Ann slipped and fell in the wet underbrush. Blackberry and wild strawberry vine snared her feet and she nearly lost a boot. A dead branch tore through her jeans and scratched her thigh. It stung but didn’t bleed much. When she got to the downed trees she had something to hold onto, but climbing over them was another matter. Sometimes the damp bark would give way and she’d slide off, skinning the log down to the bare soft wood beneath where fat, yellow-bodied insects scrambled for deeper cover. It was safer to go slow, to saddle herself over the logs instead of trying to walk on top of them. Her jeans were soaking wet now and she was starting to chill. When she stopped to catch her breath she thought she smelled smoke coming from the darker forest before her. Wood smoke and the faint aroma of cooking meat.
The bleeding elk was lying on a bed of fern, dead. She bent down and stroked its fur, felt her eyes well with tears. The body was still warm, and in the flashlight she could see a thin vapor rising, first in the shape of the elk and then dispersing into the trees. Taking note of its injuries-the broken antler and protruding leg bone, embedded glass-she was surprised by the wound to its belly-a deep cut leaking blood-but assumed that as the elk had staggered into the woods it had impaled itself on something sharp. However, nothing she could find explained the smell of roasting meat. She’d searched the area around the elk for evidence of fire but had found nothing. Poor thing must have caught on fire, she thought. Fell down on its burnt side to cool it against the ground. If I could only lift eight hundred pounds I’d know for sure. But this is no time for wildlife forensics. You’ve got to find Mitch before it’s too late-if it isn’t already. So where in the hell did they go?
She felt raindrops and glanced up, saw an advancing arm of cloud coming from the west, a dark amoebae stretching across the sky to catch the moon. Before heading back she decided to keep the elk company a while longer, remembering all the other animals she’d found perished along the highway, their varieties of fatal injuries. She felt better for the ones that were able to retreat into the woods to die, that weren’t scraped from the road by someone working for the county and dumped god knows where. She’d known for a long time that the woods next to the highway were littered with salt-bleached bones, from her days of hunting mushrooms and collecting baby ferns. She’d even seen some remains that had escaped the destruction of scavengers. Complete skeletons that had come to rest in steaming hollows, where the sun’s rays were weakened by a thick canopy of leaves and an eerie green light settled over everything dreamlike and primeval.
People thought Ann’s interest in roadkill was weird, but that had never stopped her from pulling over to investigate, to acknowledge the animals in the state they were before the earth took them back. She’d always been drawn to animals, maybe because she didn’t have the same problem with recalling their faces as she did with people. She didn’t recognize this elk, however, although she was familiar with the several herds that wandered in and out of town, was used to them stealing from her garden. When hunting season arrived the elk would wander from yard to yard, eating whatever delicacies they could find while gunfire thundered from neighboring forests. Ann had always thought of the elk as royalty, that if she stared into their dark eyes long enough she could see some ancient spirit looking back at her across thousands of years, from a world she’d never know. But in those lucky moments when she became so closely connected that she lost all sense of self and time, the effect of standing before an elk or kayaking on the bay with the crimson sockeye salmon passing below would last for days, dwarfing troubling thoughts so she could see them as the ephemeral debris they were.
In Buoy City the traffic lights were swinging above the intersections in high arcs, many pulsing red. For the most part, the storm had driven people inside for the night. And yet there were others like Ann who enjoyed storms, who couldn’t resist walking on the beach or spending the time in a cozy bar with friends. As she drove through town she noticed shadows darting in and out of doorways, blurred faces haloed by neon and the glowing ends of cigarettes. Various trash moved along the sidewalks as if the storm had bestowed it consciousness-a broken umbrella cart-wheeled in circles, a newspaper leapt from one shop window to the next like a desperate voyeur. At the north end of town she pulled into the hospital parking lot and drove around. Other than a darkened ambulance jostling in the wind, the place was vacant. Mitch and Sheriff Dawkins were nowhere to be found.