Sam Ebbons’ pointer was his pride and joy. With a solid liver head on a pure white ticked body, the dog, bred from a bloodline of champion hunters, was a gift from Sam’s father, Brutus, a man of rigid convictions who rarely indulged his son. The pup had been the largest male of the litter, alert and eager to obey, taking to Sam as soon as he had lifted him from his mother’s teat in the den’s cedar warmth. Sam had turned the pup around in his big, nicked-up fingers and announced that he was the finest dog he’d ever laid eyes on. After the pup was weaned, he never left Sam’s side. That is, until he was taken from Sam by the southerners of Lick Creek. The dog was never found, but his collar washed up, tattered and faded, on the north shore of the Lick, not long after Sam was found dead on his bathroom floor, apparently from elapid envenoming.

The collar was found by a local named Althea and turned over to the Camden County sheriff, Gideon Underwood, one week to the day after the dog was reported missing and six days after Sam Ebbons was discovered unresponsive, having aspirated on his own vomit. The tight-knit community was particularly interested in both the missing dog and the details surrounding the owner’s death, but Gideon Underwood wasn’t talking. The medical examiner initially suspected an overdose, then poison, but there had been no other signs of distress, and the toxicology report had yet to come back from Columbia.

When Gideon saw the collar on his desk, sitting in a clear evidence bag, he felt a chill spread through his groin. He took it upon himself to pay a visit to the dead man’s father. He felt badly for the man, having buried both his wife and only son, and seeming committed to living out his days alone in his double-wide behind the Dollar General off Highway 7.

Gideon turned down the CB on his way over, thinking in silence about Brutus and his particular ways. He wondered how the man would take this new detail, and decided to try to convince him once again to come down to the station and provide an official statement.’Gideon pulled off 7 and onto the gravel rural route, parked a ways off from the handicap-accessible ramp, and killed the motor, listening to the pulsating ticks of the cicadas, which had arrived in a fury that week, years prematurely, in the midst of some sort of electrical storm that had turned his jurisdiction upside down. The town had lost power for a few days, the hospital was running on their generators, and the local airport had shut down for a day and a half. The governor had called twice—not bothering to come in, of course—and there had even been talk of the National Guard. Gideon had been fielding calls from the local college’s agricultural department, anxious about the supposed climate crisis. Gideon himself didn’t mind the cicadas much. They were good for his bird-watching, as the birds fed on the glut.

The sheriff stood, stretched his legs, and walked slowly to the double-wide, giving Brutus, a veteran of the Gulf war, plenty of time to discover him before he reached the door. He knocked three times and squinted in the soggy afternoon heat.

Brutus answered in his own time, holding his Mark V Weatherby, as he was wont to do, and exhaling smoke to the side as he opened the screen door. “Gideon,” he said coldly.

“How you holding up, Brutus?” Gideon asked, looking him over.

“As well as can be expected,” Brutus said, lifting his hand to block the sunlight. A tuft of gray hairs poked out from his undershirt. “You got some news for me?”

Gideon shifted his weight, glancing behind Brutus into the darkness, where light from the television illuminated a corner of the trailer. An overflowing ashtray sat beside a sweating Big Gulp on the table. Barking echoed from the dog pens behind the trailer.

“Sam’s dog’s collar washed up on the north side of Lick yesterday,” Gideon said. He pulled the wet stub of an unlit cigar from the corner of his mouth and spat into the dirt. “It’s gone into evidence, but I wanted to stop by to tell you.”

Brutus’s sagging face tensed, and he looked down at his gun, adjusting it needlessly. “Mm-hm. Anything else?”

Gideon returned the cigar to his mouth. He pulled a glossy photograph of the dog collar from an envelope and handed it to Brutus.

Brutus looked it over. Tags were attached. No signs of distress.

Gideon watched him examine the photograph. For a man who had just buried his son, he looked about how he should.

“How the other boys doing?” Brutus asked.

“All right, it seems.”

“You heard anything?”

“Nothing from any of them since the day we found Sam.”

