Appalachian Grandpa Tales: Tracks in the Snow

"Reminds me a little of the last time I followed tracks in the snow."

The steam rose as I blew into my hands, looking back at Grandpa as he made his way through the snowy forest. It was February, and the weather had been temperamental since Thanksgiving. We had been experiencing some thick snow since the first of December, and the usual decorations had looked very festive this year as they sat huddled atop all that powder. We had picked up as many of them as possible, but I knew that come spring, we would find more of them where they had been buried by the snow. It figured this would be when Clarence, the cat owned by Grandpa's closest neighbor, would have chosen to get loose.

Clarence was a large Maine Coon, fluffier than most dogs, and she had been on the phone to grandpa when I looked up to see the temperamental feline loping through the snow in the front yard.

Grandpa had gone out to try and sweet talk the ball of fur, looking ridiculous in his pajama pants and rain boots as I stood on the porch and tried to get him to bundle up. He had been sick throughout Christmas, a nasty flu having put him to bed, and I had been afraid that I might wake up one morning to find he had wheezed out his last. Then, the day before New Year's, I had gotten up to find him cooking breakfast and feeling more like his old self.

Now he was out in the snow looking for a cat, though he was more likely looking for a good case of pneumonia.

To his credit, he had put on his cold-weather clothes before heading out into the woods. He looked like a small bear in his snow pants and thick furry coat, his furry hat with the ear covers pulling the whole illusion together. Among other things on the long list of Grandpa's talents, he was a great tracker and had taken to the woods to find the cat. It didn't exactly take a master hunter to follow the cat's trail today, and it looked more like he had bounded from snow bank to snow bank.

"Oh," I said, feeling that maybe a Grandpa story would help move our walk along.

"Of course, we were following something a little bigger than a cat that time."

I shivered as Grandpa pushed a branch, a snowbank falling onto my head.

The cold powder fell off, thankfully, before it could melt and soak through my thick coat, "Hunting wolves?" I asked, joking but a little curious to know what grandpa could have been hunting in the army.

"Bigger than that," he said, looking between a pair of prints and following the smaller of the two.

"A bear, maybe?"

"Nope," he said, looking back to grin wickedly, "It was nothing short of the most dangerous prey of all, Man."

John and I were on guard, keeping each other company through the cold night when I first saw the lights off over a snowy hill. I could see a truck trudging angrily over the hills of snow, its lights heading for the nearby forest. The local forest wasn't a great one, little more than fifty or sixty miles of dense and hearty mountain trees. The trees in Georgia were no light weights, but these Alaskan trees were definitely built for the weather. You might ask what anyone was doing in the woods that late at night, but it was February, a little before valentines day, and it had been dark nearly all day. In reality, they were driving up there at about six pm, right about the time our watch had started, and soon I could see a fire winking on the horizon.

"Surely they aren't camping out there?" I asked John.

"Why not?" he asked, "If they've spotted a caribou herd and can take a few of them, all the better for the tribe."

He took out his binoculars to see if he could catch a glimpse of anyone in particular, but despite the clearness of the night, it was no good. The best John could determine, there were five figures around the fire, and they seemed to be getting ready to head into the woods. He was a little more interested than I thought was strictly healthy, and finally John scoffed, putting down the binoculars and shaking his head.

"They can't be going into the woods. No one with any sense would go into the woods after dark."

I snorted and commented that it was always dark this time of year, but John didn't laugh.

"There are things here that know the difference between dark and night. If they are out there this late, they are either very foolish or they have grit."

"Let's hope it's the grit, then," I say, my breath puffing as we kept our eternal vigil over the frozen tundra that stretched brightly around us.

By this point, I had been in Alaska a year, the first of my three-year stretch over there, and the cold never got any easier to handle. I don't remember being warm the whole time I was in Alaska; not the sort of warm that I was used to. I was accustomed to sitting by a river bank as spring bloomed and catching the sluggish fish that lazed through the snow melt. Alaska was beautiful, without a doubt, but I never quite acclimated to the weather.

A few days later, John woke me up around midday, his own eyes a little less bleary than mine.

"I need your help if you're willing."

