Ran along the road that marks the boundary between the bush and the plantations. A beautiful morning, the air lemony thin, the light and dark of everything magnified somehow, the shade damp and cool with flickers of warmth from an already high autumn sun. A good run. Light on the feet, for a change. Optimistic, for a change. Felt great, until a ute passed slowly on the right. Big dogs in the back: short-coated, barrel-chested, tight-waisted. All tied up and balancing on the tray.
Hunters.
Tried to ignore the instinct to turn, to flee, to calculate how many kilometres to home. Kept running. Stubborn pride, anger, and an instinct for self-preservation: don’t show fear to those who get off on fear—to people who like to kill, like to kill, like to kill. Ran, to this beat—like to kill, like to kill—as they slowly drove past and away. Ran to this beat, till the turning point.
Five kilometres from home. Felt alone. Felt safe in feeling alone. Wondered if safety is something that can be felt. Wondered if being alone is ever safe.
Turned, began to run back. Felt calm until, just before heart attack hill, another ute passed, much more slowly than the first.
A different ute. More dogs. Six of them tied to the roll bar: long-muzzled, floppy-eared, scruffy-furred pointer-cross mongrels. Were they not so close and staring, the image would have been funny for, despite their arrogant air, they wore plastic fluorescent jackets with GPS radios duct-taped to their chests. Half dog, half machine. Techno killers. Toy dogs. Then—felt before seen—yellow eyes staring through steel grates. Yellow eyes stating that none of it was a joke: two more dogs in cages welded to the back of the tray; square-jawed, squat-bodied. Dogs to find blood—and dogs to kill.
The animals were quiet. Eerily quiet. Pure obedience, perhaps, or indifference, staring down at the unknown human trotting along the gravel below them, a creature they hadn’t been taught—yet—was prey. The ute drove by very slowly. Too slowly. P-platers. Probably two or three teenagers in the tinted cabin. Kid-men. Kid-men who like to kill.
Faced forward, kept running.
The ute finally sped up, searching for momentum as it approached heart attack hill. As it began to climb, its other cargo was revealed: a dead boar strapped to the roof of the cabin. As the car ascended, the boar slid back with the slope-pull of gravity. Rested to a stop, a strap cutting into the length of its dark, bristly spine—a pink smear left on the white metal panel where its head had rolled and lolled. The ute bumped in and out of a pothole. A trottered leg jerked up and over another, so its front legs were crossed girlishly, like Miss Piggy. Funny, if it weren’t real. But it was real. Pig hunters with their kill—still awaiting rigor mortis.
Finally, they disappeared over the crest. Listened carefully, made sure they kept on driving.
Ran home, but could not, this time, find a calming beat. Just heart flurries in the throat. Questions and images that would pursue all day, to bed, to sleep, to the problem of tomorrow morning’s run at the same time on the same road—the problem of threat (real, or imagined) and the problem of fear (and worse, fear of fear).
What did those boys feel, chasing that creature down? And what, exactly, did the dogs do? Find it and maul it? Pin it? Guzzle gushes of blood? Who were those men? Why did they do it? Did they—do they—know why?
Preying and killing…
If they were allowed to hunt people, would they? For pleasure, for power, for fun—for whatever it is that they hunt for. For sport, they’d say, as if that explains anything. For sport.
Would they hunt people, if they could?
What would they do, if they could?
What would anyone do—if they could?
If a tree falls, and nobody hears it…. If someone screams, and nobody hears them… If there are no witnesses to a thing, then anything—everything—goes.
H.C. Gildfind is the winner of the Miami UPress Novella Comp 2020 and Griffith Review Novella Project 2015. H.C.’s short fiction collection ‘The Worry Front’ is out from Marg River Press. Find H.C. at @ltercation and www.hcgildfind.com.
I thought the tension in this was fantastically built up.