Small annoyances, ones I rarely went out of my way to chase out of my home.
Kids needed to party.
People needed to learn they didn’t have what it took to survive in the wild.
But there were others too.
Ones who saw this barren land, the mostly lawlessness within as a prime stomping ground to do other things.
Damaging things.
Hurtful things.
At least once a year, a noise would reach me, a sound that didn’t belong.
Follow it, and you might happen upon men trying to overcome the women they had tricked into coming into the woods with them.
You might find someone getting the shit beaten out of them by bullies who’d made their lives hell for years.
You might find assholes taking a dogs’ natural instinct to obey commands, twisting it, warping it, forcing them to use it against one another in bloody, horrific ways.
I followed those sounds.
I dealt with them appropriately.
Well, maybe the law would have something to say about how appropriate my punishments were, but this was my place, my land, my laws, my punishments. If they wanted to find me and give me a talking to, well, they would be at it for weeks just to try to locate my place. And by then I’d have gotten a whiff of them and would have been long gone.
As a whole, cops just stayed clear. Rangers patrolled the more border areas. But no one was coming into the thick of the Pine Barrens on the regular. It would take hours to get back out again. If you were lucky.
“You hear that too, Cap?” I asked, pressing my hand on the rounded white head of an American Bulldog deemed too aggressive to be adopted, shipped off to death row where I had found him, convinced them to let me take him.
Too aggressive.
The dog was a teddy bear.
He just didn’t like most people.
And, well, who the fuck could blame him.
People, as a whole, were loud and selfish and predictably terrible.
Captain had the best ears of all my dogs, able to hear the first hiss of breath of one of the birthing goats, waking me up, leading me out to lend a hand.
We stood there a few feet outside our front door, silent, listening.
And there it was.
Crying.
A woman crying.
“Fuck,” I hissed, charging back inside, slipping my feet into shoes, throwing a jacket over my bare torso, tossing a flashlight into my pocket, and grabbing a gun, feeling the familiar weight in my palm.
By the time I was out the front door again, the whole pack was awake, alert, ready to bound off into the darkness with me.
I pointed to two of them, grinding out a simple, “Stay,” never wanting to leave my place wholly abandoned as the others fell into a run along with me, following the sound of whimpering on the breeze.
Sure, it was possible it was someone like me. A woman who had been through some shit, seen some shit, found herself haunted by it, brought herself to the woods, so the neighbors didn’t knock on her door while she sobbed, called the cops when she screamed through nightmares.
But, well, it was more likely that she wasn’t. That she was here against her will. That someone had or was currently trying to hurt her.
The sharp arms of pine branches whipped the side of my face as I tore through the woods, the sounds getting louder as I curved off to the right, away from the lake, going toward one of the deepest parts of the Barrens, so deep that there was no way a car had been driven in. If this woman was brought here, she had walked or had been carried. Dragged. No. No one was strong enough to carry someone for hours. Dead weight or struggling. It couldn’t be done.
My hand curled tighter around my gun, solid, reassuring.
I hadn’t needed to use it in years.
I had a shotgun over the fireplace that I had needed once or twice over the years to scare off some persistent bears, ones hungry enough, desperate enough to be able to break into my barn, kill my animals.
But I hadn’t raised a gun with the intent to kill in longer than I could remember. Which was a solace of sorts. Once I put one down, I genuinely hoped I wouldn’t find a need to pick one up again, to pile on some more unpleasant memories.
But, at the end of the day, if it came to me – and her – or them, I could use it. I could take a life. Again. I could live with that.
Hell, I’d learned to live with everything else up until this point.
A low grumble from one of the dogs had my head jerking to the side, watching him turn directions, looking at me, conflicted.
Because the sound was not coming from that direction.
But something was.