The Beast and the Bairns, Part I

I. Amity Bairns came home late one fall day, Clothes in tatters, face white with shock. Her mother cried and ran from the cabin, Brother Amos jumped up from where he rocked. In the lands west of old Fort plain, in seventeen hundred and eighty-five, Amity slumped to the ground in pain, a look broken and lost in her eyes. Amos fumed,"Was is the damned Mohawks?” But Amity then weakly shook her head, “Well just tell me who forced themselves on you, and I’ll go make that bastard dead!” Tears still flowed from her green eyes when she somehow managed to speak: “It looked like a m-man, but it was not— n-not like anything that I ever seen. “He-he stood really tall, near eight foot, and he wore not a stitch of clothes. H-he was huge and covered in fur… brown from his head to his great toes. “H-his face weren’t right, it was to f-flat, he didn’t speak, j-just whooped and roared. I-I was coming from Montgomery’s when… when he grabbed me and made me his whore!” With that she bawled, and spoke no more, Amos shared a long look with his ma. They’d heard of this beast who walked like man but did not answer to reason or law. For years folks had sighted him in the trees, and last winter Ben Miller had found tracks. He’d gone out early one morn to follow them, but Ben Miller had never come back. Still Amos stood and clenched his fist. “I don’t care be he a man or a beast. Nothing gets away with hurting my kin, no matter what the size of his damn feet!” Amos went to get his musket and pistol, his mother Mary pleaded for him not to go. “Since your pa died, you provide for us both, if you die we’ll both starve come the snows!” Amos frowned, but he still stood resolute. “If I don’t come back go to Uncle Ike. Pa’s brother looks at you as pa once did, he’d whole-heartedly make you his wife.” He left them both, and took to the trail, soon finding where it had taken Amity. Its footprints were huge, simple to track finding the monster would prove all too easy… CONTINUES IN PART II.