This last image came from a game camera in East Texas. Jonathan followed the digital trail of links back to the original source: an online video with the poster’s contact information. He said he posted the video because he thought the child might be in trouble and the local authorities had come up with nothing. He was looking for anyone who might have information. Jonathan looked up his profile on different sites. He wasn’t a ghost hunter; he was just a regular guy, a mechanic during the week, a hunter on the weekends – someone not unlike himself before the incident in Coombs’ Gulch. His name was Daniel Degan of East Amarillo.
When Jonathan called, Degan’s voice was packed with southern twang and an ethos of ‘leave me the fuck alone’. Jonathan told him briefly that he was a fellow hunter in the Northeast so Degan wouldn’t hang up the phone on him too quickly.
“I wanted to ask you about the video and photo you posted online. The one that shows the boy in it? At the very edge of the camera’s range?”
Degan sighed, and, for a moment, he seemed defeated, as if he were about to beg and plead to be left alone. “Look. I know y’all interested in that picture. I can’t tell you how many nutjobs have called me up and wanted me to take them out to that hunting ground to look for some ‘ghost kid’ or whatever, but I ain’t doing it. All you fuckers are just wasting my time. I searched those woods myself; got nothing. I contacted the police; they got nothing. So I finally posted it online to see if someone out there knew something and got a whole lotta shit for it. You know what? Now, I don’t even know what it is in that picture. Maybe it is just a fucked-up lens on the camera or something like all these online camera wizards say. I don’t know. Camera don’t fuck up any other times I use it. Even that same night, got plenty of other photos that are just fine. But it damn sure looked to me like some kid lost in the woods in the middle of the night, and I wanted to figure it out, and all I got was grief for my trouble. So no thanks. I just want to let it alone.”
“I’m not looking for anything like that,” Jonathan said. “I guess, I’m just… I think maybe I’ve had a similar experience and I just wanted to talk to you, to see if your picture is real – if you were real – and not one of these made-up internet pictures that are all over the place.”
“As real as your mother,” he said. “I don’t just go around putting this shit up ’cause I think it’s fun. It was fucking weird, you know? Spooked me out! Let me tell you, that hunting area was way out there. Can’t no kid just accidentally wander out there, especially at night. And no kid should be out there! Place is filled with razorbacks that would tear him up something awful. Nah. That picture’s real. What it’s a picture of, I’m not sure anymore.”
Jonathan kept his explanation vague, that he’d been hunting at night and thought he saw a kid running around and so he started researching it. Degan’s voice rolled off the phone: “Fuck. If I’d been out there that night I damn well coulda put a bullet in him; then I’d be on the hook for murder or somethin’.”
Jonathan hung up the phone, and waited in the silence of the evening. He tried to listen. He tried to find a voice inside himself – the voice that sits on the periphery of self-made illusion and whispers the truth, but all he could hear was the blood pumping through his heart, and all he could think of was a question he’d once asked a fellow hunter.
Richard was an old neighbor who’d lived two doors down when Jonathan was growing up. He was an avid hunter – bow, single-shot, black powder. It didn’t matter what part of the hunting season it was, Rich was out there in the early-morning hours. He was an older man with skin leathered by the elements, a thick mustache and sandy hair. He had always been quiet, but when he saw Jonathan and the boys unloading their gear from the truck one Saturday afternoon, he wandered over and struck up a conversation. After that, Jonathan, Gene, Michael and Conner looked up to him as a kind of hunting guru. He knew literally everything about it, no matter the species, no matter the location, no matter the tool. They would bring him beer sometimes and pick his brain. Rich drank Coors Lite and sat on the porch in the evening, talking with them. He wasn’t married. He had no kids they knew of; it was just him in this small ranch-style house with a small arsenal and a seemingly endless supply of hunting knowledge born out of past military experience in the Arctic Circle. During the Eighties he became a guide for various hunting safari networks throughout the world, tracking and locating top game for wealthy clients who showered wildlife preserves with six-figure donations in exchange for a hunting trip – guaranteed by Rich, of course.
“Why’d you stop doing it?” they’d once asked him, but he just shook his head and drank his beer like they would never understand.
“It ain’t what it seems,” he finally said. “It’s not true. I don’t think there is much that’s true anymore.”
His last few years before coming to this quiet hamlet were spent back in the Arctic Circle, working for an oil company and doing side work tracking wildlife movements for the Environmental Protection Agency.
Jonathan once asked him which animal was the most dangerous to hunt. Naturally,
