A hunter

A Story by Indrid Cold

A man in the search of a mythical creature

A HUNTER

After several hours of following the trace of the beast without sleeping or even resting, Anatoly was starting to feel exhaustion getting to his bones. The night before, right after lying down to sleep, he heard it walking around but he didn´t manage to see it. He felt his breath warming his surroundings as it tried to remain silent. It moved slowly expecting his guest to continue asleep; it did everything it could to observe without being observed but it failed. Anatoly packed up immediately and began the search.

He had arrived in the country three months ago from the millennial land of the Tsars. He was marveled by the green gigantic mountains as he moved patiently towards his destination. He saw the people covered in dark long clothes with no collars or sleeves, but a single hole for their heads to pass through.

He stared at the old houses made of mud and manure where more insects lived than people. Dogs wandered these lands trying to protect their owners from invisible enemies that dared to jump over the stone fences and cross their fields. Trees created a mattress of dramatic silence where spirits whispered their lost desires.

He saw this and so much more and felt fascinated by the lost world that science had destroyed in his old continent.

When he got off the bus in the first town, he asked around about the creature that had been seen six months ago by an expeditionary German group. He held in his hands the smudgy clipping taken from a national newspaper which talked about the rare figure they´ve seen. He got no answer.

Two weeks later, the landscape suddenly ran out of roads. The last place he was able to reach was a set of dirty wooden houses in the middle of a mountain range. He spent the night there, hoping to find someone who could guide him. At dawn, he went into a dark and old tavern, sat down and asked for a transparent beverage he saw on a shelf. As he drank it he felt a burst of fire going down his throat. Even the strong flavor he initially tasted at the back of his tongue had a residue in his stomach. Anatoly established a weak conversation with the bartender and when he started to feel dizzy, after some shuts, the strength went back to his mouth and he dared to ask about the odd animal that lurked among the letters of the press. Evading his face, the bartender assured he didn´t know anything about it. Three days passed before the same person who took the German group to its expedition found him. He was a short and thin man that had a strong resemblance to an excessively tanned Chinese. With mumbled English they agreed to get to that specific point walking from the next morning on.

The first day they moved without remarkable difficulties on a path built by slave natives centuries ago. It was a trail made of stones of every size and shape possibly imaginable that stuck out. Zigzagging down carefully not to roll, Anatoly wondered how could small people as his guide, have built such amazing stairs.

“With the incentive of fear.” Answered his companion. “Spaniards made them do them with whips and horses.”

Anatoly tried many times to set a long conversation with his guide but he merely managed to hear his name: “Chiquito”. He found out later that he had ironically received that name for having had the tallest progenitor in the region.

They walked until sunset.

That night after setting his tent and having dinner, Anatoly took his diary and wrote his impressions on his journey. Chiquito had assured him that they would be able to see “El negro”, which was the name people from the zone had given the creature. “Black”, he thought, might be the price he´d been looking for a long time.

He remembered that when he was young, his father had tried to pass his ideas about the paranormal on to him. It was useless at that time, not because he wasn´t open minded enough to accept his father´s thoughts, but because their relationship was in decay since his mother died. She used to be the bond that kept them together.

Now it was a different situation.

One day, after having arrived from work, he felt like helping his wife with the housework. Anatoly thought it might be a good idea to start by cleaning the kitchen since it was the place she complaint the most about. He started doing the dishes but in the middle of the task, someone knocked on the door. He turned around and tried to look through the kitchen´s door, and pass the living room, if the person who was at the entrance could be visible on the window. It wasn´t. He dried his hands with a cloth and walked to the entry. Just a few seconds later he turned the knob and opened the cold metal piece but no one was there. He took a look outside and saw nothing in the surroundings, so he closed the door to continue his labor, but as he turned around what he saw terrorized him and changed his life forever. Everything he had cleaned was just as he had found it when he entered his house from work. The dishes and the pots were dirty again. The leftovers he had thrown to the garbage were back on the dishes. It was like someone had rewinded his last twenty minutes, allowing him to remember everything.

When his wife returned home, Anatoly told her everything but she didn´t believe him. And that was the beginning of the fire that burned through his veins: The fire of uncertainty.

