn't work in such ways.
But a frigid chill came from within him as Jarod let the prayer leave his mind and go into the aether of whatever is beyond. Ice seemed to seep into his mind and spread chilled tendrils down through his spine. Somehow, Jarod knew his prayer caused the feeling. Somehow, he knew his thought had never left his mind. It never reached the aether beyond this world. Jarod had never known his prayers to truly go anywhere until this moment. This moment where he knew his prayer went nowhere.
The hoof of the beast in shadow silently fell to the ground in front of it, but the animal did not take another step forward.
"I am here."
The thought entered Jarod's mind, though it wasn't his own. It seemed to wriggle in through the gap left by the frozen wake of the prayer unheard.
No, thought Jarod, not unheard. Unsent. stopped. Held by the voice he heard come through the same blank space in his soul.
He did not know how he knew these things, but they were obvious. In all his life, Jarod had not lived a devout path. But here he knew.
That voice was real.
It was as real as the beast standing in darkness and fog ahead of him.
He didn't know when it became a beast in his mind. That was a word never used on the beautiful deer. He hunted them, yes, but they were beautiful to him. Animals, full of grace. Never beasts. Nothing so vulgar could fill his thoughts of the creatures of the wood.
Still. Jarod knew a beast stood before him now.
"You hunt?" came a thought in his mind.
The voice was not malevolent, but there was a darkness to it, an icy chill like that which came from the stolen prayer.
The beast took another step.
Jarod was afraid to think.
What could have stolen his prayer? What could see into his mind and say these words there?
Another step from the silent hoofs.
Jarod could see the rear steps of the best now, though the top of the animal was still shrouded by evergreen brush. It was massive.
Once, when Jarod was only a teenager, he had been hunting the woods further back, still on the private land, and had seen a moose. It had been running, crashing through the brush and the branches. When he saw it at first, he could only see the torso and the feet of the animal. It looked like a horse. It was the largest animal he had ever seen, and his mind couldn't comprehend what was before him. He never even raised his rifle out of shock or fear. He simply watched as the moose, massive and proud, emerged from the brush and ran by on the trail he had taken into his stand. Awe had filled him then.
Terror filled him now.
The beast before him made the moose look small. No animal could have a gait that long. Nothing of these woods, this continent even, could.
He could not move as the figure before him took another step forward. Finally, a step into the clearing.
A black stag stood before Jarod. It looked at him with black eyes, dark voids that seemed to pull in the mist's light that flanked the beast. It stood unnaturally tall, antlers seeming to touch the sky impossibly, warping the woods about them in a visual contortion of light and shadow. Pulling both the light and the dark towards their twisted, sharp shapes.
Instinctively, Jarod fell back. He should have held. His age and experience should have held. But the beast seemed to push him back. The 30-30 fell to the ground with a crunch as the basics of gun safety left him. He didn’t hold on to the rifle. The basics of living left him. There was nothing he could hold on to. All Jarod saw was death.
In a flash, he saw his own. The impossible antlers, bloody without velvet, bloody with the life of men and souls. Bloody and dripping without a drop touching the ground. He saw these spikes of evil and death gore through his stomach, touching the base of the chill that had rushed down his spine from the prayer before. He thought nothing but this fear. Jarod could not pray for hope. He was afraid it would be stolen from him once more.
He saw this great beast, this horror beyond imagining, spear him through the gut and drop him to the forest floor, only to feast on his soul.
This image, though. This feeling. Something cut through the fear.
He lay on the ground. This forest floor, new yet so familiar to him.
"You dare hunt the devil?"
The thought entered his mind as the others had. Jarod knew it came from the massive stag which stood before him. The stag which was not a stag.
His hands felt the forest floor. The real one and the one in his mind, the one his dying body, leached of life from the horrendous antlers of the stag, felt. It was real. It all was real.
"You're not the devil," he said. It was only a whisper, and he did not know if he said the words in real life or in the half-dream vision he saw.
The stag took a step towards him.
It was no beast.
It was beautiful.
Jarod closed his eyes to the real stag before him, surrendering to the vision.
I stepped forward, towards this man. This hunter. I felt his mind. I loomed over his body and read his thoughts. I know his soul. These woods. My woods.
They are his woods, too.
He knows the trees, the trails, the water, and the land.
He walks silently, as I do.
His soul will be delicious, but it is not yet time for that meal.
Nothing came. No death. No sound. The vision ceased and Jarod opened his eyes. He saw the black voids, endless and pure, that made up the eyes of the black stag.
The 30-30 was still behind him. There would be no way to reach it, but his hand sat atop his pack. His knife was in that pack. If only...
The stag loomed above him, watching, unmoving. Then it appeared to shrink before Jarod's eyes. Just as confusing as the growth had been, the monster now looked to be only a large, dark buck of the woods, nothing more. Void filled eyes dimmed to merely bright reflections of the rising mists about them.
Jarod’s thoughts were empty. There was no longer a voice in his mind. The cold left only vestiges of the frigid tendrils that once filled him. The man dared not wake the monster again with a question in thought or voice or prayer.
The animal huffed a short, sharp grunt. It stomped the ground with a single hoof.
Then, before Jarod's disbelieving eyes, it turned and bounded off into the darkness of the woods.
It was a long time before Jarod stood up off the forest floor and left for camp.
It was only a year before he returned to hunt his woods once more.
(12/31/2024)
Thanks for giving that a read! In case you couldn’t tell, I’m doing as Cosmic horror schtick this January! Got one or two more tales coming your way this month. Let me know which one’s your favorite and if you think I hit the mark on the genre or missed it in what I’ve written so far. Thanks for reading!
Love ya!
Max