KIDRO POTTER LEANED against the hewn stone mantle above his Inglenook fireplace and watched the dance of the flames, letting the heat soak into the marrow of his bones. He'd propped his sore left knee in exactly the right place, getting hot.
Scooter lay at his feet, sleeping in the warmth. At this elevation, even in summer, the High Sierras got cold at night.
He reached up to the mantle, pulled down his tumbler and sipped rye whiskey, feeling pretty good all over, thinking maybe Nason was right. Maybe J. J. would come home. He'd loved it here as a boy, as had Kidro’s wife and their other son; then came that night.
Ten long years ago.
Strange, how Kidro had never appreciated this place. He had never appreciated his wife and kids or his mother and father, not until after they'd been taken. Now, while he did miss them, he still didn’t give a whiff about this place. With his money he could go anywhere; the French Riviera, Miami Beach, Malibu, Tahiti, anywhere with some decent weather.
That familiar anger welled from deep within. He’d been abandoned. A quirk of fate had stolen them all away and this place had become his prison. He never thought about how any of them died, or why. After everybody else had been taken, John Jethro, Kidro’s pride and joy, had walked away and had never come back.
Ten long years ago.
It had taken Kidro more than two weeks to realize the importance of J.J. in his life.
Kidro hated this emptiness. Surely J.J. must still be alive. He had to be. Kidro would have otherwise heard something.
Everybody up here loved J.J. the same way they’d loved Kidro’s mother and father.
They'd never liked Kidro.
Anger and bitterness had filled Kidro for the past ten years, anger that his only living relative didn’t want to know him anymore, the one he cared for most, bitter because of this place, all these squatters in his valley.
They'd always treated Kidro like an outsider.
Everybody had seen something special in J.J. His love for everything and everybody had been undeniable. It was catching. With J.J. at his side, everybody seemed to like Kidro too.
I miss that.
How could J.J. just up and leave like that?
“Ah.”
Forget about it.
He tossed back the remaining rye, refilled the tumbler and noticed the half empty bottle.
J.J. would have insisted it was half full, as if it really made a difference.
That night, ten years back, Kidro and Ethan had taken their shots. Was J.J. who'd chopped that thing up with his axe, chopping off its front leg. Kidro thought they’d killed it for sure.
Ethan, Kidro’s oldest son, he got the closest look and said he thought it was a Sasquatch. They'd all thought it went off to die someplace and J.J. had nailed its paw to that big spruce by the barn.
For the first time in a long time, Kidro now remembered something awful, something only he had seen, something long hidden in the back pages of his memory. By the following morning, that paw had become a human hand. Kidro had backed away in disbelief and left it nailed there. He'd spun into the barn to feed the horses, eager to forget he’d ever seen it.
That same night, after it had come back and taken all those lives, the hand had vanished.
A chill cold sweat covered Kidro’s body and sheeted his face.
Stop it.
Forget it.
Time to move on.
He needed to find a girl and have another child, another heir, another son to fill his heart.
He refilled his tumbler, bolted it down and filled the glass again, watching the dance of the flames. Flames might dance away bad memories.
I hate the full moon.
He needed to think about something else.
How this place kept Kidro feeling young was reason enough to stay. He knew that. Hell, he’d never been to a doctor in his life. Nobody ever needed a doctor here. Maybe some kind of minerals in the water kept them all feeling young, kept them all so healthy.
He limped into his dark kitchen and stood at the dining table, looking out the bay window at his lower meadow, long grass swaying with the breeze, shimmering blue in the brightness of the moon, light twinkling off his brook. He saw it now as if for the first time.
Magical.
He sipped whiskey, surprised by his sudden appreciation.
Why had he never noticed this before?
“God, they all loved it so.”
He missed them.
That heavy pit in his stomach pulled downward on his heart, remembering his wife, Heather, remembering his eldest son, Ethan. He’d been named after Heather’s father.
John Jethro, J.J.
Kidro wiped away tears, seeing J.J.’s smiling, laughing image in his mind, hearing his voice in his inner ear.
Strange.
All of them were in his memory now, their smiling faces, their laughter echoing through the house, a very distant sound.
My God.
His heart grew heavier than at any time in his life.
If only they had known.
None of it . . .
If they had known about the bull calf, if they had used the ritual back then, they might never have had any trouble.
How could we know?
It hadn’t come for years.
Not until . . .
Maybe Nason had a point. Maybe it had been about the mine. He and his mom had argued about that earlier in that week.
Ten long years ago.
“Ah.”
Forget about it.
Something struck the bay window hard, right in front of him. He leaned forward and looked up through the window.
Those stupid meadowlarks swirled in the moonlit sky. Some dove and flapped close to the glass. One of them darted toward him, smacked the glass with its wings and fell away.
Kidro stepped back from the glass. “Damn.”
Two more hit the window and Kidro backed into the darkness of his kitchen.
He turned back into his living room, refilled his tumbler and wavered; a strange dizziness, not from whiskey. He set the whiskey down and watched the hypnotic dance of the flames, fluttering like wings.
“Wait.” That night ten years ago, the birds had been swarming. He’d forgotten how strange they'd
