"Longtooth" by Edgar Pangborn (From Good Neighbors and Other Strangers; included in David Hartwell's Foundations of Fear)
It seems strange to me to pair Pangoborn's name with the word "horror." Pangborn was the most compassionate and empathetic of writers, not one to try to scare the reader, more inclined to a gentle, wry humor and a contemplation of good will and how sometimes good will isn't enough. But "Longtooth" is definitely horror. It's also just as definitely a Pangborn story.
Harp is married to Leda. At 56 Harp is bordering on old -- the story was published in 1970 and ideas of what was old were a bit different before us Baby Boomers ripened enough to extend "old" outward -- and Leda is 28, a fact Harp's friend Ben, our narrator, ponders on. Ben is an old friend of Harp's, a year older and less healthy, already feeling the effects of a failing heart and lungs battered by heavy smoking. He has come back to Darkfield after the deaths of his wife and his brother, settling in expecting to retire quietly. Visiting Harp to bring him a book, he is snowed in and immersed in an adventure he's not truly prepared for.
Over the brutal Maine winter Harp has heard noises off in the woods around his house. And one of his cows was killed after a crossbeam of the fence had been pulled out, and the cow led off into the woods before being slaughtered and eaten. Harp is an experienced woodsman but can't find the trail of the killer; he suspects it reaches the woods and travels tree to tree. Ben wonders about Harp and the pressure on an aging man of a young wife, even if his every move and glance at her is filled with adoration. But then Ben hears the sounds, too, and even sees the shadow of the thing, and while Harp and Ben are busy with the livestock, something crashes in the bedroom window and Leda is taken.
The town officials are more than skeptical, they don't believe Ben and Harp, and so the two are on their own to find the truth and avenge Leda.
"Longtooth" explores aging -- in this it might make an interesting companion read with Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes -- and the effects on a man of losing the trust of his community, of losing his wife, and wondering about his sanity. If "Longtooth" doesn't reach the heights of terror of other outdoor horror stories like "The Willows", it applies the decency innate in all of Pangborn's work to a melancholy and sad effect, and reminds us some forms of dread do not issue solely from the thing in the night.
About Good Neighbors and Other Strangers, it's been about 30 years since my second reading of this collection, and I'm enjoying it every bit as much as back then. Pangborn, rich in humor and observant and tolerant, makes a good companion for quiet nights. It's a pity his short fiction isn't readily available, although I see the title story can be purchased for Nook and Kindle.
Randy M.
