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If he’s a poacher, why did he bring me my laptop, InReach, and the rest of my gear?
It reinforced her gut impression that he was a good guy beneath that grumpy exterior. But she sensed that the key to his identity lay in the footage from her trail cams.
Outside, the steady rhythm of splitting firewood continued. Holly bent, ignoring the stabbing sensation from her injured calf, and swiftly collected the SD cards for the trail cams before covering them up again with the tarp. She stuffed the cards in her bra, then limped back to the sofa.
As she picked up her laptop, she asked herself, What am I going to do if Ice really is a poacher?
She hoped against hope Ice wasn’t the one who had set that bear trap.
To her relief, the laptop screen instantly came to life when she opened the lid, displaying the usual lock screen with IDFG’s shield logo. She typed her PIN to log in, then inserted the SD card from trail cam #7.
Time to see whether the startling footage she remembered was a near-death hallucination.
Holy moly! It wasn’t a hallucination! Heart pounding, Holly rewatched the footage. Her memories hadn’t lied to her. The sabertooth cat had been real, right down to the backpack and the ax.
Keeping one ear out for the continued sounds of wood chopping outside, Holly saved the video to her hard drive. Then she reached into her bra and hunted for the SD card from trail cam #8, which she’d placed inside the fir grove.
Fascinated, she watched the sabertooth cat pad through the trees. It wove around the trunks, as if searching for something.
If that’s an animatronic puppet, it’s a damned good one, she thought, watching it stop in front of a Douglas fir and thoroughly scent-mark it before moving out of camera range. It moved and behaved exactly like a feline.
The footage time stamp was 0902 this morning.
She returned to the thumbnail index and skipped hours of bird and squirrel footage before spotting the sabertooth cat again. She knew it was the same individual because it still wore the backpack. It appeared to be intently focused on something off-camera.
Me, helpless in a bear trap, she realized, glancing at the time stamp. A chill ran down her spine.
The sabertooth walked out of camera range, then reappeared a few minutes later.
Then the big cat crouched on the ground, gripped by a visible tremor. The tremor intensified until the beast writhed on the carpet of fallen fir needles.
At first, she thought that either the electronics controlling the puppet were shorting out, or it was having a seizure. It sure looked real, its long, graceful feline body contorting in agonized spasms.
Then it began to change. That was when the already-unbelievable footage got even weirder.
Holly’s jaw dropped in disbelief as the video turned into a scene straight out of a classic horror movie.
She forgot about Ice working outside. As she watched, transfixed, fur receded. Muscles rippled and twisted. Bone reshaped.
At first, she had no idea what might be happening. Had the big cat eaten poisoned bait?
Or was her first guess correct, and this was an epic malfunction of a special effects puppet?
Then she realized the sabertooth cat was transforming into something else. Something human-shaped.
Finally, the writhing stopped. Now a big, muscular, sweaty, and completely naked man lay curled on the ground. Full sleeve tattoos covered both arms from shoulders to wrists. Even with his back to the trail cam, he looked familiar. Especially with that shaggy brown hair.
The man climbed shakily to his feet, then shrugged out of the backpack he still wore. He turned, revealing his profile to the camera, and began pulling clothes out of the pack.
“Oh. My. God,” Holly muttered, her mind blown. “That’s Ice.”
She couldn’t believe what she’d just seen. It had to be some kind of movie magic. A special effect.
But on my trail cam? she asked herself. How is that even possible?
Still, it seemed more plausible than believing that a sabertooth cat could change into a man.
She tapped the Rewind key, and watched the entire sequence again, looking for any evidence of special effects. Because none of this could be real, right?
