Not a Raccoon Dog—It's a Raccoon (2)
I wasn't the only one tearing my hair out over that thug of a monster—raccoon or raccoon dog, nobody could say. When I went back to the county office, the Environmental Division's Section Chief handed me the investigation report with a face that had gone even gaunter in just a few days. Their speed was commendable. The contents of the report, less so.
Apparently everyone had been thinking along the same lines. The civil servants, too, had put their money on the monster being a raccoon rather than a raccoon dog, thanks to the hand-like dexterity described in the original sighting. Raccoon dogs had lived wild in these parts since time immemorial, which made them all but impossible to track. A raccoon, on the other hand, had required a permit to keep even before the Incident—which made the investigation considerably easier.
They had contacted every licensed individual and facility from Taean County all the way through neighboring Seosan, checking whether any animal might have slipped away in the chaos of the Dimensional Anomaly. Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending on how you looked at it—the search came up empty. Every registered raccoon was accounted for, living safely under its owner's scrupulous care. The more responsible keepers had even microchipped and registered the kits those animals had produced. On paper, it was a complete bust.
In the end, the last page of the report offered nothing but a handful of guesses that were barely worth the ink. Someone's illegally kept pet had escaped. Or, against vanishingly long odds, a raccoon already living feral in the wild had been affected by the Anomaly. Or—and this one they clearly wanted to believe—it really was just a raccoon dog with unusually clever front paws. There was only one way to settle it. We'd have to see the thing with our own eyes.
I followed the sour-faced Section Chief into a small conference room at the county office. On the table sat a drone he said he'd borrowed from another department. The plan was to send it into the underground tunnel first and confirm the creature's identity.
I folded my arms, looked down at the drone, and tossed a remark at the civil servants standing there wound tight as springs.
"Want to make a bet? Raccoon or raccoon dog. I'm putting my money on raccoon."
The Section Chief answered my joke with no strength at all.
"I'd rather it be a raccoon dog. If that thing's a real raccoon, everyone in Environmental is going to have to eat dirt."
The young officer beside him whispered, his face nearly crumpling.
"Agreed... Liability for negligent management of illegally kept animals... A written apology isn't going to cut it."
Inwardly, the civil servants had already all agreed it was a raccoon. The moment that suspicion became fact, though, a simple case of a Variant appearing after the Anomaly would turn into a man-made disaster born of administrative failure. Contemplating the fallout and the question of who would take the blame, they were praying with everything they had that it was just some unidentified monster of a raccoon dog. Watching them work so hard to look the other way was equal parts pitiful and funny.
The conference-room theorizing was over. We packed up in silence, piled into the Section Chief's car, and drove out to the streamside tunnel where the thug had first been spotted.
The site was quieter than I'd expected. Whether the thug-monster had shaken the locals down properly, or whether the ugly rumors had already spread through the neighborhood, we didn't even need to put up a cordon or shoo anyone away.
We pulled the drone from the trunk and sent it into the damp, reeking dark of the tunnel. As it vanished into the gloom, the young officer beside me asked in a nervous voice.
"It's not going to get wrecked for nothing, is it? That thug's going to think it's a toy and smash it."
The Section Chief rolled a stiff neck and answered his worry with a shrug.
"Let it. It's a consumable. We can always get another one."
Easy for him to say, seeing as it isn't even his department's equipment. A snort escaped me at the sheer gall of it, but what could you do. That was how the world worked.
We huddled together around a laptop set on the ground and peered at the screen. The tunnel the drone's light revealed was a place I had absolutely no desire to enter. A sticky carpet of sludge was a given, and even through the screen the black standing water seemed to punch you in the nose. The food scraps the creature had discarded were rotting with great enthusiasm in that damp environment, and the droppings scattered here and there looked almost human.
I muttered without taking my eyes off the screen.
"The droppings look human... that's tilting things even further toward raccoon, isn't it?"
The young officer's face went paper-white. He asked as if clutching at a last scrap of hope.
"Is that true, Huntsman Jang? Really?"
Those poor civil servants were still trying to deny reality to the bitter end. I decided to drive the nail in for good. I turned my head and smiled.
"Raccoon dog droppings don't look like that. And in this day and age, nobody's crazy enough to crawl into a cesspit like that to do their business."
The drone was moving slowly, but the tunnel was far longer than I'd expected. Watching that endless concrete passage on the laptop, advancing on a single thread of light, sent a chill down even my spine. We'd been flying for a few minutes when I spoke up.
"Hold on—the tunnel's that long? I thought this was just a culvert."
"Culvert is the name of the structure. That tunnel is a line connecting our county all the way to Seosan-si next door."
