Beauregard Ashworth III's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Three nights running, something had climbed the stilts and stolen Beauregard's food. Now he sat on the sagging porch of his shack with his last strip of jerky in his fist, counting scars instead of stars. Forty-seven claw marks across his chest and arms. Every one of them belonged to the same beast, the thing he had sworn since boyhood he would trap and gut. He could not hunt it starving. He could not stay fed if the thief kept coming. He was sixty years old and lean as a heron. His white hair hung in wet ropes down his back. He wore cut-off jeans and boots cracked from swamp water. Once, a long time ago, there had been a family with money and a big clean house. He did not think about them. He thought about meat. He set the trap before dusk. He dragged the old iron cage out from under the shack, the one with the dead trapper's bones still curled inside. He did not bother pulling the skeleton out. Bones made good weight. He propped the cage door open with a notched stick and tied his last smoked catfish to the trigger. Then he climbed the ladder, pulled it up behind him, and waited by the window with a rusted machete across his knees. The moon came up green through the cypress. Frogs quit singing. Something big shifted the water below. Beauregard saw one red eye first. Just the one, low and burning, chest-high to a tall man. Then the shape resolved — red fur, matted black at the belly, and three legs pushing through the muck like a stool walking on its own. It sniffed the fish. It ducked into the cage. The stick snapped. The door dropped. The beast screamed, and Beauregard screamed back, laughing. He came down the ladder shaking. Up close the thing was bigger than the cage wanted it to be. It slammed the bars. Rust flaked into the water. One arm punched through and swiped at him, and he stumbled back into the reeds. Then he saw its face clearly. The single eye. The heavy brow. No scarred muzzle. No missing ear. This was not the beast that had cut him. This was something else. Something's mate, or its child, or its neighbor. He stood in the mud and understood. His thief was caught. His hunter was not. The cage groaned. The bars would hold a night, maybe two. He had a live animal now, red and furious, and whatever had carved him would come looking for it. Beauregard wiped his mouth. He picked a small clump of leaves off his sleeve, a tidy little bunch shaped like a grinning mouth, and flicked it into the water. He climbed back up to fetch his knives. "Come on then," he said to the dark. "Come get your boy."