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Following Jonah’s lead, A
“I got it,” A
“The body is right beyond that. Trees’ll clear out and there’ll be a rock about the size of a refrigerator, then you turn left. Can’t miss it. Wind’s coming up. I’ve got to head back.”
Jonah had said “body” out loud. Out loud and over the radio. The breach of tradition gave A
“Where is everybody?” She didn’t whine, but she felt like it.
“They’re coming,” Jonah promised. “They got held up leaving the bunkhouse.”
A
Maybe somebody dropped by. Given recent events, that thought bordered on the sinister.
She topped the rise by the nose, spotted the refrigerator, half slid down and turned left as she’d been directed. Jonah said, “You can’t miss it,” and he was old enough and wily enough not to say that unless it was true.
In swampy areas, cedar trees fell like jackstraws, one over the other, the living with the dead, branches entangled. During the growing season, the swamps were water filled and choked with under-growth. In winter, they were navigable, but just barely. Fresh snow cloaked the branches of the upright trees and filled tiny ledges in the bark. Downed trees, fallen willy-nilly, made a lumpy quilt, protecting the living trees’ roots. Snow hid where one deadfall crossed another, and maybe three more below that, till walking through was like negotiating an icebound jungle filled with Lilliputian tiger traps.
Traversing a cedar swamp in the snow was just begging to have an ankle broken or a knee sprained. A
Then the “find” was in front of her. A body.
Parts of a body.
The reason Jonah had been able to spot anything from the air was due to small creatures, probably foxes, which had worried and dug until they’d uncovered the arm. Not Katherine’s body, just her arm, still in the sleeve of her parka, her ungloved hand a stump of chewed fingers. At least A
The sleeve of the parka wasn’t the only color in the naturally black-and-white landscape. There was no blood on the ground – or, if there was, the snow had covered it – but on the trunks of the trees leading away from the severed arm was iridescent orange paint applied with a spatter brush. The neon color was so screamingly out of place, A
A macabre vision of the severed arm blazing a trail to the body it was snatched from played through her mind. She shook it off, the way a dog shakes off a bath, and skirted the area where the arm lay, palm to the sky, fingers gnawed to the knuckle bones. At the first of the orange-daubed trees, she stopped. The neon dots were crystalline. She pulled off her glove and pinched a bit of the stuff up, rubbing it between thumb and forefinger. Body heat melted it, leaving a trace of red on her skin.
She didn’t sniff it or taste it. Blood was said to smell metallic, but she could never smell anything unless there was a lot of it and it was getting ripe. Still, she was sure it was blood. The spatter patterns formed when Katherine had fought whatever had taken off her arm. For some reason, the interaction of blood with the intense cold turned it Halloween orange.
White cedar trunks, bright Pollock-like paintings in blood orange, black of the branches overhead sketching a white sky: the scene was stu
Until she saw Katherine.
The body was facedown, head shoved partly under a log as if Katherine had tried to burrow away from her attackers. The back of her parka was torn, tufts of down leaking out rents that ran shoulder to hip where claws had dug to get at the chewy center. Strands of light brown hair mixed with the tatters of cloth and goose feathers. The fur that ringed the hood of her coat was ripped away, as was half the hood. Blood, not orange but black as tar, glued the mess together. From the waist down, she was clad only in Levi’s. Her ski pants had been shucked off of her, as a man might shuck an ear of corn, and for the same reason. The light down trousers had then been torn to pieces, played with until there was little recognizable as clothing but the suspender buckles. The Levi’s were surprisingly intact but for the bottom of the left leg. That had been chewed to a mess of string and blood. The foot was gone.
A
Katherine bothered her.
She concentrated on breathing in and breathing out and making excuses: The light was unsettling – dim and slanting and yellow-gray – cold carped on the bones, undermined body and spirit, the natural world behaving u
“Get a grip,” she growled and looked around the rest of the clearing. Focusing past the mutilated arm, she began to see other disturbances in the snow. Over an area about five feet in diameter, animals had been digging. Where they’d dug were bright orange stains. She saw the foot, boot torn off and bones showing where the flesh had been eaten away. In another depression in the snow was a hank of light brown hair clotted with black. Mostly whatever had stained the snow – fingers, flesh, a toe – had been carted off and eaten elsewhere.
Little guys, foxes and ravens and rodents, had feasted. But the little guys had not torn a full-sized woman to pieces.
“A
She twitched so hard it hurt her neck. Being startled pissed her off and being pissed off was a lot better than being tired and scared.
“It’s about damn time you got here,” she hollered. “Where the hell have you been? What in God’s name could have held you up on this godforsaken island?”