woman would behave when I saw his footprint near a stream. Was it a bluff or a double-bluff? Which way was he really going? I’ve always trusted to instinct. You get a feel of your quarry stronger than any scent. If the signs don’t add up with the feel you ignore the signs. That’s the difference between a lousy tracker and a great one.
—You never caught it, though, interposed Two-Time sweetly.
—Saw him twice, said Peckenpaw from a distance. This shape, huge like a mountain, going through thick forest growth like it wasn’t there. When I got to the spot it was like a tank had gone through. It gives a man respect seeing a thing like that.
He was silent for a moment.
—The second time, he went on, was the time he came to visit me. Sleeping’s a risky business in Bigfoot land. I used to put an alarm system round my campfire—tripwires everywhere to ring bells and clatter my pans. One night I wake up and there he is, just standing there, looking down at me. Walked through all the alarms as neat as you please just to take a good look. That’s when I stopped thinking he was a woman. I lay there still as the grave and he nodded and walked away so then I turn to grab my rifle, IT WASN’T THERE. He moved it to the other side of the fire. O he was clever all right. And I’ll tell you something else, Mr sophisticated Hunter. I may not have caught the motherfucker but he made me more of a man than You’ll ever be. COME AND GET ME, he meant when he gave me that stare, CATCH AS CATCH CAN. YOU see: he showed me a point of no return. didn’t matter that I was the best tracker that ever lived with ten lifetimes’ experience. He had a million years’ practice at running away. So now? Now I respect his privacy.
One-Track Peckenpaw leapt to his feet suddenly, his arms windmilling as he shouted: —COME AND GET ME, YOU BASTARD! CATCH AS CATCH CAN I and burst into convulsive laughter, great gulping laughs that shook his eyebrows; while Two-Time Hunter pulled the last leg off his spider, leaving it a round, wriggling, dying core.
Blink.
Elfrida Gribb had always thought the trouble with Flann O’Toole had to do with two things: his preoccupation with being such a disgustingly uproarious broth of a boy, and the fact that his middle name was Napoleon. An Irish Napoleon was a concept so grotesque it had to end up like O’Toole.
O’Toole made potato whisky in a back room and seduction attempts upon the person of every female who entered the Elbaroom; he swore oaths regularly and broke promises unfeelingly; he was prone to fits of violent temper, but thought himself a reasonable man; he was likely at any moment of the day or night to keel over in an alcoholic stupor, but he considered himself a man of power; he was carried to his bed every night in a haze of obscenity and vomit, but was convinced he was a leader in the community; he quoted poetry as he did ugly things. To Elfrida, his presence darkened a room and denied the beauty of life; to himself, he was a lightning-rod, conductor of electricity, Prometheus unchained, raw, carnal man in his prime, the very vitality of life. There was, too, a strong religious streak left in him; on mornings-after he could be seen mortifying his flesh with a cane, or heard crying in agony through the door of Mlle de Sade’s chambers at the House of the Rising Son. It was one of the reasons Dolores had left him; those who undergo physical suffering or mutilation involuntarily naturally loathe those who inflict it upon themselves in the name of God. Her only possible reaction had been flight.
—Holy Mary, cried O’Toole to a farmer’s wife, who had shrunk away in fear, you look about ready for it, me darlin. What wouldn’t you say now to a large dose of O’Toole’s hot cock, eh? There, don’t shrink away. ’Tis the Organ O’Toole I offer, you Protestant whore. And that’s no mean gift I can tell you surely with the stops pulled out and all.
The farmer sat bridling by his wife, but made no attempt to defend her; a bellyful of potato whisky makes a mean fighter.
—There now, observe your husband, lurched O’Toole, if he isn’t being more sensible than yourself, then I don’t know