We Named the Dog Boston

by Tom Mabe

“Dogs is the only good way to hunt a Puma,” said McCrede. He had narrow
shoulders, narrow head and narrow eyes the color of a glass of whiskey and he squinted
at me to make sure I was listening. Mostly I was, so I glanced down at the dog trotting
along with us to show that I had heard him. And I hefted my shooter.
“I got a scatter gun that can poke a ragged hole into whatever gets in front of it,” I
said.
He grinned. His mouth was small and it didn’t move much when he talked.
“That’s not going to help,” he growled. “Puma’s are a cowardly creature. They hide. The
only way to get at one is to root it out, to tree the thing. And to do that, you need dogs:
good dogs. After that, the operation is simple.”
He squinted at me again and then shifted his carbine rifle from one shoulder over
to the other. “We ain’t after fowl, or chasing a rabbit here,” he said, looking at my hands.
“That Winchester’s not right for the job.”
“If we find the thing and I shoot, then it’ll go down just the same,” I said.
I stopped walking to take a look back down the ridge trail we had just come up; it
angled down on a sharp angle and ended at the logging camp about 400 feet below. Apart
from a wide path our logging crew had cleared up the middle for the skid road, it was
dense with cedar and fir. There was a thin layer of fog clinging to the tops of the trees, but
I could still make out the camp cookhouse and one or two of the bunkhouses. The oxen
team was heading out to yard yesterday’s trees and, walking up the ridge, I could see Al.
We had to wait for him.
“Al’s about half way up with the other dog,” I told McCrede.
His whiskey eyes hadn’t let me go. “Puma’s are devilish,” he said. “You won’t see
one before it sees you, which means you can’t shoot something that ain’t there.”
“If it’s not there, then we’re wasting our time and we should head back down and
chop on some trees,” I said.
He shook his head and looked past me, at one of the big firs off in the woods. He
wore a flannel shirt, faded and stiff from tree resin, with the sleeves rolled up above the
elbows. He had more hair on his forearms than on the top of his head and he had more
hair on his face than on his arms. His thick, shaggy beard crawled up to high cheekbones
where it chased his eyes closer together and, in desperation, his ears stuck out from
behind the beard. He had on oiled pants held high above his waist by fat suspenders and
he smelled of burnt apple and sweat.
“How many hunts you been on?” he asked.
I didn’t say anything.
He sighed and kept looking at the tree. “Not many a man can say they seen a
puma and lived to tell about it,” he said. He moved his hand to an oiled-canvas bag and
pulled out a small wooden snuff box with a line drawing of an apple stamped on the top
and the makers’ mark printed below it. He opened it carefully and took a draw of the
snuff between two fingers and inhaled it noisily. Bits of tobacco clung to the hairs under
his nose when he looked at me. “But I have. Twice.”
“I’m guessing neither animal enjoyed the experience,” I said.
 “Nope. I killed ‘em both,” he said.
“With your bare hands or did you use a gun?”
He didn’t laugh. “If you’re at the point of using your hands against it, then you
better put ‘em together and pray to the Maker, because you ain’t going to beat it. And I
can tell you they’re big cats and they can take a hit. I put two slugs in one, close to the
heart, and it turned and started after me, a smirk on its face. My third slug, I put between
its eyes.”
His small mouth smiled. I didn’t want to look at him anymore so I checked to see
where Al was with the other dog. He was close and the dog was closer; it bounded up to
the top of the ridge with its tongue hanging out and barely looked at me before it darted
past and on into the woods. It didn’t have a name that I knew of, they were McCrede’s
dogs, and he never called them anything except “dog.” He kept them hungry too, not
feeding them and making them rely on scrounging up morsels of whatever from the
woods or around the camp; it kept the instinct in them, he said. Mostly they looked half-
starved and this one was no exception. It was lean and rangy, with pitch colored hair.
The other dog, the one that came up the ridge with us, was thin-ribbed and black
and white. It was lying next to a tree with its head down, watching, and McCrede
hollered at it to get up and go find a puma.
The dog got up lazily, stretched and sniffed the air, then went off in the direction
the other dog had gone. Not long after, Al walked up from the skid road, breathing hard.
