Jakob's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Three nights ago, something ripped open one of Jakob's cows and left it in the pasture. He found the carcass at dawn, its throat torn out, the grass black with blood. The thing that killed his family in this valley had come back. Jakob buried two sons and a wife in the ground behind his farmhouse last spring. He had stayed to find the beast. Now the beast was finding him. He counted his herd each morning. Ten brown cows, horns catching the light, calm as ever. By the fourth morning there were nine. The ninth lay near the fence, half-eaten, the earth dragged where the killer hauled it. Jakob knelt and studied the drag marks. They led toward a low ridge past the far edge of the grass. He did not wait for another night. He loaded his rifle and followed the marks across the pasture. The trail bent through wet soil, then through brush, then to a gap under a fallen slope of rock. Flies hung thick at the opening. Old bones lay scattered there. He smelled rot and something worse, a den smell, warm and close. Jakob set his remaining cows in the pasture as bait and waited at the mouth of the den until dark. The living cows shifted and lowed, nervous, their horns swinging. He crouched behind a boulder with the rifle braced. The moon rose. The cows went silent all at once. It came low along the ground, wrong in its shape, too long in the leg. It moved toward the herd. Jakob held his breath and let it pass. When it reached the nearest cow it rose up, and he fired. The shot cracked across the valley. The thing screamed, not like any animal he knew. It spun and charged him. He worked the bolt and fired again. The second shot took it in the chest. It dropped at his boots, shuddering, claws scraping the dirt. Jakob stood over it and put a third round through its skull. Then it was still. He lit his lamp and looked at what he had killed. It was no wolf. The body was lean and gray, the paws tipped with hooked claws, the mouth full of teeth set in rows. He had seen those teeth before, in the wounds on his wife. His chest went tight. For the first time in a year he had the thing that did it, dead in front of him. But it was small. Too small. The bite that had killed his family was wider than this jaw could open. Jakob crouched and pried the mouth apart to measure it against the memory. This was not the killer. This was something smaller that had learned to feed where the killer fed. He raised the lamp toward the black mouth of the den. More bones lay deeper inside. And deeper still, something breathed. The thing he had hunted all year was not out in the valley. It was in the ground, and now it knew where he was.