Harry's Game

The rifle bucked once more in his shoulder. He had fired it countless times, but it still had a way of surprising him and every time he felt disappointed with himself. Ahead, through the scant undergrowth he saw the rabbit jump high in the air, as if it had been shot - which it had, of course, but such was the disconnect between Harry and the act that this too came as a surprise.

It was not a kill shot; not a clean shot, at all, and he watched as his wounded prey limped slowly into a patch of cover, dragging its wounded leg behind it like a fallen comrade.

Harry didn’t need to move quickly; his dinner was going nowhere fast and anyway, he had learned quite quickly that out here in the semi-wilderness, it paid to move slowly.

He pushed himself up to his knees, with an outward breath that crystallised instantly in the cold mountain air and ejected the spent casing from the rifle, catching it in his hand and imagining the comparative warmth he would have felt, had he not been wearing his thick winter gloves.

He slung the .22 caliber rifle over his shoulder and got to his feet, brushing the fine coat of powdery snow from his jacket and pants, before following the trail of claret left by his unfortunate target.

It wasn’t long before he found the stricken animal, collapsed in a small clearing, breathing heavily as it sat in a small pool of its own blood.

Harry had never enjoyed sport hunting. His dad had tried to take him out a few times when he was in junior high but he hadn’t taken to it. There was no thrill in the kill for him. He took no pleasure in the taking of a life, animal or otherwise. He couldn’t understand why the police and townsfolk thought he was capable of those things, in spite of all the evidence against him.

He shook his head, as if to shake the thoughts and memories from his head, and picked up the rabbit by its long gray ears. Its breathing had become more laboured now and Harry new it wouldn’t be long. However, where possible, he always tried to put an animal out of its misery. So, in a practiced movement, he quickly broke the neck of the animal.

“Thank you, Rabbit,” he said aloud, smoothing the soft grey fur over its head and ears, before placing it in the small canvas bag he had tied to his belt. He wasn’t in the habit of talking to dead animals, but he had seen a documentary series on HBO wherein the hunters would always thank the animal that had died for their dinner, livelihood and survival. Harry had respected that and done the same, whenever he was forced to take a life.

In his current situation, Harry had to take between three and five rabbits a week to survive. He roasted or stewed the meat and made broth from the bones and innards. The skins he made into fur pelts using knowledge garnered from a tanning book which he had stolen from a local library on the way to the cabin. He collected the pelts over the month and sold them to a local dealer in a nearby town - not the closest town - for a little under market-value. The money from the pelts helped to pay for other food stuffs, tools, clothing and either fuel, for his generator, or candles, depending on the amount he managed to get that month.

Harry took the long route back to the cabin to check on his traps. He wasn’t a particularly good trapper yet and his traps rarely yielded anything fruitful but, occasionally, he would find something larger than a rabbit, like a hare or a weasel. They fetched higher rates for their pelts and were often the difference between gasoline and candles.

Harry walked slowly down his trap line. Most were still in place, undisturbed. None had an animal inside; alive or dead, and one had been sprung and the bait taken, by a very lucky animal. Harry knelt down in the damp earth and took the rabbit from his canvas bag. He took a small knife from his belt, opening it in a smooth motion with one hand and made a long incision down the belly of the animal. He wiped the knife on a patch of snowy grass and put it back into its sheath on his belt before delving into the belly with finger and thumb, pulling hard at the guts of the animal until he had a small handful of the rabbit’s stomach and intestines. He wretched quietly as he placed the rabbit back into his bag and placed the slightly steaming guts at the base of the sprung trap before setting it again and getting gingerly back to his feet.

Harry regarded the rabbit’s dark blood that now stained his hands. He stopped for a moment, paralyzed by the image that sprung once more into his mind. Blood on his hands again, his heart hammering, the sight of the children; a boy and a girl, sitting motionless on the floor of the basement of the building he managed. A brother and a sister posed sitting back-to-back like a scene from a children’s game. But in this game, both were children clearly dead, their throats cut, caked in tacky half-dried blood that covered their fronts like some kind of macabre apron.

