Feral

Feral



The military park occupied wooded heights overlooking a bend in the river.  Although it was generally warm and humid, the winter had been harsh.  In January and February, snow had fallen three times and accumulated to depths of a foot or more.  Meltwater coursed down the steep sides of the bluffs and cut ravines in the hillside.  In April, severe thunderstorms bombarded the park and one of the rangers thought that he spotted a tornado whirling through the undergrowth in the river bottoms.  Several of the hiking trails were blocked by fallen trees and the path that led down the forested slope to the river was washed away where it crossed the water-courses.  Two of the park rangers descended the trail from the bluff-top to the bayous and found that it was barricaded in a half-dozen places by spiky-looking branches and boughs and that the small foot-bridges over the stony, fern-filled ravines had been shattered, smashed by boulders plowed down from the heights by torrents of water.  Most of the trail switchbacked down the steep hillside, cutting back and forth against the slope where palisades of crumbling rock stood half-hidden in the underbrush and pine trees.  The switchbacks were edged with logs halved to make  shelves supporting the trail and more than half of those timbers were dislodged and had skidded down the slope.  Some steep sections of the trail, where there were stone or wooden steps, had turned into mud grooves incised in the hill.  Worse, the park rangers found that one sheer bank of red-brown clay had collapsed to reveal a dark-brown ribcage and a femur and, perhaps, a leather boot embedded in the mud.

On weekdays, Brainerd was an instructor in strategy and tactics on the vast, nearby army base.  But he was trained as a military archaeologist and, sometimes, called to National Military Parks in the area to examine artifacts.  The county coroner was summoned to the hillside and hiked down the ruined trail to the bones.  He declared the remains a casualty of Civil War fighting on the battlefield and, then, the park superintendent sent an email to Brainerd and asked him to come on Saturday to inspect the skeleton protruding from the eroded clay bank.  Park employees put police tape across the trail head on the hilltop and, also, set some saw-horses with flags on them across the path a hundred yards down the slope where the first switchbacks began.  It was one-mile zigzag down the path to the crumbling clay cliff where the bones had been found.  From that point, it was another half-mile to the lagoons and swamp in the river bottoms where the trail dead-ended at a small, rickety fishing pier.  It wasn’t easy to  reach the casualty: where the path had been washed-away, there were steep, ladder-like trenches gored in the hillside and Brainerd had to clamber over trees fallen crookedly over the trail and the deep and shadowy ravines, clogged with boulders and deep green potholes brimming over with impounded water, required climbing down and, then, scrambling up sheer and slippery gorges.

Brainerd was sweating and winded when he reached the dead man.   It was black-fly season and the stinging insects made orbits around his head.  He took some pictures of the bones and the boot leather and probed the mud a little, locating what seemed to be a button encrusted in soil and a piece of metal.  Brainerd said that the bones were undoubtedly the remains of a soldier who had fought in the battle but it was impossible to identify whether the dead man had been a Federal or Southern soldier.  The climb to the hilltop was arduous and Brainerd had to stop and rest, leaning against trees or sitting on knee-high outcroppings.  And, as he rested, and acclimated his eyes to the green shadow of the forest and hillside, he noticed other artifacts: something brown and sinewy that might be a harness wrapped around the base of a tree, a cannonball cradled in a bathtub-shaped stone depression, more bones, although perhaps, from a pack-animal extruding from the edge of a ravine freshly carved by a downpour.

Brainerd met with the park superintendent in the conference room at the visitor center.    On the wall, there was a print sold in the gift shop, a fleet of ironclad river boats under heavy bombardment.  “The whole slope is a graveyard,” Brainerd said.

“That’s what we tell visitors,” the park superintendent replied.

“The troops manning the batteries on the blufftop ran out of water,” Brainerd said. “They sent a skirmish line down toward the river to bring back water and, at the same time, the enemy was attacking up through the thickets on the side of the bluff.”  The superintendent nodded.  “Both sides poured troops into the fight which was actually pretty much accidental,” Brainerd said.  “You had a couple thousand men in the jungle on that slope, no visibility, everyone fighting hand to hand, with both sides tilting their artillery to shell the place indiscriminately – it was a slaughter.”

“Very bad,” the superintendent agreed.

 “The battle down there was inconsequential, no one won, and, then, the fort was captured and the front moved elsewhere. The Northern army didn’t really had time to retrieve the corpses which were hanging in trees and buried by rockfalls or at the bottom of ravines,” Brainerd said.