He had a bottle in one hand and he was carrying an ax in the other. He said, “The woods
boss don’t want us back unless we’re dragging a dead mountain lion with us.”
Al was a big fellow, tall and broad shouldered, with hands like the paws of a bear.
He could just as easily have worked the stock yards punching cows and butchering steer,
or been the camp pugilist, but he was either just smart enough or just dumb enough not to
do it. I figured him to be just dumb enough. He was a good looking guy, strong featured,
heavy brow, big woods-worthy mustache, but his eyes were dull, like fish eyes. They
pulled in toward the center a bit, like he was trying to make sure his nose was still on his
face or as if someone smacked him on the forehead with a heavy plank and he was
thinking about whether it hurt or not. It was the kind of look that made the girls in the
corset houses fight over who got at his timber money first. He was always smiling, so I
doubt he minded.
“That mule of his won’t die,” I said to him. “It’s only got some scratches on its
backside. They’ll heal.”
“He’s still mad about it though. Even if it’s just a young stupid one, he wants it
dead. He thinks it’ll be back after the mule again, or the oxen maybe. He gave me his gun
even.”
McCrede had been scratching his beard and stopped. “That old Henry? Where is
it?”
“Left it under my bed roll,” Al said, and he held up his ax. “Brought this instead.
Don’t figure on doing much shootin.’”
Then he pulled the cork off his bottle and tipped it back. “Smooth,” he said.
“What do you have there: jakey?” I asked.
“No, it ain’t jakey,” he said, annoyed. “Only the Scots drink that cheap whiskey.”
He handed me the bottle and I sniffed it. The smell was enough to peel the bark
off a tree, but I took a drink of it anyway. It was smooth alright; it burned all the way
down to my feet so that I had to look at my boots to make sure they were still on. They
were, so I kicked the dirt to put the feeling back in my toes. I handed the bottle back.
“Damn,” I wheezed.
“You got that right,” Al said. “A fine lady in Seattle gave me this with the promise
that I marry her. I told her I wasn’t the marrying type, but if she let me keep the bottle, I’d
think about it. She said ‘OK’ and asked when she would know my answer. And I said,
there were a lot of fine ladies in Seattle and after I had met them all, I’d tell her.”
He laughed and slapped me on the shoulder with a hand like a block of wood.
When my arm stopped hurting, I said, “Let me guess, that fine lady was Nancy over at
The Clover Green?”
Al nodded, “Yeah, that’s right.”
“They’re all named Nancy at The Clover Green,” I said. “They hand every fellow
that comes in the joint a bottle of that jakey and it usually gets drunk down right there.
The fellow passes out and then he gets rolled.”
McCrede laughed until he coughed, then he spit on the ground. He took the bottle
from Al and drank from it. “It’s jakey, alright,” he said.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, studied the bottle and took another
drink. “I guess that leaves us with one gun and a rabbit chaser,” he said. He looked at me
and winked, and then he started off where the dogs had gone.

----

The sap was running up the trees and there was a strong scent of cut wood in the
air. There wasn’t a trail to speak of except to follow the path of the ridge and battle the
continuous tangle of dropped limbs, salmonberry, ferns and fallen timber. Al used his ax
at times and I thought maybe he wasn’t as dumb as he looked. It was late-afternoon when
we came on a small clearing.
A few hundred yards on, we could see some rocky outcroppings that McCrede
said would be a likely nesting spot for a mountain lion. On the western side of the
clearing, the ridge had steepened and would make walking too difficult. On the eastern
side, there was a valley of trees, and perhaps 100 yards off, a tremendous fir had fallen
and created a gash at the edge of the tree line. Through the opening I could see a creek at
the bottom of the valley. It looked to meander along parallel to the ridge for a stretch and
to maybe converge on the outcroppings up ahead. I wanted to test that notion, but
McCrede’s dogs were up ahead and they looked excited.
The black and white one was putting its shoulder down on something and the
other one was running back and forth among the trees, sniffing the ground. When we got
near I could see a frothy string of saliva hanging from the dog’s mouth and a strong
musky tang smacked me in the face and nearly made me sit down. The cheap whiskey
smelled like roses next to it and I put my hand to my nose and backed away.
