Read In The Forest Of Harm for Free Online

of luck, Buster,” he said to the snake that lay coiled inside the bag he’d carried over his shoulder all morning. “I thought for sure we’d only have cornbread tonight.”
    The snake made no response. Brank tied the rabbit’s back legs together with a piece of rawhide and slung it, along with the sack and his shotgun, over his left shoulder. He wiped the blood from his knife, stuck it in his boot and continued climbing up the slippery, pine-straw-covered switchback that would eventually take him to the top of Cowcamp Ridge. He’d walked east since dawn, and the once-warm sun had disappeared into a thick gray cloud bank that seemed to float up from the mountains themselves.
    â€œWe’ll check the weather at the top of this ridge, Buster,” Brank huffed, his legs burning from the near-vertical climb.
    They crested the ridge just as the wind began to whip raw and sting his face. Out of breath, Henry dropped his gear next to a rotting log and looked out over the acres of forest spread below. Only the dark tops of pine trees poked up from the thick white stew of fog.
    â€œShit. Whited out.” He turned northward and sniffed the wind. The sharp-iron smell of cold tingled his nostrils. Winter was coming, and soon. In a couple of weeks these gold mountains would turn a sullen brown, then pale blue snow would dust them like sugar. Right now, though, opaque clouds bloated with water swirled down from the sky, obscuring everything from trees to entire mountaintops.
    He shifted the sack to his other shoulder. “We gotta find us a place fast, Buster. We don’t want to get lost in the Hell.”
    Since midmorning Brank had skirted Godfrey’s Hell, a huge tangle of laurel named for a long-ago bear hunter who’d once followed his dogs into the monstrous coil and had never been seen again. When Brank heard that story, all he could picture was a frantic man forever careening through a viney maze with a pack of frothy-mouthed dogs, and he’d given the Hell an extra-large dollop of respect ever since.
    He squinted at the ground. A finger of a trail beckoned through the fog—nothing more than a dark track through the mist. He followed it carefully, keeping the ridge on his left, the Hell on his right. If he could just find a cave, or even an overhang to hole up and build a fire in, then he and Buster could wait out the weather.
    He trudged on. He despised picking his way down a mountain like this, with clammy vapors icing your bones and putting blinders on your eyes. When he’d first come into the woods he thought whiteouts fun, like walking through giant swirls of cotton candy. But he’d been younger then, and losing yourself in a cloud was not a problem when lost was what you badly needed to be.
    Suddenly he stopped. A noise, off to the right, coming up from the Hell. He sank to his knees and shouldered his shotgun. Maybe it was Trudy. He’d tracked her all the way from Nova Scotia, catching sight of her at dusk, slinking like a tawny scarf through the trees, at night screaming like some caterwauling demon. He’d been able to follow her by the remnants of what she ate—gnawed-out Holstein calves in Pennsylvania; mangled little shoats in Kentucky. These days she fancied fawns and feral pigs. Every place he’d tracked her though, she’d been too canny for the special trap he’d designed, and he’d never been able to draw close enough to get a shot off.
Shit
, Henry thought in disgust, aiming into the white nothingness.
You’ve wandered up and down these mountains for thirty
years and you still can’t beat Daddy’s little girl.
    He listened, peering into the mist, but he heard nothing more. “Musta been a troll,” he muttered, rising to his feet. Immediately his father’s voice boomed through his head.
Der Kobold will come and pluck out your eyes, he said.
Then he laughed that jouncing, beer barrel laugh. Hohohoho.
Poor