Back in his country he tried to solve old mysteries that nobody had ever been able to. He spent whole nights waiting for the ghosts to show up, the amorphous creatures to come out from their lairs, the space ships to come down, and the gods to talk to him.

Many years passed and nothing happened.

And now he was trying in a different country. A specific place which he would have never thought as a possibility for him since he had never been abroad, or even away from his birthplace.

He was a lost prophet in a lost land.

That night he dreamt of his wife. He saw her dressed in an old white bride dress. She was standing next to their bed, waiting for him to take her to church. There was a slight innuendo of a smile on her face; just like the Mona Lisa. Without knowing why, he felt uneasy in his dream. Anatoly saw himself as a frightened little child who rested on the bed without knowing what to do. He wondered why they were getting married again. He remembered very vividly that day and most of the events that had taken place.

“She’s so beautiful.” He thought the moment he saw her in the temple and compared the fear he was feeling at that moment with the one that made his hands sweat profusely that day.

She was smiling and never lost eye contact. They danced for everybody to see how happy they were and, in the end, he got drunk with his old pals as they congratulated him for his beautiful wife.

So he kept wondering in his dream the reason she might want to get married once again. A bird sang and he was halfway awake. He opened his eyes, looked around, remembered where he was and found out immediately the answer to his question.

Anatoly ate a typical South-American breakfast for the first time. He thought it was a unique experience. There were some small tortillas made of corn with a flavor he couldn´t identify in his old country´s food.

Excited with the prospects of the local cuisine, he and his guide re-took their path and walked continuously for many days, stopping only to rest and eat.

When the time passed, Chiquito felt a little more confident and began to talk to Anatoly about the mysterious creature they were after.

“People see it when the rain comes,” he said, “But that is all you will get.”

“Why is that?” Anatoly asked.

“He always returns to the spirit world before you can touch him.” Then, Chiquito remained silent.

Anatoly had read a lot about it. He was very fond of an American writer called Prentice Mulford, who had dedicated his whole life to search the answers to the most important mysteries of the soul, but he hadn´t proposed what Chiquito just mentioned. He read it on a magazine.

According to the author of the article (whose name he couldn´t remember), we would never find any conclusive proof of the existence of the phenomena studied by the cryptozoology since these creatures came from a different dimension. Many researchers thought that certain gates were used by some entities to visit us from time to time, but it wasn´t possible for us to even identify where such doors were located, or the specific timing required to be used.

“That is why it is quite improbable to find the bones of a dead yeti or anything like that.” He read in the article.

Two days later the sky turned black and a constant and cold rain started. At the beginning, Anatoly tried to cover from the water as much as possible but after a week of a world transformed by liquids, he stopped looking after his clothes and his gear, and tried to adapt to the new environment.

It wasn´t easy, especially because they weren´t able to cook the food they collected. It was depressing. Everything they consumed was cold. Chiquito seemed not to care but Anatoly became a sad and quiet person.

To complement their emptiness, the vegetation around them became denser with every step they took. It was the jungle. Everything was covered by shades cast by the dim light of a distant sun.

One afternoon when Anatoly had lost track of the time, he asked Chiquito:

“Where have all the sounds gone?”

But he didn´t pay attention to his partner´s answer because his mind was busy trying to separate the hours from the years, and the dreams from the consciousness.

Next morning they walked up to a waterfall cliff. From the top, it looked like it was about 30 meters deep. Anatoly felt he didn´t have enough energy to face it.

“We are very near.” Chiquito said.

“I don´t think I can make it.” Anatoly answered. “Besides, with the rain and the waterfall it´s even more difficult to climb down safely.”

He was right. Even taking into account that the quantity of water that formed the string wasn´t considerable, it was constant; and it meant that the surroundings were dangerously slippery. Anatoly thought about the possibilities of an eventual fall. In the worst case, he could break a leg, or the two of them, and Chiquito wouldn’t be able to carry him anywhere. He would have to go look for help in a nearby town but that might mean days, or even weeks.

Having the possibility of spending long hours of horrible agony in the middle of a hostile environment wasn’t comforting to him. Besides, wild animals showed up all the time and he could not be able to defend himself. He once read on a magazine article about giant snakes. He was simply not going for it.

