Witch's Canyon Read Free Page B

Justin work boots. By the time he zipped up, scrambled to the truck, and yanked down the gun, though, the Beemer had been nothing but a pair of distant taillights, and he didn’t think he came anywhere near hitting it.
    Didn’t mean he wouldn’t try again in a similar circumstance. He made his living with a small salvage logging operation, so unlike some of his neighbors, his paycheck didn’t depend on the tourist trade.
    At the moment, he was between contracts, but that wouldn’t last long. The people who hired him were the ones who had to deal with environmental impact studies and logging permits and all the bureaucratic paperwork; all he had to do when they gave the word was gather a crew and go into the woods and take out the downed trees and the slash, or the skinny striplings that would never gain purchase there.
    Land managers liked neat, clean forests these days, big trees with plenty of space around them.
    Ralph had some money in the bank, the fi sh were biting at Smoot Lake, and there was enough snow on the ground so he could stick a six-pack in it and every bottle would be as cold as the last, so he was a happy man.
    Maybe a little too happy. As he negotiated the turn off the highway onto Lookout Trail—the dirt track that led past his place to a lookout tower that fire spotters hadn’t used for a decade or more—he almost lost control of the truck. The rear end caught 18 SUPERNATURAL
    an icy patch and fishtailed and he barely got it back in line before it smacked into the stump of an oak he had cut down—illegally, since it wasn’t on his land—because its branches had blocked his view of the highway.
    But he did get it under control, and then it was just half a mile to his place. He could do that stretch with his eyes closed.
    The close call had put him on edge, shaken a little of the buzz away. That was unfortunate, since the day had been just about perfect so far. He had been thinking, in fact, that the only thing that would make it more perfect would be if Doris Callender came over for dinner—better, with dinner—followed by a little of what his old man had called “knockin’
    boots.” He’d give her a ring when he got inside, see if she wasn’t free. Most nights, she was.
    By the time Ralph came to a stop outside the old barn he used as a garage, the shakes from his near-accident had faded. It wasn’t that he had been too concerned about crunching the truck, he thought, as much as it was the implication that he’d driven all the way back from Smoot Lake impaired. If six beers threw him off this much, did it mean he was getting old? Forty was closing in fast, after all. If the day came that he couldn’t handle a chain saw or an ax, he really would have to worry.
    He left the motor running and climbed down to open the barn door. The night air had turned cold, and he blew on his hands to warm them. He tripped over a root in the driveway but managed to keep Witch’s
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    his balance. “Jeez,” he said out loud. “Six beers?” Maybe I’m getting sick, he added silently. Catching a cold. Sure, that’s probably it, no way six brews would hit me so hard otherwise.
    He had almost reached the barn door, where he knew the rusty hasp would give him problems because it always did, when he heard a strange sound.
    He froze. The woods around here were full of animals, deer and mountain lions and snakes, rabbits and chipmunks, various birds. Black bears too, sometimes, and at first he thought that’s what had made the noise. He hadn’t had a lot of close encounters with bears, he was glad to say, so he didn’t know for sure if they made sounds like that. It had been a kind of irregular chuffing noise, like something that climbed a steep hill and hadn’t caught its breath yet.
    But liquid, moist. Hearing it made Ralph envision something with loose, floppy jowls and big teeth and strings of saliva dangling from its open mouth, and he shivered, not because of the cool night air.
    The