Harry shook his head and vanquished the scene from his mind. His heart was racing, just like in the vision he had just witnessed. A thin layer of cool sweat covered his head under his trapper hat with signature ear flaps.

He dropped to one knee in the snow and began to sob quietly, thinking to himself,

“How could they think that I had done such a thing? Such a heinous, heinous act? Yes, I was at the crime scene - I was the one who had found the wretched children. I was the one who had called 911 and had stayed until the police arrived. Yes, my DNA and fingerprints were all over the scene - it was my workplace, where I stored all of my tools and materials. Yes, my DNA and fingerprints were found on the victims - I had checked their vital signs while on the line with the police. But I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill those poor kids.”

Grace and Timothy Mayor were nine and seven years old, respectively, and the children of Geoffrey and Eileen Mayor - a self-lauded power couple from the medium-sized town of Littlehampton, which straddled a small inlet on the western shore of Bear Lake. Their father, Geoffrey was a prominent local businessman and philanthropist who owned a chain of sporting goods stores dotted all over the state. Their mother, Eileen, was a lawyer specializing in civil cases; most commonly family law. Geoffrey was a distinguished member of the local Freemason Association, through which he organized most of his charity drives.

Both of the children attended Beech Rise - the local private school which was just expensive enough to keep the riffraff out, but not so expensive that it warranted security above and beyond the norm.

One afternoon in late-September, the school had received a call, purportedly from the children’s father, Geoffrey, saying that he was running late and he was sending a member of his staff to pick the children up. He gave a name and a description of the man who would be picking them up in his stead. The school did all the necessary formalities, checking the man’s name and ID before handing the children off. Witnesses outside the school gates reported seeing the children getting into a white van which was then casually driven away. Nobody noticed a struggle. There was no need to note down the license plate. The children were never seen alive again.

The parents, of course, were distraught and tried, unsuccessfully, to sue the school. The school had covered their backs, though. They had checked the ID of the person picking the children up and they had checked the number that the person had used to call and found that the call originated from the Mayor family home. It was only after this revelation that the police had found signs of forced entry at the home. The kidnapper had gone to the lengths of breaking into the Mayor family home to make the bogus call to the school. It was clearly a professional job.

Harry stood up and began limping off down the trail, but he couldn’t shake the thought that careered around his head every day.

“A professional job. It must have been. At least that would have been a motive. What motive did I have? None. Didn’t seem to bother the police, though, did it? Didn’t seem to bother the good people of Littlehampton, did it?

What started as curious looks and hushed words from the tenants in his building turned into people not opening their doors when he came for their inspections. When came home one evening and found the word 'MURDERER' sprayed crudely across his door in red paint, he knew it was time to plan his escape.

That was six months ago; back when he was a different person, a building supervisor named Travis Wade and not a lone forest dweller named Harry Forde who eked out an existence in the mountains a hundred miles from his former home in Littlehampton. Harry was now 40 lbs lighter than Travis was. His hair was cut shorter and dyed darker. He still walked with a slight limp, but he tried his best to cover this up when he was in town buying and selling. He was fortunate that most people in this area wore hats and scarves, especially at this time of year, which further improved his disguised appearance.

So far, things had gone well. He had been alone here in the shadow of the mountain for just over half a year and the only people he had seen were hikers in the distance on a trail and a pair of dirt bikers who had taken a wrong turn. These impromptu visitors had made him paranoid, however, and Harry had taken it as a sign to beef up some of his crude early-warning systems, a network of trip wires that set off small rock slides, air horns, or bear bangers.

Harry continued mumbling to himself; the same rhetoric which tumbled over and over in his mind, day-in, day-out, as he traversed the rugged trails around his new makeshift cabin in the woods.

“Why did I run? Did I make myself look even more guilty? No, those people would have lynched me soon enough. They don’t care about motives and alibis. They’re blinded by science these days - DNA, hair samples and fingerprints rule supreme, and The Bear Lake County Police Department had them all. They had me bang to rights; an open and shut case. The Sheriff was probably looking at an award from the Mayor. There was only one problem: I didn’t do it.”