The officer's matter-of-fact explanation nearly dragged a sigh out of me. I wasn't some special-forces trooper sweeping tunnels... and here I was, about to comb through a cesspit that ran all the way to the neighboring city, just to catch one raccoon the size of a person. My head was already starting to throb at the thought.
That was when it happened. The Section Chief, who had been flying the drone, hesitated with his fingers and brought it to a halt.
"Did you sense a raccoon or something?"
"How would I know? Just a feeling."
I couldn't help laughing at that cocky answer.
"So the old Hunter instincts are still kicking, huh?"
He cleared his throat at my teasing and answered in a voice that had gone genuinely serious.
"That instinct is screaming that the thing is somewhere around here."
I looked at the map displayed on the laptop.
"Where are we, roughly?"
"Probably... somewhere near the boundary line connecting to Seosan-si?"
The officer tilted his head, unsure.
"Can we seal it off?"
"Probably... that looks like the exact boundary, so if we look up a bit we should be able to tell."
"Chief, tilt it up."
"I know, I know."
The Section Chief grumbled and raised the drone's camera. Sure enough, a concrete joint appeared—built so that a massive bulkhead could be dropped into place.
"Whoa... thank god. We almost had it popping out of a manhole in Seosan-si."
Before I could even finish that sigh of relief, the laptop screen shook like mad. It spun until ceiling and floor were indistinguishable, then slammed into the ground.
There was no time to be startled. All of us locked every nerve on the last image visible through the cracked camera lens. Gray fur and a black band around the eyes filled the frame—then came a tap against the lens, and the screen went dead.
The drone had done its job thoroughly, and died a glorious death.
It was a raccoon.
A brief silence hung in the air. Then, from every mouth but mine, groans burst out almost in unison.
"Ah... we're screwed. Why did it have to be a raccoon?"
"No, seriously, why a raccoon?"
"Haa..."
"Go ask the keepers again, or... Chief, why don't you grab that sword you used back in the day and go question them yourself?"
The Section Chief shot back, looking utterly incredulous at my teasing.
"You—do you not know the presumption of innocence?"
"People still bother with that these days?"
"We can shake them down all we want and nothing will come of it, Huntsman Jang. Whether they let it go or it escaped, if they just deny everything, there's nothing we can do. We're not the police..."
"So what are you going to do?"
"What can I do. I'll be the one eating dirt, as the representative."
For all the back-and-forth, the way he ultimately volunteered to put his own neck on the line looked—just a tiny bit, a speck of dust's worth—cool. Was that the sense of responsibility that came from having been a Hunter, once upon a time? Mm-hmm. So this was what adult responsibility looked like.
"But... as for luring it out with food... I hear raccoons are ridiculously cunning. They open doorknobs. They open trash can lids."
"We've already sent a drone in, so the thing will have gone on alert by now. Looks like... this is going to be a tunnel fight."
Ah, I take it back. Damn civil servants. Their own hopes had been smashed, and now they were cheerfully smashing mine—the hope that I somehow wouldn't have to go into that cesspit myself. Birds of a feather, as they say.
We knew what the creature was, and we had a rough search area. All that remained was to gear up and go into that cesspit ourselves.
The moment I got home I went into my room and opened a battered notebook instead of the laptop. Sometimes a method this old-fashioned did a better job of sorting out my head.
The main trunk of the plan was simple. Wait for the raccoon to leave the boundary zone that connected to Seosan-si, call the county office, and have them drop the bulkhead to cut off its retreat. Then I go in and catch the thug. A beautifully clean plan. Now I just had to put some meat on its bones.
First I listed what I'd demand from the county office. A comms set, at the very least—there was no telling what might happen that deep underground. I wasn't going to ask for military-grade gear, but I at least needed one of those gas masks they used on construction sites. If I breathed that rotting air with my bare face, I'd be the one collapsing before the hunt even started.
Next was my own equipment. Shot was too dangerous inside a tunnel. Fire in a narrow concrete space and I might end up laid out by my own pellets ricocheting off every wall, which would be a spectacularly stupid way to go. I needed a load with as few pellets as possible—or I needed to switch to Slug Rounds entirely.
And then there was the noise. The sound of a shotgun in an enclosed space would be beyond anything I could imagine. I'd have to find the best earplugs I could, or go buy a headset from some hardware store if it came to that.
As I wrote down the necessities one by one, a creeping feeling took hold that the numbers on this job were refusing to add up. This was just perfect. I'd get an earful about the stink, I'd have to buy the gear out of my own pocket, and the work itself would be grueling and dangerous. Was there anything left in it for me at all?
I set the pen down and sank deep into the chair back. Getting something for nothing, it seemed, was never going to be in the cards for me.