A Weekend with the Mountain Man Read online

  “Come!” I instructed the mutts and they instantly appeared at my side through the inky blackness.

  I could see little else and with Rufus still grunting and whining, I couldn’t hear any signs of life in the trees.

  “Rufus, shut up!” I growled, running a hand through the scruff on my face. I was sure it was some sort of wildlife out there but you could never be certain, even in my remote area of the Black Mountains.

  Not that I was concerned for my safety.

  I had a small arsenal at my disposal and despite the sucky nature of my dogs, they were trained to kill first and ask questions later.

  Or at least they were in theory. I had never really had occasion to test their killer commands.

  I had ever had any issues in the past but one could never be too sure.

  You always see those poor assholes on the news who say, “we never had any problems before.”

  I didn’t want to be one of those assholes.

  Suddenly, Rufus stopped barking and sniffed the air as if trying to sense whatever it was which had gotten him going.

  I eyed the mutt and he cast me a sidelong, sheepish look.

  “Well?” I demanded. “All done now?”

  He dropped his eyes and sighed.

  Chuckling, I leaned forward to scratch his black head, slipping the gun over my shoulder by the strap.

  “Can I go back to bed now?”

  As if to give his consent, he started in the door first, Clayton already having gone ahead.

  By the time I threw another couple logs on the fire and put my rifle back in place, the dogs had claimed my spot on the bed.

  “Oh come on!” I grunted, shaking my head. “Move the hell over!”

  They ignored me, closing their eyes in unison so I was forced to shove them toward the foot of the double bed, knowing full well that they would just take over while I slept.

  I see why female dogs are called bitches, I often thought. They take over your bed and leave you in the cold with nothing.

  It wasn’t really a fair assessment

  Most of the dogs I’d had were warmer than the women I’d known. It seemed unfair to lump them together in the same category.

  Sighing, I closed my eyes and stretched out to the best of my ability, my toes digging into Clayton’s ribs as he sprawled elongated across the foot of the bed and tried to regain the blissful sleep which had consumed me before Rufus had started his symphony of warning.

  I was on the day shift these weeks and after coming off two months of nights, it was already hard enough to get my body in synch without the hounds keeping me awake.

  Blissfully, I found myself slipping back into slumber with little sheep counting.

  Maybe this weekend wouldn’t be so bad, even if I had to work it.

  The double time pay was going to make it more than worth it.

  I felt myself drifting off as I thought about the new extension I was working on for the cabin.

  No sooner had I reached my REM state did both dogs start, causing me to jump at the same time.

  Guttural noises erupted from their throats in unison and my body tensed.

  Something was out there, I had no doubt.

  Again, I jumped from the bed and the dogs followed me as I once more reached for my weapon, flicking on the floodlight outside the cabin.

  As I stepped onto the porch, I gazed around the property, looking for the slightest movement in any direction but I could see nothing.

  Like the dogs, however, I could sense a presence.

  “Get the fuck out of here!” I growled into the night, raising the gun to my shoulder as I waited for whatever beast was out there to show itself.

  Both Clayton and Rufus were vibrating at my side and I knew that we couldn’t all be imagining it.

  I fired a warning shot out into the sky, hoping that whatever it was would run scared.

  As the sound echoed through the mountains, a flutter of birds squawked in protest at being woken in the middle of the night but I still saw nothing else.

  Slowly, my canines seemed to relax and after another minute, it became clear that whatever was lurking about had retreated through the ravine and away from my cottage.

  Still, I was reluctant to venture off the wraparound porch.

  It was rare to have such an insistent animal lurking about and I wracked my brain trying to understand what had drawn it to the property.

  Every night I burned my food waste, knowing that the wildlife could sense it from a distance and that evening had been no different.

  I didn’t want a nosy black bear wandering by after all and no matter how loud Rufus could be, he was no match for one of those.

  I wondered what it was that night and why it was so eager to stay near.

  Black bears were not nocturnal.

  It had to be a coyote.

  Whatever it was had disappeared again, my suspicion solidified by my now yawning dogs who padded their way back inside once more, leaving me to stand guard outside.

  When I finally gave up watch and retreated into the cabin, my adrenaline was pumping and I forsook the idea of returning to bed.

  I had lived in the mountains since birth and it was rare for me to be unnerved by the idea of a critter prowling about but as I put the kettle on for coffee, I could not shake the sense that whatever was out there was no ordinary beast.

  Before I sat down at the kitchen table, I returned to the front door and secured the triple deadbolts, unable to shake the uneasiness in my gut.

  I could count on one hand how many times I had locked the door while being home since the day I was born on the kitchen floor.

  I managed to fall asleep at four but my alarm woke me obnoxiously at five, bringing me to a miserable awakening.

  If I had been the kind of man to do such a thing, that morning would have been as good a day as any to call into the oil fields and catch up on my sleep but I was Harding Jackson.

