The barn was very bright. The long fluorescent lights overhead chased all the shadows from both the ground floor and the loft. The stall doors were all closed—the younger man no longer owned horses—and the smells in the air were of yard equipment and car parts. Everywhere was disarray. Cracked wood panels, spilled cans of liquids, torn tarps, scattered tools, tracked dirt and mud. The older man stopped by the riding mower and put down his backpack.
The younger man had a raccoon trap he’d brought down from the loft. He’d said that if a snipe was so small, the trap was big enough. He put it on the floor, put a sandwich inside, and set the trap.
He asked, “Will ham and cheese work? This is deli-quality meat, man.”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. You won’t catch it.” The older man looked around for a moment. “I always liked this place. We had an old-fashioned barn raising back when your folks first decided to build it. That was a while before you were born. I organized it. I was friends with a lot of locals back then.”
“I’m your friend,” the younger man said.
“No, you’re not. I know better.”
The older man rested on his haunches and reached into his backpack. He took out a carved wooden instrument that bore a distant resemblance to a flute, though shorter and rectangular. On one end it had a small crank handle.
The younger man said, “What is that? A snipe call?”
“No, the opposite. Something I made a long time ago to clear snipes out of a junkyard.”
He began to turn the crank, and the younger man braced himself for some sort of hideous noise. To his surprise, there was nothing, just the sound of the handle turning in the wooden base and the older man’s breathing.
This is not going to work, he thought. There’s nothing supernatural here. There’s no such thing as a snipe, and he really is crazy. Like they all say. It’s a raccoon or a possum or something like that.
A clip-clopping sound rattled the loft’s floorboards over their heads. It expanded rapidly, shaking dust and old hay down through gaps, growing louder, creating a fog. The walls began to tremble. Stall doors flew open and banged shut again. Tools fell from the workbenches and clattered loudly on the concrete floor. The air in the barn became thick with motion, though it was still only the two of them, the older man bent over his wooden instrument as he cranked the handle. The younger man felt movement by his knees. His pant leg twitched as if touched. He turned in circles.
For a moment, he saw something. He would later think it might have been a duck with bright yellow feathers and the biggest blue ears he’d ever seen on any animal, let alone on a bird. It was small, just like a chihuahua, as the older man had suggested. It waddled on webbed feet at an exceptional speed—and it came right at him. Then it was gone before he could blink at the dust stinging his eyes.
He was lifted a foot into the air, and he could feel a host of contacts from his feet all the way up to his neck. He’d once tried crowd surfing at a concert, and he was reminded of that sensation now as he was hefted up.
Then he was flipped over. Something poked him in one eye. He could hear the sound of the handle turning on the older man’s instrument, but this disappeared under the growing thunder of movement. Running feet. Bodies bumping, ricocheting off one another and off support beams and workbench legs and farm equipment and stall doors. He thought he could hear strange sounds of displeasure following impacts. He was turned end for end.
Then whatever support was beneath him tossed him upward, and when he came down again, nothing caught him. He fell all the way to the floor. The concrete was cold, and the wind was knocked out of him. He rose to his hands and knees, hanging his head, and as he caught his breath, the older man stopped cranking the handle.
“All right,” the older man said. “It’s done.”
The younger man sat up, sliding to put his back to a stall door. All around him, more damage had been piled atop the wreckage the snipe had done to the barn before. He could only guess how long and at what expense it might take to repair all the harm done to the structure. Just the same, he sensed it was only the two of them now; they were alone.
“Was it a snipe?” he asked.
“No,” the older man said. “It was about a hundred-and-fifty snipes.”
“So, you really aren’t crazy.”
“I don’t know about that.” The older man put his instrument back in his backpack and helped the younger man to his feet. “But the colony’s gone now. You got your folks’ barn back. They won’t bother you anymore.”
He paused then asked, “Do you still think we’re friends now?”
The younger man didn’t hesitate—he nodded before he looked around at the mess of the barn once more. Then he sighed. “Oh, man. They even took my sandwich.”
