Dead to the World

surroundings than I was, but he wasn’t able to move like Calvin and Felton. They glided through the woods like ghosts, making about as much noise.
    Once, when I ran into a particularly dense thicket of thorny vines, I felt two hands clamp on either side of my waist, and I was just lifted over it before I had a chance to react. Calvin Norris put me down very gently and went right back to his position. I don’t think anyone else noticed. Jimmy Fullenwilder, the only one who would have been startled, had gotten a little ahead.
    Our team found nothing: not a shred of cloth or flesh, not a boot print or panther print, not a smell or a trace or a drop of blood. One of the other teams yelled over that they’d found a chewed-up possum corpse, but there was no immediate way to tell what had caused its death.
    The going got tougher. My brother had hunted in these woods, allowed some friends of his to hunt there, but otherwise had not interfered with nature in the twenty acres around the house. That meant he hadn’t cleared away fallen branches or pulled up seedlings, which compounded the difficulty of our movement.
    My team happened to be the one that found his deer stand, which he and Hoyt had built together about five years ago.
    Though the stand faced a natural clearing running roughly north-south, the woods were so thick around it that we were temporarily out of sight of the other searchers, which I would not have thought possible in winter, with the branches bare. Every now and then a human voice, raised in a distant call, would make its way through the pines and the bushes and the branches of the oaks and gum trees, but the sense of isolation was overwhelming.
    Felton Norris swarmed up the deer stand ladder in such an unhuman way that I had to distract Reverend Fullenwilder by asking him if he’d mind praying in church for my brother’s return. Of course, he told me he already had, and furthermore, he notified me he’d be glad to see me in his church on Sunday to add my voice to those lifted in prayer. Though I missed a lot of churchgoing because of my job, and when I did go I attended the Methodist church (which Jimmy Fullenwilder well knew), I pretty much had to say yes. Just then Felton called down that the stand was empty. “Come down careful, this ladder’s not too steady,” Calvin called back, and I realized Calvin was warning Felton to look human when he descended. As the shifter descended slowly and clumsily, I met Calvin’s eyes, and he looked amused.
    Bored by the wait at the foot of the deer stand, Crystal had flitted ahead of our point man, the Reverend Fullenwilder, something Kevin had warned us not to do. Just as I was thinking, I can’t see her, I heard her scream.
    In the space of a couple of seconds, Calvin and Felton had bounded over the clearing toward the sound of Crystal’s voice, and the Reverend Jimmy and I were left to run behind. I hoped the agitation of the moment would obscure his perception of the way Calvin and Felton were moving. Up ahead of us, we heard an indescribable noise, a loud chorus of squeals and frenetic movement coming from the undergrowth. Then a hoarse shout and another shrill scream came to us muffled by the cold thickness of the woods.
    We heard yelling from all directions as the other searchers responded, hurrying toward the alarming sounds.
    My heel caught in a snarl of vines and I went down, ass over teacup. Though I rolled to my feet and began running again, Jimmy Fullenwilder had gotten ahead of me, and as I plunged through a stand of low pines, each no bigger around than a mailing tube, I heard the boom of the rifle.
    Oh, my God, I thought. Oh, my God.
    The little clearing was filled with blood and tumult. A huge animal was thrashing in the dead leaves, spraying scarlet drops on everything in its vicinity. But it was no panther. For the second time in my life, I was seeing a razorback hog, that ferocious feral pig that grows to a huge size.
    In the time it took me to realize what was in front of me, the sow collapsed and died. She reeked of pig and blood. A crashing and squealing in the undergrowth around us indicated she hadn’t been alone when Crystal stumbled upon her.
    But not all the blood was the sow’s.
    Crystal Norris was swearing a blue streak as she sat with her back against an old oak, her hands clamped over her gored thigh. Her jeans were wet with her own blood, and her uncle and her—well, I didn’t know what relationship Felton bore to