Free Die Dog or Eat the Hatchet by Adam Howe

plaster cast of this print?”
    He looked at me like I was stark raving mad. “Whatever for?”
    “I don’t know …” I said, sheepishly. “Science or something?”
    He gave a savage laugh.
    “Once I deliver the beast dead,” Salisbury said, “the scientists can study it to their hearts’ content.”
    “You’re just going to kill it?”
    “And then empty my bladder on its stinking carcass.”
    He strode towards me. “Let’s get something clear right now, Mr. Levine. I’m not here to capture or chronicle this creature. I’m here to return it to hell where it belongs.”
    “What about Ned?” Eliza said.
    “And perhaps to get your friend back alive,” Salisbury added as an afterthought.
    “Now,” he continued, “any man or woman who has a problem with that ought to say so now—”
    Lester raised his hand. “Yeah, I wanna go home.”
    “Because once we’re out there on its trail,” Salisbury went on, “once the hunt is joined, there’s no turning back—”
    Lester said, “If you could just drop me off at The Henhouse—” “Your lives will depend on you doing exactly what I say when I say it—” “Why’s no one listening to me?” Lester whined. Salisbury fixed his gaze upon me. “Are we clear?” I nodded. He grinned. “Then let’s go bag this bastard.”
10
    Now I’m no skunk aper, but I’ve hunted before, mostly squirrel, and it wasn’t long before I began to question Salisbury’s methods, and wonder what the hell we’d gotten into here.
    Salisbury was manning the lawn chair fitted to the camper’s roof. His feet were propped on the loudspeaker. The stock of the elephant gun was nestled against his crotch, the barrels jutting up from between his thighs like a magnificent steel phallus. Scanning the woods through binoculars, gnawing a stick of beef jerky to maintain his energy levels, Salisbury barked directions over the engine noise.
    Eliza was driving the camper. At Salisbury’s command, she’d press a button on the dashboard console to activate the loudspeaker, and a godawful honking yowl would echo over the woods. It sounded like Ric Flair being sodomized by a moose with its pecker greased in pepper spray. Salisbury claimed it was a close approximation of a skunk ape’s mating call—or at least, the best impression he could do. And who were we to argue with him? He was the expert.
    Lester had by now passed out drunk. I might’ve been grateful for the brief respite from his endless whining, except that left me alone on bait detail.
    The camper’s rear window was raised, and I was pouring out slop from the bait buckets, gagging at the foul stench despite the bandana covering my nose and mouth. A rancid stream of rust-colored slurry glistened in the wake of the Minnie Winnie. So far the stench had failed to attract the skunk ape, and if there was a skunk ape out here, it seemed impossible he could have missed it; what it had attracted was a biblical swarm of flies, trailing the camper like gulls behind a fishing trawler.
    It was at times like this that I wondered what my old friend Boar Hog Brannon was up to nowadays. After he whipped me, I’d followed his progress in the boxing journals. I might have felt better about the loss if he’d gone on to have a long and illustrious career, retiring undefeated as light heavyweight champion of the world. But after steamrollering me, Boar Hog made only a brief appearance in the top twenty ranks, losing a wide points decision to Chick Estevez, before he vanished into obscurity. Still, a guy like Boar Hog always landed sunny side up. I imagined he probably owned a successful restaurant or car dealership. He lived in a nice big house, had a wife with nice big jugs, and sired a litter of husky piglets. Wherever Boar Hog was now, I felt confident he wasn’t slopping out buckets of shit that smelled worse than the River Styx.
    I was prising the lid off another bait bucket when the camper hit a bump on the trail. Sludge spewed from the