“Hello? Hello? Gods curse this fucking thing! HELLO?”

“I hear you,” I said. “Lower thy voice, for your father’s sake.”

“Who is this?” There was just enough drop in volume for me to put the listening cone a little closer to my ear. But not in it; I would not make that mistake twice.

“A deputy.” Jamie DeCurry and I were the farthest things in the world from that, but simplest is usually best. Always best, I wot, when speaking with a panicky man on a jing-jang.

“Where’s Sheriff Peavy?”

“At home with his wife. It isn’t yet five o’ the clock, I reckon. Now tell me who you are, where you’re speaking from, and what’s happened.”

“It’s Canfield of the Jefferson. I—”

“Of the Jefferson what?” I heard footsteps behind me and turned, half-raising my revolver. But it was only Jamie, with his hair standing up in sleep-spikes all over his head. He was holding his own gun, and had gotten into his jeans, although his feet were yet bare.

“The Jefferson Ranch, ye great grotting idiot! You need to get the sheriff out here, and jin-jin. Everyone’s dead. Jefferson, his fambly, the cookie, all the proddies. Blood from one end t’other.”

“How many?” I asked.

“Maybe fifteen. Maybe twenty. Who can tell?” Canfield of the Jefferson began to sob. “They’re all in pieces. Whatever it was did for em left the two dogs, Rosie and Mozie. They was in there. We had to shoot em. They was lapping up the blood and eating the brains.”

* * *

It was a ten-wheel ride, straight north toward the Salt Hills. We went with Sheriff Peavy, Kellin Frye—the good deputy—and Frye’s son, Vikka. The enjie, whose name turned out to be Travis, also came along, for he’d spent the night at the Fryes’ place. We pushed our mounts hard, but it was still full daylight by the time we got to the Jefferson spread. At least the wind, which was still strengthening, was at our backs.

Peavy thought Canfield was a pokie—which is to say a wandering cowboy not signed to any particular ranch. Some such turned outlaw, but most were honest enough, just men who couldn’t settle down in one place. When we rode through the wide stock gate with JEFFERSON posted over it in white birch letters, two other cowboys—his mates—were with him. The three of them were bunched together by the shakepole fence of the horse corral, which stood near to the big house. A half a mile or so north, standing atop a little hill, was the bunkhouse. From this distance, only two things looked out of place: the door at the south end of the bunkie was unlatched, swinging back and forth in the alkali-wind, and the bodies of two large black dogs lay stretched on the dirt.

We dismounted and Sheriff Peavy shook with the men, who looked mightily glad to see us. “Aye, Bill Canfield, see you very well, pokie-fella.”

The tallest of them took off his hat and held it against his shirt. “I ain’t no pokie nummore. Or maybe I am, I dunno. For a while here I was Canfield of the Jefferson, like I told whoever answered the goddam speakie, because I signed on just last month. Old man Jefferson himself oversaw my mark on the wall, but now he’s dead like the rest of em.”

He swallowed hard. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. The stubble on his face looked very black, because his skin was very white. There was drying vomit on the front of his shirt.

“His wife and daughters’ve gone into the clearing, too. You can tell em by their long hair and their . . . their . . . ay, ay, Man Jesus, you see a thing like that and it makes you wish you were born blind.” He raised his hat to his face to hide it and began to weep.

One of Canfield’s mates said, “Is those gunslingers, Sheriff? Mighty young to be hauling iron, ain’t they?”

“Never mind them,” said Peavy. “Tell me what brought you here.”

Canfield lowered his hat. His eyes were red and streaming. “The three of us was camped out on the Pure. Roundin strays, we were, and camped for the night. Then we heard screamin start from the east. Woke us from a sound sleep, because we was that tired. Then gunshots, two or three of em. They quit and there was more screamin. And somethin—somethin big—roarin and snarlin.”

One of the others said, “It sounded like a bear.”

“No, it didn’t,” said the third. “Never at all.”

Canfield said, “Knew it was comin from the ranch, whatever it was. Had to’ve been four wheels from where we were, maybe six, but sound carries on the Pure, as ye know. We mounted up, but I got here way ahead of these two, because I was signed and they’re yet pokies.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

Canfield turned to me. “I had a ranch horse, didn’t I? A good ’un. Snip and Arn there had nothing but mules. Put em in there, with the others.” He pointed into the corral. A big gust of wind blew through just then, driving dust before it, and all the livestock galloped away like a wave.

“They’re still spooked,” Kellin Frye said.

Looking toward the bunkhouse, the enjie—Travis—said, “They en’t the only ones.”

* * *

By the time Canfield, the Jefferson Ranch’s newest proddie—which is to say hired hand—reached the home place, the screaming had stopped. So had the roaring of the beast, although there was still a good deal of snarling going on. That was the two dogs, fighting over the leavings. Knowing which side of the biscuit his honey went on, Canfield bypassed the bunkhouse—and the dogs snarling within—for the big house. The front door was wide open and there were lit ’seners in both the hall and the kitchen, but no one answered his hail.

He found Jefferson’s lady-sai in the kitchen with her body under the table and her half-eaten head rolled up against the pantry door. There were tracks going out the stoop door, which was banging in the wind. Some were human; some were the tracks of a monstrous great bear. The bear tracks were bloody.

“I took the ’sener off o’ sink-side where it’d been left and followed the tracks outside. The two girls was a-layin in the dirt between the house and the barn. One had gotten three or four dozen running steps ahead of her sissa, but they were both just as dead, with their nightdresses tore off em and their backs carved open right down to the spines.” Canfield shook his head slowly from side to side, his large eyes—swimming with tears, they were—never leaving High Sheriff Peavy’s face. “I never want to see the claws that could do a thing like that. Never, never, never in my life. I seen what they done, and that’s enough.”

“The bunkhouse?” Peavy asked.

“Aye, there I went next. You can see what’s inside for yourself. The womenfolk too, for they’re still where I found em. I won’t take ye. Snip and Arn might—”

“Not me,” said Snip.

“Me, neither,” said Arn. “I’ll see ’un all in my dreams, and that’ll do me fine.”

“I don’t think we need a guide,” Peavy said. “You three boys stay right here.”

Sheriff Peavy, closely followed by the Fryes and Travis the enjie, started toward the big house. Jamie put a hand on Peavy’s shoulder, and spoke almost apologetically when the High Sheriff turned to look at him. “Mind the tracks. They’ll be important.”

Peavy nodded. “Yar. We’ll mind em very well. Especially those headed off to wherever the thing went.”

* * *

The women were as sai Canfield had told us. I had seen bloodshed before—aye, plenty of it, both in Mejis and in Gilead—but I had never seen anything like this, and neither had Jamie. He was as pale as Canfield, and I could only hope he would not discredit his father by passing out. I needn’t have worried; soon he was down on his knees in the kitchen, examining several enormous blood-rimmed animal tracks.

“These really are bear tracks,” he said, “but there was never one so big, Roland. Not even in the Endless Forest.”

“There was one here last night, cully,” Travis said. He looked toward the body of the rancher’s wife and shivered, even though she, like her unfortunate daughters, had been covered with blankets from upstairs. “I’ll be glad to get back to Gilead, where such things are just legends.”