Page 2 of Four Calling Birds

1. Bruce the Buck

Mack

That.Mother.Fucker.

Bruce was taunting me. He wasabsolutelytaunting me. He stood on the ridge, his antlers high, large and proud, as his pointy black nose sniffed at the air. I swear, he was looking right at me, as if he was saying, “Catch me if you can, fucker.”

Not to be cliché, but I’m really too old for this shit. I’ve been broken by thirty years in the Army, and twelve combat tours.

Bruce, the buck, was old like me. He was six years old, if he was a day. Practically geriatric in cervine years. His antlers were enormous, and he had a grumpy arrogance that could only come with age.

His younger companions might be more spry. They might be able to leap over my wire fence and get into my vegetable garden. But they weren’t smart enough to know that my light-up Scarecrow, which turned on a strobe and played Classic Rock anytime it detected motion, wasn’t a real person.

Not Bruce. Bruce knew. I caught him at dawn, munching away in my garden, not giving a shit about the disco-tech Scarecrow hollering AC/DC.

While he was masticating my patch of broccoli stems, that were getting ready to bolt for the winter, he shook out his fur, as if to say, “What are you gonna do about it, punk?”and then calmly walked out of the garden, and up the mountain.

I swear to God, he got to the ridgeline, looked down at me, and snorted like he was giving me the deer-version of flipping the bird. I taunted him back, taking the bow, and pulling the string. It was a silent promise that next time, he was fucking dead. I’d stick an arrow into his thick hide, and I’d dress him right here on the porch for all of his little doe bitches to see.

He made that grunting deer sound, as if he was laughing at my threat.

That son of a bitch…

I put the bow over my shoulder, looking down to the wagging tail attached to my old dog, Bo. He looked up at me with eyes that had grayed and dulled with age. He still had the heart of a puppy, but the laziness of a true grandpa.

“Great help you are,” I grunted.

I fucking love this dog. He had taken a liking to my wife, back when she worked with the military police and he was a bomb-sniffer. When the dog retired at the rank of Sergeant First Class – yes, dogs have ranks. They usually had one rank over their handlers – she brought him home.

Her new “civilian” job didn’t let her keep him, so he and I were stuck together.

We were both the discarded baggage of one, Charlotte Elizabeth McClanahan. Together, we moved to an Upstate New York farm to forget the fucking devastation she left us in down in Pinehurst, North Carolina.

Just me and my old buddy.

My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I dug my hand into my jeans to fish out the old flipper. Why do I have a dumb phone? Because smart phones are easily hackable. I worked strictly off of burners. I don’t need constant access to google, social media or any of that other shit. I didn’t need Siri or Alexa to give me directions, or track my shopping habits. I had done just fine through a thirty year military career and a youth spent outdoors.

So, an old flipper phone was all I needed. Texting took a while, since it still used the old T9 method. But it forced me to keep things short and efficient.

I answered the call and brought it to my ear. I regretted it almost immediately.

“How’s retirement treating you?” I recognized the voice on the other end right away. It was none other than the harbinger of spooks, the man, the myth, the bowel irritant, Brett Bradley. The guy made James Bond look like a puppy dog.

And I mean the Daniel Craig version. No one comes close to the amazingness of Sean Connery.

I looked at my decrepit, ancient Victorian house, the treated lumber that was strewn over my three-acre lawn that would, eventually, turn into a fence, and the tools over in my detached garage. My vegetable garden was half decimated by Bruce. The untended woods that lined the back of my property were inaccessible to any biped, at least until the damn ferns, weeds, and underbrush died for the winter. I’d need to make a hiking trail soon, but that was a level of hacking and axing that my old bones resisted last summer.

I’m retired. So, I just put it off until next year.

“It’s going fine,” I said through gritted teeth. No, it wasn’t. The house was falling apart. Getting a contractor to help me with the collapsing barn was impossible. It felt like I couldn’t even throw money at the damn problem, because no one wanted to work. I still refused to admit that I bit off more than I could chew when I decided to get this fucked-up fixer-upper. “What do you want?”

“Is that any way to talk to an old friend?” Brett asked.

“No, but it’s a perfectly fine way to talk to you,” I grumbled, and repeated, slower, “What do you want?”

I still hadn’t forgiven him. I don’t think I ever would. This… this was all his fault, when I got down to it. If he hadn’t meddled, Bo and I would still have Charlotte. My sweet Lotte.

“Command Sergeant Major,” he said with false respect. The sarcasm was just an innate part of his personality now. “Would you believe that I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d come by for a beer and a bit of your hospitality?”

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