  I didn’t call in sick unless I was dead and I was far from being in such a state.

  I was probably the healthiest person in Utah.

  All the fresh air and self-reliance made me a fit and muscular, a towering six feet four inches tall with a defined body, right down to glutes made of titanium.

  Chopping wood, hunting, fishing, and hiking ensured that I never skimped on exercise as if my job in the oil fields outside of Cedar City didn’t keep me occupied enough.

  But it was a life I loved, one I could have traded to live in town instead of pouring copious amounts of money into the shack in which I had been raised, making it livable.

  It hadn’t always been so.

  Growing up on the almost uninhabited side of Black Mountain, the one-roomed cabin had housed me and my parents.

  There had been no electricity or plumbing, our water coming from the trickling stream stemming from Crow Creek.

  I had learned how to handle a gun before I was old enough to speak in proper sentences, something that the rest of the world might have frowned upon but in our family, it was a necessity.

  Our only means for food had been living off the land in any way possible.

  The nearest neighbors I knew of were miles off and once a month or so, I would encounter one of the six or eight kids who lived in that shack but they regarded me with the same skeptical eyes that I did them.

  After all, we were all after the thing – survival. Friendships were the last thing on our minds.

  Their shack had long ago crumbled to the ground, their family relocating for parts unknown.

  I never even knew their names and truth be told if I had run into them in town I probably wouldn’t have recognized their faces either.

  The Jacksons were just that secluded, that tight-knit.

  It was the way my dad wanted it.

  When I was in my pre-teens, my father introduced me to the world of theft, sending me into Cedar City to fill my holey pockets with whatever I could manage from the general store but those excursions were far and few between.<
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  “You don’t want them to recognize you, son,” Jacob warned me. “Otherwise they’ll chase you out or get you arrested on sight.”

  The words meant little to me until I wound up in jail overnight and I quickly learned the value of stealth.

  I had never known another world than the one removed from others, without outside relationships or ties. I didn’t know there was more to life when I was young.

  My education was the mountains, my skills were developed through my reclusive parents.

  It never occurred to me that I wasn’t like other kids since I had nothing which with to compare.

  I later learned that my mom had not been raised in the mountains like my dad. He had met her in Cedar City when she was eighteen. She had been visiting family, on her way to college at the University of Washington but Jacob Jackson was a devastatingly handsome man for all his limited social graces.

  Somehow, Victoria Harding had fallen head-over-heels for him, much to the chagrin of her very wealthy parents who inevitably cut her off when she wound up pregnant with me and marrying my father.

  “It was love at first sight, son,” Jacob told me often and when my mom looked at him, I knew that he was telling the truth.

  But that was another story.

  On the upside, my mom was well-read and while I didn’t attend school (something she and my dad fought bitterly over), she was happy to share her endless knowledge and love of reading with me.

  One of the things I would steal freely was books for her and together, we would devour them by candlelight after my father had passed out.

  If he had known about us wasting all that candlelight, there would have been hell to pay most certainly but once he was out, he was out.

  My father was a hard-drinking man, something which eventually caught up with him and he succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver when he was my age, thirty-two.

  By then, my mom had become a frail, shadow of her former springtime self and three months to the day after we put Jacob in the ground, she also died.

  I was the only one in attendance for her burial.

  But before she died, she made me promise that I would not stay in the mountains living in squalor.

  “You must do better for yourself, Harding. Your father was a stubborn man who refused to accept a hand when it was offered. You cannot allow your pride to do that to you. I gave you my family name because it is a proud name, a successful name. Honor it and do something with it.”

  I had laughed aloud.

  “Mama, I don’t have an education,” I reminded her. “And I happen to like living up here.”

  I didn’t tell her that the thought of living among the townsfolk, even if it was possible, made me dizzy with apprehension.

  I liked dogs, not people.

  “You must promise me you will find a way, Harding. I have spent thirty years holding my tongue and allowing your father to do what he wanted. Lord knows I loved that man from the second I laid eyes on him until this very second but the time for change is now and you must embrace it. Promise me.”

  In the end, I had no choice but to make her the promise so she could die in peace.

  To this day, I’m not sure what killed her.

  There was no autopsy or doctor’s report.

  We didn’t have money for that.

  The Jacksons didn’t exist to the rest of the world.

  We were just mountain people to the few who might be able to identify us in passing but we were nobodies and when we died, no one noticed.

  But I noticed when my mom died. Suddenly I was on my own, living in that dilapidated shack on Black Mountain, my parents buried deep in the ravine where I could visit them when I got lonely.

  But I fulfilled my promise to mom, kind of.

  Taking the step into the real world had proven almost unbearable but finding the job had been the easiest thing I had ever done.

  Wearing the cleanest shirt I owned, I trekked into Cedar City, a task which took me half the day and asked where I might find me one of those job things.

