Yellow Stonefly

by Tim Poland

  Tommy stomped to the carcass and pointed to it with the barrel of his shotgun. “There. See for yourself if you don’t believe me.”

  “Geez, what a mess,” J.D. said as he and Sandy joined Tommy at the side of the carcass.

  “I don’t know if you’ll be wanting to look at this,” Tommy said to Sandy.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said.

  And she would be, of course. After fifteen years as a nurse, in one capacity or another, she’d seen more variations of the world’s assault on the flesh than either Tommy or J.D. would ever see. Sandy found no source for awe or astonishment in the human body—that animated bag of skin and hair, blood and bone—other than its remarkable frailty and vulnerability. She’d observed at close range the results of the vast array of means by which it could be beaten, broken, burned, punctured, gnawed, invaded, infested, infected, severed, and spent. If she ever saw any cause for wonder, it was only that any one body might make its transit over an average lifespan and remain relatively intact.

  J.D. was right, though. It was a mess. The young steer’s head was nearly severed. Its nostrils and snout were caked with dried blood and dirt, and its eyes had been pecked out by the vultures. The neck had been torn completely away, exposing a portion of the spinal column, festooned with shreds of tendon. Flesh had been torn out in chunks, and the wide, flat bones of the ribcage on the upside of the carcass were likewise exposed. Hide had been ripped away and lay shredded around the body, along with bits of entrails left from the steer’s gutted chest cavity. Flies were everywhere.

  “See. What’d I tell you,” Tommy said, the shotgun barrel still pointing at the dead steer’s remains. “Killed by a mountain lion or my name ain’t Tommy Akers.”

  “Look, Tommy,” J.D. said. “It’s a damned shame, but there’s no way this was a mountain lion. Probably coyotes. Could have fallen and been weakened. Easy prey. Was it sick?”

  “Weren’t sick. None of my cattle’s sick. Couldn’t nothing but a cat do this.”

  “Damn it, Tommy. There aren’t any mountain lions around here. How many times do I have to say it?”

  Tommy took a step closer to the carcass and poked with the shotgun at the frayed hide above the ribcage.

  “Yeah? Well, just how do you explain that?”

  Sandy and J.D. leaned in closer, squinting at the spot Tommy indicated.

  “What?” J.D. said.

  “That.” Tommy poked at the spot again. “Claw marks.”

  Sandy could make out no mark distinct from the general shredding of the hide. Tommy was insistent.

  “See there? That slice in the skin?”

  “Geez,” J.D. said. “The animal’s been torn to bits. How in the world could you possibly see claw marks in this mess? And even if this mountain lion of yours did kill the steer, coyotes and buzzards have destroyed any sign of claw marks. You’re seeing things.”

  Sandy leaned in closer still. On a flap of hide she thought she could just see a tear, a notch of sorts, no more than an inch in length. “This?” she asked, pointing.

  “Yes, that,” Tommy said. “Plain as day. You see, government man. I told you this little lady was smart.”

  “Just let it go, Tommy,” J.D. said. “There’s no way you can make that out as a claw mark.”

  “I know what I know. And that’s a claw mark from a cat.”

  J.D. swatted at the flies around his head and stepped away from the carcass, walking back to his SUV. Sandy and Tommy followed.

  “Tommy, I’m sorry. Probably coyotes, and vultures for sure, have made a mess of your stock. But it wasn’t no mountain lion. State biologists have done studies. Eastern mountain lions have been extinct here for a hundred years. Proven science.”

  Sandy looked back across the pasture. She could just make out Stink’s head protruding from the half-open window of her truck.

  “Then how come you hear stories all the time about someone seeing a mountain cat?” Tommy dug a tin of snuff out of his back pocket and lodged a fat pinch into his lip. “I been hearing those stories all my life.”

  “And they’re just that. Stories. Tall tales.”

  Tommy spat onto the ground. “Well, I heard tell a while back that you guys at fish and game are secretly releasing cats back into the mountains, to keep the deer down. What do you say to that, government man?”

  J.D. threw up his arms, shook his head, and opened the door to his vehicle. “I say that’s nonsense, Tommy. And I’ve had enough. I’m leaving. I’ll put in the report.”

