Muddy

I’ve got to find a way to make this easier on myself! If you only knew the amount of time I spend fighting with the code to unf*ck the formatting and such. Ah, well. I’ll come up with something.

***

Muddy Wolfe picked up the beer and drank deeply. Sandy Pelham sat on the next stool.

"So, Muddy, found any more mangled cows?" Sandy chuckled.

Muddy’s head swivelled slowly to face Sandy. "You’re welcome to go out yourself and have a look round," he said.

"is it true you and Teddy spent the night up a tree?" asked Sandy. "Cuddling with koalas, were you?"

"Nah. Your mother had ’em all busy." He drained his beer and rose to his feet. "See you tomorrow, Jack," he said to the bartender. He waved to the others in the small bar on his way out the door. Bloody stupid Sandy. He wished Sandy had been with them. Probably would have pissed himself.

It had been a rough night, no denying it. They had talked about pitching their tent on the little platform at their campsite, but opted for sleeping in the LandRover instead. It had been cramped and uncomfortable, but they had felt safer. 

They hadn’t heard so much as a mouse all night long, nor had the dead cows been further disturbed, as far as they could tell the next day. It was while they were documenting the damage that they came across the few dead creatures.

Only one had been intact, although somewhat flattened by the panicking hooves of a one-tonne animal. The others were in pieces, flattened and trampled before the cattle were brought down. Muddy couldn’t think how many there must have been, nor could imagine where they had gone. He and Teddy planned an expedition back to the site to see if they could find the predators’ lair. There must be a cave or a burrow or some other hidden place where they spent their sleeping hours.

It was probably safest to search it out during the day. If they were related to Tasmanian devils, then they were most likely nocturnal. When he and Teddy found the bloody bastards, they’d take them out with gasoline and some matches. Teach them to go destroying a man’s livelihood, or any part thereof. 

All of this went through Muddy’s mind as he drove home from the small bar. Once he arrived at the house, he flicked on the computer to check his email. It was wonderful how modern gadgets brought the outside world that much closer. He had grown up with short wave radios, but computers were so much better.

He skimmed through the messages in the inbox and deleted the obvious spam. There was a message from Jen Dunbar, who said she was going to pass along his news to some Canadian friend. And there was a message from someone he didn’t know with a dot-ca address. He read Jenny’s email first. There were a lot of questions from her Canadian friend about the creatures. The other email was from the friend herself.

He read:

Hi. You don’t know me, but I got your email from Jenny Dunbar. I guess you have her email with my questions by now. I’m hoping you’ll answer directly to my email address to save time. I’m working with a researcher who is studying previously unknown species. Jenny sent me the pics you took and we’d like to know the results of the examination of the creature itself, if you would share that with us.Also, if you don’t mind, would you tell me the details of your discover. I’d like to have it in your words. I look forward to hearing from you. Eva Stern

He read again, thinking her language was a little stilted, but decided that it was a hard letter to write to a stranger. He reopened the message from Jenny, then copied and pasted the list of questions into a reply to Eva.

He began typing answers to the questions. One question in particular made him pause. “Did the attack happen during the day or at night?”

“How the bloody hell should I know?” he said aloud. “It’s not like I was there.” He typed the first few words of his reply and then stopped. He ran a mental movie of the cattle lying down for the night, legs tucked under them. Ferocious little animals swarmed over the cattle, biting and clawing their backs and necks. A few lumbered to their feet and tried to flee, perhaps stepping on one of the predators that fell off, but the image didn’t fit the scene of carnage.

He ran the attack with the cattle up on their feet. As the swarm overran them, the panicked and ran, bumped each other and trampled the animals biting their legs. That fit with the slaughter. The legs had been savagely mangled. Cattle that had died lying down wouldn’t have had such damage to their legs.

Muddy put this reasoning into his answer and ended with, “Strange as it seems, I think they must have attacked in the daytime. It doesn’t make sense, but neither does losing over thirty head of cattle to something smaller than the average house cat. I hope this helps.”

When the last question was done, he sent the email on its way to Canada. Then a quick note to Jenny to let her know he’d answered Eva directly, then Muddy took himself to bed, his mind busy with questions and a lack of answers.

 ***

Okay. There we go for today.