It was all he had to say. I was up and dressed in a matter of minutes, accepting a mug of cowboy coffee from John. He was dressed warmly, his thick service coat pulled up to the ears, which were covered by a furry hat I had seen him wear often on post. He had his rifle slung over his shoulder, and his boots had fresh snow clinging to them.

"What do you need?" I asked, pulling on my own coat and grabbing my soogin cap.

"Apparently, one of those foolish kids around the fire was my godson, Liam. He and some of his friends were looking for something that had taken some livestock off the farm, and they've been gone for two days. Charlotte is beside herself, and no one from the village wants to go into the woods to look for him or his friends. She called me earlier and asked if I could help her, and I know how good you are in a pinch."

I was already on board, but I was a little curious as we set off for the Major's office.

"Why wouldn't the tribe come help find your godson?"

John and I had been friends for long enough that his silences told me more than his words. I could hear him grinding his teeth, a clear sign that he was overthinking something, and as the longhouse that served as the Major's office got closer, he still hadn't made a decision. What was so important that he couldn't tell me?

"There might be something dangerous out there, something that might require more than a rifle round."

He looked at me like I might refuse to go now, but I laughed as I kept heading for the office.

"It wouldn't be the first boogin I've met on its own turf. Let's go, John, we're wastin lack of daylight."

An hour later, we were both heading towards the woods, the old Jeep's tires slipping a little on the fresh snow.

The Major hadn't wanted to let us both go. He didn't see any reason to let two soldiers go slog through the woods looking for some town kid, and John's face had gotten pretty red when he’d said it. He looked like he meant to go no matter what the Major said, but I stepped in and reminded him that we were only loosely tolerated in the settlement. They took our money, and they let us live in their shadow, but they saw us as outsiders, and that was never going to change if we didn't show them we could belong.

"Say the two of us go out in the forest and never come back? You can just say that the two of us were deserters and that you told us not to leave. But if we find these kids, we're a couple of soldiers doing right by the town. Either way, you stand to lose very little but gain quite a lot."

Major Charelt was an Idaho native, about as big as his desk. I would have put him against any Rooskie who wandered in and maybe even some of the grizzlies I'd seen from the watchtower. He wasn't the brightest bulb on base, but he could see a positive spin when he was shoved in his face.

"You boys got till tomorrow, quadruple zera. If you ain't back 'ta base 'fore then, I report you as deserters. If you ain't back 'fore then, I sugges you find a comfy spot to hunker with the injuns."

He allowed us to take our rifles and even told us we could borrow a jeep to get out there.

"D'nt drive ma Jeep through da woods, on God, boys," he warned us, and we promised that we wouldn't drive the Jeep offroad.

We pulled up next to the Jeep we had seen the night we were on post.

It was fourteen hundred, but it was as dark as early evening. We flipped our torches on, and after some tromping, we found the remains of their campfire. They had left behind a few bottles, a little liquid courage, and some wrappers from sandwiches or food of some kind. John was looking around the campsite, trying to find something to tell us what direction they had gone, but I knew it would be futile. It had snowed for two days, and the powder was nearly deep enough to cover the campfire. I wagered that we'd find them somewhere in the woods if they were still alive.

"Is there a house out there? A cave maybe? Somewhere they could have gotten out of the cold?"

John looked back at the foreboding canopy and shuddered, "I have no idea. We don't go into these woods or never did when I was younger."

"Why?" I asked, thinking it odd that anyone could quash the urge to take to the woods in search of game or adventure.

John looked at the midnight gathering of frosty trees, and sighed stoically, "It appears we have some time, would you like to hear the story of these woods?"

I told him I would, and we crunched along as we headed into the tree line.

"My Grandmother told me that long long ago when we were outsiders, we came to settle here and were hunted by something we could not run from, something we could not escape. It came at night, hunting us as we shivered in our tents. Those who stood against it died. Those who hid were found, and no one was sure what to do. It wasn't just our tribe either. When we came together, other tribes reported losing people to these things. Some believed it was death itself, come for us since we dared to enter its domains, but others believed it might be something different. Our elders had faced things like this before, these creatures of the other world, and came out the victor, and they believed they could do it again."

