The Night is Dark

The world outside the cabin remained dull. Lit up only vaguely by a faint, dark blue tinge of night light, the sky is a solid blanket above him. Not even the moon is visible. The snow supersedes it all as it falls, but that’s not why he is staring out of the window.

The screams are saying his name.

Hamish. That’s what they call. Out in the thick pines, branches dipping with the snow they’ve caught and collected, holding to it with bald faced greed much as he holds his rifle, his repeater.

Hamish.

He steps back from the window, letting the curtain, so terribly thin, fall back into place. He levels his repeater, his jackboots depressing the half rotted floorboards under his weight and spilling out groaning creaks with each cautioned step.

Hamish.

Hamish.

Hamish.

It is unbearable. The shrill cries are at once human and animal; both conscious of the word being said and mindless to its meaning, only that calling it causes the names owner great distress. A jabbing sensation in the back of his calf sparks greater fright in him, and he whirls around only to bring the toe of his boot into the underside of his now upturned table. He spins again until he faces the window, faces the door. He must not stop facing the door.

Even as the dark bags collect under his eyes and his skin becomes hot and itchy with lack of sleep. He cannot bring down the repeater rifle. He knows this, was taught this so he could better kill the rebel Cree and Assiniboine. The memories of those days, at least the quieter ones, flood in and he’s brought back to those times. When he was still yet to be grey and old, and his left knee hadn’t buckled under his one misplaced step.

Mostly, though, he remembers the heat, that thick, choking marsh heat in Rupert’s land, on the way to Cut Knife. Oh, he hated it then, might hate it now even, but those marshes and the woods beside those marshes were still home to creatures he knew, and he knew God made them.

Hamish.

God had no hand in what was screaming his name now.

Hamish.

A new sound, the sound of claws on wood. Wood above his head.

On the roof. Toying with him.

Hamish.

He should have stayed in Rupert’s Land

Hamish.

He should have stayed with Lucy, that beautiful woman who he made a mother of. He should have made a father of himself, accepted the ire of her family, that family of well offs who turned their noses up at the poor army boy he was.

More scratching, screaming becomes whispers. Many whispers. Too many voices for too few whispers ad it’s make his ears ripple with pain.

Lucy. That poor girl. He should have been better. Should have been braver. Should have stayed where it was warm.

At once it stops, but Hamish has no reprieve. He knows what they know, and what they know is their prey is old, alone, and gimped up on one leg. The gun though, they know what that does even better. He holds it still, level at the door, ready to swing at the windows, pray on his lips as he can feel the warm glow of his lantern petering out. It is so dark. It is so cold.

A new feeling on his bare neck and a new sound, one of whistling wind, enter she ear and snuffs the lantern beside him. Something tiny falls on his shoulder, and it shakes him like he were hit with a mallet.

He looks up, and he sees the faint bits of snow against a backdrop of infinite, pitch black.

The claws came before he could even raise his rifle. They drag him from the floor and up to the ceiling, hooking under his chin and into his neck meat as they raise him up to a hole scarcely big enough to fit his head through.

They manage, though. Even if they leave some parts behind.

——

The wolf is lost in the heavy snowfall. It does not knows where its pack is, or where it is trudging along, snow up to its haunches. The night is dark and the trees are thick, and, distantly, it can make out vague silhouettes of things on their hind legs.

Hairless folk, perhaps? The ones with sharp sticks they send flying with curved sticks, or maybe the ones with long sticks that spew fire from one end, felling other beasts. Perhaps they will share.

The wolf hurries into some stiff limbed version of a trot toward the hairless folk, able to see them better now.

Yes, they do have something, perhaps for the wolf. Large hunts tend to soften their candour, and the wolf can see that the ones up ahead are already setting about their gutting.

The wolf approaches, and then stops. The snow hear does not fall as thick, so the wolf can see them all clearly. There is hairless folk. One of them at least, hung upside down between twins posts, asleep or dead, the wolf cannot tell. They’re gutting him, not with tools but with claws, clenching warm guts in bare hands and shovelling them into wicker containers. Even then, the hairless folk looks crushed up, like something large had trodden upon him, had crushed him so throughly that none of his arms were set right. The left one, the one the wolf has seen them hold with but not handle, is gone utterly, leaving just a ragged hole for the gutters to scoop gore out of.

The Gutters are not hairless folk. They are too big, too wide, too covered in markings and scars and body fuzz. They are something of greater stature. The wolf cannot move now, cannot make a sound. The wolf feels the primal tension that arrives when danger is afoot, and that much is necessary for it.

One of the gutters turns its head —only its head— and stares at the wolf.

The spell is broken. The wolf flees. The Gutters do not pursue. They have all the meat they need. There will be no more need for screaming tonight