Vance Holloway's Arc

Chapter 1 of 5

Vance Holloway hunted people in these woods, and one had gotten away. He kept a shelf for his trophies inside an old bootlegger's hideout, half-buried in the earth. Twelve carvings sat there now. One slot stayed empty. He had cut it for the camper who ran three years ago, and every night he came home to that gap and said nothing. Tonight the forest would not stay quiet. New campers had pushed deep into his ground. Their lights bled through the trees. Their music thumped like a bad heart. Vance crouched near the ridge and watched the far tree line, where his mark always crossed. No deer moved. No fox. The noise had scattered everything he needed to hunt unseen. He could not work in this light. He could not hear a footstep over their laughter. So Vance decided to drive them out. He circled their camp through the dark. His uncle taught him this patience long ago, on nights just like this one. Chester Grimwald used to grip Vance's shoulder and whisper that fear did more work than any blade. Vance had believed him. He still did. He found the skull of an elk near their tents and set it on a stake. He smeared deer blood across three trees. Then he went to the poisoned flowers that grew low by the creek, the ones with the red and purple blooms. He cut a bundle with a rag over his mouth. He crushed the leaves and spread the pulp on the path to the water. By midnight one camper stumbled to the creek. He touched the wet leaves, then rubbed his eyes. His throat closed. He dropped to his knees and gagged. His friends dragged him up, shouting. They saw the elk skull on the stake. They saw the blood on the bark. One screamed that something was out here. They ran. Tents left standing. Lights left burning. Their trucks tore down the fire road before dawn. The forest went silent again. Vance stood in the empty camp and breathed the quiet like water. It worked. He had his dark and his stillness back. Then he saw the tracks. Not boot prints. Long bare feet, four of them in a line, pressed deep into the mud beyond the creek. The toes ended in points. The stride was too wide for any man. Something tall had circled the camp while Vance worked. Something had watched him bait the trap. He knew the stories. He had kept to his own ground for years to avoid them. The thing that left these tracks did not fear blood or bone. It hunted the hunters. Vance had cleared his woods of noise. He had also called something out of the deep dark, and it now knew his face. He looked once at the tracks, then back toward his buried shelf and its empty slot. To finish his collection, he would have to hunt with a predator on his own trail.