“Even Kurt?”

“Seems recovered. Back filling gas at the Red Fox.” Gideon hitched up his pants. He knew what Brutus was thinking. Why had Sam been the only one of the four to die? Why his son?

“I wish those boys would give you something useful,” Brutus barked, his face suddenly looking very old in the sunlight.

Gideon nodded. “You sure you don’t have anything useful?”

“Told you everything I know, Gideon. And you won’t listen worth a damn.”

“We’ve been over this, Brutus. South of the Lick is out of our jurisdiction. Their people are looking.”

“‘Their people.’ So they say.” Brutus raised his voice. “Who in the hell are their people anyway?”

Gideon had contacted the precinct in charge of the area south of Lick Creek two days after Sam’s death. They had told him they had no intention of combing those parts for anything beyond what they had already found: nothing. If he wanted more, he’d have to escalate the situation himself, which was not within his budget.

“Well, if anything comes to you, you know how to get a hold of me,” he said to Brutus.

“I told you,” Brutus answered, stepping a few inches closer and lowering his voice, though no one was around. “You’re asking the wrong person. South of the Lick is where my boy got bit. You know as well as I do that things aren’t right down there.”

“Aren’t right?”

“Those hill people and their snake medicine—well, they got my boy, and you know it.”

Gideon stiffened. “The Lick folks have their own ways, but there is no evidence of any foul play, Brutus.”

“Ah, that’s horseshit! Someone had to have seen something.”

Gideon tongued the sore that had been lingering in his mouth since spring and thought over Brutus’s claims. He took the photograph back and made a show of looking around the property as he fit it back into the tight envelope. “Let me think on it,” he said finally. “I’ll be in touch if anything else comes up.”

Brutus limped backward, grunting something incoherent before closing the door between them. Gideon lingered on the shoddy porch for a moment, the smell of Marlboros lingering outside the trailer. He took his time walking back to his vehicle, noting the security cameras, one out of order, along the perimeter of the property. Aside from the rhythmic ticking of the cicadas, he found the place unsettlingly quiet.

The Gascon River and its tributary, Lick Creek, were at the heart of the Department of Conservation’s current legal snafus. Primarily spring-fed and running through the westernmost part of the county, the creek had once drawn a plentiful number of visitors, heartily contributing to the hunting and fishing industries in Camden County. Lick Creek, or “the Lick” to the clans around those parts, was beautiful flat water, with postcard-perfect shores full of active wildlife. But beneath the scenery was something much darker. The problems had started with the old coal mines in the area, which leached acidic drainage into the drinking water around the turn of the century. Illegal dumping of industrial waste, mostly from Bryson Foods in Pettis, had accumulated in such intensity that by the time Reagan was in office, bacteria levels were over eight hundred times what was federally allowed in drinking water. Gideon’s office displayed a framed, yellowing letter from the White House expressing concern and stating the President’s commitment to supporting the great state of Missouri in its clean-up. During his tenure as sheriff of Camden County, Gideon had seen some of that, but not enough to keep away the men in white suits wielding test-tubes. Dead Zones popped up nearly every year. Boil orders were a regular occurrence. Babies were frequently born with problems, the hospital said. And there was the current to boot. In short, the Lick was trouble.

To avoid the toxic run-off, some of the locals had moved upstream, but a cluster of old-timers had stuck around. South of Lick Creek was one such cluster. They fell under the care of Shale County, but according to public records, the law hadn’t been called to those parts since Y2K. Hell, no electricity or septic had even been set up in the two thousand acres of timber below the highway. They were old Ozark hill people, traditional types, with their own churches and medicine. The folks on the north side paid their taxes and used the roads like anyone else, but the folks on the south side lived wholly off the grid. They birthed and buried their own, grew their own provisions, and caused no disturbances to speak of. They’d kept to themselves for so long that some northerners thought they’d died out. Around the time Jimmy Carter took office, they stopped paying taxes. There were no registered births or deaths south of the Lick after 1985, no school house, no fire station, no use of the roads. No people were even spotted by the law, though it was true that most of the private properties went unsupervised by the sheriff on the south side. For all Gideon knew, the folks down there were simply private people who interacted only with their own clans—if there was anyone left at all.