 “I know that no one would go into that forest, not around these parts, for...I don’t know...sixty or seventy years,” the park superintendent said.  “They unearthed all sorts of fragmentary skeletons and ordinance during the Depression, back when they put in the trail down from the bluff,” he continued.

 Brainerd said: “Well, it’s a problem now, what with these heavy rains and the snow and all, they’re coming out of the ground, the lost legion, their appearing again...”

 “It was a mistake to put a trail through there,” superintendent said, “a goddamned mistake to disturb that mess – the funding’s been cut...and... I’ve got no budget to manage casualties coming out of the ground...”

Brainerd stood up, leaving his Diet Coke can on its coaster on the conference room table.  His hair was matted with black flies that he had squashed on his scalp.  “We’ll have to do a surface survey,” Brainerd said.  “At least, along the trail.  Maybe, when the trail is restored.”  The superintendent nodded his head.  Brainerd walked to the window overlooking the river valley.  In the distance, he saw pale green lagoons thronged with egrets and a mild curve of bland, blue river rolling the deep, heavily wooded valley.

“It’s such a pretty place,” Brainerd said.

The park superintendent sometimes used convict labor to repair campsites and fill potholes on the roads and to maintain the lawns, particularly around the monuments and the little soldier’s cemetery where the grass around the stones pillowed on the sod had to be hand-clipped.  He approved some funding to retain Brainerd as a consultant for the project and, then, drove to the county seat where he had coffee with the sheriff.  The superintendent told the sheriff that a couple of his employees at the Park had been deployed to Iraq and that he needed to use two or three inmates from the chain gang.  The sheriff was a little reluctant at first.  He told the superintendent that he had contracts to maintain highway right-of-way all the way to the border with Kentucky.  But he said that he could spare two men, his most trustworthy inmates, even, for work in the military park.  He’d allow them work-release and, even, authorize them to drive up to the park each day from the county jail.  “That will be helpful,” the park superintendent said.

Snipe and Cricket were late for their first day of work.  Snipe was driving an old pickup truck with rebel flag decals on its back bumper and rear window.  He said that the directions to the Park provided by the jailer were wrong and that the distance was greater than they were told.  Cricket was listening to an I-Pod with earbuds and didn’t pay any attention to the conversation.  Both men were wearing prison-issue orange jumpsuits.  Brainerd shook hands with them and said “Well, you’re here now.”  They got into Brainerd’s Suburban and drove along the loop road on the ridge, passing the little turn-offs where there were marble obelisks or explanatory plaques.  The sun was bright and warm on the bluff-top but the river valley was filled with dense grey mist.  At the trail-head, Brainerd gave the two men canteens filled with water and unloaded a wheelbarrow and some shovels from the back of the vehicle.

“Today is exploratory,” Brainerd said to Snipe and Cricket.  “I want to see if we can get the wheelbarrow down the hill.”

 They loaded a half-dozen forty pound  plastic bags of pea-gravel in the wheelbarrow and Snipe and Cricket took turns maneuvering it down the steep trail and around the switchbacks.  A couple times, they almost lost the wheelbarrow, the little front wheel tottering on the brink of a precipice while both men leaned backward to keep it from falling, but, moving slowly and with care, they reached the eroded clay face where the casualty had been found.

The bones were gone and the air was sultry, sweet with creosote scent and big insects that buzzed up into the shafts of sunlight like slow, fat helicopters.  The path was bright but this made the thicket clinging to the rocky hillside seem all the more dark and impenetrable.  The morning ground fog had retreated to a gleaming white shelf that sliced across the bluff-side fifty feet below them.  “This is hard work,” Snipe said.  Cricket nodded.

Brainerd said: “Folks from the National Cemetery Association – it’s part of the VA – exhumed the body.  We had people from the Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy on hand too, because it wasn’t clear that the soldier was Union or from the South.”

“Who was he?” Snipe asked.

“No one knows,” Brainerd said.

Cricket was panting a little from the exertion: “This is a hilly land,” he said.  He was from Nashville and the shaggy trees pressing close to them all around and the deep ravines filled with boulders like broken teeth seemed to alarm him.  He batted the air in front of him to knock down a small spider floating on a gossamer parachute.

“The whole hillside is full of bones and shells and soldier’s knives and canteens and other gear,” Brainerd said.  “It’s like an outdoor museum.”

“Someone could come out here and drag a metal detector over the ground and who knows what you’d find,” Snipe said.  “I know guys who got metal-detectors and they can dig up old coins and other stuff, all over the place.”

