Tyler and I wriggled into coveralls — one-piece jumpsuits made of heavy canvas, the sort worn by mechanics and highway crews — which we wore to keep contamination off our clothes. The temperature was dropping as the afternoon waned, and the extra layer of warmth felt good. Moving fast, we scrambled down the steep shoulder and into the woods at the edge of the ravine. A hemlock, its trunk a full two feet thick, grew from a cleft in the rock bluff, curving outward above the stream to claim as much sunlight for itself as possible. Tied snugly around the trunk was a thin rope of yellow polypropylene. Tyler eyed the knot dubiously. “You think that’ll hold?”
I took a look. “Sure,” I said. “That’s a figure eight on a bight. I recognize that—“
“Yeah, yeah, from your merit badge in knot craft. So it’s got the Woodchuck Seal of Approval, right?”
“Hey, don’t be dissing the Scouts,” I said. “The knot’s fine; the rope’s the problem. I’ve seen a lot of ski ropes break, and that’s basically what this is — polypropylene ski rope. Probably snap if you put more than a couple hundred pounds on it. But long as we’re not both hanging from it at the same time, it ought to be okay.” I eyed him; Tyler was an inch taller than I was, but skinnier. “How much you weigh?”
“One sixty,” he said, his eyes zeroing in on my waistline. “You?”
“One seventy.”
“Okay then,” he said. “Heft before beauty. Think helium-filled thoughts.”
Backing up to the notch in the bluff, I spiraled the rope around my left forearm to create a bit of friction and then clamped my fist around it. Then, with my right hand, I pulled the rope snugly around my butt, gripping it with my right hand at waist level. The skinny plastic rope was lousy for climbing, but I hypothesized — and hoped — that I’d get enough braking power from the combined friction of both hands, the spiral around my forearm, and the detour around my rear end. Leaning back slightly, I tested my theory. The thin rope bit into my forearm and the backs of my thighs, but it didn’t slip through my hands. “Not great,” I said, as much to myself as to Tyler, “but it’ll do. Stick that hoe under my left arm, would you?”
“Why don’t you just chuck it down there?”
“And chip that edge I spent an hour sharpening? No way. Besides, I want it with me. Call me crazy.”
“Crazy,” he said, but he brought me the tool. I raised my left elbow, as if it were a chicken’s wing, and he tucked the handle into my armpit, the blade flat against my chest. Still leaning away from the tree, the handle of the hoe jutting into the ravine, I stepped backward and down, into the crevice, and began my descent. The bluff wasn’t high — only about twenty feet — and the notch offered plenty of footholds, so I made it down with no trouble, despite the awkwardness of the hoe.
Just as I stepped onto the ledge at the base of the bluff, I heard a sound that sent a shock wave of fear coursing through me. It was a dry, hollow buzz: the buzz of a rattlesnake. I froze, trying to pinpoint the source. It didn’t take long. The snake — a big timber rattler, its body as thick as my wrist — was eighteen inches from my right foot. Head up, tail vibrating, the snake was coiled to strike. The rock ledge was catching the last of the afternoon sun, and the snake had been basking in the warmth — possibly the last real warmth for months. No wonder it was mad about the disturbance. Its eyes, I noticed, looked cloudy — a sign it was about to shed its skin. The good news was, that meant its vision was impaired; the bad news was, rattlesnakes get more aggressive when they can’t see well, so the snake might launch a preemptive first strike.
Moving with excruciating slowness, I relaxed my right hand, lowering the loop of rope with what I hoped was enough subtlety to escape notice. Then I eased the hand up and across my chest, grasping the blade and sliding the hoe upward from beneath my left arm. The snake buzzed steadily, its head motionless except for the tongue sliding in and out, in and out, as it sampled and resampled my scent. My scent was changing fast, I suspected, with the flash flood of sweat, adrenaline, and whatever other chemicals were triggered by terror. Fearomones, I thought. When the hoe was halfway out from under my arm, I inched my right hand down the metal neck to the midpoint of the shaft, and then eased my left hand onto the thicker wood near the end.
Twenty feet above me, Tyler’s footsteps crunched on leaves and twigs as he approached the edge of the bluff. “Dr. B?” he called. “You down yet?” I dared not answer. “Dr. B? Are you okay?” I hoped his voice might persuade the snake to crawl away, or at least distract it enough to allow me to move. No such luck — it remained poised, and it continued to buzz its warning. “Shit,” I heard Tyler mutter, and then, loudly, “Hang on, Dr. B, I’m coming down. Don’t worry!”
Suddenly I felt my left arm jerk wildly as the rope — still spiraled around my forearm — was yanked from above. Pulled off balance, I stumbled, and the snake hurled itself at my leg. In desperation I swung the hoe, knowing I was too late, too wild with my panicked swing. But to my astonishment, the snake’s head stopped in midair, as if it had hit a pane of glass, then the body dropped to the ground. The edge of the blade, I saw, had sliced halfway through the snake’s lunging body, pinning the creature to the ground, its jaws snapping an inch from my shin. Pressing down on the handle, I stepped away; then — when I was safely out of reach — I raised the hoe and brought it down on the neck, severing the head.
