I was three days in, hiking alone on the Bear Creek Trail, when I found the body. The sun split the clouds in a rare appearance and one dusty stream of light shone like a blessing through the branches of the trees, picked up the sparkle of a dragonfly barrette in blood-matted hair.
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The twittering of birds. Wind rattling the tops of the redwoods. The brush of my leg against sword ferns. Everything stopped dead. Breath stuck in my belly. Hiking boots halted mid-stride. Nothing existed for that moment but the flash of that cheap hair clip and the knowledge that, seeking solitude and communion with God, I’d stumbled instead upon His counterpart.
Later, in session after endless session, Dr. Shaw pushed me to dig for the details of the scene, insisted I was repressing some black memory too painful to confront. How else, she asked, seeing only that one small flash of light, a glimpse of dark hair, could I have known instantly that this wasn’t the work of a bear or even a cougar. How could I have known, not suspected, but known on some cellular level that I was looking at the wanton act of a member of my own species?
Again and again, I gave the good doctor the explanation I give you now. The air itself was empty, bereft; some invisible but essential part of each and every molecule absent. I stood in a dead zone, permeated with man-made evil.
In a trance I slipped the backpack from my shoulders, sat flat on my butt and slid into the narrow, fern-wrapped canyon. The orange of spore rose around me in a dreamlike cloud. Maidenhair brushed my face. My passing stirred the pure white of delicate trilliums.
The child lay on her back, as though she’d fallen peacefully asleep. Her arms at her sides, sightless eyes stared up at streaks of sunlight through tall trees. It was crazy, of course it was, but the closer I inched to her, the more the air changed. I had the sense that, in a bubble around this dead child, evil had been pushed back.
I imagined her at peace even as I looked on the ravages of death. Her small body was decomposing. Bone glared white at the shin and femur, cheeks and forehead. My mind scrambled frantically, desperate to make sense of what I was seeing. The dead and rotting body of a child lying under a blanket of carefully-placed ferns, the top fronds fresh, dark green, and tipped with the curling gold of a leaf still unfurling.
The juxtaposition of evil with innocence trembled the air. She’d been there a while, lying alone in the woods, and yet no crow had pecked at soft tissue, no bear or coyote scavenged a free meal. A shiver took me, an icy finger that ran from head to toe.
The police and later Dr. Shaw returned often in our sessions to the unlikeliness of me accidently stumbling upon the body. I have no explanation for why I left the marked path that day. Cut cross-country for over three miles. Followed bear trails through meadow and wild salmon berry bushes. Slipped sideways down scree and jagged boulders, the pack on my back growing heavier with each step. Was I drawn to that narrow canyon, that thin border between good and evil, or was I driven? I have no answer.
But I know without doubt or hesitation what led me deeper into that lush valley. I know with the knowledge of a true believer what turned me from the body of that innocent child and drew me further into the narrowing canyon.
A scuffling whisper, a shifting of the air behind me and I rotated slowly in a half-circle. Even as I squatted, my back to the child, eyes darting from redwood tree to fern to the pinkish granite of the mountain’s exposed bedrock, some deep, long buried part of me felt . . . at peace, protected, safe. It was crazy and I knew it was nuts, but there you have it. Some presence prevented fear, dropped me into a state of calm.
Dr. Shaw says what I experienced was shock. She insists my brain, unable to make sense of what I saw, simply shut down. I’ve spent six months trying to convince myself she’s right. But I’m telling you, that moment, standing in an ancient slash of rock, the decaying body of that child lying under her fresh blanket of green, some entity I recognized as though from a dream or another lifetime stirring the air behind me– in that moment, I experienced something outside this world. I knew joy and hope, accepted without question that some long-forgotten creature was calling me to follow.
Low grunts and soft footfalls pulled me deeper into the canyon. I moved freely then, into a bloody, gore-splattered, tree-lined, primal justice.
The arm was the first body part I found. That’s the moment joy turned to terrified awe. Here the forest animals had been at work with sharp teeth and hard, curved beaks. The right hand lie open and palm up. A bloody arc splattered the forest floor from rat-gnawed fingertips to the curved blade of the skinning knife six feet further on.
The toe of a hiking boot protruded from a patch of bright red poison oak, led me to a denim-wrapped right leg. I jerked away. An arm’s length to my left, pressed to a soft-barked redwood, the headless trunk was impaled on a broken branch. The body, red flannel shirt shredded, hung limp in the sunless, suffocating crevasse.
You know those dreams where something beyond imagination is chasing you? And your legs won’t move, and you’re trapped, caught. With the pursuer coming closer, and closer. And then you wake up.
Well, I didn’t wake up.
A shadow, wide and tall, like a floating boulder, moved in the brush to my left. I stood, rooted to the forest floor, tried to remember how to breathe. A rock hit the ground at my feet, bounced, came to rest against the toe of my mud-splattered boot. The air was heavy, filled with spore and leaf mold and the smell of death and rotting life and I could not pull this thick brew down into my lungs. I panted, swayed, fell.
When I came to my senses, I was alone in a deep gash of forest. The body still hung suspended from the tree. The arm, torn from its socket like a child will dismember a plastic doll, still lay abandoned behind me. I rubbed my hands over my face, twisted my fists into my eyes. But the scene did not alter.
It took three days to hike out, another twenty-four hours for the sheriff’s department to organize a helicopter and a forensic team. In the four days between that flash of light on a child’s barrette and when I led human law into that narrow gap between worlds, we had our first snowfall of the season.
But, in that first moment, that surreal instant, when the hard truth of what I’d stumbled upon overtook me, claimed me for its own, in that living dream, I saw the truth of what had happened.
A dragon fly, its wings the sheerest gossamer, lit gently on a small, wet depression at the base of a hollow, lightning-burned redwood. My eye followed the darting electric blue of the insect. It was then I saw the footprint. Twice as long as my own, three times as wide. Big toe splayed wide as the creature pressed its weight into the mud, pushed upward, moved on.
Pamela Foster is an author who has written Redneck Goddess, over a year ago and she has her next novel due out in October, Bigfoot Blues.
http://pamelafosterspeakerwriter.wordpress.com/
'This is my main blog and the links at the top will give you my biography, information about both novels and links to various other interests. Please click on the link for The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pen, as I think you may find this especially interesting. Five women authors, traveling together on the long and winding road to overnight success. We are all published now, though this was not the case when we formed The Sisterhood. At the moment, we are speaking at conferences and libraries, promoting our books together, and having a blast.'
http://pamelafoster.blogspot.com/
http://www.authorpamelafoster.com/