The northerners were the last true hill people of the Ozark valley who were still in touch with the outside world. Their population consisted of families whose people had settled in the territory hundreds of years before. Largely isolated, they had learned to rely on themselves, developing superb carpentry methods that could be seen in houses and public buildings all throughout Camden County. They primarily home-schooled their children, and they treated their maladies using their own Yarb doctors and granny women, whose techniques relied on Indian medicine learned from the Osage tribes that had once inhabited these parts. In the last twenty years or so, they had started venturing out “into town,” finding that their crafts would fetch a pretty price at the farmers’ markets.

The northerners kept on their own side of the Lick. If asked about the south, they averted their eyes or crossed themselves, pressing their lips into a line. Highly superstitious people, they avoided gossip, but if encouraged, they sometimes spoke in snatches about the Devil and his work. They had their own beliefs and stuck to them, and that included not running their mouths about anything that might follow their folks home.

Brutus’s boy had died the day after hunting frogs on the Lick. Ever since, folks had been on edge. How does an otherwise healthy twenty-four-year-old man suffocate after drinking only two beers, with a blood alcohol level well within limits? And how to explain that the three other men in the party had been hospitalized and treated with antivenom, but—and here’s the kicker—had no rattler bites? A resident doctor from Rolla had come up to inspect them: not a mark. Then there was that missing dog, and tire tracks all askew on the north side, but no word from anyone on the south. In the days since the incident, there had been talk of poison, drug deals, witchcraft.

No one from the north had seen anything, it seemed, and the three surviving young men were as baffled as the law. There were no trails for Gideon to follow, but something in his gut still felt off, like seeing light at the wrong time after waking up from a nap.

The community always locked their doors at night, but since last week, church attendance in the town had doubled. When there’s talk of the Devil, no one sleeps in on Sunday.

Brutus Ebbons and his three siblings had been raised on a dairy farm in the boot-heel of the state by their parents, Joan and Jack, both veterans of the Vietnam war turned homesteaders. Joan, who had worked in intelligence, was a sensible woman of slight stature who, in her retirement, cultivated heirloom tomatoes and bred Yorkshire Terriers. His father, a retired Army Sergeant and a recipient of the Purple Heart, raised Holstein dairy cows and studied Roman history. Working the cows taught Brutus, his two brothers, and his sister to respect the end of a long day and to understand the exceptional value of quiet. Brutus was a sturdy and focused child who gave his parents little trouble, and this was the central source of his pride.

After passing a special state exam that allowed him to enlist in the Army three months shy of the required age, Brutus completed two back-to-back tours in Iraq as part of the 4th Stryker Brigade, doing his part to save the world from rising oil costs. His career was cut short when he almost lost his leg to an IED, though he’d tell you that his long-term disability was due to a combination of Gulf War Syndrome and anthrax injections.

Not even thirty and home on disability, with an honorable discharge, Brutus settled back in Camden County, married a local girl, and produced one son, someone he hoped would serve his country as he had. After losing his wife to a painful bout of a rare esophageal cancer when the child was still a boy, Brutus turned his energy toward raising German short-haired Pointers, always lugging around an old hunting rifle to take the weight off his bad leg. He used this gun to direct the dogs, discipline his son, and dissuade visitors to his property, as he was deeply distrustful of his fellow men, especially elected officials.

His boy, Sam, was a child without direction. Slow-speaking and quick to anger, he was held back in school, struggled with petty crime, and was eventually deemed unfit for service. He had given his mother, while she lived, a nervous disposition, and regularly sent his father into fits of fury. In manhood, Sam had neither wife nor children.