“I’m sorry to have wasted your time, Chiquito, but…” Anatoly couldn’t finish the message since his guide was already tying an old rope to a tree.

“It’s not difficult.” Chiquito said and he started to climb down the rock and plant wall.

“Wait!” Anatoly looked sincerely concerned. “You aren’t using the appropriate gear.” He, on the other hand, was holding a bag with his, which was a professional climbing set. He took a rope out and tied it to the same tree, but when he came back to the edge; his partner was already half a dozen meters away.

“Damn it,” He thought, “If I pull through this, I’ll never get out of my country again.”

He started to climb dawn. As soon as he felt the weight of his body distributed on his four extremities he realized how weak he was. Anatoly stepped on a plant that looked like a cheerleader’s pompom only to find out it wasn’t safe since its density was minimum. His foot went straight through. For a second he thought he would fall right on the rocks but his body reacted immediately.

He was terrified.

His body had started shaking. His back covered completely with a thin surface of cold sweat. His mind was already creating a dozen possible situations in which his fate was reduced to a terrible and dark experience. Anatoly looked at Chiquito in search for help but he didn’t seem to be concerned; he had stopped although he wasn’t climbing back to find out about his status.

“Should I go back?” He wondered. “To what?” That was his answer.

First, his wife left him. She realized her husband had stopped being the accepting man she once met on a June afternoon. That day, they were both, separately, taking care of somebody else’s child. They would remember it as a struggle they agreed not to repeat, and therefore, they never had any children of their own. But from the moment Anatoly discovered that there was so much more than the dense world he lived in, his mind found a second place for his wife and the job he has always loved.

It was the fire of uncertainty.

Then, he neglected his job. He would arrive late and left early. From time to time his employees received news from him informing all kinds of sicknesses and ailments that kept him from his post. Just a month later his boss said he had enough of it and asked him to clean his desk.

When he got home he sat down on his old armchair and fixed his eyes on the floor. No TV, no music, no people around to remind him of his obligations as an employee, as a husband, as a citizen. A dog barked nearby, kids played on the street, and someone knocked on the door but he even didn’t bother to ask who it was. That was his time for the first time in his life and, as he tasted it, he realized the movement of the hands in the clock had always been his. It was his life; it has always been.

Anatoly looked down at the tempestuous waters bursting over and over and he truly felt no fear at all. So he went on.

His first step put him back on balance. The second one was a mistake that could have cost him his life because he slipped immediately. When Chiquito noticed Anatoly was in trouble, he saw his partner hanging upside down and trying to regain his original position. Anatoly simply didn’t have enough strength to do it.

Chiquito darted towards the exact spot where his companion was in danger. He moved on the rocks with a gracious ability that made him look like a circus acrobat performing his act. In a few minutes he reached Anatoly and started to assist him. Without saying a word, Chiquito moved his strong fingers on the rope untying the chaotic knot that had been formed due to the fall. Anatoly began to complain about his right leg. It was possible to see his blood on his pants but, apparently, there was nothing to worry about.

Suddenly, Chiquito stayed very still and with the palm of his hand he indicated Anatoly to do the same. A couple of seconds passed and, after having put his index finger on his small lips to ask for silence, Chiquito indicated a specific point by the river’s shore. At first, the young Russian couldn’t identify what his companion was trying to show him. After all, he was still hanging upside down and the bloodstream redirected mainly to his head was starting to cause him a headache.

But then he succeeded in seeing it.

First it moved just a little bit. After that it stayed still, apparently staring at something that wasn’t them.

“They were right,” said Anatoly, “it’s black. As dark as the night.”

He passed his right hand over his face to wipe out the rain water from his eyes but the result was even worse. He could only see a multicolor blur. He had to act fast.

Anatoly made an enormous effort to arch his back forward and gain verticality again, with the sky and the ground in their usual position. Chiquito noticed it and helped him at once. When Anatoly finally got the desired position, he looked at the creature again and marveled with its enormous size.

Out of the blue, the beast moved his view directly at them as if it knew it was being observed. Anatoly understood he had run out of time. He reached his backpack immediately and, as he opened it, he looked for his camera. It was a brand new reflex Pentax with teleobjective lens. He pointed at his objective and snapped.

“I think I got something, Chiquito.” Anatoly said as he retired the machine from his face. The creature was already gone. “I think I finally got something.” He was smiling.

