The Hunted
Dale Pruitt had a spot cleared on his wall.
It was right above the fireplace in his cabin, between the twelve-point buck and the wild boar he’d taken down in Texas. He had pulled out the old nails and patched the holes and even bought a little brass plaque, still blank, waiting for an engraving. Everyone in Harlan’s Diner knew about that spot, because Dale had told every one of them. Twice.
“A black panther,” he said that morning, tapping the counter with one thick finger. “Biggest thing these woods have ever seen. And I’m the one bringing it home.”
Old Wendell Hayes didn’t look up from his coffee. Wendell had lived at the edge of the Blackwater Forest for seventy-one years, and he had a way of not looking up that made you feel smaller than you’d been a second ago.
“Folks have been chasing that cat since before you were born, Dale.”
“Folks weren’t me.”
Wendell finally raised his eyes. They were pale and watery and very steady. “Thing about that cat,” he said, “is that nobody chases it for long. Sooner or later, they look behind them.”
A couple of the men at the counter laughed. Dale laughed loudest. Then he paid for his eggs, left a tip he thought was generous, and went out to his truck whistling.
He reached the trailhead at four o’clock, an hour before dusk. That was the plan. Panthers hunted at twilight, so Dale would hunt at twilight too. He had studied it all. He had read every article and watched every video. He had worn his best camouflage jacket, the one that had cost more than his first car, and his lucky camo cap, faded soft from twenty seasons in the woods. Over his shoulder hung his grandfather’s rifle, the old bolt-action with the walnut stock rubbed smooth by three generations of hands.
Dale had never missed with that rifle. Not once.
The forest swallowed him almost at once. The Blackwater was old growth, tall dark pines packed close together, their lower branches dead and gray and draped in moss. The light came down through them in thin, slanting threads. The ground was soft with a hundred years of fallen needles, and Dale moved over it without a sound, the way he had always moved. He was proud of that. He could walk up on a deer at twenty yards before it ever twitched an ear.
An hour in, he found the first sign.
It was a scratch on a pine trunk, high up, higher than his head. Four long, deep grooves cut through the bark, fresh enough that the sap was still beading in them. Dale ran his fingers down the marks and felt his heart start to drum.
“There you are,” he whispered.
He found tracks next, pressed into a patch of soft mud by a creek: big round pads, four toes, no claw marks. A cat’s print. A big one. Bigger across than his whole hand spread flat.
Dale grinned. He followed the tracks along the creek bank, rifle ready, eyes moving. The trail led uphill, through a stand of young pines, over a fallen log. Every so often it disappeared on hard ground, and every time, Dale picked it up again a few yards on. He was good at this. He was better than good.
The sky above the treetops turned violet, then purple, then the deep bruised color that comes just before dark. A mist started to rise from the hollows, white and low and slow, curling around the tree trunks like smoke.
And somewhere along the way, though he didn’t notice it happen, the woods went quiet.
No birds. No squirrels. No frogs down at the creek. Even the wind seemed to have stopped to listen.
Dale did notice the tracks, though. He noticed when they led him in a long, gentle curve back down the hill. He noticed when they crossed the creek again. He frowned a little when they brought him past a tree with four long scratches in it, high up, with the sap still beading.
The same tree.
He stood there in the mist, his breath clouding in front of him, and looked down at the mud at his feet.
There were his own boot prints from an hour ago, clear as day, heading up the hill.
And pressed neatly on top of every single one of them, big and round and fresh, were the prints of the cat.
For a long moment Dale didn’t move. He didn’t even breathe.
It had been behind him. The whole time. While he was creeping uphill, so proud of how quiet he was, the cat had been walking in his footsteps, close enough to step exactly where he stepped. It had followed him in a perfect circle and brought him right back to the start, the way you might walk a dog around the block.
Sooner or later, Wendell had said, they look behind them.
Dale turned around very slowly.
