Chapter 1
Cat True was bowhunting whitetail high up Rattlesnake Ridge, though the property was posted and she was trespassing. There was a big buck moving back and forth along the steep slope two hundred yards below the crest, between the Pennsylvania state forest where she was allowed and the neighboring private land where she wasn’t, and she found the temptation to go after him irresistible.
Sign was everywhere. Among the laurel and loblolly pine were handfuls of raisin-like scat. Scrapes on the forest floor, hoof-dug craters with the pungent odor of doe urine on bare dirt, aroused and alerted him that a hot doe was nearby. He left fresh bark rubs on saplings and small trees to show off his virility. He’d rubbed raw an eight-inch maple trunk next to the trail, scratching off the summer’s itchy felt to smooth his bone-hard tines.
He must be a monster. Even fully gutted, it would be hell dragging him back through the public land to her pickup along the road, but it was mostly downhill, and she figured it would be well worth it to help feed her and her mother through the winter. And her mother Sally, a half-blooded Catoosa from Tulsa, coveted the big racks as much as the local white men.
Cat climbed a tractor trailer-sized granite outcropping above the deer trail and crouched to study the terrain, a serene slope of oak and maple skeletons and wild brush swallowing severed limbs and lichen-covered rocks, everything blanketed in dead leaves. She listened intently to the chatter of the squirrels objecting to her presence, the “caw, caw, caw” of an equally perturbed passing crow, the screech of a suspicious circling hawk, the “knock, knock, knock” of an oblivious far-off woodpecker.
As she did at the start of every hunt, she had begun her day before dawn with a leaf bath upon entering the woods, a ritual as sacred for her as a devout Catholic dabbing holy water and making the sign of the cross before entering the sanctuary. She rolled back and forth on the forest floor, rubbing the fragrant brittle leaves into the fabric of her clothes and hair and under her arms. It was an old Indian trick her mother had taught her, imparted generation to generation from those whose very survival depended on their hunting expertise, camouflaging her scent from the deer whose sight and hearing were no better than human, but whose sense of smell was extraordinary. Every advantage counted, but for Cat it was something more. It was a way to formally turn her back on the grim world of men and machines and quiet her mind before approaching nature’s holy altar.
She wore faded Levis, worn high-top Keds and a tree bark camouflaged vest over a tight-fitting, pine-colored, hooded sweatshirt. The insulated vest had long sleeves that detached with zippers. She’d removed them when the morning frost first melted and she could no longer see her breath. They were stuffed in an inside pocket in the lining at the small of her back along with her rarely-used bow counterweight. Her clothes were old and torn, repaired with duct tape and sewing thread, but clean, washed with odorless detergent, air-dried on a clothesline deep in the woods far from the human smells of home.
She traveled light and carried only what she needed. A recycled water bottle filled from a mountain stream, a USMC Ka-Bar Fighting Knife sheathed on her leather belt, a zipper-lock freezer bag, a ten-foot length of number eight sash cord and her Pennsylvania resident hunting license. She didn’t need a compass or a watch. She could read the sun.
Careful to make no noise, she was a good hunter--patient, quiet and able to keep still for long periods--though her mother’s ancestors back in Oklahoma would surely have laughed at her fancy bow, an Oneida Strike Eagle, once the Cadillac of compounds, an extravagant gift from an old boyfriend. She’d stripped it down, eliminating the gaudy sight and onboard quiver to lighten the weight, but there was no denying the distinctive modern design, wicked in its lethal beauty. When she wasn’t hunting, she liked showing it off, hanging it face down on the rifle rack behind the seat of her beat-up pickup, where some hunters showed off their guns.
She didn’t like guns. They were heavy and noisy. The gunpowder stank, as did the men who carried them, more often than not. They could shoot further, but not always more accurately. She liked the stealth of her bow. She once made a heart shot on a six-point not fifty yards behind the back of a muzzle-loader in his tree stand, dressed it and dragged it off under his very nose and the fool was never the wiser. She was happy to take this prize buck now, three weeks before rifle season opened and the real shooting started, when local hunters took off work, schools shut down for the day and out-of-staters invaded. Up from Virginia, Maryland and D.C., in from Ohio, down from New York, over from Jersey. They’d fill the local motels and lodges and taverns. The countryside would crackle and echo with high-powered rifle shot. Deer carcasses became automotive hood and roof ornaments. And gun shop owners, hardware store clerks, butchers and taxidermists would keep busy through Christmas.
