The Hauntings of Hood Canal

Interlude: Jubal Jim Smells Something Dreadful

Night holds the mountains like darkness is welded to rock. Night clasps roots of trees and rhododendron and blackberry, and the bug-running litter beneath fallen leaves. Night defeats a brilliant moon where shadows fall. Owl-light, as it fades to darkest dark, signals a time for night creatures to scurry, glide, tramp, or scatter. It is time for hounds to run.

Jubal Jim Johnson, who, during the day could be taken for a goldbrick, oozes serpent-like from the porch of Beer and Bait. The Canal lies black as tunket behind him, and mountains stand bountiful and dark with smells. It’s a smorgasbord for the nose out there, at least if one is a hound.

In light from neon, Jubal Jim looks like a black-saddled, but otherwise white apparition fading into the forest. His ordinarily smiley face with its little brown eye patches, and the blue ticking on his brisket, can’t be seen. His eighty-pound body stretches long, lithe, muscular, and he can run twenty miles in a night.

Hound sense being what it is, Jubal Jim makes do with half-a-hunt, for he has no hunter following. Jubal Jim can run a fox to ground, make a raccoon wish he was in Topeka, and tussle a bear in a manner that leaves both parties bloody and unsatisfied. If he had a hunter, or had a pack to run with, Jubal Jim would be a fulfilled hound. As it is, he has vague longings.

Of sin he is innocent because he doesn’t know what it is; or gives a smidgen. In his doggish way he understands that men stand around pool tables and things go click. He understands that brown paper bags sometimes contain interesting things to eat. Dog-like, he knows some humans can be trusted, and some cannot, and he knows the bar smells of sweat and beer like he knows the back of his paw. In the field of crime Jubal Jim is innocent, although he once secretly peed behind the piano, possibly through a whim, or possibly because during winter months Bertha keeps the doors shut and forgets to let him out.

Of crimes of passion Jubal Jim has no knowledge. He obeys the laws of dogs when in the forest, and manages to sleep past the laws of men during daylight. In the forest he learns from doing things. It sounds like fun, for example, to tangle with an adolescent cougar, but the experience is such that you generally ignore the next one.

Of history, Jubal Jim is proud heir. His bloodline traces back to the time of the Phoenicians, or at least part of it does. His sire lived a vigorous life of twelve years, his dam lived thirteen. Jubal Jim, at age seven, already moves toward that passing show where, if there is a heaven, and if that heaven comes up to advance notices, all humans who are worthy will be allowed to rejoin their dogs.

Jubal Jim runs through a windy, moonstruck night in a place where humans have lived for twenty thousand years. He runs past an extinct Indian village covered by an ancient mudslide, from which, occasionally, appears a stone or ivory tool that Chantrell George scrounges and sells. Jubal Jim runs past sites of ancient massacres, slavetrading, bone breaking, and lodge fires where echoes of dance and chant are long since washed into the soil by millenniums of rain. And who is to say, in those prehistoric days, whether bone breaking did not amount to cultural amity?

As Jubal Jim follows his nose past scents of drying needles beneath firs, of mice, and shrews, and chipmunks (small bait, these, for the attentions of a hound), past the smell of a two-week-old bear trail, past the smell of a campfire extinguished two years previous, he passes down an avenue of smells as a human might walk an avenue of advertising signs and art.

A hound’s nose is one of the exquisite instruments of creation. Relatives of Jubal Jim, the bloodhounds, can follow a week-old scent across a highway on which cars have been running. A hound’s eyes can handle darkness better than a human’s, but a hound’s nose is as keen as the eyes of an owl.

And, as with humans in a city, a hound often runs on sensory overload. As humans come to a blessed state where ears no longer register sounds of sirens, so Jubal Jim’s nose ignores unimportant smells. For deer poop he cares not at all, but will note the scat of weasel, martin, or wolverine. He will pick up the scent of humans, of the lingering smell of chainsaws, and the fresh smell of wood chips flung by saws. His nose discards the comforting salt smell of the Canal as it flows on the strong night wind, although his nose picks up the smells of carrion along the shore where lies an occasional gull or seal whose luck went bad. If Jubal Jim were human he would say he had lived a long life, had seen it all, and what is more, smelled it all. Yet now, trotting beneath moonlight, he stops, attentive, ready for fight or flight. There is a new thing under the moon.

Stirring on the Canal, a hump moves languidly, then disappears in the milk-white froth of breaking water. Wind fades beneath a fading moon as clouds cloak the scene, and from the Canal comes an ancient smell, like the musty scent of two-thousand-year-old tombs, of camphorwood and olives.

The smell passes on the back of a dying wind, and the milk froth begins to fade. Something Jubal Jim has never seen before—or has anyone else—begins slight movement. Jubal Jim watches a figure rise near the shore, a figure seemingly born of surf. The thing stands with the unsteadiness of a drunken man, and it vaguely resembles human form. The thing is pale as rapid flying clouds that obscure the moon. Jubal Jim hesitates, tests the dying wind, the smells, and stands ready to bolt.

Stench flows ashore in a wave that would sicken gulls. Stench flows like rotten meat turned liquid, like dread odors from musty graves.

The thing staggers, makes movement toward the beach, then slowly sinks; gradually fading into depths like an empty beer can filling with water. Stench blows away into forest. The thing seems weak, not yet strong enough to walk the earth.

Jubal Jim sniffs the wind, noses out an approaching storm, and begins an easy trot toward home. Drivers in occasional cars see a white and black-saddled dog cruising the side of the road. None of the drivers recognize Jubal Jim, because all of the drivers are strangers. Perhaps there is a squalling of brakes as another car disappears beneath water, perhaps not; because when Jubal Jim turns his easy run into a full dash, water overfloods and slickens the road as a mighty rain hurls against forest and Canal.