The way my Aunt Katie told this, the June night was cold enough that even the gnats took cover, hiding in the crevices of the white barn instead of swarming beneath the farm's single night-light.
She launched into the story one morning when I joined her on the screen porch for a cigarette, which she let me smoke because my grandparents were at the grocery store. I settled into the rocker across from where she sat on the swing before I noticed her duffel bag sitting beside her. I knew not to interrupt her in the middle of a story, but my mind sort of focused on what the bag meant instead of on what Katie said.
She was out that night to avoid the heated discussion going on between my grandpa and grandma. She walked along the lane beside the pasture, heading toward the creek and putting the brick house behind her. The grass between the tractor ruts wet the bottom of her corduroys. Besides the cold and wet, it was dark---in her words, "the moon too had pulled a blanket of heavy cloud across its brilliant face." My aunt used to really get into her stories.
About halfway up the lane, where the pasture on her right rose into a small hill, Katie heard a strange grunting breath. What the hell, she thought. Whatever it was, it sure was blowing hard. She stepped up to the barbwire fence and peered into the pasture. She glimpsed a dark form just past the crest of the hill.
Jerking back, she almost tripped into the tractor rut. She had no idea what she had seen---some unknown animal. It looked to have a hulking stoop to its shoulders and it moved as though rooting into the grass. Her mind said bear.
She thought of my grandpa's rifle on the rack above the bedroom dresser. The square of light from the kitchen window was farther away than she realized, and she took a couple of nervous steps in that direction. But glass broke somewhere in the tension-filled house, and she turned back to the animal.
More heavy breath and more rooting around out there. Her mind raced. What was it? It must be a bear, but what was it doing in the pasture? Had it found something there to eat? What? She looked again at the house, back to the animal, and then she dropped to her stomach and scooched under the fence.
When she stood on the other side, her hands and clothes were soaked with dew. She skirted the hill to the right, looking for the slight hollow at its base and the stump of an old oak grandpa had cut down a few winters before. The ground dropped off in the dark, and she held her breath as the swishing grass and her clumsy feet covered the animal's breathing. Where's that stump, she thought. There, she crouched behind it with the house to her back.
Closer, she could hear squishy wet movement between the snorting breaths. The clouds had begun to shift off the moon, and she could almost make out the dark thing's shape---she caught her breath as it jerked and doubled its size before her eyes. She pressed against the stump. The breathing was quieter. What's that new sound, she wondered. Sandpaper?
The moon shone clearly, and she saw the animal that she had been so afraid of---a cow and her newborn calf. The mother had just stood up at the end of labor, and she was nudging and licking the calf to its feet. I can see my aunt's wide embarrassed grin as she relaxed and sat on the stump to listen to the mother's sandpaper tongue.
"Ah, ha, ha! What an idiot!" I laughed. "It was just a dumb cow having her calf!"
My aunt grinned at my ridicule, watching cigarette smoke curl up between her fingers. When a truck pulled into the driveway, she gathered her bag. "There's my ride."
"Where ya goin'?" I asked, and maybe I knew then that we would not see her again.
She paused at the screen door. "I don't know."
Written sometime in the late 90s and submitted to the soundinthedarkness
writing contest hosted by 