Bay of Souls Read Online Free

graying beard. The man was covered with blood. He was humiliated and armed. Michael prayed that he would not look up.
    He held his breath and watched fascinated as the man and the deer and the wheelbarrow passed beneath him in fits and starts and howlings. If the hunter below was possessed of the violent paranoid's tortured intuition, of the faintest sense of being spied out in his ghastly mortification—if he tilted back his head far enough to wail at the sky—he would see the witness to his folly. High above him lurked a Day-Glo-painted watcher in a tree, his masked, delighted face warped in a fiendish grin. If he sees me, Michael thought suddenly, he will kill me. Michael slipped his shotgun's safety off and put his gloved finger at the trigger.
    Iced by fear, Michael's hilarity was transformed into a rage of his own. Oh priceless, he thought. Bozo sits up late drinking Old Bohemian in his trailer. In between commercials for schools that will teach him to drive an eighteen-wheeler and make big money, or be a forest ranger and give people orders and live in the open air instead of cleaning shovels down at the guano mill, he sees an ad for this idiotic conveyance to haul killed deer out of the forest. No more jacklighting them off the interstate ramp or chainsawing roadkill, hell no, he'll go into the forest like a macho male man with his nifty collapsible wheelbarrow. Folds up into twenty-five tiny parts so you can stick it in your back pocket like a roll-up measuring tape or wear it on your belt. It was shocking, he thought, the satisfaction you took in contemplating another man's disgrace. Another man's atoned for your own.
    Finally, cursing and howling, the hunter bore his burden on. When he was gone, Michael realized he had been tracking the man down the barrel of his shotgun, every stumbling inch of the way. He shivered. It had got colder, no question. A wind had come up, whistling through the branches, rattling the icy leaves that still clung to them. When he looked at his watch, it was nearly four and time for the rendezvous. He tossed his pack, climbed from his tree and set out for the base of the granite rock where he had left the others.
    Alvin Mahoney was already waiting, hunkering down out of the wind. He stood up when Michael approached.
    "See anything?"
    "No deer. I did have something to watch, though."
    Norman Cevic came trudging up from the direction of the creek, his red-banded felt hat low over his eyes.
    "So, I didn't hear any firing, fellas. Nothing to report?"
    With all the suppressed energy of his long solitary day, Michael spun out the story of the sorry, angry man and his wonderful device.
    "Didn't you hear the guy?" he asked his friends.
    Norman said he had heard nothing but crows and wind in the trees.
    "Poor bastard," Alvin said.
    "You're lucky," Norman said. "Lucky he didn't look up and shoot you. A local. Probably needs the meat."
    Michael wiped his lenses with a Kleenex. "You're breaking my heart."
    "Revenge on the underclass," Norman said. "Nothing like it."
    "Oh, come on," said Michael. "Don't be so fucking high-minded."
    "We all enjoy it," Norman said. Then he said, "You know, more game wardens get killed in the line of duty than any other law-enforcement officer?"
    For a while they talked about populism and guns and militiamen. They had fallen silent in the dimming light when Alvin put a delaying hand on Michael's arm. Everyone stopped where they stood. There were deer, four of them, an eight-point buck and three females. One of the females looked little older than a yearling. The deer were drinking from the icy river, upstream, upwind. The three men began to ease closer to the stream, where a bend would provide them a clear line of fire. The deer were something more than thirty-five yards away. Michael tried shuffling through the snow, which was topped with a thin frozen layer, just thick enough ice to sound underfoot. He stepped on a frozen stick. It cracked. One of the does looked up