The Ragman's Memory Read Free Page B

was standing beside me. “Speaking purely scientifically, it’s a good thing your dog died when it did. Had he lived, he not only would’ve pulverized these fragments, but no fisher in his right mind would’ve had the guts to forage anywhere near here. As it is, this scat tells us there may be more to find, and maybe where to look for it.”
    “The fisher took something?” I asked.
    “The scat’s a little old, so it wouldn’t’ve been recently, but it’s a good guess.”
    I noticed Tyler nodding, a pleased look on his face. This was turning into his kind of investigation.
    “You said they avoid open country,” I said. “Does that mean we need to search the woods for where this one might’ve gone?”
    Evans rose to her feet, steadying herself by placing her hand on J.P.’s shoulder. “Yes, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find. Look for a large, craggy, crevice-filled old tree—probably just a few hundred feet from here. You may not find much, though. Fishers aren’t very big. On the other hand, they aren’t bone-gnawers, either. This one would’ve gone for whatever meat was still attached to a smaller fragment. Find out where he had his meal, and I think you’ll find the bone it was attached to.”
    I glanced up at the sky. The fading light was sufficiently offset by the quickly vanishing storm clouds. “We’ve got maybe an hour and a half before it gets too dark,” I told the others. “Let’s see if we can find the right tree.”
    It took barely half that time. Sammie pulled the entire team together and strung them out in a line facing the woods, whose dark latticework of intertwining bare branches was offset by a bright frosting of snow.
    Entering the forest was like infiltrating a dense and eccentric crystalline structure whose very size and darkness muffled and absorbed our movements. The sensation forced my thoughts back to the body lying under the cold, impersonal snow, lost and forgotten.
    There were a couple of false starts—trees whose appearance could have fit Christine Evans’s description. But when we found the real thing, there were no doubts. Barging through a tight cluster of skinny saplings, our arms crossed before our faces for protection, several of us stumbled into a clearing dominated by a crippled monster of a beech tree. Gnarled, bent, lightning-shattered, but determinedly alive, it half-lay across the land like a wounded elephant, holding itself up on a tripod of enormous branches, each the thickness of a normal full-grown tree.
    “Jesus,” Sammie murmured in awe.
    There was a moment’s stunned silence as we absorbed the majesty of the scene and were touched by the Herculean effort this tree had made to survive.
    “Wow,” Christine added. “I’ve got to get some kids out to see this.”
    “This what you were after?” I asked her.
    But she was already looking for ways to ascend the staggered trunk into the sprouting of branches high overhead. Sammie summoned the others on the radio, and soon Evans, Sammie and I were surrounded like circus acrobats by a semicircle of small, upturned faces. The three of us had split up at the first major junction, to pursue our own separate tangle of twisting branches, looking for any hole, crevice, or half-rotted crack, all the while keenly aware of the tree’s slippery surface and the long drop to the ground.
    It was because of this latter distraction that I almost missed what I was after, only returning to a narrow split in the wood beneath me because I thought I’d seen a glimmer, as from the reflection of a single cat’s eye.
    I straddled the thick branch nervously, wondering what I’d seen—and wary of something suddenly bursting out of the hole. Cautiously, I played my light down into the darkness, leaning forward only as I became convinced that what I’d found was safely uninhabited.
    The crack I was poised over opened onto a large rotted-out cavity beyond. Playing the light around inside, I saw the debris of steady