Page 320 of Nobody's Girl

She nods. The guys come back out of the woods with more wood for the fire, stopping our conversation. “We can talk more about this later, Laura.”

“This dude has eagle eyes,” Kyle says as he motions towards Eden. “It’s so dark out there and he just kept finding one piece of wood after another. I couldn’t see a thing.”

I look at Eden. “The bird thing?”

He shrugs his shoulders. “I don’t think so. I’ve always been able to see well in the dark.”

The sound of several hound dogs barking gets closer. “Did you see those dogs when you were out there?” Laura asks them.

“No, they seem to be getting closer,” Eden says. “I’m sure someone’s hunting raccoons or something like that. They use dogs for that type of hunting.”

The sound of one of the hounds baying comes from the tree line. Then the dog appears in the pasture, followed by more dogs and more barks.

“Um, guys, is that how they normally hunt, by coming up to people?” I ask.

Eden and Kyle turn to see the pack of around twelve dogs coming towards us from across the pasture. “Maybe we should go back inside,” I say.

The dogs start running as fast as they can towards us. I move farther back into the bed of the truck, as does Laura. The dogs are not slowing down and they begin to bark differently, like they’ve caught something.

“Eden, get in the truck,” Kyle tells him.

Eden looks at him for a second, but then does what Kyle said to. He sits on the tailgate, but has to move back quickly as one of the dogs jumps at him. Suddenly all the dogs have surrounded the truck and are barking like crazy. Kyle stands where he’s been standing all along. They don’t seem to even notice him.

“It’s the dogs from last night,” Eden tells me. “They know it’s us, Alyssa.”

A shot rings out from the edge of the pasture as several men come out of the woods. They begin to come toward us. “Laura, please climb through the back window of the truck. There’s a handgun underneath the driver’s seat. Stay in the back seat and use it if you have to,” Kyle tells her as quietly as he can over the noise of the barking dogs.

She moves quickly through the open back window, making it into the truck before the men get up to us. “I found it, Kyle,” she says.

“These your dogs?” Kyle asks the men as they approach us.

“Yep,” one of the men answers him.

“You might want to get them outta here. They’re kinda fuckin’ up our night,” Kyle says.

“They sure are barking like they treed something,” another one of the men comments.

Kyle offers an explanation, “Well, we have some baby ducks in the back of the truck, so they must think they have something, but they don’t.”

An older man asks, “Y’all are new around here?”

Kyle nods. “Yes, sir. We just moved here from Cloudcroft, New Mexico. Me and my wife are going to UT in the fall. Our friends are visiting us for a while. They helped us move in.”

“You had a big party last night,” the older man says.

“A housewarming party. Where abouts do you live, if you don’t mind me asking,” Kyle asks.

“Oh, about twenty minutes up the road. Did you people notice a loud jet airplane flying around last night?”

Kyle nods again. “We did. The noise from it broke up our party last night. Does that type of thing happen a lot around here?”

“No. I have a police scanner at home. The plane was watching something fly and lost it about right here,” the man says.

“We were all outside. We saw nothing but the loud jet plane. If he had seen something, we should have seen it too,” Kyle tells him.

“Quiet them dogs down, Jimmy!” the older man yells.

“I can’t get them to quit, Bob,” the one who must be Jimmy answers.