Chiquito, on the other hand, looked completely indifferent. “Good. We can go home now.” He said.

Anatoly’s eyes changed. He became very serious. He carefully put his camera back in his bag and kept staring at his guide.

“We’re not going anywhere.” He said with cold voice and then re-started his descent.

Chiquito looked at him and found on his face the rising insanity of every stubborn man. He knew Anatoly would want to continue in search for some credit and prestige that existed only in his mind. He had already seen this phenomenon on other explorers who were ready to sacrifice their lives in order to prove that all their detractors were wrong. Now, he knew his situation had turned extremely dangerous.

When the two men finally run out of food, Chiquito insisted on the necessity of returning to his town, or at least, looking for a village where they could obtain certain items as sugar and salt, that were almost impossible to get in the jungle. Anatoly didn’t agree. He said he wouldn’t risk losing track of his trophy.

“I found it once; I can find it again later.” The little native said.

But Anatoly didn’t change his mind. He was simply obsessed.

That day they couldn’t find any snakes to eat. The first time Anatoly had tried them he was part of the glorious red army. They had just eradicated Hitler’s invasion from the mother land, and now they were going after Berlin and its boss. Those were times when food was not a common thing in Stalingrad. So they had to try whatever they found and it was a single snake. He immediately loved it. He felt like he was eating fish with a slightly different flavor. For his short companion snakes had never been an exotic meal. Since he was a child he had had the opportunity to eat them, as well as other animals from the region. He preferred piranhas.

So they had to hunt a monkey down with an old Winchester rifle that Anatoly had bought, along a Colt revolver, as soon as he entered the country. Both of them felt guilty to see that the poor animal fell heavily on the ground after shooting it, but it wasn’t dead. Guilt was quickly substituted by disgust since Chiquito reacted at once by cutting the primate’s head off with a machete. A fountain of bugs erupted from the neck but not a single drop of blood emerged.

Neither of them enjoyed the experience. They ate in silence listening to the rain and looking at the floor like a couple of grounded kids. Chiquito had already tried many attempts to convince Anatoly of returning to a safe place. The food, the rain, the mosquitoes; even Anatoly’s injure, but his answer was always negative. That night Anatoly wrote on his journey book again:

When I started this trip I had a goal. I wanted to get irrefutable proof of the existence of the creature the native people talk about. And I got it: I have a photograph. I took it by a river just two weeks ago. And it is everything I’ve heard about; and even more. The animal looks like a big ape that walks on two legs just like us. It’s very, very tall. I’d say about two meters and twenty centimeters, or maybe more, and its hair is completely black. I can’t be sure but I think it might be a male by the look of its chest.

It has been a though experience but I have to continue. If I go back now and it turns out the photograph I took shows nothing, or it’s not clear, or maybe damaged, then I would have wasted my time.

The same day I took the image, I tried to make a mold of the various footprints that the creature left on the mud, but unfortunately the soil was not very consistent. It was a mess. All I could do was taking more pictures.

Tomorrow I’ll continue my search. If what my guide tells me is right, the beast must not be far away. I need to make sure I get more than what I have now.

Anatoly made a pause; he listened carefully to the noises around him, and then continued writing.

The weather’s not going to change. The rain has made everything more difficult. But it doesn’t matter that much. A little water won’t stop me.

Next morning, Anatoly discovered that Chiquito had run away during the night. He had taken with him everything he could, including the revolver that hadn’t been used. The food that they had hunted the days before was cut in half indicating that his ex-partner had respected most of his belongings.

“I guess he took the revolver as a payment.” He thought.

For a moment the idea of him having been rude to Chiquito made him feel ashamed, but by the time he realized the seriousness of his situation he cursed himself for not having chained his guide as the Spaniards had with his ancestors.

He tried to remember the information Chiquito had given him. It was all a matter of observation. He knew the creature enjoyed eating fish so he had to wander the river’s shore until he found traces of his objective and, according to what he saw, he might set a trap. He did it for a couple of days. He walked along the crescent serpent of dark waters. On the third day he found new footprints that indicated the animal had been around lately. He set his tent and lain down to sleep. But he couldn’t. He was thinking of her again. He tried to remember all those happy days by her side and all he could see on his mind was his wife walking away from him before their divorce.

