Winter Run by Robert Ashcom Page A

put my father halfway down the ridge, above where I had seen the doe killed. Matthew and I would be at the end closest to the village. Matthew had Professor James’s old double-barrel 16-gauge. We crossed the creek and stood next to the rock out-cropping at the end of the ridge. We couldn’t actually see my father’s stand, but sound carried well so we would know what was happening if they came our way. There was a rock pile at the other end of the ridge, across the lane from where the summerhouses had been, and that was where the dogs were spending the nights. Luke said later that before the hounds were a hundred yards from the rocks, they put their noses to the ground and began waving their tails, showing that they had caught the scent of the dogs’ night lines. They could see the bloody tracks of the bitch in what was left of the snow. When the hounds started whining and pulling at the leads, the men turned them loose. Almost at once they burst into full cry. Those dogs may have just been dogs, but they sure smelled wild. Luke and Fred looked up to see the quarry crossing the lane in a tight bunch, heading south, upthe wind, straight away from us. Two things saved the situation. The first was that they were heading for unfamiliar territory. And the second was old Bat. The dogs had veered a little to the east, and just as it looked like the show was over, or would never start, there came a bellow so loud that Matthew and I heard it at the other end of the ridge. There is nothing on earth that sounds as disgruntled as a pissed-off mule. And old Bat was really pissed.
    Having escaped for whatever reason, Bat had decided to go a new way and had ambled down the lane toward the lake where the pipe cattle guard was across it so trucks could cross but cows couldn’t. When she got to the cattle guard, she walked right into the thing up to her knees and hocks and was stuck. Being a sensible mule, she didn’t struggle, she bellowed. And that turned the dogs back to the northeast, heading down wind, toward us.
    So with old Bat bellowing and the black and tans throwing their tongues like the end of the world as the hunt became a sight chase, my stomach jerked up into a knot that grew even tighter when we heard shots. Leonard and then Robert had let go with their single-barrel 12-gauges and killed the first two. In spite of the shots, the last two kept running hard downwind rather than risk making the turn back into unfamiliar country. So they went right past my father. The crack of the .22 long rifle hollow point sounded and another one went down.
    This left the last one for Matthew and me, and himwith the double barrel. It was the tan bitch. As she rounded the end of the ridge with the hounds in hot pursuit and the winter funneling down to that moment, she looked back and hesitated as if to make sure the whole thing was for real and not just a game and maybe we could go home now. Matthew fired once and this time she didn’t get up.
    As I held on to the sleeve of his old denim coat, trying not to cry and looking back and forth from the bitch to Matthew, I could feel the tension so hot in him I thought for a second he might shoot her again. But as we stood there watching the light go out of her eyes and the blood spreading around her like a snow cone, I felt him ease and saw his eyes change and soften. And when I looked again she was dead.
    The wind had stopped and beneath the leaden winter sky the voice of a single crow filled the echoed silence of the morning. The hounds went over to smell the bitch’s body, to be sure of what it was they had been running. When the others came up, there wasn’t much to be said—running dogs with hounds had a bad feel to it, but at least now they were gone.
    All that was left to do was free old Bat. Matthew and I agreed to meet up at the cattle guard just as soon as he finished milking. We figured she could last that long because it was not her nature to struggle, and she had gotten tired of