“Could you do that?” Cricket said, blinking in the bright sunlight.

“Of course,” Snipe told him.  “Easy as shit.  You come out here with a metal detector and pick up handfuls of bullets, maybe, even, find them shot through skulls and shit.”

“You could sell that shit,” Cricket said.  “Make good money.”

“There are collectors who will pay top dollar for a Confederate helmet or part of an old Confederate gun,” Snipe said.  “You just need a hundred-dollar metal detector to pick that shit right out of the ground.”

“That would be looting,” Brainerd said.  “This is like a cemetery.  That would be looting and a violation of federal law.”

Cricket shrugged.  Snipe said: “You know, I was born and raised in these parts and there’s little battlefields all over the place, not just here.  Places where the armies camped where you find all sorts of things.  I know guys who made a good living picking stuff out of those campgrounds and selling it to collectors, you know, in Memphis or Nashville or even up north.”

“That’s archaeological heritage,” Brainerd said.  “The artifacts tell a story.  That’s looting.”

“Guys around here do it all the time,” Snipe said.

“And they make good money?” Cricket asked.

“Excellent money,” Snipe said.  “Hell, I even know guys in the National Guard who go out on the weekends with metal detectors and find minnie balls and bayonets and all sorts of cool shit.”

The layer of ground fog seemed to retreat below them as they descended the trail, sweating and reversing direction on the switchbacks and, at last, they were at the bottom by the marshes ululating with frogs.

Snipe pointed to some big oval ruts in the black mud along the side of the bayou.  “You see that?” he asked.  Cricket nodded his head.  “It’s a wallow,” Snipe said, “I seen them before.”  “What’s a wallow?” Cricket asked.  “Wild pigs, razorbacks,” Snipe said.

“Is that true?” Brainerd asked.  “I heard there were feral pigs out here once but...”

“Absolutely true,” Snipe said.  “I lived out in the country all my life.  I seen wallows all the time.”

“Pigs?” Cricket asked.  He looked over his shoulder nervously.

“Little Black boy like you,” Snipe said.  “Those motherfuckers just eat you up alive.”

“They’re dangerous?” Cricket asked.

“Deadly,” Snipe said.  “You don’t want to meet one of those bad boys on that narrow trail.”

“The park rangers didn’t say anything about wild pigs,” Brainerd said.

“They don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground,” Snipe said.  “I’m a country boy.  I know what I’m seeing.  There’s a bunch of ‘em.  They been rooting up the trail.  You see that, rooting up the trail for nuts and shit.  Hell, they probably rooted that there good old boy out of his resting place.”  Snipe grinned.

“Well, I’m a city boy,” Cricket said.  “I don’t want nothin’ to do with no wild pig.”

They poured the pea gravel in a place where the trail was cut by a little stream gushing between some rocks.  Then, they took turns hauling the wheelbarrow up the hill.  Brainerd stopped them in places where the trail needed repair and wrote down observations about sites where he thought he saw artifacts or expected that something might be buried and, at one point, he picked up a shard of glass from the trail and held it close to his eyes to inspect it in the light.  In the shade of the trees clinging to the hillside, the black flies harassed them.
 
When they reached the bluff-top, they were sweating.  Brainerd drove Snipe and Cricket back to the visitor center and bought them bottles of soda pop from the vending machine.  “A cool brew would taste better,” Snipe said.  “I don’t want to violate my terms with the Sheriff,” Brainerd said.  An old man wearing a Johnny Reb forage cap and shorts was leaning on a cane and reading the historical plaques posted around the grassy embankments and the depressions marking the old trenches that were slumped between the mounds.  It was very humid and the air smelled faintly of carrion and high overhead, in a patch of sky that the could see between trees, some big black birds circled.  Brainerd told the men that he had to teach an the infantry school on the post for a few days but that they should meet at the park’s visitor center after the weekend, bright and early on Monday.