That night he had arrived very late from one of his personal quests in an abandoned house. Anatoly had receiver information about some sort of apparition of an old woman dressed in white on a specific spot of the place. He had spent hours trying to get evidence but, as usual, nothing happened. He got home looking tired, without shaving and smelling. As soon he entered the bedroom he had shared with his wife for the past three years, he noticed something was not right. Everything was completely tidy. The sheets and the blankets were still perfectly covering the bed, the TV was off and his wife wasn’t resting from work. He put all his equipment on the floor and walked towards the kitchen. She was there, by the backdoor, sitting on a chair, waiting for him. A young man was standing next to her: it was her younger brother, Leo. Anatoly said hello but only Leo answered his greeting with a slight movement of his head.

“What’s going on?” Anatoly said.

He didn’t receive an answer. Instead, his wife indicated Leo to take her things to the car. Anatoly hadn’t seen the two suitcases resting on the cold floor. His wife and her brother had been waiting for him, maybe for hours, and they hadn’t taken the luggage away: she wanted him to see it. She wanted him to know it was for real.

His wife’s face was clear and calm; she hadn’t cried. Anatoly saw this and shivered unnoticeable. He wasn’t able to say a word, though.

“You know why I’m leaving, right?”

Anatoly nodded.

“Do you have anything to say to make me stay here with you?”

He shook his head as he moved his eyes to a different direction. He was ashamed and she would be right about anything that could be said there: he didn’t spent time with her anymore; she hadn’t heard beautiful words from him in months. They wouldn’t watch TV or cook together; they hadn’t even made love for weeks. It was over. Their relationship was dead.

“Fair enough,” she said, “believe it or not I’m going to miss you.” And then she cross the door of their house and never returned.

“Raisa,” Anatoly said in the middle of his dream and then woke up to the noises of the beast.

After having observed the customs of the creature for more than three weeks, Anatoly had started to understand what Chiquito meant by the “World of the spirits”. He found out that there was a cave constantly visited by his prey. He took advantage of one of the creature’s visit to the river, and took a look to the entrance of the place. It seemed that some food had been collected since he found fish in a small pond.

Black is an outstanding animal. Anatoly had written on his journal. He had an advanced concept of the time. It has put together some supplies as if he was preparing for a trip. Maybe It’s using the caves as an efficient way to travel to far distances; even to other countries, like old South-American cultures used to.

Tomorrow is the day; tomorrow I’ll catch him alive and obtain samples of its hair and skin, measures, photographs, etc… I’ll release it then, of course, and return home with all the evidence.”

A lightning caught his attention and made him look up to the sky. He could hear the thunder some seconds later. Alight breeze hit his face and indicated him it was time to go back to his camp, which was located approximately two hours away. He knew he had to walk fast; most of his equipment and all his food were inside his tent and they might be in danger. Half an hour later the clouds stopped drizzling and started to downpour. The breeze became gusts and the jungle transformed into a total chaos of flying debris and falling branches everywhere.

When he got to the campsite, he saw his temporary refuge turned into a flat mess of fabric, metal and plastic. Anatoly felt very tired but he had to put it all back as it was before the storm; otherwise he might get pneumonia due to the extreme low temperatures of that time of the year. He carefully placed his camera and the rifle inside the tent. He checked the poles and saw they could resist the strong wind. He took them up and confirmed they were holding. He thought about changing his clothes before entering the tent but as he checked it he noticed it was completely soaked inside.

A couple of hours later he had finished drying the inner side of his temporary house. E had had to use almost every single dry clothes in hand. He changed and started to eat the fish he had caught that day in the river. He promised himself he would never have sushi again. He regretted not having any salt but suddenly it came to his mind an idea he had read on an old book: meat can be seasoned with gun powder. He grabbed a bullet and his knife and tried to open it but the blade slipped and cut his left hand index finger.

“Damn it,” Anatoly yelled. He took a deep breath and made a great deal of effort not to cry. “What the f**k am I doing here?”

Then, out of the blue, the roaring became loud enough. The ground started to tremble and it was evident that an unavoidable force was coming his way. Anatoly grabbed what was at reach with his left hand and tried to hold on to something with the right one, but it was too late; the flood had found him.

