Demon Child

the trees and the brush. They were almost instantly gone from sight, leaving mountain laurel trembling in their wake. Howling more excitedly than ever, slavering and yelping, falling over one another in their haste to make contact with their quarry, they somehow still managed not to lose sight of their objective.
        The scent had grown stronger; the wolf was nearer!
        The state trooper named Halliwell led the procession along a narrow, beaten trail between the elms and the pines. Far ahead, in the dark tunnel of foliage, the last of the hounds was in sight. Halliwell spurred his mount forward. Behind him, the rest of the hunting party followed in single-file as many of the men began unsnapping the flaps of the rifle cases strapped to their saddles.
        “It looks as if it might not be a long affair, after all,” Walter said in the short moment before it was Jenny's turn to goad her horse into the woods. “Those brutes are yapping right on the heels of something. It might be only minutes now.”
        Then the horse before her had gone forward, and she had to follow it into the shade of the trees where the sunlight came through in thumb-sized patches and dappled everything beneath the branches. Behind her, Walter Hobarth followed, enjoying himself.
        But he had been mistaken. The hunt was not about to be concluded at all. They followed the noisy dogs for another hour, twisting through dangerously narrow forest paths, urging their horses around low-hanging branches, sometimes crossing blessedly open fields only to enter the trees once again at some other point.
        Shortly before ten-thirty, they found the cave.
        “What is it?” Hobarth asked as he drew his mount even with Jenny's mare, wiping at perspiration that beaded on his broad forehead.
        They had come out into a mid-forest clearing some two-hundred yards across and roughly circular in shape. On three sides, there were trees, a few meandering animal trails like the one they had just left. On the third side, to their right, there was a stone wall approximately forty-feet high. Set into this was a wide-mouthed cave that wound backwards into the land, into purple darkness.
        “It's a lair of some sort,” Jenny said.
        “Why are the hounds holding back?”
        Jenny pointed at Gabe Atchison who had dismounted to talk to his dogs. “He's holding them back, preparing them, I guess.”
        Atchison ruffled the heads of the dogs, scratched their ears. It was an indication of the enormous control he had over them. They desired nothing more than to invade that cave that stank of their enemy, but they fought down their instincts and listened to their human master. Their eyes rolled in a comic manner. Their tongues lolled, and they pawed the earth desperately. But until Gabe Atchison told them to go inside and flush the beast out, they would remain here.
        Atchison hunkered down.
        The two state troopers had their rifles ready. Everyone slowly fanned out in a semi-circle around the cave mouth. Only Jenny and Hobarth hung back, weaponless.
        “It's impossible to know whether or not it's rabid,” Trooper Halliwell told them. “But we are going to proceed as if we were certain that it is.”
        Men nodded.
        The gray clouds crowded more tightly into the sky than before, and the land seemed to take on a cape of shadow.
        “Okay,” Halliwell said to Richard.
        “Gabe,” Richard said, passing on the permission.
        Gabe snapped some brutal, high-pitched command to his dogs and returned, quickly, to his saddle.
        The hounds dashed forward, disappeared into the confines of that dank, stone tunnel.
        “They don't have any fear at all,” Jenny said admiringly.
        “Oh, yes they do!” Hobarth said. “But with a dog, he never thinks that fear means he should run. Fear makes him attack. If he gets hurt badly, suddenly, then he runs. Dogs are natural optimists. They never seem to see that something bad might happen to them.”
        She wished she had some of that quality herself, she decided. Of course, the dogs only leaped into trouble because of their optimism. They never learned to avoid trouble altogether by being wary.
        Any moment now, they would come roiling out, pursued by or pursuing the wolf.
        She gripped the reins tighter.
        The ungodly racket inside the cave had all of them on edge. The hounds were no longer