As it happened, Snipe had a court appearance, something about another warrant for which he was serving concurrent time, and so only Cricket met Brainerd in the parking lot.  They loaded their equipment into the wheelbarrow and slipping and sliding on the dew-wet trail descended down the slope to the place where the first foot-bridge over a ravine had been mostly washed down the shadowy defile that the small stream had chiseled into the palisades.  The park service had hauled some timbers down to that location along with a posthole digger and some sacks of sack-crete.  Cricket had to climb down into the little gorge with a bucket so that they would have water to mix the cement.  The work was slow during the morning, but, after lunch, some part-time workers came down the trail to help them, high-school kids who helped them in a desultory way and eyed Cricket with suspicion and dismay.  The high-school kids whispered among themselves and, sometimes, vanished into the underbrush.  Brainerd suspected that they were excusing themselves to smoke marijuana because after each sojourn in the bush, the kids returned hilarious, loud, profane, brash young voices echoing off the cliffs, a temporary change in their mood which quickly enough reverted to sullen despondency.  Without Snipe to impress, Cricket was subdued and he looked around nervously, startled, it seemed, by every noise in the brush.   He mopped his brow and spoke only when spoken to and, then, he was very polite, referring to Brainerd as “sir.”   The kids ignored him and, when he said something, they replied that they couldn’t understand him and that he should talk more loudly and, when he complied, the high school students, then, acted as if he were speaking in a weird dialect or a foreign language.

Cricket seemed very young to Brainerd, less experienced and more naive than the high school kids, appalled at the size of the forest and its tangled wild slopes, a lost boy standing on a steep trail on which the exposed roots of trees were poised, perhaps, to wrap around his slender ankles and pitch in head-first into the abyss.

When the bridge over the ravine was finished, Brainerd led his troop of workers down the hill to the river, commenting on landmarks that they passed and pointing out places that the regimental histories mentioned, cliffs or rock-lined pits hallowed for bravery or sheer deadliness, “sepulchers and graves,” he told them.  The lagoon was now a little clouded with a bloom of algae, and in the mud, big dragonflies with iridescent pincer-shaped wings decorated the ‘wallow’ by the water’s edge.  The ‘wallow’ seemed fresh and the mud newly disturbed, as if turned by spades.

As they ascended the trail, silently, panting heavily in the places where they had to scramble across the ravines, the afternoon heat weighed down upon them, a dense soporific pressure that made the air itself seem an obstacle.  Something shuddered through a glade nearby and branches snapped and crackled and Cricket cried out in fear: “It’s a pig, a pig!”  But, in fact, they saw the white-tail of a deer winking at them as the animal slid through the undergrowth.  The high school students laughed at Cricket and he bit his lip and Brainerd said: “He’s right to be a little worried.  There’s wild boars around.  You saw their ‘wallow’ down at the river.”  “But that was a deer,” one of the kids said.  “I guess so,” Brainerd replied.

On the hilltop, the high school kids had parked some golf-carts that they had driven from the visitor center to the trail-head.  They hopped on the carts and raced away, whirring down the narrow one-way loop road on the ridge in the wrong direction.  Brainerd and Cricket drove a half-mile in the other direction to a little picnic area, a gravel turn-off from the one-way lane that opened into a clearing on the brink of some squat, crumbling cliffs overlooking a vista of the river far below.  A Hmong family was gathered around one of picnic tables eating fried-chicken and drinking beer.  Brainerd toted a small cooler to the other picnic table and said that he had a can of beer for Cricket and would let him drink that beer on the condition that he didn’t tell anyone.  “Yes, sir,” Cricket said.  Brainerd also had brought a couple candy-bars in a plastic zip-lock bag to keep the ice in the cooler from getting them wet.  He gave Cricket both candy-bars.  “You can have Snipe’s candy bar too,” Brainerd said.  “What about his beer?” Cricket asked.  “I’ll drink that,” Brainerd said.  “I don’t want you to get in trouble.”  “Yes sir,” Cricket said.

The Hmong family had a small dog that pranced back and forth around their picnic table, yapping and begging for food.  The dog was the color of a wild rabbit and it hopped around the clearing, approaching Cricket and Brainerd to see if they were willing to feed it.  “See,” Brainerd said.  “Those Asians are violating two park rules.”

  “What?” Cricket asked.

 “They have a dog,” Brainerd said.  “Dogs aren’t allowed in National Military Parks.  You don’t want them retrieving the bones of dead soldiers.”

 “Oh, I see,” Cricket said.  “Makes sense.”

Brainerd nodded: “And that boom-box,” he said.  He pointed to the black CD player at the end of the table, booming out rap music.  “That’s also against the rules.  Disrespectful,” Brainerd said.

“Okay,” Cricket said.  He drank his beer in four or five deep deep gulps.

“You don’t have any cigarettes, do you?” Cricket asked.

 “I don’t smoke,” Brainerd said.

 “Me neither,” Cricket told him.  “But you can trade them for things at the jail.”  Brainerd nodded to him.

