The Mockingbird Legends

A Postmodern Gothic Tale. Comng of Age Rural in a Dissolute Time.

Thirty-eight

They followed closely the milling dogs as they swept the ground ahead, great slack ears skimming the moldering litter and the skin melting down in swags off their faces to form folds and recesses into which the rising spoor could hang and concentrate. Here, you see? Her tracks right here again in this duff at the edge of the trees. It’s her. Same track we picked up at the head of the trail. The hounds making some modest forward progress on the spoor.

Are you sure these hounds know what they are doing Mister Gunderson…

Don’t you worry none, these cathounds is the best sleuthhounds out there… just look how these two take the scent…

They seem slow…

Wantin’ to make sure of it ’fore they pick up the pace. Bugger me if it won’t be long now they’ll be givin’ tongue. Start making time. Be a trick t’keep up. You’ll see. A trick keepin’ up. ’Speshully fer my fat ass…

They proceeded painstakingly for leagues in like fashion through the building gale, west through the tract on the far side of the trees and down through the gully and up the other side and into the carnivorous woods and arcing around now to south and proceeding long in this direction, milling, circling, intermittent, silent save for the sounds of their scenting, the snorting, sneezing. Coming now into the rising lee of the great looming ridge before coming about again and moving back into the womb of the sun, passing back through the gully with the woods opening up in mature oaks and approaching now a great ancient specimen of the species not far back from the top end of the upper meadow. Ignorant of the suspended and motionless form watching them from the boughs directly overhead. The dogs becoming suddenly charged as though informed by some inner voltage, giving drawnout tongue and surging off into the meadow.

Here we go boy, here we go. Bugger my arse but didn’t I tell ya?! She won’t be far ahead of us now. We’ll run her t’ground in no time!

***

Down in the basement of the hollow the young yeoman exile from his time had just risen from a meal of smallmouth caught as the sun rose. He was returning to his sepulchre to pass the midday when the first rondelays of the hounds reached his ears above the soughing of the wind from over the lip of the basin, purling into his sylvan houseyard like the honking of distant fowl. He hesitated a moment and when the sound was unmistakable for what it was he sprinted for where his crossbow and quiver lay on the end of the picnic bench and taking them up in an unbroken sweep of his arm he went at a full-run into the current of the sound, across the floor of the basin and up the slope and over the road and upward again.