  Tommy kept hammering away at J.D. as the SUV bounced back across the pasture. By the time J.D. had brought the SUV to a stop between the house and barn, he’d had enough.

  “Damn it, Tommy. Stop it. You know, I have a wife and kids I’d like to get home to, and I don’t have time or energy for some old fool who thinks he sees mountain lions that aren’t there.”

  Sandy was startled by this display of temper from J.D. She’d seen earnestness, consternation from him before, but never anger. Tommy’s jaw locked. He stared at J.D., but didn’t speak. Sandy wondered which prong of J.D.’s remark had pierced most deeply, being called a fool or the reference to a wife and kids Tommy no longer had.

  Tommy opened his door, spat on the ground, and got out. Sandy climbed out, too, as Tommy walked slowly toward his house. Looking through the passenger window Sandy saw J.D. rubbing his forehead, clearly regretting the degree of his outburst.

  “Look, Tommy,” J.D. called after him. “I’m sorry.”

  Tommy turned, scowled at the game warden for a moment, and spat again. “You surely are.” Tommy’s shotgun dangled from his hand as he walked to his house and disappeared inside.

  “You okay?” Sandy leaned into J.D.’s window.

  “Doesn’t seem so,” J.D. said. “Tommy may be a fool sometimes, but I had no business calling him one. Just stretched so thin these days, and I, well, sort of been losing it from time to time. No excuse for that though. Ain’t like me.”

  “No, it’s not.” Sandy reached into the vehicle and patted him on the shoulder again.

  “I get short-tempered. Just so tired. It’s a miracle Margie ain’t thrown me out.”

  “Go home and give her a big hug and a kiss.”

  “I’d like nothing more.”

  Sandy stood back from the vehicle as J.D. shifted back into gear. “J.D.?” she said. “No chance at all it could be a mountain lion?”

  Sandy realized that as they’d stood over the yearling’s ransacked carcass, she’d become intrigued by the idea of a predator so formidable roaming somewhere through the mountains around her.

  “None. Don’t let Tommy’s nonsense get to you.”

  Sandy stroked Stink’s fur casually as she climbed into her truck and started the ignition. She wondered for a moment if she should look in on Tommy before leaving, but decided it would likely be best to leave him alone for now, in sole control of his version of events. Gravel spit from beneath the wheels and a plume of dust rose into the breeze as her truck rolled out onto Willard Road.

  Ain’t Been No Mountain Lions in This Part of the Country for a Hundred Years

  The young steer had been heavy with meat, strangely so. Equally heavy laden with fat, as well. Not so lean and taut as a deer. It was far slower than a deer, simple to catch, but bigger, harder to drag down. The flesh was ample and would have fed and sustained her for days. She’d brought it down, torn out part of the neck, and ripped her way through the guts to the plump heart, but no further. By then coyotes had begun to close in. Only a few of them, a small pack, but too many to make a fight of it, so she abandoned her kill, not nearly finished with it yet.

  Retreating through the thick brush at the edge of the open field, she followed the riverbank upstream to the dam. In the dim shadow of the dam, she crouched low at the river’s edge for a moment and lapped a little water, to cut the thick tang of hot blood still on her tongue. The river ran in thin braids from the bottom of the dam, the water levels low enough for her to leap
easily from rock to rock across to the other side and up the bank and into the trees. She had listened to the knowledge in her blood, had traced the course of the map inscribed in her flesh. She could not do otherwise. But her ancient range was now overlaid with the fledgling geography of human haunts. Lured by the scent of irresistible prey, she’d crossed these inscrutable lines into terrain that required enhanced caution.

  She stalked carefully through the trees and arrived at another line, the access road around the lake that shone in the starlight off her right shoulder. She stepped onto the line. Her ears twitched at the rumble of the engine, and her eyes blinked back the lights piercing the dark as the vehicle rounded the curve. She crouched and leapt into the trees, the line safely crossed with only the fringe of the light beam catching her tail as she fled into the forest. The grinding of brakes and the squeal of tires on the road behind meant nothing to her. She ran freely through the trees, the venerable scent of the upland headwaters leading her as she moved, defining her stride.

