Beast of Beowawe

The night before last, Brady had found the first signs of slaughter. The snow had fallen clean and new, a soft quilt draped across the valley, but it hadn’t stayed white for long.

Near the fenceline of Miguel Lardizábal’s pasture, he’d found the sheep, what was left of them, strewn about like rag dolls, throats torn open, their bodies dragged and dropped, leaving dark arterial fans of crimson in the snow that steamed faintly in the frigid air. Brady was a man who’d seen death before, cattle mauled by cougar or coyote, sheep lost to the cold, but this was something else; wounds too deep, the savagery too personal.

The snow around them bore strange impressions: four-toed prints, big as a man’s hand, arranged not in the staggered rhythm of a quadruped, but the even pattern of something that walked upright. He crouched low, studying one track where the blood had frozen at the edges.

The claw marks were deep, set with purpose. Caught on a low branch nearby was a single wiry hair, coarse and brown, thicker than a horse’s mane.

When he rubbed it between thumb and forefinger, a faint oily musk clung to his skin. That same musk wafted up from the droppings he found farther on, dense, rank, threaded with shards of bone and tufts of wool.

He followed the trail through the aspen stand where the snow muffled every step. The night was still, save for the groaning of trees shifting under frost and the distant drip of meltwater from the trough he’d helped Lardizábal build the summer before.

The moon hung high and full, a perfect white coin behind thin clouds, and in that cold glow Brady saw it. The creature stood erect, no more than fifty yards ahead, framed between the trunks.

Its shape was almost human, but elongated, and distorted, limbs too long, shoulders narrow and twisted as if broken and re-healed in the wrong places. The snout jutted forward, black and wet, and it sniffed the air in long, deliberate draws, each one loud enough to echo across the snow.

Brady froze, breath held, heart pounding so loud he feared it might draw the thing’s attention. It didn’t move at first.

Then its head turned sharply toward him. Eyes like dull coals caught the moonlight. The creature let out a growl that rose into a howl, something ancient, furious, and heartbreakingly human beneath the animal rage.

Brady didn’t think. He drew his Colt and fired once. The bullet struck true, snapping the thing’s head back. It fell to its knees, then onto its side, thrashing once before going still.

When he approached, the steam of its blood curled into the night air, but as he stared, his breath caught in his throat, as the form before him was changing.

The hair sank back into the flesh, the snout drew inward, the claws retracting into fingers. Within moments, what lay in the snow wasn’t a beast at all but a man.

Miguel Lardizábal.

Brady stood over him for a long time, his breath fogging the still air. He holstered his gun and whispered a curse, then he turned and walked home, leaving the body to whatever carrion the desert called its own.

By morning, the ravens had found it. The coyotes would follow.

Two nights later, Brady dreamed of the tracks again. Only this time, they led not through snow but through stars, four-toed prints impressed upon an endless black expanse. He followed them, though there was no ground beneath him, no air to breathe, only a cold pressure in his chest that pulled him forward.

He found himself standing once more among the aspens. The moon was close now, brighter and pulsing, its surface crawling with motion like a nest of insects.

Beneath its light, the snow began to bubble. Shapes moved under it, limbs, faces, the faint sound of whispering.

He awoke slick with sweat, the sound of those whispers still clinging to his ears.

At dawn, he went back to where he’d left Miguel’s body. Brady found the snow, churned, blackened with blood and feathers.

But the body was gone. No bones, no scraps, no sign of struggle, just those same upright tracks leading off toward the hills.

Brady followed.

The trail wound through the sage and into the basalt ridges beyond Beowawe, where the earth opened, becoming old mine shafts and caves. There, beneath a lip of rock, he found a hollow filled with bones, sheep, deer, and humans alike.

The air was thick with the musk of rot and something sweeter, almost floral, that made his eyes water. Carved into the rock above the hollow were marks, circles intersected by lines, spirals nested within spirals.

They seemed to shift as he looked at them, as if the stone itself pulsed faintly in time with his heartbeat. Then Brady heard movement behind him, a slow, dragging step.

Turning, he saw the tracks again. Fresh ones.

He raised his gun. The sun hung low and red, casting long shadows that bent and twisted with the rocks, where one of those shadows moved, tall, upright, familiar.

“Miguel?” he whispered.

The thing tilted its head, and for an instant, Brady saw his neighbor’s face, eyes sorrowful, mouth working as if to speak. Then the face melted away into fur and teeth.

The howl that followed was neither challenge nor rage, but something else entirely. An invitation, maybe.

And before Brady knew it, he was stepping forward, toward the sound, toward the hollow breathing darkness that awaited within.

Afterward, those who saw him swore that his eyes had changed color, and that, sometimes, when the wind cut across Beowawe Brady was heard howling back.