There were two Hmong men who looked like brothers, both of them short and squat with mullet-haircuts and tattoos girdling their wrists and biceps.  One of the men went to the car and brought out a small metal detector.  He carried the metal detector to the edge of the clearing and began to pass the wand over the nearby brush.”

“No, no, no,” Brainerd said.  “That’s a federal offense.”

“They’re just souvenir-hunting,” Cricket said.

“No, this is unacceptable,” Brainerd said.  He stood up from the picnic table and walked across the grass to where the man was waving the metal detector’s wand over the foliage.

“You can’t do that,” Brainerd said.  “It’s against the law.”  The man holding the metal detector shrugged and ignored Brainerd.

Brainerd said again: “Against the law.”

The man’s brother came from the picnic table with a tiny woman with grey-hair and turquoise necklace around her throat.  The woman with grey hair seemed distraught.  Brainerd tapped the tattooed arm of the man with the metal-detector.  The rap music was very loud and the bass rumbled across the hill-top and, then, spilled down from the cliffs into the vast glowing space above the river bottoms.  Three-hundred feet below treetops waved up at them.  The man with the metal detector turned and scowled at Brainerd.  The man’s brother had come to stand by Brainerd’s side.  He reached up and knocked Brainerd’s hand away from where he had tapped the man on the arm.  The tiny woman said something in a language that Brainerd couldn’t understand.

“What’s the problem?” she said in English.

 “Metal detecting in a national military park is against the law,” Brainerd said.

 “How do we know?” the woman said.  “We don’t see no sign.”

 “It just is,” Brainerd said.

 “Okay, okay,” the little grey-haired woman said.  “We don’t want no trouble.”

 She muttered something to the man with the metal detector.  The two brothers, then, bent their heads together and conferred and Brainerd saw that they both had earrings that glinted a little in the late afternoon sun.  Then, the men looked up at Brainerd, who was much taller than him, and they grinned in his direction, so that he could see that they had bright silver and gold teeth and, then, they said: “Okay, okay, is okay”.  Brainerd went back to the picnic table where Cricket was standing and watched as the man carrying the metal detector slowly disassembled it and, then, carried the pieces back to their station wagon.  The man opened the back and put the metal detector parts among a nest of fishing tackle, nets and rods and reels next to a batterd-looking minnow bucket.

Cricket said: “Those Asian gangsters could have stabbed you.”

“Not a chance,” Brainerd said.

“Dude, they could have cut you.”

 “I don’t think so,” Brainerd said.  Brainerd and Cricket walked back to the Suburban.  The Asian family glared at them from their picnic table and the little dog made short fierce charges, barking wildly.

“The moment we leave that metal detector comes back out,” Cricket said.

“I’m gonna tell the Park Ranger,” Brainerd told him.

The next morning, both Cricket and Snipe met Brainerd at the Visitor Center.  It was cooler and columns of wet fog were rising from the river valley and, then, toppling sideways over the loop road on the ridge.  When the fog didn’t envelope the Suburban, Brainerd could see big, brutish-looking thunderclouds, all burly with rain, wrestling one another in the sky.

“It’s gonna rain all day,” Brainerd said.  “I don’t see how we can work.”

“We sure as shit don’t want to go back to jail,” Snipe said. “Have a heart, man.”

“You can sit in the truck,” Cricket said.  “We’ll work in the rain.”

“I don’t think it’s even gonna rain,” Snipe said.  “I know this weather.  I lived here all my life.”

“Whatever you say,” Brainerd told them

Snipe and Cricket used the wheelbarrow to haul more sack-crete and timber down to the next wash-out on the trail.  They had to back the wheelbarrow down the switchbacked trail carefully because the stones were wet and the tree-limbs laddering the steep parts of the rail were slick and the air was heavy and dull with fog.  A cloud had rammed against the bluff and was stalled there and the air was chilly and the branches and leaves dripped cold water down on their faces and necks.

Cricket shuddered.  “Cold,” he said.  “I be a natural-born cold-blooded man.”

“Cold-blooded man,” Snipe said.  “You’re just a pussy.”

Brainerd sat on a wet boulder and watched the men work.  His job was to supervise and make certain than any artifacts of archaeological significance discovered during their labor were properly identified, indexed, and retrieved.  Thunder rolled like a cannonade from bluff-top to bluff-top and cliffs rang like huge, somber bells.  The mist from the river, dank and putrid-smelling, came up from the valley and mingled with the fog falling out of the sky.

