The Cabin in the Cave

The sun began to fade behind the gray, overcast plateau that Ethan was hunting on, and darkness began to take over the lonely Mesa De Blanco wilderness once more.

      It wasn’t long ago when the already threatening sky had turned an angry, boiling, black color, and it had begun to rain down hectic sheets of bitter snowflakes and tiny shards of stinging ice. He squinted furiously around him, looking for any sign of the animal he was currently hunting.

      He had found some spoor of the massive beast a little way back, and was a little surprised when he found out that the trail seemed to lead directly to the snowline of Mount Blanco, and then seemed to wind about the trees in the sparse forested areas.

      He knew its lair had to be nearby.

      Most people would have called the wilderness around the White Mesa beautiful, or serene, or perhaps, breath-taking. But, right now, in this bitter cold, he thought that maybe stark, bone-chilling, or bleak would better describe it.

      Ethan had seen this particular plot of God’s good Earth many times before; had wandered its trails, climbed its cliffs, waded its streams, and stalked its woods. It was referred to affectionately by most of the people in Ethan’s profession as ‘Greenhorn’s Grave.’ It had been many years since he had been in this part of the Southwest, and for good reason. The game was sparse, and the land was inhospitable.

      The local townsfolk of Mesa Pueblo had sought out Ethan the last time he was at the local trading post selling his furs, and had told him of how, for the last three and a half weeks, they have been tormented by a gigantic ghost cat, and that if there is anything he should not do, it would be to go out at night.

  Apparently, not soon after the last full moon, the livestock around the sleepy village of Mesa Pueblo started going missing. Large livestock. There were holes ripped through fences, and large tufts of white fur caught sticking to barbwire, but no bodies were left behind. People started seeing the phantom cat ghosting about outside of town, and swore that it had glittering, pink eyes. It loved killing livestock, but within a week it had started targeting children.

Any poor child wandering too far away was very liable to be snatched up, especially during night hours. There was very little blood. Apparently, the giant wild cat was taking all of this food back to its lair to eat the majority of it and leaving nothing behind. It was the largest animal any of the people had ever seen, even larger than a grizzly in size, but only short glimpses had ever been seen of it so far. There was no noise made when it attacked, not even from its victims.

      The majority of the people of Mesa Pueblo were elderly and children, with scarcely a man between 15 to 50. They said they would like to buy Ethan’s services and have him hunt down the giant ghost cat.

      The prospect of hunting this dangerous and legendary game, albeit in the unforgiving Mesa de Blanco region, intrigued Ethan. And to think of what price the pelt would sell for when the deed was done! It seemed like a profitable situation, but only a fool jumps headlong into the dark, so he quickly went about gathering more information about this incredible beast.

      Most people were too scared to say anything useful, but a boy on a ranch on the eastern outskirts of town said he saw it and could even draw how big it was. Ethan watched in stunned silence as the boy pulled out a piece of charcoal and started making long, hard lines along the wall of one of the outer barns. When the boy was done drawing, he wiped his brow and stepped back to admire his work.

      On the peeling barn wall was the outline of an enormous cougar, and the height of its shoulder went above Ethan’s head. The kid wasn’t a bad artist, Ethan had to admit. But, the thing was way too big.

      “Really, kid? You must be joking. That’s bigger than a bear.”

      The kid emphatically shook his head in the negative, then threw his hand toward the wall to emphasize his work.

      “Grande Fantasma Gato! Espiritu Gato!” the boy exclaimed.

      But when Ethan shook his head, the boy sighed dramatically in exasperation and then grabbed the cuff of his jacket and led him to the other side of the barn. There is where he saw the pawprint the enormous cougar had left behind in the mud. Ethan’s foot easily fit in it. Ethan was no small man.

      When Ethan returned to trading post, a few eager locals looked up hopefully, wondering if he would take the job.

      “I’m going to need an advance,” stated Ethan.

      He was going to use some of the advance to upgrade his old equipment. Ethan’s current arms didn’t have enough power to do the job, and they also had distinctive quirks that made firing them extremely dangerous in life-or-death situations. If he was going to do the job, he was going to do it right.

      A few minutes later, after meeting with the elder chief and obtaining the advance, Ethan was at the local gun shop.

      ‘Ol’ Bessy’ was an aging scattergun, well beyond her years of useful service. She was traded for the largest caliber rifle they had; a Winchester Model 1886 chambered to fire a .50 caliber buffalo-killing round. It held nine rounds in a rotating clip, and he was sure it would be able to put out the firepower he would need to put it down. If not with one shot, maybe two.

      The gun shop owner wouldn’t even hardly look at the worn Colt Paterson he was carrying. Cap and ball were frowned upon these days. So, he decided to keep the old .36 caliber as another backup.

      When Ethan started haggling over the price of the Colt .45 Single Action Army, (*.45 SAA) the shopkeeper just put her hands meaningfully around his hands, which were still holding the gun, and said, “Tu mantienes.”