“It’s a scrape,” McCrede said. He knelt down and poked around at a small pile of
fir boughs and bits of bark; what the dog had been rolling on. “Pumas scrape these
together and urinate on them. Mark their area. Usually they’re smaller and just leaves and
grass.”
 He picked out a clump of dark brown hair. I said it looked like it came from a bear
and he shook his head. “Ain’t the right kind of hair,” he said. “This is too long and it’s not
as thick.”
He put the hair clump close to his nose and jerked his head back suddenly.
“Powerful strong,” he said. “Fresh too. Big male I reckon. Not young like we were
thinking.”
He squinted and worked his jaw some. “A puma kills for the mere fun of the kill,”
he said through thin lips. “The woods boss is right; that puma’s got the camp marked as
an easy meal. It’ll surely be back after the oxen and mule if we don’t find it.”
McCrede stood and hollered at the dogs to ferret the thing out. Al had been
cleaning his ear with a finger, waiting for something to do, and took after the dogs with
his ax and bottle of jakey. I thought about that creek and the idea of going up to the rocky
outcroppings from another angle and McCrede must have had the same idea, because he
pointed at it with his rifle and said what I had been thinking. I told him I’d meet him up at
the top and then angled off down toward the creek.
I got to the downed tree and climbed up on to it. The bark was thick with wide
grooves big enough to put a fist between and the trunk was broad and straight and gave a
clear path to the creek. Toward the base it was enormous; the trunk was higher than a
man was tall and would have taken two hard boys with strong backs most of a day to
bring down. The whole root base, with rocks and dirt, had come up cleanly when it fell
and there was a shallow pit where the tree once stood. A couple inches of water had
pooled in the hole from the creek and the roots splayed out around the butt like a knot of
broken fingers.
I scrambled down off the tree and knelt by the water. The creek was only a few
feet wide, maybe ankle deep and it was running cold. I splashed my face and looked up
stream at a crisscross of gray, moss-covered, downed trees, big rocks and fallen branches.
Fat cedar and fir trees crowded the creek and fought each other for the sky. I liked the
idea of hopping from mossy tree-to-mossy rock-to-mossy tree on up to the top of the
ridge, so I stood up to go. I didn’t get very far.
Something that had seemed like a rock moved. It looked as big as a bear, but it
didn’t have the same shape. It was about 50 yards up creek on a flat rock, and it was bent
over the edge of the water like a man kneeling, with an arm hung low, as if scooping
water. The arm moved up from the water to its head and then went back down again. A
musky scent like sweaty feet came down off the ridge with the breeze and made my eyes
sting. I blinked back tears and decided it wasn’t a mountain lion, but I needed to be closer
to tell what it was.
I started to move and only made it a few steps. My boot slipped on a mossy rock
and came down hard on a fallen branch. The branch cracked like a gunshot in a tomb and
the creature jumped. I reached around for my rifle and saw the thing go to stand up on
two feet. I didn’t want it to get that far so I brought my shooter up and fired.
I didn’t hit anything except rocks and dirt; the thing lunged for the trees and was
gone, leaving me with the dying sound of it crashing through the under brush as it went
up the side of the ridge. McCrede had been right, the Winchester was out of range to have
done any good and I cursed him out loud for it. I shouldered the gun and thought about
the creature moving its arm in and out of the water, figuring the rocks where it had
kneeled would still be wet, and I started up for the spot. The sound of a rifle shot stopped
me short.
It had been close enough to make me jump, and to bring my gun back out in front
of me. I heard one of McCrede’s dogs start barking and I moved up through the trees
toward the sound. I got to the top of the ridge and the barking stopped, then another rifle
shot blasted near by. I stopped again and watched the trees long enough to make the
shadows come to life when Al appeared. He had his ax and bottle of hooch in one hand
and he was carrying a mountain lion over one shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
He saw me and said, “Your shot run it out of hiding and right on to us. It got into
it with the dogs until McCrede picked him off.”
He shifted around to show me the animal. It was dead; its legs hung down loosely
and there was a moist red hole behind its right ear that oozed something dark. The tongue
stuck out from between the bloodied fur of its mouth and its eyes were still open. There
was a fading gleam in them like two shiny coins glinting in the sun. And it was big, but
not as big as I the thing I had seen. I was about to say so when McCrede came walking
out of the trees with his rifle. He had his snuff box out and inhaled a pinch in each nostril,
then wiped a hand across moist eyes. The black and white dog followed behind, its tail
between its legs and dripping blood from an open wound on its snout.