About four years before Sam’s death, Brutus and his son engaged in a shouting match that ended with Brutus putting his fist through the walnut paneling in his double-wide. Angry and ashamed, Sam stormed off, while Brutus made a call to the mill about honest work for his son. The manager was a former private whose life Brutus had saved when their humvee was hit by an IED. Brutus had reached into the vehicle as it burned, pulling the private from the gunner’s hatch seconds before it blew. He received the Gold Lifesaving Medal as a result, and the grateful private, Skip Henry III, was able to return to his wife and children with only third-degree burns, which he proudly displayed during his rounds of inspection at the mill.

Skip was happy to hire Sam for the third shift. The hours meant Sam would clock out around the time when Skip was arriving for the day. He’d greet Sam as the sun came up, never missing an opportunity to remind Sam that Brutus was the great hero of his life, a detail that quite profoundly contradicted Sam’s own experience of his father.

The mill work was repetitive and exhausting, requiring physical strength and sustained focus, but it was ideal work for Sam, whose quiet, heavy-bodied disposition preferred such an environment. After two years without incident, he was promoted to operator, and Brutus, feeling pride in his son for perhaps the first time ever, called him over for beers that he had cooling in the icebox.

After they had each drunk a couple, Sam followed his father to the pens behind the double-wide, where a mound of eight-week-old puppies tumbled over one another, their cries filling the air.

“Pick one,” Brutus said, looking down at his healthy litter.

“What?” Sam asked in astonishment.

“This one here’s the runt,” Brutus said, pointing at a tiny female, “but she’s robust. Liver-headed ones are all male.”

Sam crouched down, feeling as though he might cry. He watched the little bodies climbing over one another for the teat and vowed to work harder to be a better man. He chose a larger pup, chubby but quick, and picked it up, holding its face to his. The dog looked at him straight on, as if he’d known him forever. This here’s the dog for me, Sam thought.

After he had selected his pup, in a moment of warmth for his father, he asked if he could name it Brutus Junior.

Brutus looked at his son, thinking what an odd boy he was. “Seeing as I’ll not likely have any grandchildren of my own, I s’pose that would be all right,” he answered awkwardly.

So Sam called the dog BJ, and he trained him up right.

Sam knew he was a disappointment to his father. Usually he didn’t care much. He hadn’t been interested in going overseas when he could make his pension more easily right here in Camden County. His father had kept insisting for a long time, not listening to his son’s muted protests, so Sam simply refused to take the ASVAB, staying out the night before and missing the two scheduled tests, though he felt halfway sick because of it. Truth of the matter was, he didn’t think he could stomach killing anyone, even an enemy. But Brutus wouldn’t hear of any show of weakness. Sam had never been one to fight, though his size could have backed him up; instead he fell back on being too slow, too drunk, too dumb, even when the charade made him feel all wrong inside.

After he told his father he had missed the tests, Brutus kicked him out on the spot. Sam called his friend Jess, who helped him load his things into his truck while Brutus watched from the window, leaning on his big unloaded gun.

Sam found a small room adjacent to the Mexican restaurant on Highway 5. It had fluorescent lights in a popcorn ceiling where water stains collected, but it included his own garage space and a little grassy patch out back, where he could grill up venison on his Weber. Time passed, and he worked his job at the mill. His father gave up on his resentment, and they’d meet for chicken dinners, never talking much about anything aside from the mill and the dogs. His life felt thin. Devoid of color.

Sam kept a photo album full of pictures of his mother, Rosie, on his kitchen table, and he looked at it every morning over his bowl of cereal, after his third shift ended. She had been a frail sort of woman who bottled every feeling she ever had deep inside of her, and so love to Sam came to mean quiet obedience. She had died of cancer before he’d finished high school, the illness taking her alarmingly quickly, within a season. She had never smoked a single cigarette in her life, yet she was the one who got sick. She had never complained when Brutus smoked in the house, which he continued to do after her diagnosis. Her leaving had left the house even quieter than it had been before. Sam, of course, wished it was his father who had died, and Brutus knew this. The unspoken unfairness of it all hung like a cloud between the two men. Sam looked for his mother in every barfly he bedded, but all he ever seemed to find were women who had been hardened into coldness by whatever they had seen before him.