      Ethan grunted in response. “Fine, but I’m just borrowing it. Do you have bullets? Oh, and gunpowder.”

      An hour or so later and Ethan had found lodgings at a homestead around the west side of town, in the area where most of the sightings happened, and at a place which had been devastated by the ghost cat.

      Grandma Theodora Ecketts ran a pretty decent operation breeding horses. Her business had recently come crashing down when Fantasma Gato had started hauling off her male studding stallions in the middle of the night. Now she only had a couple of foals and a mare or two to her name. Her workhands and her daughter wouldn’t leave her, however. They said they never would, no matter how bad it got. The ranch was their life.

      Grandma Ecketts wasn’t complaining. In fact, she was in a cheery mood since she found out Ethan was going to be staying with them, because she had another person to cook for. She at once proclaimed Ethan too skinny and went about filling his plate with all sorts of tender meats, all seasoned perfectly and cooked to perfection.      

      Ethan had excused himself after dinner and went out back to sight-in his weapons. He placed several cans and bottles on various posts around the main barn area, and then cut a circle in the side of the barn itself, to serve as some basic targets.

      The trapper smiled to himself as he began to twirl the .45 Colt SAA around his right index finger. Then he twirled it a little faster. Then he switched hands and continued to twirl with his left, all in one fluid motion. Then suddenly, the gun ceased moving and the barrel aimed directly at the nearest bottle. Ethan fired from the hip, and the bullet cored into the fence post below the target bottle. He fired again, and it went wide. On the third shot, the bottle exploded. Ethan finished with a last twirl and replaced the SAA in its shiny new hip holster, all in one smooth movement.

      Clapping could be heard from behind him, and then a low whistle. Ethan turned to see Grandma Ecketts’ beautiful daughter Christina standing there, hands on her hips, half-smile on her lips. Standing next to her was José, the ranch’s youngest occupant, and he was holding onto the top of his cowboy hat with one hand and had an astonished look on his face. José’s mouth hung open, revealing crooked teeth.

      “Nice shootin’ there, stranger. That bottle didn’t know what was coming. And what fancy gunplay!” said Christina.

      “He is like some gunslinger straight from the Wild West! How did you do that, mister?” wondered José aloud.

      Ethan shrugged. “I have a lot of time on my hands and not a terrible lot of things to fill it with. This calms my nerves.”

      “Let’s see it again, mister! Shoot something else.”

      Ethan nodded, then turned back to the targets, standing stock still. He stood there for a good ten seconds, lasting until the tension could be snapped with a knife. Ethan pulled out the aged .36 Colt revolver quicker than it takes a bolt of lightning to hit the ground, right-handed, and fired three times in a row. Two cans and a bottle met their untimely demise.

      “Amazing!” cried José, visibly awed.

      “Well, now, with shootin’ like that we sure don’t have nothin’ to worry about as far as that white cougar that’s been prowlin’ around eatin’ our people ‘n cattle. Where’d you learn to do that?” wondered Christina,  quite astonished at the impressive display of marksmanship.

      “My father, some. I taught most of it to myself.”

      “Really! Really like a gunslinger!” said a woozy José, the excitement getting to him a little and making him stumble.

      “I gotta sight in the rifle, now,” said Ethan, pulling the Winchester 1886 out of the holster on his back. He worried over it a bit, before kneeling down and aiming at the round circle he cut into the barn. It wasn’t long at all before he fired, three times.

      The sound was deafening.

      “Holy cow, mister! I never heard nothing so loud in my life!”

      Ethan offered the gun to José. “Want to try? I’m warning you, though. It kicks like an ornery mule.”

      José shook his head emphatically ‘no’. To witness such perfection was enough.

      Ethan walked over to the barn and examined his shots. They were closely grouped, lower down and slightly to the left of center in the circle.

      It was almost full dark before Ethan was satisfied enough with his arms to go inside and turn in.

      Now he was out here on the snowy and desolate Mesa de Blanco Plateau with only his guns for company, and he was stalking an enormous, albino cougar through the unforgiving wilderness.

       And Ethan’s prey was a proven man-eater.

      If it spotted Ethan first, he was sure that he wouldn’t even hear the damn thing at all before it had its fang-ridden mouth around his neck. The struggle would be brief. Then it would most likely haul Ethan’s bloody corpse back to its lair to munch on at its own leisure.

      Grim thought, that.

      Still, he was sure he could put the monster down with a good shot or two from the .50 caliber Winchester rifle. It really all came down to who saw the other first.

      But, Ethan was also beginning to worry about the weather. It was starting to snow even harder, and the wind was picking up. With full dark right around the corner, getting caught out in a storm like this could be quickly fatal.

      He trudged through the icy, blinding snow, eager to find some kind of shelter or, at worst, a large snowbank he could dig his way into and spend the night.

