Termination Shock

Rufus had seen enough of pig body language to know that this creature had been alerted by something. Most likely their scent, guessing from the direction of the breeze. The giant hog swung its head back and forth, and Rufus knew that if he were closer he’d hear it snuffling air into its nostrils. Seen in profile the head was flatter, less dished than that of Sus domesticus. This animal was closer to a Eurasian wild boar.

Reggie chose that particular moment to crack open a can of beer.

Snout turned to look right at them.

Even if the rifle had been mounted to that scope, Rufus would not have taken the shot. An errant round would pass right over the point of land where Snout was standing and carry for half a mile toward the campground beyond. And they were out of range for a pistol shot. “Take her in!” Rufus said to Beau, who was at the wheel. “Get on in there!” Beau shoved the throttle forward and swung the boat around, but the next time Rufus got the inlet into his sights, the swine were gone. He could see a few stragglers disappearing into the scrub farther inland, but Snout was nowhere to be seen.

This happened around midnight. Over the next sixteen hours, matters then developed in a way that a hypothetical journalist or detective might later have been able to piece together with pushpins and yarn on a wall-sized map of Lake Waco, with spreadsheets and timelines, but to Rufus at the time it was just chaos. Just things happening too fast for him to react.

Maybe the worst decision he made was to stay calm. Which seemed reasonable enough. For years he’d been hunting Snout all over Texas. Now he knew almost exactly where the creature was. It could only move so fast. He and his herd would leave in their wake a wide trail of shit and damage; it would be as easy as tracking an armored division across a golf course.

As long as Snout remained in a populated area, Rufus would have to stay cool, get close, and use a shotgun or something. He tried and failed to get some sleep during the hours of darkness that remained, then perversely fell asleep at dawn and didn’t wake up until midmorning. He drove down to where he’d tied the inflatable, on the banks of the Bosque, a little ways below the dam, and ran it all the way up to the spillway. There he poked around in the woods for a few minutes until he found the place where Snout and his herd, a day or two earlier, had climbed up out of the ravine and gone up over the levee. Once they’d crested that, it was an easy traipse down the rocky slope on its lake side to reach the water, and from there they had their pick of directions. The smart way to do this would be for Rufus to use the drone.

He was squatting there at the rock-covered base of the dam on the lake side when the purple sky to the west was snapped in half by a lightning bolt. Before the rain came he had time to scramble back up and over to the grassy side and make sure the inflatable was well roped to a tree. He got plenty wet running back to his truck, but given the heat he didn’t mind it so much. It turned into one of those rainfalls so intense that he wouldn’t have been able to drive in it, so he just stayed put behind the wheel until the roar on the roof lessened slightly and he felt it was safe to drive up to higher ground.

When the storm finally ended it was well after noon and he had a powerful sense that he’d blown the last twelve hours doing exactly the wrong things in the wrong places and that he was desperately far behind. All sorts of things had gone into motion in the camp. Some kid was tearing around in one of those open all-terrain vehicles that, on ranches, had basically replaced horses. Riding shotgun—literally wielding a shotgun—was an older man. Message traffic from the Boskey clan was all to do with alligators. Rumor in camp had it that someone’s dog had gone missing and was presumed to have been eaten. Beau was trying to get people to understand that he could get the gator situation squared away if they would just settle down, but the guys in the ATV had their blood up and couldn’t be managed.

Rufus, taking all this in, was distressed by the lack of attention being paid to the herd of feral hogs. If family pets really were going missing, the culprit was just as likely Snout. And tearing around on an ATV was exactly the wrong thing to be doing. People made use of just such vehicles to chase and massacre wild pigs in the open country. Some members of Snout’s herd had probably been hunted by such vehicles.

Rufus ended up driving to and fro along the roads that formed the perimeter of the camp and the woods, trying to figure out who was where. One of those roads ran along the airport fence. He was driving down it at 4:06 P.M. when Snout, followed by his entire herd, burst out of the woods to his right and stormed across the road a hundred yards ahead of him.