“Had to put the other one down,” McCrede said when he got close. “That puma
come out of the trees after you fired on it and cut the dog up too bad with its claws. It
turned on that one there next, but I put a shot in it before it could get pleasure from killing
again.”
“Wasn’t a mountain lion that I fired on,” I said.
He narrowed his eyes on mine to make sure I wasn’t messing with him. “That
right?” he said.
I told him I didn’t know what it was. “I never got a good look at it, except to
know that it smelled like the bunkhouse and was bigger than that mountain lion.”
He chewed on his lower lip some and then said, “Skookum, most likely. It’s when
a man’s been in the woods too long and starts seeing and hearing things that ain’t there.
The Indians out here gave it story too. Said it was a mountain giant that protected the
trees and was supposed to have been a beast of thing, as big as a bear, but not as nice.”
I told McCrede that sounded about right and he nodded, then put his snuff box
away and gazed up at the sky.
“We’re running out of light,” he said. “I reckon we can make camp on that
clearing where we found the scrape.”

----

The dark comes on fast in the woods and it wasn’t long before the flicker of the
camp fire was all the light we had. McCrede sat alone next to the fire, occasionally
poking it with a stick and watching the sparks swirl up to the sky, and Al lounged nearby
with one hand behind his head and the other one up over his eyes. I sat down on the
ground with my back pushed up against a tree and slowly nodded off.
I woke in the dark to McCrede’s rifle going off. There was some scuffling and
fists against hide and the black and white dog was barking like it was trying to get at
something. A man grunted and an animal snorted.
 The camp fire was down to a faint glow of embers and I couldn’t see past my arm.
I felt around until I found my gun and I pointed it toward the dull coal and called out for
McCrede.
A hand brushed up against me and I heard Al say, “What the hell?”
“Where’s McCrede,” I asked.
He didn’t reply, but he moved up closer to me so that I could smell his cheap
whiskey. I sensed he was scared and it made me want to punch him. I pushed on him hard
with my shoulder instead and told him to get back. I kept my eyes where the fire used to
be and finally saw a shadow pass in front of it. A large foot brushed across the embers
and sent up a spray of sparks that briefly lit the area.
A hairy thing as tall as a door and nearly as wide had McCrede in its arms and
was shaking him around. I saw enough to know that McCrede had his gun and was trying
to get it around on the animal.
“What the hell?” Al said again.
I shook my head and said, “Skookum.”
A spike of fire shot out of McCrede’s rifle then, and in the glow of the blast, I
could tell he didn’t hit anything. The thing that had him let out a deep chest-thumping
grunt and then I heard a muffled crunch like the sound of dry twigs under a heavy boot.
There was a thud as if a gun hit the ground, followed by a long sigh.
Without thinking I brought my scatter gun up and fired it. Something dropped and
something bellowed. The something that bellowed passed in front of the coals and into
the woods. The something that dropped didn’t move.
The dog had stopped barking and began a low growl that sometimes went into a
whine. There was a heavy musk that seemed to be everywhere and I handed the scatter
gun to Al and told him to shoot anything that might come out of the woods. Then I
crawled on my hands and knees toward McCrede to see if I could do anything. I only got
a few feet before I heard Al mumble some words behind me and set off with the gun back
the way we had come in that afternoon.
I hissed his name and called him a bastard, but that didn’t stop him, so I got up
and started after him. He was fast in the dark and I was slow; I stumbled around for
several yards and stopped when I couldn’t hear him anymore. Then some branches broke
nearby and I dropped to the ground for no reason. I picked up a fist-sized rock thinking
I’d throw it, but instead, started down the slope toward the sound of the creek and the big
downed tree.
I climbed up onto the tree and ran along the top of it until I slipped and fell off.
My head met the side of the tree on the way down and I hit the ground hard. I sat up with
a ringing in my ears and the warm, wet of blood running down the left side of my neck.
