"Something Got At Them"

Part 5

Harold was killed by a four-hundred pound monster that had once been a bull moose. For some reason the rangers were talking about its weight, saying that number over and over again, so it burned into my mind for those days afterward. Later I learned why: that's actually pretty light for a bull moose, who can go past seven hundred pounds easily. The thing on the road that had lunged out of the pines onto Harold's ATV had been a starving, emaciated moose. Still heavy enough to crush him before succumbing to its injuries, though apparently one whole flank of it had been 'pure red'.

Rabid moose? I wrestled with a crazy laughter and barely won. I think since Paul everyone was a little on guard about looking or acting crazy, not fiddling with anything absent-mindedly, picking our words carefully when everyone was listening at the bar, which was full those nights. I remember drinking heavily - and I remember Mike having both his hands bandaged, hiding it with a towel as he served drinks. His long hair seemed to hang more noticeably over his face too. But Mike had always been a long-haired hippy like his dad, and more than one of us had punched a wall recently, so these things didn't have to mean anything.

Then my mind started thinking other ways, picking at something. Like feeling relief when seeing that the mosquito hadn't nipped me, I felt there was a reason just on the tip of my tongue. While park rangers and state police were helping us fill Hugo's one night days later, talking about poor Harold and other road accidents caused by animals, I was listening but leaning a bit on my stool, counting black eyes, bandages, chapped lips. There were a bunch, and the odd thing was there were fewer on the drinkers.

Hugo himself was back here, the old man up from southern retirement for hunting season and sore about all the news, but he looked completely bright-eyed and whole. He was at least seventy years old, a grey-haired hippy with a golden tooth, wearing a neon orange sweater, leaning on his stool with a glass on his knee.

"Could be CWD," he muttered. I thought I saw a state cop wince.

I maneuvered myself down the bar for a closer talk, sitting by Hugo and Mike and a freckled local cop, Terry Calhou, who wasn't much older than Keith Docherty. They were talking aplenty on their own, I thought, in lower voices.

"Hi Jacky," Hugo said, same as when I was a boy. "You're not a forestry guy, so you'll do for our little circle. That man in a uniform over there isn't the first person to look the other way on this mess. First those gut piles in the open, now this. I don't like it."

"They'll be a checkpoint set up this week for the first hunters, but it's still 'just precautionary' in the talk," Terry Calhou whispered, covering his mouth with his drink.

"Way behind," Hugo muttered angrily. I saw Mike nervously wringing his bandaged hands together. His dad was rarely mad. "Way, way behind. Blast it!"

I kept my voice low. "What's CWD?"

"Chronic wasting disease," Hugo said, matching my volume, and this made my skin crawl. It suddenly felt like we were looking at everyone else through glass in our huddle, like they were already gone, dead rats in an experiment.

"It goes through deer, elk and it got that moose. Not much can hurt a bull moose, and the bears are all driven off around here. That wound wasn't a predator - that bull rubbed itself raw, like sheep with scrapie, so this is something a little new, a new strain catching on. And an ATV motor would scare off a healthy moose. A moose in its right mind. That bull had no fear of people because its mind was going. Terry says they got dashcam footage of a deer they're holding onto, but he got a copy."

Terry shrugged, eying the room nervously.

"It's bad. Really bad."

I needed to see, so Mike passed me Terry's phone. Hugo told me to go watch in the bathroom, and that was smart. I have no iron stomach, but I just about kept it together.

The first few seconds were more shaky cam as the cop car with the dashcam pulled over and rolled to a gradual stop on a highway south of Prent, in what looked like early evening with long shadows from the trees with leaves of orange and brown. The state cops had been cruising along on the lookout, and had a sighting - but not of the dogman or a little green creature from a saucer. The thing shambled out of the underbrush between the pines onto the highway from the right in the recording, not noticing or caring about the car on the side of the road. It was a deer, or it had been one.

Red ribs showed at its side, and the flank glistened and dripped onto the road as it came up the bank. The patch of skin that had sloughed off was dangling like a gnarled fifth leg. Its true legs all shuddered, and only with great effort could this thing still move. It foamed at the mouth, and when they shot it down the video stopped with the cops still arguing about who was going to pull it off the road into the pines.

It was really bad, quite gross, and it was tinfoil hat and campfire nonsense. Harold, Paul, even Keith Docherty had been scraping on the edge of the truth.

When I came back from the bathroom, I was all in, whatever it was they were up to.

"We're going to get lockdowned all over again if we stay here," Hugo whispered, with Mike, Terry and myself respectfully silent, three boys once more. "Paul had some land that he was preparing, good fishing territory. Clean waters he knew about, not these polluted waters. Reason enough to get out, since right now I'm testing every sip in my own bar for a strange taste. I'm guessing that it's some kind of CWD but they'll be stopping everyone and their dog for tics, Terry says. It could be some virus, something that spreads with a bite."

I suddenly remembered Spike. "Does it infect dogs? The CWD virus?"

"It's not a virus," Mike said quickly. Up close I could make out a bruise on his cheek through his dangling hair. "Little thing called a prion. No vaccine, no cure. Can't kill it because it's not alive. I don't think it gets dogs though. It's not like rabies, more like Mad Cow."

I thought about what Harold must have seen in his final moments, charging out of the woods, and shuddered. "Could they drink it? Like downstream from the caves with the dumped guts?"

"Yeah," Mike said. "Yeah ... Jesus, that gotta be it-"

"Be quiet," Hugo said, whacking his son on the wrist. "We're going fishing away from here. Terry, you keep listening and collecting until you get time off to join us. Clean water, clean animals, clean cop." He seemed to pause, wanting to say more, but the room was full and he didn't. It wasn't until we were in the parking lot later, gathered for a smoke (Hugo was curing his glaucoma, he claimed), that he added the other thing.

"Lots of banged up people in there. Lots of bruises, limps. I saw some guys staggering coming in, not leaving."

Mike blinked, and slowly moaned. I saw him put his bandaged hands behind his back, and I think Terry saw me noticing, his eyes wide and then shrinking, his freckled face smoothing and trying to act normal badly. 

"Dad, do you think-"

"I'm just talkin'," Hugo hissed. His gold tooth was gleaming in the dark after each puff of the herb. "This could be lead in the water that they're also not telling us about for all I know, plus whatever the deer and moose have. Whole expeditions disappeared in the 19th century because of lead in the canned food, killing their brains. But it's not everyone. Jack's clear, Terry's clear and he drinks the local brew like a fish. You're washing dishes and glasses with tap water all the time, no wonder your hands are shakin'. Use the damn machine until we're gone."

Looking back now, it's dangerous how sensible a smart man can sound. He can tell himself or other people almost anything.

At the time I had clicked some things together on my own, despite the alcohol and shock from Harold's death. Tics were one way, and mosquitos were another - and I didn't get bit. And all the stagnant water out of Paul's exits, where those mosquitos laid their eggs, was probably crawling with these prions, which I thought of as little worms or bugs, breeding or congealing or mutating out of the underground gut clog.

And Terry? Did mosquitos avoid drinkers? Or did the prion get in their blood and just die if you couldn't pass a breathalyzer? I couldn't say, I had just learned about the damn things that night.