Winter Run by Robert Ashcom

about and the whole bunch throwed up their heads and were gone. But they come back in the night, because the next morning that calf was laying dead in the middle of a patch of churned up snow.
    “They may be just dogs, but they’ve sure God gone bad, and we got to kill ’em, Matthew. I ain’t never in my life seen anything like that tan bitch. She looks at you like she knows more than you do. And now that they can bring down a wild doe, running in a pack, Lord knows what will be next. Trouble is they ain’t scared like they was wild. They just come and kill.”
    When Fred had finished, Matthew turned to Fred’s brother, Luke, who was the older of the brothers and was section foreman on the C & O Railroad. He was tall and looked like a black Paul Bunyan. He wore hunting boots with his trousers tucked in and a stocking cap and a mackinaw. The brothers dressed the same and looked the same, except Fred talked and was short. Luke was quiet and he kept hounds, hounds that would run anything you put them onto.
    “Do you reckon it’s eased up enough to bring the hounds in the morning, Luke?” Matthew asked. “I know where they’re laying up.”
    This revelation turned heads, mine included.
    Luke nodded and Matthew continued, “I’ll get Leonard and Robert. You and Fred bring the hounds. The old summerhouse foundations is where they’re staying when they ain’t hunting. I seen them the other night and tracked them in the snow. You and Fred can walk in with the hounds, and we’ll be at the three crossings; and if you jump them, at least one of us will get a shot most likely. The wind might be wrong, but we got to chance it. Maybe they’ll run the country and not the wind.”
    Then he said to me, “Reckon your daddy would come, Charlie?”
    I said I was sure he would, bursting with pride once again that my Pennsylvania-born father, the virtual foreigner in that land, would be asked to help. He had an out-of-character and uncanny ability with a .22, so when precision shooting with no side effects wasrequired, he was asked. Like the time a bat bothered a lady at evening prayer and Daddy was commissioned to shoot it and not mess up the church. I remember him sitting in the front pew on the Epistle side, dressed in a Sunday suit, waiting while the bat flew around and finally landed under the eave on the dark pine plate. I remember him bringing up the rifle real slow and hitching his body around to make the shot less awkward, hearing his breath ease out, the little crack from the short-short, and the bat falling dead. And I remember wanting to cheer, but being afraid to because we were in church. Yes, I was sure he would come.
    Matthew took me home. My father came to the door and stood there kind of skinny and awkward with the backlight making shadows across his hawk nose and deep-set eyes. He agreed that something had to be done, particularly in the light of the doe being killed. He would be glad to come, and it would be fine to meet at the store at six.
    It was a restless night—probably for my father, too. From the distance of years, I remember him as always completely cool, but it is an unlikely memory.
    The next morning, they were waiting for us around a fire they had built next to the hog-scalding tub at the branch. The hounds were baying in excitement in the hound boxes on the pickups. Besides Luke and Fred and Leonard, there was Robert Paine. He drank some and had done time on the road gang and, as I’ve mentioned before whenever something big happened Robert was always there. And, of course, Matthew, who knewwhat to do even though he’d never seen such a winter or heard of a pack of wild dogs before. You could see in the firelight the tension etched into their shadowy faces. It had been a long winter.
    Luke and Fred and the hounds headed for the burnt-out summerhouses above Silver Hill where the ridge that ran almost to the village began. Robert and Leonard went to the crossing behind the barn at our house. They