  With each leap further up the slope, deeper into the woods, her tread delineated the indelible lines of an indigenous territory, charted by sight, scent, and the reason in the blood. Here was the ineluctable cycle of seasons. Here the lean, wild flesh that nourished generations. Here the high ledges and deep cover. Here the caves in which to den securely. She ran on and on, rising through the night.

  9

  EDITH WAS DEAD. SANDY KNEW IT WITH CERTAINTY THE moment she held up the rainbow trout and turned to show it to the old woman. Clear to Sandy’s experienced eye, there had been no spasm, no desperate, painful gasp, no frantic struggle to cling to the last breath. She had just slipped away, as they said, quietly, gently. Edith sat in the lawn chair as she had since they’d arrived at the riverbank. The only change, her head now lay slumped forward and onto her right shoulder. Her left hand remained in her lap, as it had been, her right dangled at her side, the gnarled fingers hovering a couple inches above the rock ledge.

  The rainbow writhed from Sandy’s distracted grip and flopped back into the stream. Calmly, she pulled it back to her, pinched the hook from its lip, and released it. Reeling in her line as she walked, Sandy waded toward the body.

  Edith had been nearly insistent on going to the river this particular day when she learned Sandy had the same day off. Summer was drawing to a close, leaving few days remaining that would be warm enough for Edith to go on one of their outings.

  “That, and they say there’s a good lot of rain coming in at the end of the week,” she had said when asking Sandy if they might go.

  If Sandy had been completely honest with Edith, she would have told the old woman that she really wasn’t up to it just then. She hadn’t had a day off in nearly two weeks, not since a day or two after she’d been up to Tommy’s and seen the mangled yearling. In the last week alone she’d worked two double shifts as well. She was tired and looking forward to a day off. In addition to that, she’d already agreed to join Margie and J.D. after work on the evening after her day off. They planned to take Margie’s sons to see Sherwood’s minor league baseball team play a game. Even Keefe was going. She wouldn’t have a day to herself for over another week yet if she took Edith to the river, but all her hesitations felt petty and selfish. Sandy couldn’t imagine offering any of it as an excuse to Edith, so she turned it in another direction.

  “Are you sure you’re up to it, Edith?” To Sandy’s eye, Edith seemed more pale than usual. Not so pale that any other nurse on the staff would have noticed, but Sandy noticed. In truth, Edith had seemed to Sandy a bit slower and weaker of late.

  “After all this time, you should know better than to even ask me that,” Edith had answered.

  Looking at the smile playing at the corners of the old woman’s mouth as she lay propped up in her bed, Sandy could never have said no. “I’ll pick you up in the morning.”

  As promised, Sandy had arrived at ten that morning and brought Edith to her special place on the river. A little before noon now, and the old woman was dead.

  Sandy advanced through the water toward Edith’s body with slow, graceful determination, having more to do with reverence than trepidation. She knew what waited. She stepped from the river, laid her rod down, and knelt beside the old woman’s body. The nurse in Sandy lifted the dangling arm and laid two fingers to the wrist, confirming that the pulse had ceased. She laid the limp hand into the old woman’s lap with the other and sat back on her heels.

  “Edith.” Two simple syllables, they slipped from her lips in a whisper and resonated over the waters of the pool, leaving Sandy empty of breath. As if fused to the rock ledge beneath them, she sat like a stone before the old woman’s body.

  The low sound of the current weaving through the rocks in the stream gathered behind Sandy as one minute passed. Two minutes. Three, four, five.

  And then Sandy’s shoulders broadened and pulled back as she drew a long breath into her lungs and exhaled slowly, the push of breath through her lips setting a counterpart of air to the rush of river water into the pool. She rose from her knees and removed her fishing vest, laying it on the rock next to her rod, the tote bag with their picnic lunch, and Sandy’s little canvas purse.

