Story: "Hunter"

This is a short story I thought I'd write up. Feedback is appreciated!

Hunter

Gabriel Smedley

It was October 12, 2020. The trees were bare of any leaves and the sunlight blanketed the ground and the trees casted their shadows. I waited in my treestand in front of a small clearing near my cabin in Ohio close to the Zaleski National Forest area in Hocking Hills. From the edge of the woods the leaves were crunching, turning my head a sounder of feral hogs came into view. This was deer bow season, but hog I can take at any time and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to get a hog today. I picked up my bow and waited for the right moment. A sow started to root closer to me, so I set my sight for her and drew my bow back. But before I could release the arrow, the sow lifted her head up to the forest edge. Her nose was moving up and her ears were held high, but suddenly, he squealed and dashed back into the woods followed by the rest. I sat there and watched, lowering my bow while shaking my head. But then I thought, “What could’ve scared a group of hogs?” as I was climbing down from my stand, I decided to walk in the direction the sow sniffed into to get an idea what scared them. As I walked through the woods I was thinking it was either a person or black bear that scared them, but I stopped. Something in the ground caught my eye. In the mud I saw footprints, but these had five toes, each was somewhat separated and showed claw marks. What really caught my eye was the fact that they didn’t look like paws and when I lowered my hand into one it dwarfed it. At that moment, I noticed the light began to get dimmer, and moved my head behind me and started to shake a little, so I figured it was time to head back to the cabin.
It was almost dark when I got back, I told my friends what I saw and they giggled a little. Right after we sat down on the couch and my buddy turned the tv on. We were watching a rerun of Finding Bigfoot, you know, the show where these people never found anything but claimed to be experts on bigfoot. One of them was talking about how bigfoots break the legs of deer and hogs and my friends teased that’s probably what scared the hogs. I laughed of course, but the tracks I saw didn’t match the supposed tracks on the show. While we watched them do one of their night investigations an animal’s cry made us jump and look outside. We couldn’t see anything. But from what we could gather, it might’ve been a bear. After a while we decided to take a look in the morning to see what happened and we went back to the show.
The next morning we quickly got dressed, cooked eggs and bacon with some coffee and headed out. From what we heard, the cry came from a ravine, at least that’s where the direction of the sound came from. We went downhill from the cabin and grabbed onto any tree we could so we didn’t fall. As we went to the ravine, a horrid stench filled our noses, and we could see a pair of turkey vultures soaring above. We walk further, then we stop. We see flesh and black fur. We walk closer, and see that this was a black bear. A dead one. The head remained intact, one of the legs was covered in flies, but the rest of the bones were picked clean. This flesh was pink and blood was on the leaves. This wasn’t due to illness, this was a kill. We stood there and we talked about what out here could kill a black bear. One of our buddies figured it might’ve fought with a feral hog and got killed in the process, and other hogs ate it, but there wasn;t any hog sign anywhere. We then thought this was killed by a cannibalistic bear and we left.
My friends and I were in a treestand not too far from where the other treestand was. Night had fallen, and the light of the moon cast down on the woods. We waited for over an hour for something to show up, and then finally, some movement. I raised my night vision scope and it turned out to be a pack of coyotes. Now, we aren’t the type of people who kill coyotes on sight, but rather we leave them alone, to give them some peace. But tonight, something was off. The pack looked at us, then sniffed the air and kept looking at us. They just stood in the clearing and kept looking at us. Normally when these coyotes saw us they ran away, but here they were, standing right in front of us, despite knowing we were there. We watched, and wondered what was going on with them. One of them lifted it’s head up, staring straight into the woods, just like that one hog did. Out of nowhere it barks, the rest of the pack fled, and before we knew it a large mass came bursting from the woods, grabbed a coyote in its mouth and slammed it to the ground. A cracking sound came from the clearing. We looked through our scopes all at once. What we saw was something that’ll stick with me forever. It was huge, had to be as long as my truck and there were no ears that were visible. The animal we saw had faint, black stripes, brown fur, a white underbelly, and it’s eyes were glowing. The legs were muscular like a those of a big cat, but the tail was thicker and a big cats, and once more, the head was large and its snout was somewhat elongated and it has whiskers, but the thing getting me the most were its fangs. The fangs were long, but didn’t protrude past the jaw, but they weren’t covered by lips. While it was eating the coyote, it ripped off meat and bones, threw the chunks into its mouth and swallowed them whole. It froze for a moment, twitching its nose. Then suddenly it lifted it’s head and stared straight at us. We froze, my heart started to beat faster and I began to sweat. I slowed my breathing but kept my eye on the animal. As it stared at us we could see the blood-stained fangs and cat-like nose. It began to snarl, the snarl was deep and rough, and then, it roared. The roar sent shivers down my spine and went straight through me. It looked away from us, picked up its kill and walked back into the woods. We stayed in the treestand for the rest of the night. When the sun rose we climbed down the ladder and sprinted to the cabin. We quickly packed our stuff, loaded the truck and drove off to our fishing lodge in Muskingum. We asked each other what the heck we just saw, but none of us knew. What we did know was whatever it was, it didn’t want us there. We’ve since agreed not to go back to that area again. We still hunt, but we do so in Pennsylvania, far away from that thing’s home.

Comments

[Opium4TmassS]

Not too bad. Needs a little work and a little more description. Ex. Who is this friend? What does he look like? “My friend Max who I have known since that fight in sixth grade had a bit of a temper on him but was always in the mood for some hunting.”