Nothing. Just the mist, and the dark trunks of the pines, and the deep purple sky between them. Nothing moved. But the skin on the back of his neck was crawling, and every instinct he had, every instinct that had ever made him a good hunter, was screaming the same simple thing.
You are being watched.
He gripped the rifle tighter. His palms were wet. “All right,” he said out loud, and his voice sounded strange and thin in the silence. “All right. Time to head on back.”
He started walking toward the trailhead. Not fast. You never run from a cat. Every article had said so. Running makes you prey.
A twig snapped somewhere to his left.
Dale spun, the rifle coming up to his shoulder in one smooth motion. He stared down the iron sights into the fog. Nothing. Just a low pine branch, gently swaying, as if something had just brushed past it.
He kept walking. His heart was pounding so hard that he could hear it in his ears.
A little farther on, something rustled to his right. He spun again. Nothing again. Then, a minute later, a soft sound behind him, so faint he almost thought he’d imagined it. The whisper of weight settling onto pine needles.
It was playing with him. He understood that now. It was letting him know, very politely, that it could be anywhere it wanted to be, any time it wanted, and that there was nothing he could do about it.
The trees thinned ahead. Through the mist he could see the small clearing where the trail began, and beyond it, glinting faintly, the windshield of his truck.
Dale let out a shaky breath. Thirty yards. Twenty.
Then he stopped.
He didn’t know why. Nothing had made a sound. Nothing had moved. But he knew, the way you know someone has walked into a room behind you, that if he turned his head right now, he would see it.
So he turned his head.
It was standing in the mist not fifteen feet away.
It was bigger than he had imagined, long and low and black as the space between stars. The mist curled around its legs. Its eyes caught the last of the purple light and glowed a deep, clear green. It wasn’t crouching. It wasn’t snarling. It was simply standing there, perfectly still and perfectly calm, looking at him.
The rifle was already in his hands. Dale knew he could raise it. He had raised it a thousand times. He had never missed.
But he also knew, standing there with the cold mist in his lungs, that the cat had had a hundred chances to end this tonight. On the hill. By the creek. Every single time he had turned his back. It had walked in his footsteps for two miles, and it had never once come any closer than it wanted to.
It wasn’t here to fight him. It had come to show him something.
Slowly, very slowly, Dale lowered the barrel until it pointed at the ground.
The panther watched him do it. Then it blinked once, a long, slow, lazy blink, the way a house cat blinks at someone from a sunny windowsill. It turned without hurry and walked back into the mist, and the forest folded around it, and it was gone.
All at once the frogs started singing again down by the creek.
Dale walked the rest of the way to his truck on legs that didn’t feel like his own. He sat behind the wheel for a long time without starting the engine. It wasn’t until he reached up to wipe his forehead that he realized his lucky cap was gone. It must have been knocked off by a branch somewhere in the dark.
He didn’t go back for it.
The next morning, Wendell Hayes was in his usual seat at Harlan’s. He watched Dale come in, take the stool next to him, and order a coffee in a much quieter voice than usual.
“Well?” said Wendell.
Dale wrapped both hands around the warm mug. “I looked behind me.”
For the first time anyone in the diner could remember, Wendell Hayes smiled.
That afternoon, Dale took the brass plaque down from the empty spot above his fireplace. He thought about it for a while. Then he hung it back up, still blank, with nothing above it. Some spaces, he decided, were meant to stay empty. It felt good, somehow, to know there was still something out there bigger than him.
He slept better that night than he had in years.
It wasn’t until the next morning, when he opened his front door to get the paper, that he found his lucky camo cap.
It was sitting neatly in the middle of his welcome mat, a little damp with dew.
Around it, pressed into the soft dirt at the edge of the porch, was a perfect ring of big, round paw prints.
Dale stood very still in the doorway. Then, slowly, he lifted his eyes to the edge of the woods behind his cabin.
In the shadows beneath the pines, two green eyes were looking back at him.
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