The Last Day of Hunting Camp

 

            His friends and he had separated and spread out. It was normal practice among these hunters.
            It was late afternoon and he had been walking uphill for a long time, it seemed like all day in fact. Though it was late in the year, October, it was warm and sunny and very dry in the hills.
            It was beginning to seem like an extended camping trip. One guy had succeeded in shooting a big one. Not the hunter, or his other two friends. He was sleepy too. It was hypnotically sleepy-making walking through that sunny quiet landscape. He was a middle-aged fellow in good physical condition, but even they do get weary from time to time.
            The wind blew through the rolling hills, bringing little bursts of freshness. It didn’t last long.
            He glanced about, seeking some shade because he had begun to think about just sitting on his back end for a while and eating something. The area was short on shade trees. There were scrubby bushes in abundance, too small for shade.
            He noticed some rocky outcropping not too far away so he headed that direction with quickened steps. One, a good twenty feet tall emerged out of the dry grassy hillside in such a way that there was a deep shadow underneath it. Bingo!
            The hunter looked around for snakes or anything else in that shadow, didn’t see any, and so he crawled into its depth on his hands and knees. He shrugged out of his pack, propped his rifle standing up against the stone easily to hand at his right side. He put his back against the cool stone.
            His eyes wanted to close, but he was hungry. In the pack he had a two litre bottle of water, some jerky, and a pound of almonds. The hunter didn’t eat junk. So the meat and nuts and water would have to do for lunch.
            He managed to put his things back into his pack after eating, and he slept. After a bit he was uncomfortable, so he lay flat, using his pack for a pillow. He didn’t want ants in his ears or anything like that. It was his last sleepy thought.
            Ah, but someone, or several someones, had their eyes on the sleepy man. They knew they couldn’t handle him while he was awake, so they waited for sleep to have him firmly in its grip. It wasn’t long before he was out cold.
            Five of them came out of their concealment. It didn’t take much to hide one of them. They would have been hard to discern among the scrub and rock in any case. They were tanned dark brown and naked. Their general configuration was humanoid, but only about a foot and a half tall. Wild black hair covered their heads and grew over their backsides like a pelt. They had sqwunched up, greedy looking little faces with black little eyes and possessed large canine teeth. Gnarly might have been the most apt descriptor.
            Each one carried a coiled length of homemade rope. It seemed to have been fashioned of long hairs gleaned somehow, and long dry grass.
            Fin and Nr each approached one of the sleeping hunter’s shoulders, apparently with an eye to fastening a line to each of his shoulders.
            “It’s big,” said Fin.
            “Not too big. Looks tasty!” said Nr. “Len, get a leg hooked up! Ov, you get the other one!”
            Zur had been elected to sit on the man’s chest and hold his head up so he could be dragged off. Things were looking pretty good for a clean capture.
            “There’ll be feasting tonight!” said Fin.
            The hunter didn’t have long enough hair to hold onto, so Zur rigged his head up with some of that rough line, and was just getting settled in. All of them were ready for the hauling.
            But just then someone else arrived. A very large someone. Someone with a disgusted look on his big face. His lips curled and he spat off to the west.
            “Rock Grunts!” he said. “Dirty, rotten, stinky, stupid little Rock Grunts!”
            Five little stinkies looked up in dismay and scattered, leaving their little weird ropes behind.
            The hairy giant, watched them as they ran He shook his head and spat again.
            “Ew,” said the giant.
            “I wonder if the kids would like this one?” he asked himself. “Of, course they would!” he answered his own question. “He’s just the right size for a pet!”
            He wasn’t very worried about the man’s opinion of the matter. Who checks with a creature to see if it wants to be a pet. A pet’s status is determined by the possessor of said pet. No? Yes!
            The big guy carefully removed and tossed aside the Rock Grunt’s little hairy ropes and hoisted the hunter up onto his shoulder with the man's head hanging down behind. He was careful not to damage the man. He wanted him to survive the trip to the cave.
            When our man finally woke he couldn’t understand where he found himself. He was hanging over the back of a very large hairy and muscular walking creature. His head flopped as the giant marched along. This was going to take a minute to figure out he realized as he bounced with each step.
            It was making him so sick to his stomach that he could hardly think. It didn’t help that the giant smelled like vinegar, musk, gym socks, and something else too. It didn’t help at all. And his nose kept hitting that long hair as they bounced along.
