It don’t take us long to find them.
After maybe two hundred yards of walking through the still-smoky woods, Alex is the first to spot a massive pile of black fur in the middle of a small clearing surrounded by loblolly pines. They don’t say anything, just put out a hand to stop me and Chris in our tracks and then slowly point to the literal dogpile before us.
We’ve been calling them hellhounds, because that’s what the general public calls them, but the leading scholars say they’re more like wolves than dogs. I read a couple of the older papers about them for my dissertation, and researchers debated for a while about the scientific nomenclature, trying to decide between canis lupus ignis or canis lupus infernus. I think ignis—Latin for fire—is more precise and more accurately describes the animal’s well-documented ability to breathe fire, but general consensus eventually went with infernus—Latin for hell. Some histories you just can’t shake, I guess.
There appear to be four of them sleeping in the clearing—one adult that’s about the size of a Shetland pony and four pups maybe the size of smallish dogs. Bigger than the really yippy dogs, but smaller than a hunting dog. They’re clearly still pups, maybe only about eight weeks or so old.
They’re fluffier than I expected them to be in this ridiculous Alabama heat—not quite Chow or Pomeranian levels of fluff, but they could definitely give a newfie a run for its money. They’re just laying there in the middle of the clearing—as apex predators, they can do that—and the sun cuts through the still-smoky air to shine brilliantly on their beautiful black coats.
It makes for a beautiful scene, to be sure, but the leftover smoke is making it difficult to properly document these dogs. I’m doing what I can with my smartphone and its tiny telephoto lens attachment—I’ve already got about a dozen photos—but I’d really like to get closer. I wasn’t lying to the rangers earlier; no one has documented pack behavior in hellhounds yet, and it looks like this might be my chance to be the first.
I take a careful step closer to the hounds, but not careful enough. My foot lands on a charred twig and snaps it in two with a crack. I freeze. Wait.
The adult hound’s tail twitches, and a pup yips in its sleep. I wait for a few more seconds, but nothing else happens. I start to creep closer.
Alex’s hand shoots out in front of me, blocking my path, and I remember it’s not just me and the dogs in these woods. I turn to face Alex and see their eyes are wide in apprehension and fear. Chris, too, on their other side, looks like he wants to turn back.
I raise my phone to take one last pic—okay, five last pics—of the hounds, then turn and lead the way out of the forest.
#
We regroup in the Ranger’s Office, Alex, Chris, and I crowding around one of the two small desks while Blake kindly bring us a few Gatorades from the office minifridge. We sip in silence for a few moments. Well, I sip. Chris and Alex all but chug. Their bottles are half-empty within the minute.
“So, Chris,” I say once he sets his bottle down. I know it needs asking, but I’m still trying to figure out how to word my question, so I take another swig of Gatorade. “Maybe we should have clarified this before walking into those woods, but….” I sip again, still trying to find the words.
Chris eyes me warily, like he knows what I’m going to ask. “What was my end game plan?”
I nod. On our way back into the station, I’d tried to take a closer look at what I’d guessed to be Chris’s vehicle—the only one in the lot besides mine that didn’t have a Forestry Service tag hanging from the rearview mirror. It was an old, dusty red pickup with a white removable camper. I hadn’t been able to see any guns, but that didn’t mean they weren’t somewhere in the vehicle—either behind the bench seat in the cab or literally anywhere in the bed of the truck. His camper windows needed washing something awful.
Chris shrugs. “What was yours?”
I highly doubt he took the gig without having any kind of plan for actually wrangling whatever monster he’d find; he’s just trying to sus out what mine is.
Here’s the thing about working with—or competing against—other hunters in the gig economy. Well, one of the things. The creatures we work with aren’t exactly protected species. They’ve only been openly acknowledged as existing for a couple of decades, and there’s been enough superstition to keep environmental protection measures from making it all the way through Congress—at least in this country. And our clients only want the beasts out of their hair; some of them don’t care what happens to them, so long as they stop carrying off chickens or snatching pets or setting haybales on fire.
And that means different hunters have different means of containing any given supernatural threat, some of which are more or less harmful to the “threat” in question. Some of which are fatal. We are called hunters, after all.
Right now, Chris is sizing me up. Trying to decide whether agreeing to work with me was a mistake. I don’t blame him, though. I’m doing the same thing.
The thing is, what I want to do with these hounds is different from what I know I can do with them. I’d like to just let them be and spend a few weeks watching them, documenting them, and writing about them. I haven’t sent anything out for publication in at least a year—not because I haven’t been hunting, mind you, but because I’ve been… otherwise preoccupied. But these dogs, they’ve got me excited about my work again. Hell, they got me so excited I almost got dangerously close without proper protection.
But these dogs don’t belong here. I don’t know for sure how they got here—though I’ve got my theories—but I know they’d be better off somewhere else, away from the underbrush of Tuskeegee’s dry and dry-mesic oak-pine forest right at the beginning of drought season.
“I’ve got a contact at the Duke Supernatural Wildlife Refuge,” I tell Chris. “They’re better equipped to handle four hellhounds in the middle of summer than any other refuge or center I know of in the Southeast. I think the best course of action is to trap, sedate, and relocate.”
I wait for Chris’s response, hoping his too-dirty camper windows don’t hide a hunting rifle in the bed of his truck.
Chris’s face is inscrutable. “Duke, huh? Interesting,” he says. “I just got one question for you.”
“What’s that?” I ask, apprehensive.
“You planning on driving them dogs all the way to North Carolina in the back seat of your Altima, all by yourself?”
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