For hours he had walked through a field of destruction. Hopelessly he had looked for his belongings but the enormous wave had washed everything away. He saw dead animals, broken trees and a river twice as big as the one he had been fishing in the day before. It was all a picture of desperation and, above all, devastation. He had been able to save his rifle and a dozen of bullets. But he thought he would go crazy when he saw that all his equipment, along the evidence and everything else, was gone. Anatoly sat down against a tree and kept staring at a limbo created by his eyes without movement, fixed on a specific point. He thought about what people would consider of his experience. With no photographs, or molds, or hair, he had nothing except his testimony. The problem was that not only the world, but also him, had already had enough of testimonies without proofs. How many people had seen UFOs flying over their heads? How many housewives had been visited by huge monkeys in their backyards? Weren’t there enough kids “almost” kidnapped by enormous birds? Or could there be any more abductees in our planet? And yet, no uncontroversial evidence had been handed in.

Anatoly thought about his situation back home. There was not much difference; he simply had no home. He had already sold his house and gave to his wife her share. He spent all his money on that trip and expected to receive a lot more from a university or an institution that would undoubtfully get interested in his discovery. Now it wouldn’t happen.

Knowing he had no family left only made his misfortune darker.

“I should’ve paid attention to Chiquito,” he thought, “it would’ve been only a picture but, at least, evidence.”

The rain was still falling; the skies were still dark. Anatoly thought of the moment he decided to start his crazy enterprise. It was a very similar day: it was raining.

Leo had asked him to meet him in a common place to talk about the terms of Anatoly’s divorce from his sister. They agreed on a café downtown. It was early in the morning: both of them had to work later. Anatoly insisted on meeting after work in a bar he knew but Leo was afraid his ex-brother in law might break down and drag him into an embarrassing situation. Anatoly had no choice. Anyway, he felt from the beginning something was wrong; there was a catch to it and he couldn’t identify it. He had the opportunity to discover it almost as soon as they sat down: Leo already had the papers at hand.

“I thought we were here to talk about the details of the separation!” Anatoly said “What do you mean by just sign?”

Leo felt he was absolutely right about his fears. It seemed to him he had made the right choice. “Raisa said she wanted to go through this right away, so she had her lawyer done the paperwork,” he said.

“She had a lawyer?!” Anatoly thought, “Things were worse than I could ever imagine.”

“What does she want?” he asked.

“Nothing. Read the papers.”

Anatoly took a look. Leo was right; she didn’t want anything to do with him. He had had the odd idea he would accept everything in a very calm form but instead he felt so sad he might have sat down on a corner and cry. He had been a fool. Sometime in his life he had heard that everybody always deserved a second chance and he’d bought it. But he wouldn’t get it. Anatoly took the pen Leo had offered him and signed everywhere he saw his name written.

“I’m sorry for everything I did to your sister,” he said as he passed the pages. “I really am, Leo.”

“I know you are.” Leo replied. He started to feel even more uncomfortable.

“I’ll never regret a single moment I spent with her. Not even the bad ones.”

Leo kept silent for a couple of seconds and then asked for what he would never know.

“What happened?”

Anatoly had been wondering the same thing from the moment he saw his wife walk away from his life. He just had no answer. Once he believed it could have had something to do with her reluctance to see the new world he had discovered the day the objects in the kitchen of his house dared to move without his permission. But she never believed in anything, and he had accepted her like that. His constant absence and lack of interest would never be the answer: they were just symptoms to an illness; and that illness was the reason that would elude him for the rest of his days.

“She deserved someone better.” He finally answered.

“What are you going to do?” Leo was already placing the papers in a cardboard folder.

Anatoly noticed it and let go easily: “I’ll be fine.” He said and stood up grabbing the check.

“Wait, let me pay for this.” Leo tried to be kind; his tactics had been discovered.

“No, it’s my treat.” Anatoly finally answered. He would never see Leo again.

As he paid for the check, he was looking at the headlines of the magazines displayed on the wall behind the counter. The cashier was busy, so he had time to go through most of them with no hurry. When he was receiving his change there was a sentence that caught his attention.

“Explorers sighted a new type of giant monkey in the Amazons.”

