Chapter 14

The reason Otis Gurganus always got the big bucks wasn’t because his family owned some of the best hunting grounds in North Carolina, but because he prepared long in advance. In the spring, usually five months to the day before bow season began in September. Oh yeah, the monsters—the fourteen-pointers and bigger—didn’t get that way by being stupid.

Sure, you had to know your enemy; had to know the lay of the land and the habits of the deer that lived there. But for Otis Gurganus, it all came down to preseason scouting: finding out food sources and watering holes; setting up a stand in the trees just the right distance from their bedding areas; getting settled at least a couple of hours before sundown or sunup. Commonsense stuff, but a delicate operation nonetheless. He knew from experience that the biggest bucks bedded alone and came out looking for food later than the others. Yeah, nowadays, he didn’t waste his time with anything less than a twelve-pointer with a twenty-eight-inch spread; always left the smaller ones for other hunters to keep the kill stats for his lodge high.

Gurganus hunted with a bow. Nowadays, he thought, the big bucks, the record breakers, would only get bagged with a bow. They weren’t stupid enough to stick around or congregate with other deer once they started hearing gunshots. Gurganus was still the record holder for the biggest buck bagged in North Carolina: a behemoth of a twenty-two-pointer that he nailed broadside from twenty-five yards just after his thirtieth birthday. That was almost ten years ago, but Gurganus knew his next and biggest buck was close; might even bag him this coming season if he was lucky.

The hunter stepped out of his pickup truck, flicked on his night-vision goggles, and headed out into the woods. He had been using the NVGs now for years and almost creamed his pants two Christmases ago when his wife gave him the newfangled GPS calculator. Wasn’t a cheap gift, either. Cost his wife over four hundred dollars, and cost him almost a whole week of nonstop boning her. But Gurganus never really got the hang of the GPS calculator until the following summer, when he started documenting deer activity and plotting it on his son’s computer. It paid off in spades for him this past season, even though he didn’t bag his next record breaker.

Tonight, however, he didn’t carry along his GPS calculator. No, on this, the first night of his preseason scouting, all the hunter had with him were his NVGs and his .45-caliber Sig Sauer. You couldn’t be too careful all alone in the woods at night; never know when you might come across something unfriendly, a rogue bear from the western part of the state or a pack of hungry coyotes.

But Otis Gurganus didn’t plan on using his gun tonight. No, tonight was all about listening; about sitting up in last season’s stands and getting a sense of movement. He had not been out in his woods for over three months now, but he would not kill any deer with his bow until September. Just like everybody else.

Yeah, Otis Gurganus always played by the rules.

The stand was only about three hundred yards into the woods and was situated at the edge of a large clearing that the hunter knew would be peppered with spring clover. And he made good time—got there at exactly 3:30 a.m. and had settled himself comfortably in the tree five minutes later. He’d not heard any deer running away from him while stealing through the woods; hadn’t seen them with his night vision, either. But that didn’t mean they weren’t around—especially the big bucks, who never gave up their positions unless they were sure they’d been spotted.

Gurganus hadn’t been in his stand long when his NVGs picked up something strange. The goggles were only rated for detail to about a hundred yards, but, whatever the thing was, the hunter could tell it was closer than that—just at the opposite edge of the clearing. It looked like an oddly shaped tree trunk, but for some reason Gurganus couldn’t take his eyes off it. Had it been closer to the season, had he dumped a pile of corn in the clearing to attract the deer as he’d done when he shot his record breaker ten years ago, well, he might’ve waited until after daylight before climbing down to investigate.

But tonight, so early in the off-season, with the woods so still and no sign of any deer activity at all, Otis Gurganus’s curiosity got the better of him. And in no time he was back down the tree and heading across the clearing. He’d traveled only a few yards when his goggles finally registered what he’d been unable to put together from his stand. The sight of it stopped him dead in his tracks.

The oddly shaped tree looked like a man—a skinny green man leaning against a pole.

“Hey!” Gurganus called out impulsively. “This is private property!”

No response—only the sound of his own voice disappearing into the woods—and suddenly he felt his cheeks go hot; felt a flash of anger in his stomach as he reached down for his Sig Sauer and began running across the field.

But as he drew closer and the skinny green man became clearer, Otis Gurganus’s fury quickly turned to terror. The skinny green man was not leaning against the pole. No, the pole was running up through the middle of his body—through his ass and out his shoulder! His legs were missing below the knees—made him look as if he was floating in the trees—and somewhere in the back of Otis Gurganus’s mind flashed a clip from some zombie movie he’d seen as a kid back in the eighties.

The skinny green man smiled back at him—mouth open, teeth bared, the lips pulled back or missing altogether. Someone had tied the guy’s head to the pole so that he appeared to be gazing down and to his left. His eye sockets, however, were empty; his eyeballs and his nose gone. Breakfast for crows, Gurganus thought in numb horror.

His heart was pounding wildly now; and standing there, staring up at the shriveled corpse not five feet away from him, Otis Gurganus suddenly felt a hot wetness running down the inside of his thigh. He registered it absently, as if it were happening to someone else. And years later, when he would tell this story to his grandchildren, more than coming upon a dead body all alone in the middle of the woods, the old man would swear that what really made him piss his pants was the glowing white symbols on the trespasser’s rotting torso.