“You see any razorbacks yesterday?” Snipe asked.

“Nope,” Cricket said.  He mentioned the Asian family with the metal detector.

“Cool,” Snipe said.  “Someone ought to profit off all this misery.”

“You guys are profiting,” Brainerd said.  “You get to spend the day in the great outdoors.”

“With all due respect, fuck that shit,” Snipe said.

Cricket said that he was cold and shivered dramatically, making his hands and head tremble.  “If you two don’t run off,” Brainerd said, “I’ll walk back to the truck and get you a coat.”

 Cricket replied: “Mr. Brainerd, I didn’t have no warm clothes when I was busted.”

“We’ll do some exploring while you’re up top,” Snipe said.  “Maybe, find us some souvenirs.”

“Don’t do that,” Brainerd said.  He hiked back up the trail, walking slowly and listening to the songs of birds hidden in the fog.  On the top of the ridge, the sun sliced momentarily through the cloud cover and lit the remains of the old trenches and embankments as if intended that brightness and shadow delineate them.  Brainerd had some winter work-clothes balled-up in the back of the Suburban and the garments smelled of oil and gas.  He hung a coat and a tattered sweater over his arm and went back down the trail, picking his way carefully over the wet stones and black, slick roots.

Snipe and Cricket were standing shoulder-deep in the damp ravine, working to level a timber support spanning the rocks.  “We heard something moving out there,” Cricket said.

 “Must have been a deer,” Snipe said.  “Or a coon maybe.”

 They scrambled out of the ravine and Cricket put on the coat.  It was much too large for him and he seemed to half-vanish in its folds.  Brainerd offered the sweater to Snipe but he said that it was warmer now than before and that he wasn’t cold and, indeed, the sunlight on the ridge-top, although it had not penetrated into the valley, made the air feel denser, more clinging, and more humid.  Sometimes, the fog around them would glow with a brilliant white light and seem to foam but, then, that moment would pass and the shadows would return and cluster around them.

“I bet the crackers ‘round these parts sneak in here all the time to dig for bones and bullets and shit,” Cricket said.

“The hillbillies up here are too dumb for that,” Snipe said.

Cricket didn’t agree with him: “I bet they come here every night when the park’s closed.  We seen ‘em with a metal detector machine.”

Snipe said that it was warm.  “Downright sultry,” he announced.  Cricket said that he was still half-frozen.

Brainerd was tired of sitting and so he stood over the ravine where the men were working.

“I asked around,” Brainerd said.  “I was concerned about looting and so I asked around a couple days ago.  Do you know what I heard?”

“What you hear?” Cricket asked.

“The locals told me that, after the battle, this whole hillside was just covered in dead soldiers.  The corpses were everywhere, heaped up behind trees and washed down the gulches, and under rocks and hidden in thickets.  You couldn’t walk a half-dozen steps without stumbling over one of them and, because the overgrowth was so thick and dense and thorny, people didn’t even try to haul the dead men off this mountain.  They just left the soldiers where they had fallen, left ‘em there to rot.  Well what do you think happened?”

Cricket asked: “What happened, Mr. Brainerd?”

“The wild pigs, the razorbacks – they came from their nests, came snuffling around the battlefield.  And, of course, a feral pig is omnivorous, will eat anything, and so, as you can imagine, the pigs start rooting around in the guts of the dead men, start eating off their hands and faces.  People said that you would come to this hillside and look down toward the river and you might see eight or more razorbacks bent over the dead men and yanking them to and fro, pulling off pieces of meat.  It was such a sickening sight that the folks around here just ran away – they were appalled, disgusted – and they just went back home and shut their doors and shut their windows and wished that they had never seen such a thing...”

“And I’ll tell you what – those feral hogs are ordinarily shy and reclusive creatures, they flee from men, but the razorbacks that were feasting on the dead bodies, of course, they got to like the smell of a man, at least, a dead man, and so they became very bold, aggressive, and they went into farmyards looking for human meat and gutted the dogs that tried to stop them and they ambled right up to the houses and showed their long, yellow tusks and the folks around here shot a few of them, but they didn’t dare touch the meat because they knew damn well what those hogs had been eating...they knew what had nourished them and made them fearless and huge and wild.”

“This is a spook story,” Snipe said.