“Doc?” It was Sheriff Grainger on the bridge. I looked up and nearly fainted: Aikins had the 12-gauge at his shoulder, and the barrel appeared to be pointing straight down. Straight down at me.
“Jesus, Deputy, don’t shoot,” I shouted, and the sheriff pushed the barrel of the gun to one side, then pried it from the deputy’s grip.
“Don’t shoot, don’t shoot,” yelled Tyler, his voice high and strained. “Dr. B? Dr. B? Are you all right? What the hell is going on?”
“I’m all right,” I said weakly, twisting my arm free of the rope. “I’m fine. Come on down.”
Sixty seconds later, Tyler was on the ground. “Why didn’t you answer me before? Why was he pointing a gun at you? What was all that racket you were making down here?”
Wordlessly I nodded in the direction of the snake. The mangled body was still writhing and thrashing, the spinal nerves continuing to send impulses to the muscles, even though the brain had been disconnected. When Tyler saw the snake, he jumped back as though he’d been bitten, then gasped, “God damn, I hate snakes. Hate ’em.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s why I didn’t tell you what the hoe was for.”
“How’d you know this thing would be lying in ambush?”
“Didn’t know. Just knew to be prepared. Knew this is the kind of rocky habitat they like, and this is the kind of weather that brings ’em out.”
“You keep using the plural,” he said, his face ashen. “They and them. Those pronouns are making me really nervous.”
“I was just talking about snakes in general,” I assured him. “The same way I might hold up one human skull but use the word ‘humans.’” I resisted the urge to tell him that in the fall rattlesnakes sometimes converge in dens by the dozens or even the hundreds. If the sight of a single dying snake could spook Tyler so much, I hated to think how he’d react to the notion of scores of writhing vipers; serpentine spaghetti.
I clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on, we’ve got work to do now. Plenty of time for post-traumatic stress later.”
* * *
The woman — definitely a woman — lay facedown, the skull misshapen, probably fractured by the fall. The arms and legs had tumbled free of the body and lay at odd, unnatural angles, the knees and elbows bent. The soft tissue of the extremities was largel
y gone, as were some of the finger and toe bones. Gnaw marks on the remaining bones of the hands and feet, as well as on the distal ends of the long bones, suggested that canine scavengers — coyotes, probably — had been sharing the remains with the buzzards.
We took a series of photos — both of us shooting, in the interest of speed. “Okay, good enough,” I said. “Let’s get her tagged and bagged.” Normally we’d have spent more time observing and interpreting the scene, but time was a luxury we didn’t have in the fading light of the mountain ravine. Tyler unfolded and unzipped the heavy, rubberized fabric of the body bag, and together we worked the big C-shaped opening underneath the torso. As we did, maggots — some of them as small as rice grains, some a half-inch long — wriggled from the corpse and dropped into the crevices between rocks. A thought struck me. “Before you put her in to simmer,” I said, “find the five biggest maggots and put ’em in alcohol.”
“Uh, okay. How come?”
“The biggest ones must’ve been the first to hatch,” I told him. “Next donated body we get, we document how long it takes the maggots to reach this size. Presto — we know how long this woman’s been dead.”
“So, when you say, ‘we document’…”
“I mean you document,” I clarified. “But we both learn something. We start learning to read the bugs like a time-since-death stopwatch. Timing is everything.” He nodded thoughtfully.
Once the torso was inside, we tucked in the limbs as well, then slid the bag onto the litter. Tyler began zipping it shut, sliding the zipper across the bottom, up one side, and across the top.
“Don’t close it all the way just yet,” I said. “We might find a few bones from the hands and feet in the crevices.”
“You want to reach your hand down into snake-land, you go right ahead,” said Tyler. “I’ll start in on this pile of clothes and stuff.” He unfolded a biohazard bag, then began tugging the tangle of fabric from the crevices in the rock. “Looks like some bloody sheets,” he narrated, as I peered down into nooks and crannies beneath the spots where the hands and feet had lain. “Tennis shoes. Bra. Panties. T-shirt. Blue jeans.” He had just finished extricating the blue jeans from the tangle when he gave a low whistle. “Holy shit,” he said, holding up the jeans, “look at this, Dr. B.” I was puzzled at first — the jeans had wider legs than any pants I’d ever seen. Had the woman been morbidly obese? Then I realized what I was seeing: a single layer of fabric, as if one of the seams in each leg had been left unsewn. But that wasn’t the explanation. The explanation was, the legs of the pants had been sliced open, from top to bottom, up the front of each leg. The pants had been removed by cutting them off.