Harry continued along the trail. Just one more rise and he would be in sight of home, a warm fire and a pot for his furry prize of the morning. The going was steep and his bad knee didn’t help much. He was breathing heavily, in spite of the weight he had lost and the fitness he had gained in the last few months. He was just about to clear the top of the rise when a loud noise stopped him in his tracks and he dropped instinctively to the ground, a sharp rock on the trail digging uncomfortably under his right rib.

He froze. He couldn’t breathe. He dared not move. He knew exactly what the sound was: one of his bear bangers. Something, or someone, had triggered his early-warning system, sending a gunshot-like sound echoing through the trees and along the valley, displacing flocks of roosting birds as it went.

Harry slithered reticently forwards, feeling the relief of the rock no longer pushing under his ribs, until he was at the top of the rise. Poking his head hesitantly over the top, he surveyed the valley below. The entire area was filled with aspen, densely packed together, their white trunks forming a wall and disguising any intruders who had, innocently or not, encroached on his territory.

His hunting ground.

He fumbled for his binoculars that were clipped to his belt and surveyed again, this time in up to 12x magnification. At first, he saw nothing. He swept the lenses up and down the valley, from left to right, but his hands were shaking so uncontrollably, it was no use.

After putting down the binoculars, he took a deep breath, steadying himself, steeling himself for what was to come. He surveyed the valley again with his naked eye. The air was still and he would certainly notice any abnormal movements in the forest or the river which rushed happily through the frozen valley.

Then he noticed it. A flash of brown, but not fur. Fabric. He swept up the binoculars and frantically found the anomaly he had just witnessed: brown fabric - a shirt, a brown shirt worn by a person. A deputy, by the look of his age, from the Bear Lake County Sheriff Department. He wasn’t alone, either. Harry spied two more intruders; another young looking man in a brown baseball cap and an older man. Harry zoomed in farther to see a mop of silver hair protruding from under a wide-brimmed hat. They all had weapons drawn, spooked by the sound of the bear banger going off in close proximity.

He had been found. The Sheriff was undoubtedly here for him and they were gradually closing in on his cabin. Once they got there, all they had to do was sit there and wait for him to come back. All his gear was there, aside from what he had carried on his short hunting trip. He had no food, barely any water and wasn’t dressed for night-time temperatures. What he did have, though, was a rifle with a scope and plenty of ammunition.

Harry’s mind raced once more, as he watched the three lawmen inch closer to his cabin, coming closer and closer into the range of his rifle.

“What do I do? I’ve got a rifle, but it’s only a .22. It’s okay for rabbits but what would it do to a man? What about at this range? How far away are they? 200 yards? 300? It’s not going to kill a man at that range. Anyway, I’m no killer.I know. I’ll just wound one of them. The closest one. They’ll haul ass out of here, giving me enough time to get back to the cabin and grab my gear. Or will they? What happens if they just call for backup? I’ll have a whole SWAT team down here and then I’m screwed. I’ve got to take them out. I’ve got no choice. Otherwise, I’m going to jail, for a crime I didn’t commit. Shit. I don’t know. Maybe they’re here to bring me in and tell me they’ve found the guy who did it. No, no way. I’d have seen that on the TV in the gas station last week. They still think I did it. They’re here for me and I’m either leaving here in handcuffs or a body bag. Shit. Shit. Shit.”

Harry grabbed his rifle roughly from over his shoulder, adjusting his position on the ground to a more stable one, even though he was shaking like a leaf. Through the sights he found his target; the closest deputy whose fair hair appeared in and out of focus as Harry struggled to gain composure and make a decision over this young man’s fate. The scope’s reticle strafed up and down the young deputy’s body from his thigh up to his head and back down again as the unlikely fugitive wrestled with his conscience.

“I kill rabbits all the time. That doesn’t make me a killer. I kill them to survive. It’s either them or me and I choose me. It’s the same with him. It’s either him or me. He’s like a rabbit, really. I can kill him for survival, can’t I? Self-preservation. Human nature. Kill or be killed. Just kill the rabbit, Harry. He’s your game: Harry’s game. Or is he?”