“Not at all,” Brainerd replied.  “Now, there was a whole lot of hatred for the Yankees around these parts.  The armies came and went and burned people’s tobacco-curing sheds and lit their houses on fire and so, of course, the people living in these hills hated the Yankees more than anything else.  And, sometimes, at night, the local hooligans would get drunk on moonshine liquor and go out to one of the little military graveyards that dotted the countryside and they would take a spade and hoe and root up one of those dead Yankees and, maybe, dump his body in an offal pit or knock off his head and kick it around the lanes.  Then, the Federals, who had imposed martial law, would find the corpse lying there and they would look for someone to hang, but, when they asked the folks in the neighborhood who had done the deed, people just would look down at their boots and say: it was the wild pigs, it was them feral hogs, them razorbacks rooting up the dead soldiers.  That’s what they would say and because people knew the pigs had developed a mighty taste for human flesh, no one could really contradict what the farmers and planters around here claimed.”

“Now, one night, there was a good old boy from up around Bumpuss Mills...”

“Bumpuss Mills, my ass,” Cricket said.

“It’s a real place,” Brainerd said.  “Not more than ten miles away.”

“He’s right,” Snipe said.  “I got kin there.”

“So this good old boy from Bumpuss Mills comes roundabout and, with his cronies, gets drunk and digs up a northern boy, pulls him out of his grave with chain around his mid-section, and they are fixin’ to string the dead boy up, hang him from a tree as a kind of warning to all Yankees hereabouts, and, further to show once and for all that it isn’t the wild pigs desecrating the graves, that the dead soldiers are being molested intentionally.  So they set the chain around the dead boy’s skull and start yanking him up into the tree and it’s a dark and moonless night, dark as the bottom of a well, and, suddenly, the cartilage in the dead men’s neck rips apart and the corpse falls headless at the foot of that big oak.  Everyone’s hooting and hollering but, then, suddenly, they hear a loud coughing noise and the sound of teeth clicking together and, then, there’s a grunting kind of roar, and, when they look around over their shoulder, they see a huge ink-black hog, a razorback as large as a full-grown cow, and that hog has made himself mighty eating human guts and faces and bones and he’s standing right there, looking at the good old boy from Bumpuss Mills and the rotting Yankee.  The good old boy backs up against the tree and, when looks right and looks left, he sees that all of his buddies have suddenly departed and he’s alone facing down that huge wild pig.  The pig had fiery red eyes and its glaring at him.  Then, the boar snorts and he charges and he gets his tusks up between the good old boys thighs and he roots upward there, he just keeps a-rootin’ and a-rootin’ until the good old boy is gutted and lying at the foot of the tree on top of that Yankee just as dead as that corpse that they dug out of the soil...”

“Did that really happen?”  Cricket asked.

“That’s what folks around here say.  And they’ve recalled the whole thing just like it happened yesterday.  And they tell you that the huge boar is still out here, or, at least, his great-great-great grandchildren are still in the brush and if you come to these killing fields at twilight, or after dark with an eye to loot the place, you’re likely to meet up with that hog... It’s a sure thing.”

“That’s bullshit,” Snipe said.  “I lived here all my life and I ain’t never heard that tale.”

“Whatever,” Brainerd said.

They worked for another hour, mostly laboring in silence.  Brainerd used a clippers and scythe to cut weeds back away from some of the rocks and dirt faces near the ravine.  Sometimes, he knelt and rummaged among the leaf litter and fallen branches.  A dozen feet up the trail from the wash-out, a fat kingsnake undulated across the path.

“It’s gonna storm,” Snipe said.  The mist had broken into patches, white curtains caught against the hillside and ensnared by trees and, when they looked upward, the sky was heavy and green like mold growing on rotten food.

“We’d better get off this slope before it rains,” Brainerd said.  He stood up and tried to pick out patterns in the clouds racing by overhead.  Although the sky was agitated, it seemed very still in the thickets and the banks of fog were motionless, still, pale presences in the woods and underbrush.

Lightning struck the hilltop three times in quick sucession and the flashes lit the fog like neon.  The roar made Brainerd dizzy.  Wind surged against the side of the bluff and the tops of the trees clashed together and some ice-cold drops of rain splashed down from above.  Something heavy and swift crashed through the undergrowth.  There was a clicking sound, like hooves on rock, and, then, the thicket thrashed nearby, above them on the hillside.

“What’s that?” Snipe cried.  He threw down his spade and put up his hands as if to shield his face.  The wind began to howl in the treetops and twigs and branches were shaken down and pelted them.

“It’s a razorback,” Cricket cried.

