45 SHE IS BOTH PREY AND HUNTRESS

45

SHE IS BOTH PREY AND HUNTRESS

From her point of observation among the western trees, Vida watches the men appear in the southeast, where the driveway leaves the embrace of the forest and curves into the open meadow. Faceless shapes, they seem to rise out of the earth like revenants lacking eternal quarters in either Heaven or Hell, previously content to lie senseless in forgotten graves with the bodies that decomposed around them, now summoned by an incantation to a violent haunting.

She raises the binoculars and glasses the uninvited visitors. The moon favors them not at all, and even at magnification, they remain phantoms.

Two proceed to the back of the house and take up positions flanking that door. The other two ascend the front-porch steps, moving out of Vida's line of sight.

Evidently, the latter pair are equipped with a battery-powered automatic lockpick of the kind intended for the exclusive use of the police. The still night doesn't carry the sound of knocking on the door. No shouted command or announcement of a warrant disturbs the quiet before the men are inside and windows brighten.

The back door is opened from within, and a fan of light arcs across the two individuals waiting there, proving that they aren't risen spirits, but flesh and blood. They go inside.

The residence offers few hiding places for a grown woman, and the searchers quickly eliminate them all. They return to the night and stand as a quartet, staring toward the smaller building, as motionless as carved stone, like perverse interpretations of the four elements—earth, wind, fire, and water—with the power to unleash the fury of quake and storm.

Whoever these intruders might be, they aren't officers of the law, uniformed or otherwise. Most likely, they are here because they know more than the law does about where Nash Deacon went on Friday and have expected some communication from him that they have not received. She doesn't need to know their names, for she knows their intentions, which are unmistakably wicked.

For the time being, there is no place for Vida in any town or city, where the powerful who control the inquisitional state are listening and watching and prepared to execute their agenda without concern about using excessive force; they have arrived at the dire conviction that excess is a virtue. The uncle who raised her with respect for the natural world and with gratitude for its gifts, the robed seer whom she visited when she was ten, and her experiences in this primeval land have prepared her to recognize and embrace the truth that, in a crisis like this, only Nature offers her refuge and only in its design can she find present hope.

As the four men move toward the smaller building, Vida lowers the binoculars and retreats from the table of rock. Both prey and huntress, she quickly slips deeper among the trees, initially reluctant to employ her flashlight.

For more than two decades, she has walked everywhere that deer prepared the easiest route in their perpetual wandering. She knows this unmapped maze so well that, even at night, she has no need of a magic ball of string like the one by which Theseus was led through the Labyrinth under Crete and found his way out after killing the Minotaur. With moonlight sifting through the thatch of branches, she relies on the spatial memory that has accumulated in her muscles and bones and nerves as surely as in her mind: how and where the well-known land rises and descends and turns, how and where undergrowth crowds her or withers back, how and where the canopy of trees occludes the sky or opens to a blackness salted with stars. Vida reads the way with her body as much as with her eyes, and with intuition as well as with hard knowledge.

If those men want her with such urgency that they will come for her quietly on foot, after midnight and four at once, they will also follow her into the forest, not in this foiling darkness but at first light. The farther she leads them through what is a wilderness to them but a civilization of the lesser animals to her, the more vulnerable they will become and the better will be her chances of surviving them.