  The answer had always been the same; the oil fields. They hire anyone.

  And the rumors had been true.

  I was instantly granted a job as a roughneck.

  The pay was stunning and as the money began to pour in, I wondered why my dad had not taken a real job to support us many years earlier.

  But I could never bring myself to leave the leaky cabin, not when I knew that was where I belonged.

  Instead, I began to fix up the shack and in a relatively short period of time, it was equipped with everything I had always thought was too extravagant to own.

  Like a toilet.

  Currently, I was adding a second-floor extension but it was taking more time that I had expected because I was doing it alone.

  I didn’t want strangers in my haven and it was all things I could do alone but between work and hunting, it was a slow process.

  Backing my Ford F150 out of the dirt laneway, I eyed the blue tarps flapping in the gentle October breeze.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have agreed to work weekends, even with the overtime. I wanted to get the extension finished before the first frost or else my heating costs were going to skyrocket but it was a catch 22. If I didn’t work, I wouldn’t have the money to conquer the project either.

  I’d figure something out.

  Anxiously I realized that I would have to hire someone if it got to be too late in the year.

  And who knew when the first snow would come? It was already the beginning of October. It wasn’t unheard of for the white stuff to fall already.

  Fleetingly I thought of Aaron Jessup and rolled my green eyes heavenward.

  If all else fails, you can just ask him to help you out, I thought wryly. The overeager kid was always offering his assistance as if we were old buddies or something.

  I steered the massive truck down the winding mountain roads, my mind on how to finish the project with such little time.

  I was almost at the bottom of the unmanned road when I saw her.

  She startled the hell out of me, jumping over the guardrail as she heard my vehicle rumbling by.

  What the hell is she doing out here by herself? I wondered, eyeing her through my peripheral vision as I drove past. It’s a little early for Halloween.

  Every so often I would see a teenager thrill seeking or hikers in my neck of the woods and it always upset me.

  That area was not safe for people who didn’t know the terrain and moreover, they were dangerously close to my home.

  As I continued forward, I peered at the pale blonde through my rear-view mirror and she seemed to be staring after me but her expression was already lost as I took another curve and headed toward the fields.

  There was something odd about her, besides the fact that she didn’t belong out there but whatever it was had already escaped me.

  I didn’t waste any more time thinking about it, even though I could not shake the smidgen of alarm tickling my mind.

  Whoever she was, she wasn’t my problem.

  I had enough to worry about without bothering myself with stray kids.

  2

  Eloise

  I was hungry, cold and terrified but I couldn’t be certain which one took precedence.

  I also had no idea where I was or what I was doing out there in the wilderness.

  This was stupid, rash and incredibly dangerous, I chided myself but it was far too late for regrets.

  If I returned home, the punishment would be worse than anything I could possibly imagine.

  Yet at that point, I didn’t care.

  If I’d had any idea in which direction home was, I would have run straight back there.

  Or would I?

  I knew I was going to die if I didn’t find shelter and food.

  If I had known which direction to take to make my way back, I would have taken it but there was no indication to guide me.

  Leaving in the dead of night had seemed like a good idea at the
time, the cloak of darkness keeping me hidden from anyone who might learn I was missing.

  Like Lucy or Randolph…or mom and Sir.

  I shuddered, pushing the thought of what I had left behind out of my half-delirious mind.

  No, I vowed to myself. I must keep going forward.

  I had no idea how long I had been clawing through the woods, my sense of direction skewed at best.

  Never had I ventured this far from home in my life.

  I had no idea where I was or if I was heading toward civilization.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to be around other people.

  There would be questions, ones I had no idea how to answer.

  Leaving in such an irrational haste, I had not thought to bring anything with me.

  My cloak seemed useless against the intense chill in the air and I felt like I had been walking for days, twigs and leaves catching in my too-long mass of burnt honey hair.

  I was scratched on every exposed piece of flesh and eventually, sobs began to overtake any reason I had been clinging to as I fought through the thick of trees.

  It was then I saw the cabin, my heart ready to burst with relief.

  I could knock on the door, ask for food and water, maybe –

  The crack of branches and a feral growl caused me to gasp and I was suddenly staring at the huge head of a mixed breed dog, his teeth baring as he advanced of me.

  I choked in shock, never having seen a real dog before.

  We didn’t have those where I came from.

  No pets, only livestock.

  Pets created unrealistic bonds. That’s what Sir said.

  But why was I thinking about Sir when this beast was about to devour me whole?

  He seemed a monster as he drew near and I backed up, too exhausted to run.

  I am going to die here, I thought mournfully, tears beginning to streak my cheeks again.

  That was when the other dog appeared and I knew then it was over.

  I sank to my knees, waiting for the gnash which would tear at my skin but to my surprise, both animals simply stood in their spots, continuing to howl endlessly.

  “Jesus Christ, Rufus! Shut up!”