            “Hey,” said the hunter.
            “Mmm?” said the giant.
            “Put me down,” said the hunter.
            The giant laughed and kept going. “Later. Down later,” he said.
            “Where are we going?” said the queasy hunter desperately.
            “Hm?” said the big guy.
            After some more of this sort of thing, they came to the entrance of a cave. It was a low oval opening, relatively low, sandwiched between layers of outthrust sedimentary rock. Maybe it had been a large bubble?
            “No!” said the hunter, as they entered the cave.
            The giant put the hunter on the floor. “Down, now,” he said, in his own language of course.
            Mama Hairy Giant appeared, center stage, about then.
            “What’s that for?” she demanded looking down upon the stunned hunter. “It’s not edible!”
            “The Rock Grunts had him lashed up and were going to drag him underground and eat him, Honey! I saved him for the kids to play with!” expostulated Mr. Hairy Giant.
            “Hm? Really? I wonder what those taste like?” said she, questioning eyebrows up. You could almost imagine her thumbing her butcher knife.
            Now, our hunter couldn’t understand their language but he didn’t like the tone of it at all.
            “Hold up, Honey! I carried this guy home for the kids,” said Mr. Hairy Giant. “To play with! Look how cute he is!”
            “Cute?” yowled Mrs. Hairy Giant, “You think that’s cute?”
            Right on cue Little Hairy Girl appeared from somewhere in the back of the cave. “OH! Oh! He’s so cute! Can we keep him, Mama? Daddy?” she squealed in a high yodel.
            “I was thinking of trying to cook him,” said Mama.
            “NOOOOO! I want him!” whined Little Hairy Girl. Then Baby Hairy lying somewhere off stage starting yelling at the top of his lungs in solidarity and for general purposes.
            “Fine, play with him for a couple of days. But you have to feed him. Then we’ll eat him!” said Mama Hairy Giant.
            Mr. Hairy Giant wasn’t paying attention to the negotiations because he had noticed an odd thing at the entrance to the cave. It was a light that didn’t belong there. It looked like the moon had come to see them for some reason. As he stared as it, it grew into a shining sphere. It was pinkish and covered with swirling designs. It quite mesmerized Mr. Hairy Giant.
            It moved nearer the family group and our hunter who was still sitting on the stone floor of the cave. At that point all eyes were on it, not each other, or the captured hunter.
            It expanded until it seemed to hold about the same volume as a VW Beetle, but rounder of course. It settled down low, handy to the hunter where he sat.
            A voice that seemed to come from nowhere in particular, but mercifully spoke American English said, “Get in while you have a chance!”
            “How?” said he.
            “Just stick a leg in and follow that leg! Now!” said the voice.
            Meanwhile the Hairy family watched with mouths hanging open, stunned.
            The hunter hopped to his feet. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” he said and stuck a leg in, and then followed the leg all the way inside the shining sphere. There he found himself sort of floating in a thin pink vapor. It smelled like strawberries, maybe.
            “Now what?” he said.
            “Oh, I’ll take you back to your buddies. They found your stuff under that rock and are wigging out and have called for a search and rescue,” said the pervasive voice. “If we hurry we can put a halt to that.”
            “Um, what was that all about back in the cave?” said the hunter.
            “The kid wanted you for a pet. The old lady wanted to cook you, as an experiment. The old guy saved you from the Rock Grunts.”
            “WTH, are Rock Grunts?” said he.
“Sort of like faeries, eastern OR variety. They wanted to eat you too. So you owe Big Hairy for that one,” said the voice.
            “I don’t believe in Big Foot,” said the hunter, as if reassuring himself.
            “You do too! Face facts. Come on…” said the orb voice with a light dry chuckle.
            “I didn’t want to,” he said.
            “A word of advice. Don’t take naps in Rock Grunt and Hairy Giant territory. We have to pull somebody out of that scene every once in a while,” the voice went on.
            “I don’t know what you’re going to tell your friends, when you wander into camp. You’ll have to think of something that works for you guys, OK?”
            “Right,” said the hunter.
            The pink orb let him out near camp, but out of sight of the guys.
            He turned back to say, “thanks,” but the orb was gone.
            He frowned. “Did that happen?” Then he walked over to meet his friends at camp.
            It would be truly interesting to know what he told them!