He checked he had gotten back the correct amount of money and walked away, but before crossing the exit door, for no particular reason, he remembered the stories his grandfather used to tell him and his brothers about the strange creatures of the jungle.

“South America is a place created for a completely different kind of creatures.” He would say. “Our wildest stories could never match their reality.”

Anatoly knew most of that information was created by native people’s imagination, but there was always something linked to the real life and the facts which deserved to be taken a better look at. He went back to the counter and kept staring at the magazine, then he asked permission to skim through it but the man on the other side told him he had to buy it since it was covered with a plastic protection. So Anatoly took out a bill from his wallet and handed it in to the man. He received his magazine, asked for another cup of coffee, and sat down to read the article.

That day he arrived late to work. Next day he was fired.

Anatoly felt his fingers went numb with cold that morning. There was a mist covering everything, including the big figure moving a couple of hundred meters down his position, by the cave. It seem to him that the creature was now taking a final trip to the river before leaving the place, God knows for how long. To him, this was his last chance to obtain what he had come here to.

He had been thinking carefully about the best way to collect evidence of the beast but it seemed almost impossible. The initial plan was to use sedative darts in order to tranquilize it; unfortunately the flood had taken that kit away. Some sort of trap was now necessary but he just didn’t have time.

When he decided to start his adventure, he promised he would never do anything that might hurt any of the subjects under study. He’d seen the picture that François de Loys had taken of a big monkey in Venezuela, after having hunted it in 1918, and he felt sorry for the poor animal. “He looks so sad.” He told his wife as he showed her the photograph. “It looks so fake.” That was her answer.

De Loys was in a dilemma too because he didn’t know how to preserve a dead body, so he decided to cut the animal’s head off and cook it in order to transport it to nearest village. He claimed later to have lost it during one of his trips, which only re-enforced the idea that he had invented the whole story. But to Anatoly that was the only possibility since he was on his own and, even being able to preserve the body, he could never transport it anywhere: he had to get Black’s head.

Anatoly started to move. He had to be careful: if his prey heard him it would immediately be over. The constant sound of the rain falling was good for him. He knew the creature used a very specific path to go from his refuge to the river but it wouldn’t work for him because there were too many options for escaping. He had to make it move to a specific spot.

A couple meters away, Anatoly aimed his rifle to the sky and fired a single and noisy bullet. Then he stood behind a tree and waited for the result: around half a kilometer from his position, a dark figure ran heavily in opposite direction from the din of the gun.

“It’s heading north,” He whispered. “It’s working!”

He started running in that same direction, being careful not to catch his prey, and re-directing his steps from time to time in order to obtain an accurate position studied in advance a few days before. When he got there he fired his gun at the air again. Whit very rapid movements, he climbed a tree and observed. Not very far from that place, the same black figure was moving away from him, towards the river. But when Anatoly started to think his timing had been flawless, the animal made a turn to the right where it was supposed to make it left, right by the river shore.

“It’s trying to go back to the cave!” Anatoly said in panic.

He climbed the tree down and began to run as fast as he could; it was imperative to surpass his prey and re-direct it to the other way. He kept going for just some minutes and calculated it was enough. A new bang dinned the river. He waited a few seconds and realized the creature had changed his steps again. Now, Anatoly had to run behind it: The trap was not far away. He started moving again.

When Black ran up to a wall of rock with the river to his right, and a very dense group of bushes to his left, his instinct set off an alarm indicating him it was over. He had been fooled; he turned around and faced his attacker, who was already aiming his gun at him. But he didn’t move; Black just stood there looking with pity at that figure, for he knew what was about to come, and he regretted this wasn’t the first or the last time.

Anatoly certainly saw the sadness in those black eyes but he didn’t pay attention. His body was a rush of energy that burned his muscles like battery acid.

“It’s coming, it’s finally coming!” He thought. “I’m having it… for real!”

His index finger pressed the trigger and a fraction of second later he felt the heat all over his face, and the shrapnel hitting the bone.

Before falling he thought of her one last time: Raisa. The cold water of the river reminded him of those cold days in England. The name of the small town came to his mind: East Proctor. And, as his body faded, he wished he could repeat that experience, because just then, he realized how happy he had been.

But all the jungle could see was a dead body floating down a river.