After BJ, though, things changed. Now there was a creature who needed him, who wanted to be with him. The dog was never disappointed in him, never cold to him. In fact, he thrived on the commands Sam issued, delighting in his owner despite Sam’s many failures. BJ didn’t see him as too heavy, too lazy, too goddamn dumb. What was it if not the most perfect form of companionship?

Sam would take the dog out back, to the grassy spot beside the commuter parking lot, and work on obedience, spending hours on commands, rewarding him with kibble and all the encouragement he himself had never received in childhood. BJ had eyes for every bird Sam directed him to, running hard and fast to locate upland game. He lived to please. After a full year of the dog’s company, Sam felt his body filling out with honest love.

He spent as much time as possible in the grassy fields beyond the highway, going there at dawn or after work to wait out pheasant. Sometimes he’d go to shoot, sometimes just to watch. After he got BJ, the dog would accompany him to the fields. Sam trained him to step softly, as pheasant spook easily. BJ would tiptoe as he had been taught, his freckled legs quiet in the tall grasses until Sam gave the command. Then the startled pheasant, bursting into the sky in a rush, the gun’s crack, BJ’s blissful retrieval on his whistle. BJ showed a natural aptitude for locating fowl. He was quick as a dart, using his strong legs only when called to and waiting patiently for his owner’s direction when not moving, the little muscles around his hindquarters twitching with eager obedience.

Sam liked to wait out the male birds, tracing them as they flew trustingly in arcs across the sky. When he shot, he’d listen to the sound echo, rolling across the grasslands, and he’d feel at peace. Mostly, though, he went to the fields just to sit in the silence. In the twilight the birds would migrate slowly from one comfortable loafing spot to another, their colorful, pear-shaped bodies moving slowly, enjoying their little lives. No one bothered Sam there with talk, with disappointments.

For Sam, sitting with his dog beside him in the last of the day’s light was church. BJ was unlike any other gun dog Sam had ever known. The hours spent training him for the hunt consumed Sam, and he began to shift into a man with something to live for.

When Jess Cedars and his friends take the weekend to go hunting frogs, his wife, Lillian, issues one warning: don’t cross to the south side of the Lick. That area is private property, and its inhabitants are peculiar. Having grown up in hill country and trained as a medicine woman, Lillian knows the Lick’s dangers, and as a new mother to a baby daughter, she wants her husband to come back safely. What she doesn’t tell him is that the hill people across the Lick are tied to a long history of witchcraft.

As the men hunt, they don’t initially intend to cross the Lick. When they do, it’s to retrieve a hunting dog who has run off after following a trail. Two of the men are injured from the sharp briars in the timbers, and within twelve hours, one is dead from a mysterious illness. A day later, the others fall ill as well, first with a sort of fever and then with a rage, which leads to a form of possession no modern medicine can treat.

At this time, a cloud of cicadas, arriving several years early, disrupts the goings-on in town. That, along with the loss of electricity and the mysterious illness, alerts the local healers to the fact that something has been unearthed across the Osage from the south side of Lick Creek.

According to Ozark superstition, if you fall ill, your own kinfolk must retrieve the antidote, so Lillian is charged with returning to the site of Jess’s injury, south of the Lick, for the herbal remedy. She asks a granny woman to watch over both her ill husband and her newborn, then sets off for the creek. As she crosses the Lick, an Ozark howler, a predatory cat, begins to track her, and she must fight it before finally meeting her match—the south-side equivalent of a healer, a black witch.

In their exchange, she learns the truth of her own murky origins: she herself was an orphan from the south, and as a result she has their demonic capacities—and their potential for evil—within her, as indicated by a cowl on her eye, an extra membrane that all babies in the south are born with. After clashing with the south-side witches, recuperating with healers on the north side, and nearly being murdered by howlers, Lillian finally returns home with the needed antidote, only to face her husband, who is being consumed by a demon. Still only two days postpartum, she must fight the man she loves to protect his soul.