She carried mail-order aluminum arrows in a traditional buckskin quiver slung over her shoulder, a clearance item from a closing hardware store. The plastic tail of each arrow was specially marked with Native American glyphs to distinguish it from the others. She liked to think that they each had a unique personality. They were like her children. She loved them all, but treated each differently, since some invariably flew farther and straighter than others. Only the favored ones were awarded expensive steel razor tips. The others merited mere lead practice tips.
Suddenly she heard dry leaves rustle in a thicket of grape vines forty yards down the trail to her left. It could have been a gray squirrel or a wild turkey, but it could have been him, too. Her favorite arrow was ready to fly, poised astride the rest, nock snapped onto the bowstring, glove trigger release locked beneath the nock. Despite the quickening of her pulse, the only movement she made was an imperceptibly slow turn of the head.
It was cagey, whatever it was, and it would not leave the tangled thicket before pausing for long periods to scan for danger. That’s what’s kept him alive this long.
She waited, listening for fifteen minutes without moving. She didn’t raise the bow when he, with his ten-point rack, eased cautiously from the knotted brambles, taking a few timid steps, swiveling his head in every direction, turning his muzzle up into the breeze. He was mature, at least five years old, his coat a grayish brown, with darker markings, allowing him to blend in easily with his surroundings. His rack was dark, too, thick and magnificent, nourished by a steady diet of acorns. There had been no late frosts last spring, and the oak trees had covered the floor with their bounty, providing a hearty diet. It was hard to distinguish him from the landscape at all, except when he moved. He eased into the clear, his neck swollen with pride, displaying a good hundred and eighty pounds of muscled magnificence and regal countenance.
It was a shame to kill him, but she would apologize later, as she always did, just after cutting his jugular and before dressing him. As she waited for him to bleed out, she would say a prayer and explain to him in hushed tones how sorry she was. She’d promise to remember him at every meal and honor his antlers by displaying them proudly in her home. She would then thank him and tell him what a blessing his meat was to her and her family, and wish him well in his journey to the next world. And then she would turn him up and gut him.
It was customary among her ancestors to cut out the beating heart first and eat it whole, believing as they did that you could absorb the soul and strength of the animal, taking into you its spirit to be a part of your own forever. She did not follow this tradition exactly, but brought along the plastic bag to salvage the stilled heart and boil it later for the evening meal. Still, sometimes she could not resist slicing off a small sliver of the red raw muscle and placing it on her tongue like a communion wafer.
Adrenaline accelerated her heart, triggered by the excited anticipation of the kill and memories of ancestral hunts eons before she was born, memories lying dormant deep in every hunter’s primitive brain until the time came to kill again. The elation was difficult to contain, but still she did not raise her bow.
She salivated over the cuts of meat he would provide. Succulent roasts from his thick neck, basted twice a day in maple syrup in the fridge for three days, then slow-baked in their wood oven. Juicy steaks from his loin, grilled with a little salt and pepper. Tasty chops, marinated in wine and fried up with soy sauce. The rest cut into cubes and thrown into a vegetable stew or ground up and mixed with fatty pork for burgers and meatballs or baked in a meatloaf with eggs, onions and bread crumbs.
The wind shifted. She noticed a strand of her long black hair blowing in his direction. She watched him turn his nose up again to sniff and knew she had only this one chance before he detected her.
He moved. She followed, and in one smooth motion, drew up and pulled back, touched the kisser button to the side of her lips, aimed and trigger-released. The soft twang of the bowstring was muffled by splaying cattail silencers, deer hide threads tied above and below, to absorb the vibration and quiet the shot. A sapling she hadn’t noticed eight feet in front of him shivered as the razor tip was deflected from its path through his heart and instead punctured his lung and stopped short at a rib bone on the far side, not passing through as it should have. He fell over backwards, wide-eyed with surprise, as if sucker-punched from a barstool, then jumped to his feet, tearing off down through the woods without so much as a snort.