      Ethan quickly came up against an impassable, nearly-vertical cliff wall, and he skirted along it arbitrarily to the left. Keeping the cliff within arm’s length to his right, Ethan stoically made it about another half-mile before finding the going almost impossible, and the visibility worse than nil. The cold was making his limbs and face very numb, and it was getting harder to move with every strenuous, aching step.

      Then, like a shining beacon of blessed hope, Ethan managed to catch a glimpse of . . . what appeared to be some kind of torchlight, and it couldn’t be farther than 20 feet away. Even in this hellish storm, he was sure he could make it.

      Ethan stumbled into a cave not a moment too soon, his strength about to completely give out.

      A cozy series of somber lanterns were lit along the left cave wall, hanging from studs nailed into support posts or sitting ensconced in cleverly made recesses notched into the rock wall.

      The cave was unusually warm and inviting, at least when compared to outside. It seemed to have been mostly manmade, and was almost smooth, such was the care that had been made when the tough, mineral-streaked rock had been picked at and blasted thoroughly by dynamite, by at least several men for a very, very long time.

      Not far in, maybe about fifty yards from the cave entrance, and relieved to be out of the storm, Ethan came upon a quaint mining shack, its wooden planks built right into the side of the shaft itself.

      The door to the shack was wide open, and was hanging at a severe angle, nearly off its hinges. Ethan also noticed there were some scratches on the wall near the door jamb, but his brain was becoming foggy, and it didn’t completely register. He was just so god-awfully cold and tired. There had to be some kind of bed or chair in that old shack that he could sleep on, just for a little while, until the storm passed, and daybreak came.

      The weary trapper stumbled into the cabin and ineffectually tried to close the broken door behind him. He soon gave up and looked around the room in slumped lethargy. It was dim in here, only one low-lit lantern on a makeshift wooden table in the center of the room.

      There was only one other piece of furniture, which was a tattered cot in the corner of the room. But, at least it seemed to be roomy enough to sleep two normal sized men comfortably.

      Ethan put the rifle down in a clumsy motion on the center table, then lurched over to the bed in order to lie down. He had barely gotten his boots off and leaned his head back on the straw-filled pillowcase before he drifted off into a deep, seemingly endless sleep in which no dreams came.

      The last thing Ethan noticed before entering the warm sea of immeasurable darkness was that the bed smelled alarmingly like cat urine.

      Ethan awoke to find a half ton of murderous, purring feline on top of his chest, apparently not shy to use Ethan as a bedwarmer, sleeping the night away peacefully on what felt like a very full stomach.

      I should’ve known better, Ethan thought bitterly as he eyed the massive canines poking awkwardly out of a foul-smelling cat jaw not inches from his face. He could see tiny bits of meat still stuck in its oversized fangs. It didn’t look like it could close its monstrous overbite, and right now the thing was sawing logs away in a loud and sonorous purring rumble that vibrated Ethan’s chest.

      Its eyes were closed. Maybe. His arms were pinned to his side, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to reach The SAA with either hand, because the holster was in the wrong place to grab it under the mass of white fur and teeth that nearly smothered him.

      The rifle was a no go, not until he got this cat off him.

      The .36 Paterson, however . . .

      Ethan drew the .36 in one smooth, slow motion of his right hand, barely even rustling the beast cougar’s shaggy fur coat before thrusting the barrel into the cat’s side and firing off three shots as fast as he could.

      The effect was instantaneous, loud and very bloody.

      The cougar leapt to its feet and staggered off the bed, before jumping back in shock. It knocked over the table and sent the rifle and lantern crashing to the floor, shattering it and leaving a burning puddle of kerosene. The enormous ghost cat faced Ethan with its bulbous, pink, glittering eyes, staring hatefully at him through the haze of gun smoke from the .36.

      It kept its wounded side carefully toward the rocky cave wall.

      Ethan wiped warm cougar blood off his bearded face. This was going to get ugly.

      It was somewhat dim in the cabin, the only light coming in through the broken door and the tiny lake of fire burning in the center of the room, and the shadows abounded, merged and commingled in a dizzying fashion.

      Ethan pulled the .45 Single Action Army from its holster and aimed it directly at the snarling beast’s skull with deadly precision and a steady arm.

      “Good night, ‘Espiritu Gato’, said Ethan under his breath as he pulled the trigger. Thunder boomed.

      Later that morning, a bedraggled, snow-studded Ethan stumbled back into town. The townsfolk gasped when they saw how his leathers were slashed deeply by what looked like a monstrous beast’s paw.

      On the trapper’s broad shoulders was the pelt of a giant, white, now-docile cougar that would forever be remembered in Mesa Pueblo as ‘Espiritu Gato,’ the Midnight Ghost Cat, that was slain by the lone trapper Ethan in mortal combat, finally bringing peace to a beleaguered town.