I got up and edged around the butt of the tree and stepped into the hole left by the
upended base. I pushed up against the roots until the broken ends jabbed into my back
and dirt and pebbles fell down the collar of my flannel shirt; it smelled of wet earth and
cut wood. I realized I was still holding onto the fist-sized rock and I let it drop. Then I
waited.
There was a rough scrape against bark over my head and something heavy
exhaled. It sounded like a bull ox sniffing around the food trough and I stopped breathing
to listen. The sniffing stopped and there was another scrape, then it got quiet. I didn’t
move, but kept listening until the sun came up and showed a clouded sky above.
 By then, my left ear felt like it was hanging down against my cheek and I stepped
out from the fist of roots to sit down next to the creek and splash cold water on my face.
After that I climbed onto the tree again to go back up to the clearing. On the way I saw
drops of dried blood on the bark and it made me feel better knowing I had hit something I
couldn’t see.
McCrede was in a crumpled pile near the fire pit. He was bent in a way a man’s
not supposed to bend, his legs were folded under his body and his chest turned sideways.
Small holes peppered one side of his chest where he took part of the blow from my
scatter gun, but there was little blood; he had been dead before the shot hit him. One arm
was twisted brutally behind his back and the other was stretched above his head on the
ground, as if reaching out. His lips were blue and his face looked skyward. A dried
bubble of blood rested in his left nostril. He was squinting.
There was an apple spice in the air around him and I saw his snuff box on the
ground near his outstretched hand. The top had come open and the tobacco spilled out. I
picked the box up and pocketed it. His gun lay nearby and I threw it over my shoulder.
If I was going to drag something back down the ridge to show the trouble we’d
run into, I needed convincing; my back ached and my head had begun to throb and
McCrede looked to weigh north of 200 pounds and the puma must have been at least 150.
I kicked around the brush and found Al’s bottle of cheap whiskey and shook it. There was
still something in it and I drank it down.
The jakey was persuasive; my ear stopped hurting and my arms felt stronger, but
not by that much, so I picked what would hurt the least and wrangled the stiffened puma
up onto my shoulders. I started back down the trail and the black and white dog came out
of the underbrush and fell in behind me.
I got to the skid road overlooking the camp by midday and headed down. It had
begun to rain and I dropped the puma twice, but it didn’t complain. At the bottom, I
stopped near the cookhouse and the dog sagged to the ground with a sigh. I dropped the
puma at my feet and waited for something to happen. I didn’t have to wait long; shortly,
the woods boss rode up on his mule.
“Found this where Al’s bedroll used to be,” he said, holding out his Henry cavalry
rifle. “But I didn’t find Al.”
“Yeah, and what happened to the bastard?” I asked.
He shrugged worn out shoulders and waved a hand toward the tracks that led into
town.
“Then he ain’t as dumb as he looks,” I said. “Because I’d have shot him if I’d
seen him.”
Old gray eyes looked me over and he rubbed his jaw with a knobby hand.
“McCrede?” he asked.
I stared at him until he looked away. He lifted a crumpled hat from his head and
let the rain fall on thin gray hair, then he brought his eyes back around. “Al do something
stupid?” he asked.
“Yeah, something cowardly,” I said. “But not what you’re thinking.”
His forehead creased and he looked down at the puma.
“Wasn’t that cat either. It was cowardly too.”
A thin smile worked its way onto his mouth and then he turned and watched the
ridge. I could see his eyes move along the tree line and I asked him if we should go up
with some boys and bring McCrede back. After a long moment he said, “Every man
enters the forest on his own. He comes out the same way.”
I nodded and he looked me over some more. “There’s daylight to be let into the
woods,” he said. “Go on, get your ax.”
I remembered McCrede’s snuff box and got it out and handed it to him. He held
the box in hands burled with calluses and gazed down at the little apple stamp and
makers’ mark. “That’s the city he said he come out from, some years back,” the woods
boss said. “A damn shame.”
He handed the box back to me and then he started off on his mule.
I took a look at the mark. It read: Beantown Tobacco and Snuff Co.
I hollered after the woods boss and motioned toward the black and white dog; its
nose had begun to bleed again and it was making a smacking sound as it licked at it. I
said, “Then we’ll name the dog Boston.”