The Spirit

In the copter, Hill could hardly recognize the gun nut with brush-­fire eyes as Roy Curtis, the shy, short man too afraid of heights to venture from the Land Rover. Curtis leaned halfway out of the bubble, one hand gripping the rubber rail, the other pointing the cocked rifle downward.

“Get inside!” Hill cried over the roar of the rotors. Curtis answered with a laser glare from his bloodshot eyes, comically distended by thick glasses. He thought only of his friend, Nicolson.

Ground zero was the treetop level. Hill danced the controls so close that pine tips grazed the belly. He watched his landing lights skim the bristly branches.

Curtis screamed and thumped the bubble. He jabbed the gun at the ground. “Back!” he shouted. “Back!”

Hill backed the copter up. Down below was the dog, jumping up and down at the copter in a space between the trees. Curtis fired bullets which spurted pine needles up around the animal. Something stepped out of the trees but was driven back by an explosion of bark next to its hairy arm.

Hill rose a few feet to spread the light wider. “Jason, Curtis is shooting at it. Get your ass down here!”

Jason ran through the woods, ignoring the roots tearing at his feet and the branches that slashed across his face. The copter swayed in midair, seemingly supported by the hard-­edged beams of the landing lights. He heard gunfire above the motor. The dog was barking again. By coming up from the rear, he would have both in his sights within minutes.

One of Hill’s shots echoed from the east. Now that was peculiar. Jason did not remember any cliffs or mountains that way. After a moment he heard the echo again.

Curtis shouted, “I saw it! There’s something wrong with its head.”

“What?” bellowed Hill, shifting the engine pitch.

“I said there’s something wrong with—” The motor drowned out Curtis’s words. He leaned out farther and watched for it.

Something hit the rear stabilizer with a violence that sent a shudder through the fuselage. The stick jerked out of Hill’s hand, and the foot controls came up of their own accord.

Trees whirled and tilted below as if they were on a carousel dislodged from its axis. He had lost control of the rear rotor, and without that a copter will rotate in the direction of its rotor spin with an accelerating force that whirls the pilot into unconsciousness. Hill gathered the flailing controls and tried to still them. He managed to keep the belly flat as the trees rushed up to embrace them.

Just before the crash he realized that Curtis had been flung out of the bubble like a dust mote flicked from a window ledge.

The first shock threw him against the dashboard. Then came the endless bumpy, reverberating fall in a shower of wood, branches whipped to pieces by the rotors. Bough after bough, layer after layer as bark tumbled down on top of the machine.

What was left of the copter swayed ten feet above the ground. Benumbed at still being alive, Hill grasped his rifle, unhooked the seat belt, and dropped the remaining distance to his feet.

Jason had watched the crash from an outcropping of boulder in a clearing. First came a metallic snap, then the screeching rhythmic clatter of something caught in the rear blades. He screamed into the walkie-­talkie, but knew Hill had his hands too full to speak.

The copter spiraled down to the trees half a mile away and disappeared when the lights went out. Then he heard it hit with a swishing crackle, as if a huge bird were settling into its nest. The crash seemed to go on forever before dribbling off in a rush of falling branches.

“Hill? Hill?” he said tensely into the walkie-­talkie.

Horror seeped through Jason at the howl of canine triumph rising from the woods. It was running for the wreck, well ahead of him. The horror propelled Jason as he ran off the rocks into the trees again. It rose from his legs to form an ache in his chest where his breath tore out in deep gasps. The dog and his master would get to the copter before him, and, failing the sudden appearance of wings on his shoulders, there was absolutely nothing Jason could do about it.

Hill was on his hands and knees, trying to clear his head. Blood dripped to the ground from a gash in his scalp. When he heard the dog coming, he poked around the bush for his rifle.

The ground was covered by chunks of clumsily chopped pine. Gasoline dripped in acrid streams from the copter into the springy loam. Hill was in a hollow lipped on all sides by trees.

The walkie-­talkie was gone. No matter. He didn’t need help for this one. He had a good rifle and a steady hand. Even better, he had a good position, with a maximum range of fifteen feet on all sides. He had drilled beer cans with a pistol at that range without even aiming.

With a final woof, the dog sprang over the hollow edge and growled at him between pants. Its tongue lolled over its jaws. Hill shot at it, just missing, and the dog’s courage vanished. It scrambled out of the hollow again.