Cold Black Earth Read Free Page A

and the Larson girls, the spot was still in use.
    The creek bed bent and narrowed and the walking got harder. Rachel was having second thoughts again—a foolish middle-aged woman stumbling along a brush-clogged streambed, searching delusionally for her lost youth. She had to cross and recross the stream, slipping on rocks.
    She stopped at the sound of something scrabbling in the brush, just around the bend ahead. She remembered the coyotes and felt positively foolhardy, with an edge of alarm now. The scrabbling stopped.
    You can at least peek around the bend, she thought. She searched until she found a sturdy stick. Rachel Lindstrom wasn’t going to let a puny coyote or two spoil her morning’s walk.
    When she rounded the bend, it took a moment for what she was seeing to resolve itself into something she could identify. The coyotes were still milling around it, though they had retreated to the far side of the stream; there were half a dozen of them, and only a meal this big could have brought them out in daylight.
    Rachel had seen her share of dead animals and even, to her great regret, a few dead people. There was no particular reason why the sight of a dead animal in the bed of a stream should trigger this slow suffusion of dread.
    Except that this animal had been flayed, brutal reds and violets veining the pale, headless trunk, the stumps where the limbs had been hacked off. Something had stripped the hide from the raw flesh and left the carcass to the scavengers at the bottom of the gully.
    She stood stupefied, trying to make sense of the sight. What animal was this? The answer lay ten feet away on a pile of dead leaves, where the deer’s head, propped back on its antlers, presided obscenely, the eye gazing vacantly upward, truncated veins and the severed backbone visible in the cross section of the neck.
    Rachel’s grip on the stick tightened. Could coyotes do this? Tear the head off a deer?
    A hunter might do it if he intended to take the meat—but who would kill a deer and skin it, only to leave the meat for the coyotes? She scanned the rim of the gully on either side, looking for something that would explain this pointless butchery. She saw nothing but a tangle of brush and trees, cover for coyotes and perhaps larger things. Suddenly she was aware that she was well out of sight and hearing of any friendly being and a long, stumbling run from any kind of help.
    The coyotes were creeping back. Rachel retreated, hastening to put the bend in the gully between her and the slaughtering place. She stumbled, losing her stick, then rose and thrashed through brush. At the first opportunity she charged up the slope, pulling herself up through clinging branches, toward the sunlight.
    At the top she broke out of the trees and stood panting, looking across fields at the Larson place, tranquil in the winter sunlight. A few hundred yards back was the cluster of buildings that were her home, unfamiliar from this angle but marked by the towering oak.
    Rachel cast a look over her shoulder, shuddered and began walking along the grassy border of the field. Hunters, she thought, who’d skinned the deer on the spot and went to fetch a truck or a tractor to haul the carcass home.
    Leaving the meat unprotected from coyotes? It made no sense. Or perhaps they intended the meat for the coyotes? To keep them fed and distracted from domestic animals? That didn’t seem very likely. If you didn’t want coyotes to eat your animals, you shot a few pour encourager les autres and kept the .223 handy.
    Rachel made tracks, resisting the thought that came trailing after that one: Some people hunted just because they liked to kill things.

     
    When Rachel came into the kitchen, it took her a moment to recognize the man sitting at the table as her nephew Billy. He was a different person from the eleven-year-old she’d last seen: Testosterone had lengthened and roughened his features and furred his upper lip and chin. He had his mother’s dark good