Snipe made an inarticulate noise and, hurriedly, clambered up out of the gulch, backing downhill away from the place where the thicket was whipping and twitching.  Cricket clawed at the side of the ravine, but there were loose stones and rubble where he was trying to ascend, and he kept slipping back into the gully.  Rain suddenly sprayed them from all directions, blown horizontally by the wind and deflecting off the hillside.

In the storm-roar, Brainerd heard a loud coughing, snuffling sound.  Something black and immense shuddered through the tightly woven mesh of thorns and sumac and dead-fall.  Snipe turned to run, dashing down the trail. It was slippery and, when he reached a switchback, he couldn’t slow himself and, so, Brainerd saw him rocket off the precipice, hanging for a moment in the rain and the wind, before crashing down the hillside, rolling end over end among small bushes and jagged rocks that reached up as if to block his way.  Cricket was shrieking something but Brainerd couldn’t understand his words.  Lightning crashed against a tree nearby and the air oozed ozone and a thin scent of burning.  In the flare from the lightning, Brainerd glimpsed a moving darkness up the slope, bristles, he thought, and a sinewy black leg with sharp hooves and, then, ravine churned with water, a chocolate milk-colored torrent and a branch slashed across his face like a coach-whip knocking his glasses into the brush.  Brainerd stooped to grope for his glasses, missed his footing on an angular rock, and, then, skidded down the steep hill.  Something caught and held him and he hung there, half suspended over a wet, thunderous void, eyes full of rain.

Up the hill, Cricket had dragged himself from the ravine and was crawling up the muddy path, breasting a muddy flood that cascaded down from the ridge-top.  He looked over his shoulder and, through the blur, Brainerd could see his dark, wet face.  “I’m stuck,” Brainerd shouted to him.

“It’s the hog, it’s the hog,” Cricket said.

He picked up a shovel and raised it like a club over his shoulder.  The whole hillside seemed to shift and wobble under them.  Waggling the shovel in front of him, Cricket climbed upward, on his knees, advancing toward the thicket that was shuddering against the wind, branches recoiling like springs, snapping back up to be caught in the gale.

“I can see him,” Cricket said.  “I can see him.”

He hurled the shovel into the thicket.  Thunder boomed all around them and Brainerd, looking down, saw that he was lanced through his upper arm by a sharp branch, black and as thick as his little finger.  Water was bursting all around him and the trail was a series of white and brown rapids plunging down the slope.  He pulled himself free from the branch, took a step uphill, and felt that his ankle was hurt, possibly shattered, and, then, the pain knocked him down and took his breath away, and he crouched on the slope, clinging to a thorn bush, his face drooping down to the mush of water and leaves shifting beneath him.

Rain fell fiercely for a few minutes.  In the din of the storm, Brainerd heard his own breathing, stertorous and harsh.  Then, it was quiet and the thunder had crossed the valley and the bombardment seemed to be on the other side of the river.

Cricket helped Brainerd stand up and supported his weight.  Blood ran down Brainerd’s arm, decorating his wrist and fingers with bright red ribbons.  The two of them limped down to the switchback where Snipe had fallen.  They saw him thirty feet below, sitting with his head in his hands, drenched and shivering on a big, dark brown boulder.

“Are you okay?”  Cricket called.

“My head’s dinged-up,” Snipe said.  “But I think I can walk.”

Cricket turned to Brainerd and spoke.  His eyes were wide and white around the edges.  The big coat hanging loosely from him was scaly with dead leaves stuck in mud.

“I seen it,” Cricket said.

“What did you see?” Brainerd asked.

“There was dead soldiers rising up from the ground,” Cricket said.  “I seen their heads and ribs coming down the ravine.  I was swimmin’ in the water with them.”

They limped uphill to where the little footbridge that they had been building spanned the gulch.  Brainerd looked into the muddy water but didn’t see any bones, but his vision was blurred and falling rain smeared everything around him into a fog of green and brown.  He supposed that the bones had been washed farther down the slope and were bathing, now, perhaps, in the bloom of algae in the lagoon.

“I saw that boar,” Cricket said.  “He was comin’ to eat me up.  I saw his tusks all yellow and sharp.  You know, he was big as a car and his eyes they was flashing red at me.  They was red as fire.”        

Snipe came up the trail.  He had a cut over his eye and said that one of his teeth had been knocked out.  The falling rain whispered gently in the brush.  They searched the tangled branches and mats of dead leaves until they found Brainerd’s glasses.

“There,” Cricket said.  “You can see better.”

“I can see much better,” Brainerd replied.