As John told his tale, I began to see the woods around us as something different. I felt comfortable as the trees shaded us from the expressive sky, the womb of the woods, a place I had always loved in my boyhood. It was just another forest, my mind told me, and I knew how to move in a forest. I said I had never felt the warmth I had known in Appalachia, but as I moved naively through those woods, I felt a strange sort of warmth spread through me, the warmth of homecoming.

"And so, all the elders came together to discuss the issue. For days they deliberated, people still being drug off in the night. They discussed how this could be done, but they knew they would have to know what they were dealing with. They would need to trap the beast and where better than in a place that it would feel safe enough to slip up. They drew it into the woods with something they knew it couldn't resist, and when the trap was set and the sacrifice was released, they began to close their snare."

As I moved through the woods, however, and John began to lay out his story, the forest changed. No longer was it a comfortable jaunt through the woods but a crouching beast waiting to spring. Was this how the people in John's story had felt? Walking meat, just waiting for the butcher to come for them. The deeper we went, the more the beauty seemed like rouge smeared across the face of a monster. The farther in we went, the more that quiet weight hung around me, the barely contained hush seemed to be holding its breath so I would drop my guard.

As we clumped through the woods, my mind presented me with a picture of the beast that would be stalking me. A huge wolf, some massive black hound as big as a bear, stalking the woods as it followed us. It would be waiting behind a tree, peeking from behind a snow bank, and when it caught sight of me, it would grin with a mouth full of nasty teeth that would part to reveal its deep throat full of bellowing growls. It would blot out the moon as it leaped at us, burying us beneath its bulk and killing us before we could even scream.

I was looking around, trying to catch the beast before it got us when I tripped over something in the snow.

As I looked to see what had spilled me, I found the first of our lost boys.

His eyes were big and staring, frost forming on the orbs as he stared off into the woods. My foot had crunched through what I thought was ice but turned out to be a gout of red that had turned solid. Something had ripped his throat out, leaving his meat frozen in the cold. His face was locked into the most exquisite look of terror, and I was tempted to run back to the jeep before I could encounter what had scared him that much.

"Look," John half whispered, pointing away from the body and toward a drag mark through the snow.

It made a perfect little trail of frozen blood for us to follow, complete with several large and foreboding foot prints.

"Come on," John said, "that seems like a pretty good clue."

As we walked on through the frozen wonderland, I suddenly couldn't stand the stifling quiet.

"So what was it?"

"Could be a bear, maybe a wolf, can't think of anything else that would,"

"No, I mean the thing they trapped."

"Oh," John said, still keeping his voice low as he let his rifle lead, "they called it the Qiqirn, and it was a spirit of death. They had believed it was many beasts, but what appeared was a single creature. It was hairless, an oddity in a place like this, and it appeared like a shaved wolf. Its grotesque body looked alien to them, its red eyes glaring at them from within the boundary they had set for it. The only place it had hair was its feet, and that seemed to work in its favor. It could move without leaving a trace, making it a dangerous foe in the wild. With the creature trapped, though, it seemed that they had bottled death, but they had done too well."

As we moved, following the bloody trail, I began to believe I could almost hear the snow breaking as something followed us.

"Suddenly, death couldn't take them. The hunters feared no enemy; the explorers feared not the mountain's cold or height. They explored the unimaginable, fought the incredible, and learned the things that had eluded them. The longer it went on, however, the less there was to seek. People became stagnant, and many of them wished for an end. They had lived and lived and wanted to move on to what came next. They wanted to see those who had gone before them, to be reunited with their loved ones, and they knew of only one way to do it."

"Can't imagine too much life being a problem," I whispered, but immediately regretted it.

I supposed after seeing the Bone Collector, I could imagine too much life.

"It was always a stretch for me too when I was a kid, but as I get older, I can kind of imagine why it might get old. At any rate, they made a deal with the creature. They would send those to him who were ready to go, and any who were foolish enough to hunt the woods by night would be his prey. He would stalk the woods, but leave the places of man alone, and he agreed to such terms if he could walk the land again."

