The Best of Joe R. Lansdale by Joe R. Lansdale

mean his back ain’t broke.”
    “Daddy wanted us to shoot him to put him out of his misery. He don’t look so miserable to me. It ain’t right to shoot him he ain’t miserable, is it?”
    I looked at Toby. There was mostly just a lump to see, lying there in the wheelbarrow covered by the dark. While I was looking he raised his head and his tail beat on the wooden bottom of the wheelbarrow a couple of times.
    “Don’t reckon I can do it,” I said. “I think we ought to take him back to Daddy, show how he’s improved. He may have a broke back, but he ain’t in pain like he was. He can move his head and even his tail now, so his whole body ain’t dead. He don’t need killin’.”
    “Daddy may not see it that way, though.”
    “Reckon not, but I can’t just shoot him without trying to give him a chance. Heck, he treed six dadburn squirrels. Mama’ll be glad to see them squirrels. We’ll just take him back.”
    We got up to go. It was then that it settled on us. We were lost. We had been so busy chasing those squirrels, following Toby’s lead, we had gotten down deep in the woods and we didn’t recognize anything. We weren’t scared, of course, least not right away. We roamed these woods all the time, but it had grown dark, and this immediate place wasn’t familiar.
    The moon was up some more, and I used that for my bearings. “We need to go that way,” I said. “Eventually that’ll lead back to the house or the road.”
    We set out, pushing the wheelbarrow, stumbling over roots and ruts and fallen limbs, banging up against trees with the wheelbarrow and ourselves. Near us we could hear wildlife moving around, and I thought about what Mr. Chambers had said about panthers, and I thought about wild hogs and wondered if we might come up on one rootin’ for acorns, and I remembered that Mr. Chambers had also said this was a bad year for the hydrophobia, and lots of animals were coming down with it, and the thought of all that made me nervous enough to feel around in my pocket for shotgun shells. I had three left.
    As we went along, there was more movement around us, and after a while I began to think whatever it was was keeping stride with us. When we slowed, it slowed. We sped up, it sped up. And not the way an animal will do, or even the way a coach whip snake will sometimes follow and run you. This was something bigger than a snake. It was stalking us, like a panther. Or a man.
    Toby was growling as we went along, his head lifted, the hair on the back of his neck raised.
    I looked over at Tom, and the moon was just able to split through the trees and show me her face and how scared she was. I knew she had come to the same conclusion I had.
    I wanted to say something, shout out at whatever it was in the bushes, but I was afraid that might be like some kind of bugle call that set it off, causing it to come down on us.
    I had broken open the shotgun earlier for safety’s sake, laid it in the wheelbarrow and was pushing it, Toby, the shovel, and the squirrels along. Now I stopped, got the shotgun out, made sure a shell was in it, snapped it shut and put my thumb on the hammer.
    Toby had really started to make noise, had gone from growling to barking.
    I looked at Tom, and she took hold of the wheelbarrow and started pushing.
    I could tell she was having trouble with it, working it over the soft ground, but I didn’t have any choice but to hold on to the gun, and we couldn’t leave Toby behind, not after what he’d been through.
    Whatever was in those bushes paced us for a while, then went silent. We picked up speed, and didn’t hear it anymore. And we didn’t feel its presence no more neither. Earlier it was like we was walking along with the Devil beside us.
    I finally got brave enough to break open the shotgun and lay it in the wheelbarrow and take over the pushing again.
    “What was that?” Tom asked.
    “I don’t know,” I said.
    “It sounded big.”
    “Yeah.”
    “The Goat Man?”
    “Daddy