DEADLY GAME

by

Edward Wellen

Deep in the dusk of the wood Jess Seely saw the beast’s pupils shine.

He had been careful of every footfall and of every shift of his shotgun as he made his way through the forest. But they had got wind of him, they had been on his trail from the instant he stepped into the wood, they were all around him now. The eyes vanished, but he could hear soft scurryings.

Move quietly and keep your eyes open; that was the first lesson he had learned and the best. He moved still deeper into the wood, years of woodcraft in every move. The years had slowed him. But the experience gained in those same years had made every move tell. He heard soft scurryings. They were stalking him. How would they try to get him this time?

He let the shotgun dangle carelessly so the barrels threatened himself.

Would that tempt one of them – a squirrel? – to leap from a limb, aiming to strike at the trigger and set off the shot? No, he saw it now. They had something else in wait just ahead. A deadfall.

Only at the last fraction of a second did his sweep of eye take in the one bit of beaver track they had failed to brush away.

He walked slowly on, straining for sign of trip wire. It would be a length of vine; he should spot it by its dying colour. He should, but he did not. He frowned. Was he guessing wrong? Then, he spotted it – a length of living vine, one end still rooted, the other wrapping the trunk of a great spruce in a neat knot. The spruce itself seemed untouched, at first sight. They had plastered the gnawings back in place, but to his eyes – now that he knew what he was looking for – there stood out enough difference between the living wood and the dead to show the big bite they had taken out of the base of the tree. He admired their sense of balance. His lightest brush against the vine would bring the tree crashing down on him.

To raise – then dash – their hopes, he tried to keep from letting on he had seen the set-up and went on without breaking stride – then he lengthened and lifted his step at the last to miss triggering the trip wire by a hair. A silence, then a small chatter of disappointment.

He kept on. Under the talking foliage of quaking aspen he made out other sounds. Soft scurryings. What would they have waiting ahead? A noose? No, poison-tipped thorns.

The rustle of leaves gave warning. He whirled aside. One of them – a raccoon? – loosed a bent branch of hawthorn. The branch whipped at him and the wicked spikes barely missed his flesh. The branch was still trembling when he raised his shotgun but the raccoon – he felt sure it was a raccoon and smiled, remembering the first of them, Bandido – had vanished. Yet he had to make the futile gesture so those watching would not know the gun bore no load. He eyed the wicked spikes and again smiled. On each tip a sticky smear held a thick powdering. The powder would be dried leaves of foxglove. Or had they found something better? He smiled again at more chatter of frustration.

But he sharpened his senses as he pushed on. He stopped where the going grew suddenly easy. They had cleared a path; it invited him to bypass a tangle of underbrush. He looked to see that the overarching boughs did not hold loops of vine ready to drop, and took the path. Nothing. But there had to be something. He pushed on, then slowed, smelling dampness that was not the dankness of mould.

Ahead, the trail widened into a clearing. In the centre of the clearing lay a patch of spongy ground that could be lethal quagmire. Yet the tracks of a big woodchuck led straight across the patch, promising the ground would hold. Something about the tracks gave Jess Seely pause. They had a dainty, yet dragging, look.

He read faint tracks on either side of the patch and knew what had taken place. Not one but three woodchucks had crossed the clearing together, abreast, almost in step. Two had kept to the solid ground on either side of the bog, each holding in its jaws one end of a fallen tree limb. The big woodchuck in the middle had ridden with the bulk of his weight on that support, making footprints without sinking into the mire.

Jess Seely smiled and skirted the patch.

He wondered vaguely why the chatter he heard now seemed to be chatter not of frustration but of expectation. He had no time for more than vague wonder at that, and at the sudden hush. The ground – not ground but a covering of dirt over a wickerwork of branches – gave under him. His hands flung up, the gun shot out of his grip. He fell.

His coming to was an in-and-out thing, pulsing awareness, intermitting dream.

The pit was deep. They were good at digging. They had patience. He nodded and blacked out.

He came to again. He lay crumpled, a leg bent strangely under him. He was helpless, but they would not come right away. They would not trust him, they would wait to make sure he was not playing helpless. Then they would come.

They had patience.

He tightened himself against the pain. This was what he had worked toward, and in any case it would have been useless to have regrets. He had no regrets. He had been a good game warden. He lapsed into unconsciousness again, smiling.

The wait was long and he knew he had passed through a spell of delirium. There was a timeless moment when it seemed to him he came aware in the past, reliving the start of it. That had been the time when, feeling a gnawing helplessness, seeing the day coming when he would no longer be there to save them from his fellow man, he caught that poacher. The poacher was too busy to sense his approach, busy cursing some animal that had once again sprung the trap and made off with the bait.

He knew, in that long-ago day, that it would be wasting time to haul the man into court. The local justice of the peace would let him off with a mild rebuke. So Jess Seely booted the man out of the wood, baited and reset the trap and lay in wait.

At last a large raccoon nosed into view, picked up a piece of twig in a forepaw and reached cautiously to stick it into the trap. The trap snapped shut its grin on nothing. The raccoon was about to make off with the bait when Jess Seely remembered to move. He aimed his hypodermic gun and shot the raccoon to sleep. He carried the raccoon home – and that was the start of Jess Seely’s private, unauthorised and top-secret psychological testing laboratory.

The raccoon made an auspicious first subject, quickly mastering all sorts of release mechanisms to escape from puzzle boxes and to win rewards, learning to fit pegs into holes and to tie knots. The one stupidity was Jess Seely’s. He had grown fond of the raccoon – Bandido – and he had let Bandido sense that. It was lucky Jess Seely had realised that at this early stage, or the whole thing would have gone for nothing. He had to break Bandido of his liking. He forced himself to set about coldly instilling in Bandido hate and fear of man – any man.

Only when he felt sure he had brought that about did he free Bandido. He tagged Bandido and released him into the wild, then hunted other promising subjects. There was only one Bandido. Jess Seely did not give any of the others a name.

He did not dare.

He rigged more and more sophisticated release mechanisms, and in time was graduating animals that were able to disarm any trap safely and, before making off with the bait, move the trap, reset it and conceal it so the original setter of the trap would step into it. Other than a shot from a trapper who thought the resetting was his doing, Jess Seely had little trouble with poachers after that.

At mating seasons he used his capture-gun again to bring together the brightest of his subjects. And in thirty years, thanks to training and selective breeding, the wildlife under his protection had learned to deal with all traps, set out sentries, string alarm wires across trails, toss stones to mislead hunters and put hounds out of action and, with earth or urine, fight fire.

Now he was clear in his mind and he felt a humble pride. He had set out to teach them to guard their preserve, to save themselves. He had done a good job of this. He had taught them well. He heard them coming closer to the rim of the pit. Now he saw their eyes.

He fixed on one face. Old Bandido! But that couldn’t be. Old Bandido was long dead. This was a son or a grandson or a great-grandson. In a sense they were all children of Jess Seely.

No matter. They would have no pity on him. He had taught them well indeed, he thought smiling.

The End

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