We saw something jutting up from the snow, and as we followed the blood smear, we found a cave. To call it a cave might have been generous, but it had an overhang and looked fairly dry inside. Without knowing what was in ther, however, it might as well have been the open mouth of a dragon.

As we hunkered down to peek inside, a snarling wolf's head suddenly leered from the mouth of the cave.

He was huge, almost as large as the bears we'd seen, and its fur was patchy and scraggy. Its pink skin was covered in sores, its nose split down the middle like someone had taken a knife to it, and its teeth were double rows of sharp yellow fangs. It was a freak, a mutant of some sort, and both of us had two pounds of pressure on a five-pound trigger when someone yelled for us to stop.

"Don't shoot, don't shoot." from beneath the creature came a half-grown man in filthy snow gear.

"Liam!" John said, pulling the man to him as he shivered in his arms. He was filthy and freezing, but he was still alive and apparently the only survivor of his group. One of his legs was chewed up badly, his left arm a mass of infected-looking bites, and as we hobbled out of the woods, he told us what had happened.

"Ma was missing sheep, and Dad…well, you know Dad's been trapped by the bottle since the sawmill laid him off. Ma told me to just let it go, she always says it's the death hound or whatever they call it, but I knew it was something flesh and blood. Spirits don't need to drag your sheep off into the woods, so we went to kill it. It got Ayo first, drug him off into the dark, and tore him up. When we went to help him, it got Tom too. It tore his throat out and then jumped on Mauk too. All the while, we just kept putting shots into it, and it shrugged it off like so many snowflakes. I ran as it jumped on Frank, and when I fell into that cave, I bashed my head, and everything went black for a while. When I woke up, it was chewing on Frank, ignoring me as I pulled up my gun. It turned to look when I started shooting it, though. I shot it five times before it finally stopped moving, and then I blacked out again. When I came awake, I was cut up, bit up, and freezing. I pulled that thing on top of me and just kind of existed until you got here."

He ended up living, but not without some scars. His arm became infected and had to come off, and he never walked again without a limp. Ultimately, John told me that he crawled into the same bottle as his father, and if I had demons like that kid, I probably would too. He had seen something terrible, but it was ultimately less supernatural than John had believed. We were back at the base by nineteen hundred hours, and we were the toast of the town when we brought Liam home. The town did not accept us in one evening, but when I finally packed my bags and headed back to Georgia, I was welcome in any home within Weller Brock.

I had ceased to be an outsider, one of few who ever accomplished it.

We were treading familiar territory again, and I could see the house coming into view. It was nearly dusk, and my fingers felt frozen even as I stuffed them into my pockets. Grandpa didn't seem to notice, but I was sure his nose had taken on a slightly blue tint after trekking all day.

"Looks like our quarry had led us all the way back to the start." I commented, a little sourly, "Guess we won't be catching him after all."

"Don't be so sure," Grandpa said and I was suddenly aware of another set of prints heading for the house.

I smiled as I saw Glimmer sitting on the porch steps in her usual garb, as if it wasn't cold enough to make her breath puff out. The cat in question was sitting on her lap, purring happily as she stroked its fur. It looked up mistrustfully as we approached, but she made a soothing noise, and it melted against her once again.

"There you are, Hunter. And Fisher too. It's bad manners to leave a lady sitting in the snow. I could have caught a chill."

She rose with the cat in her arms, pecking me on the cheek as she moved onto the porch.

"He a friend of yours?" I teased, stroking the cat as he nestled against her.

"Nope," she said with a smile, "but I knew his grandsire. I met him in the woods while Fisher was away playing soldiers when I was a mere slip of a girl."

"Sounds like Grandpa isn't the only one with a story today," I joked, and Glimmer cocked an eyebrow at me.

"Perhaps," she said tartly, but only if you fix me some of that delicious milk water like last time and invite me in out of the cold. I'll be happy to tell you how I found a poor lost beasty in my woods one night and how I first became aware of this most remarkable creature you call cats."

I smiled as the three of us came inside, Grandpa moving to the phone as I went to get the fire going.

Hot chocolate and a roaring fire sounded like the perfect way to end one story and start another.