  Edith was dressed in a heavy cotton dress, dark blue with tiny white polka dots, and her shoulders were wrapped in a dark gray woolen shawl. Thick nylon support stockings on her legs. Her brown shoes on her feet. Sandy knelt, removed the shoes, and set them aside. She rolled each of the thick stockings down from the knee over the thin, purple-veined legs and stuffed one balled-up stocking into each of the brown shoes. From around Edith’s shoulders, Sandy lifted the gray shawl, folded it carefully, and laid it onto the rock. With her right arm under the knees and her left encircling the shoulders, Sandy tilted Edith’s head against her own shoulder and lifted the old woman from the lawn chair. Pillowing the head on the folded shawl, Sandy laid the body on the rock ledge, brushed a few strands of gray hair from the forehead, and straightened the skirt of the dress. Then, with gentle precision, she slid her hands under the old woman’s dress and up the legs, detached the velcro straps, removed the soiled underpants, and tossed them aside.

  Sandy heard the hum of a vehicle, not visible from the rock ledge, passing on the road above, followed almost instantly by the clacking call of a kingfisher flying upstream above the surface of the river. She turned to the call of the bird, catching sight of its wings as it vanished into the trees on the opposite bank. Sandy had dealt with dozens of such deaths, done her job of attending to the body’s final needs, pronouncing the official time of death. Save for the locale, this death was no different. An aged heart had thumped out its allotted number of beats and stopped, leaving only the clinical routine of clearing away the inanimate corpse. There should have been nothing else to it. There should have been.

  Sandy had lifted Edith’s slight frame often enough to recognize the familiar touch of individual bones against the flesh of her arm when she carried the old woman. Sandy had always been able to carry the light and frail old woman with relative ease, but now the body felt heavier, more dense, as she lifted it again and carried it into the river.

  With Edith’s body pressed securely to her chest, Sandy waded into the deep center of the pool. This far in, the warm summer air couldn’t counteract the cool temperatures of a trout stream. The exposed skin on Sandy’s arms and legs grew tight and prickled as the cold water rose to the height of her abdomen and lapped at Edith’s backside. Sandy shivered, she presumed from the water’s chill, until the moan rose up in her own throat, so resonant and rasping it startled her, as if it had emanated from the earth beneath the river. She looked up to the patch of sky lining the opening where a massive hemlock had once stood. Imagining the low branches of the vanished tree, the band of shade it cast over the stream, Sandy turned Edith’s head upstream and held her body out into the current. Her arms quivered but her stance was firm and sturdy. Edith’s body lightened as the river lifted the weight. The skirt of the dress floated up and spre
ad out over the surface of the water. Gray tendrils of wet hair clumped on the old woman’s forehead, and Sandy pushed them away, smoothing them off the furrowed face. Sandy began to sway, in rhythm with the flow of the stream. Another moan rose in her throat, but it leveled off into a steady hum, vibrating in her chest as the river washed over and through the body she cradled before her: “. . . like the river and me was made of the same thing.” Sandy released her grip, let the body begin to drift downstream for a second before she pulled it back to her. As she swayed in the current, she did this again and again, released Edith’s body to follow its own course, then caught it and drew it back into her gentle grasp. The persistent humming in her throat pulsed down the length of her legs to her feet planted in the streambed, down the length of her arms to the tips of the fingers holding Edith’s body afloat. The kingfisher clacked, emerged from its perch in the trees, and flew further upstream. Sandy’s gaze shifted back and forth, searching the face and form of the dead woman in her arms and the river’s surface for the ring of a trout’s rise.

  The sun had passed to early afternoon when Sandy carried the body from the river and laid it again on the rock ledge, the gray shawl carefully positioned under the head. She took one of Edith’s cold, limp hands in her own. With her other hand, she reached to her little canvas purse and pulled it to her. Her eyes stayed on the old woman’s body, drying in the sun, while her hand groped through her purse, among the fly box, case knife, and other few contents, until she found her cell phone. She would probably have no more than a fifty-fifty chance of getting a signal out here, but it didn’t matter. Her battery was dead. She wouldn’t be able to call for medical transport. She’d have to drive Edith’s body back to the nursing home herself. Breach of protocol that it was, she was glad nonetheless. Who else might be fitting to transport this peculiar cargo? On the rock by the river, she claimed the right and responsibility. Sandy dropped the phone back into her purse and clasped the dead woman’s hand in both of hers as the sun poured down on the two of them.