Chapter 1
It began as a trickle of ebony tar creeping across the crest of the mountain. The thin vein broadened into a rivulet and cascaded over the apex like coal-black blood gushing from a head wound. Expanding, gaining force, it uprooted trees, lifted boulders, and carried them along as if they were twigs and pebbles roiling in a bubbling ooze.
The torrent widened, then split into three writhing tentacles.
One slithered toward the kennels, blanketing the huntsman’s house and outbuildings.
Another swept across an open hayfield, entombing the summer grass under a thick layer of gelatinous pitch. Ancient monuments in the private graveyard tumbled over and disappeared.
The third came for the main house at Montfair.
Thumper Billington stared out a second floor window, speechless and unable to move, watching the tide surge toward his home. The caretaker’s cottage melted away like a child’s sandcastle hit by a crushing wave. The stone foundation of the barn offered no resistance and the structure collapsed with a creaking moan. The swirling mire engulfed the first floor of the house. Thumper felt the heat through his bare feet as the asphalt forced its way between the floorboards. The sulfuric stench of creosote enflamed his nostrils. Tears swelled from his eyes.
Just before he succumbed to the swarming darkness, Thumper saw, coming over the mountain, a horde of steamrollers, hundreds of them, churning onward, tanks leading a conquering army. At the front of this relentless force, in a machine bigger and more powerful than all the others, was a man in a rumpled brown suit. He stood in the open cockpit, as if driving a chariot. His bald head glistened and his striped tie flapped over his shoulder. He grinned with a cartoonish leer, his lips curled in a mix of disdain and exultation, his eyes ablaze with triumph.
Thumper heard himself croaking out the words, “No! Stop! Stop! Don’t!”
His feet were kicking wildly against the searing heat throbbing up through the floor.
Blackness enveloped him. Breath came hard. The final suffocation drew near.
He felt a gentle touch on his arm, a tiny spot of relief from the steaming flood. A soft voice sounded beside him.
“Thumper, it’s happening again.”
Waking with a jerk and a grunt, he turned to see Janey Musgrove, her distress evident even in the heavy darkness.
He was dripping with sweat, a sheet tangled around his feet.
A few moments passed as he sat on the edge of the bed, waiting for his heart to stop racing, his lungs to soothe back to normal respiration, his eyes to adjust to the shadowy dimness of the room.
“I’m all right,” he said. “You go back to sleep.”
“You need to get some sleep too,” she replied. “We’ve got to be at kennels by dawn.”
He arose and went to the bedroom window. The landscape was black with tinges of gauzy gray, but it was the reassuring darkness of deep night in the unlit countryside. The irregular contours of Virginia’s Piedmont, formed by the forces of nature and not the leveling blades of machinery, could be discerned in the faint moonlight. The horizon stood punctuated by arching rows of treetops.
“Still there,” Thumper Billington whispered. “For now anyway.”
********
Thumper and Janey moved off from the Montfair barn just as the late August sky blossomed into a blushing pink. He rode his most seasoned hunt horse, retired steeplechaser Lenny. She rode Bee, whose racing career lasted less than a furlong but ever since had served as a reliable mount no matter the skill level of the rider.
It was a short hack to the hunt club’s kennels, housed on Montfair property. Four others awaited their arrival on the final morning of summer hound exercise: Crispian “Crispie” O’Rourke, huntsman; Patrice “Patti” Vestor, first whipper-in and Crispie’s significant other; Ryman McKendrick, Thumper’s joint-master of the Montfair Hunt and whipper-in; Nardell Raithby, honorary whipper-in and Ryman’s SO.
As the final two joined the group, Nardell leaned in toward Janey and said quietly, “Thumper looks like crap. Still not sleeping well?”
“This thing about Frank Worsham’s farm, that he might be selling, has him really worried.”
“We’re all concerned about that. If Frank sells out, what next?”
“Exactly. What next?”
Patti Vestor opened the gate to the kennel yard and thirty-seven foxhounds—mostly tri-color, well-muscled, and eager for the chase—swarmed out, bounced and pranced around their huntsman’s horse.
Crispie blew a short note on his horn and the pack obediently fell in behind him.
“All right, me fine lads and lassies,” he cooed to them. “Come along then. Come along.”
He picked up a trot, Patti to his right; Ryman on the left; Thumper, Nardell, and Janey spread out along behind. In good order they moved off from the kennel complex just as the first full rays of sunlight beamed over the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Five of the six riders were seasoned equestrians. Thumper, Ryman, Nardell, and Crispie had been riding since childhood, Patti for more than two decades. The past year had brought monumental changes to Janey’s life. She had discovered foxhunting by chance and was now fully immersed in this little-known world of horses and hounds.
Naturally athletic, she took to riding easily but was far from ready to handle the young Thoroughbreds favored by the hunt staff and lifelong horsemen like Thumper. Her assigned mount, Bee (short for Buffoon’s Ballet), was more the babysitter type.
Dr. Janey Musgrove, PhD, was a recognized expert on the subject of fringe religions. Her research work had taken her around the world and honed her skills at observation and description. Her analytical mind churned as the group moved along on this summer morning through the verdant countryside of Virginia’s Crutchfield County (an area named for one of Thumper’s maternal ancestors).
Covering ground on horseback, she noted, reinforces the connection to the natural world. The rider senses each step, every subtle feature of the terrain. The horse’s muscles respond as the animal moves across the varied surfaces—long smooth strides over open fields, short choppy steps along a rock-strewn trail, shoulders hunched cantering up a steep hill, haunches tucked sliding down the other side. The rider feels the flow of signals through legs, hands, and back. Muscle reacts to muscle, spine connects to spine, blending the two sentient creatures into a perfectly melded partnership.
Gone is the buffer of thickly treaded tires, the mechanized force from an unfeeling motor, the cradling comfort of finely calibrated shock absorbers, climate-controlled interior, ergonomically engineered eight-way seat—all those automotive marvels designed to separate humans from the sensation of raw propulsion. Only flesh and bone remain, moving over a landscape unaltered by the artificial influence of asphalt.
She inhaled the aromas of field and forest, marinated in three months of humid swelter, as the scents rose in waves and swirled unseen in the stew of August air. The morning mist floated away to reveal a vibrant azure sky. Bright red cardinals, shrill blue jays, and darting brown sparrows reveled in the warmth and abundance. In the distance a woodpecker tapped its jackhammer beat.
Much of Janey’s life had been a vagabond existence, rootless, always at the ready to go wherever the next story took her. This, though, was starting to feel like home, a life with stability, revered traditions, permanence, where the land was used for productive purposes and cherished for more than its monetary value.
Why, she thought, would anyone want to tear this up and pave it over?