Motherfucker. Her facial expression contorted in disappointment. A fatal shot, to be sure, but hardly the perfect kill. His meat would not be quite so tender or sweet, and now she would have to earn her reward by tracking him across the private land at the risk of arrest and a fine. At least he ran in the general direction of her pickup, making the drag back through the woods a mite shorter.
Fifteen minutes later, she set out on his blood trail. She’d given him plenty of time to run and stop, feel safe, lie down to rest, and then slide into unconsciousness and die. He had sprinted at first. There was only a single drop every twenty yards or so. But his hooves had stirred the leaves in his wake and the crimson wetness from the lung shot shone like a bright signpost against the dull brown oak leaf carpet.
As the steep incline angled to a tamer downward slant, she noticed the clearing on a plateau below and stopped to scan the woods for trouble. She knew there was a hunter’s hut there, a small old chicken coop with four walls, a tin roof, no door and two open portals where a window and a hatch had been knocked out. There might well be a hunter inside bow-hunting or readying himself for the muzzle-loading season, which was to start next week. Bad enough she’d had to track her prize, but getting busted for poaching would really ruin the day. She’d claim the shot was made on the public land--which wasn’t far from the truth--and she just might get away with it. But it depended on who caught her. As was their legal right, property owners sometimes seized deer killed by trespassers. Fortunately, it was a Monday, and odds were the fools were all at work.
She continued to track him, turning now northeast, moving parallel to the ridge back towards the state forest. The blood trail was more evident here, drops every four yards, which meant the buck had slowed to a trot. Then he turned downhill again. She followed. He must be headed to water. He couldn’t be far now. There would be a spring sprouting up from underground somewhere below down in the hollow. She paused and looked up again, scanning the woods and the clearing.
The chicken coop stood in the middle of a gently sloping vacant field of thigh-high grass. There were a few dying apple trees planted long ago to attract the deer and the ruined stone foundations of a long-gone farmhouse. It was a small unpainted structure, crudely-milled, knotty one-by-six planks overlapping a two-by-four frame, abandoned decades ago, a monument to a failed human effort to live off the land and, as such, now ignored and unappreciated. Until a torrential wind or a chance lightning strike destroyed it, it served no other purpose than to shield the seasonal hunter from the elements.
That’s when she noticed it, distinct in the morning sunshine. Something red lay on the south-facing doorstep of the hut. Dark red, like blood. Not blood from a lung shot, but darker, from the heart. She squinted harder. More like the plastic red tail of a green-stemmed aluminum arrow not unlike her own. It was no arrow, though. It was something else laid upon the shed step. Something even more incongruous out here in the middle of nowhere, so far from the conventions of modern civilization. It was a freshly-cut, long-stemmed red rose.
Cat could contrive no purpose, reason or accident why such a flower should be where it didn’t belong. Curious, she moved closer to investigate. She scanned the clearing and the woods around the perimeter again and again. No trucks. No ATV three- or four-wheelers. No dirt bikes. No tire tracks of any kind. Weird. Why would anyone bring a lovely long-stemmed rose deep into the woods during bowhunting season? It was hardly a place for romance.
Even as she moved into the clearing and made her approach, she felt something was wrong. But curiosity got the better of her. The curiosity of a cat. She remembered how an old lover teased her about her name, in his own infantile--though quite charming--way. In his case, satisfaction had not brought him back.
She stepped warily and stopped short of the rose, half-expecting some fool to leap out of the hut to yell, Surprise! But everywhere was quiet and still but for the gentle breezes rustling through the pines and grasses. Above her, billowing white clouds floated across the deep blue heavens. She knew with all her highly-tuned senses that she was alone out here. And yet--
She had never dared to venture this far into the clearing before and now noticed an old dirt road winding up from the woods below and circling around the hut, leading nowhere. Wild grasses between the tracks nearly erased them.
She made a cautious approach toward the doorstep to examine the rose close-up. It was indeed a magnificent specimen, beads of dew glistening on the vein-branched, red-velvety petals blossoming in the sunlight.
And then she looked inside, peering into the dark, into the shadows. A chill ran through her soul. Her eyes widened at the horror of it. Goose bumps leapt up and down her arms and across the back of her neck. Suddenly the sweet solitude of her morning’s hunt turned to absolute terror at being totally alone in the wilderness in the season of death. If this was somebody’s idea of a scarecrow to keep poachers away, it was a good one, she thought.
And ran.
