No story scared me more than the story of a young girl disappearing in farm country. The girl who had been walking along a lonely road to the bus stop, but she’d never made it to her destination. She’d been swallowed up somewhere between the two points, and no one had a clue what happened.

I hadn’t gone for a run since we’d gotten here, and my body had lost its rhythm. My calves burned with lactic acid, my forehead itched with sweat.

The path curved, I dodged an old, massive, dry pile of shit, had to be horse shit, and when the chalky path straightened out again, there was something big up ahead right in the middle of the path.

A lone male deer with huge, fractal antlers.

I stopped running. My pulse pounded in my throat.

I’d heard deer were skittish, but did they ever attack people?

Keeping still, I gazed to my right and singled out an evergreen tree with low, beefy branches. If the deer charged, this was the tree I would climb.

It lowered its head and sniffed the ground like a dog. I relaxed. If Trevor were here, he’d be so excited. He’d say this buck was some magical omen of good things to come. A spirit from the forest welcoming me, my very own Totoro.

It lifted its heavy head and gazed in my direction, looked me right in the eye. My heart twitched, a little fear but mostly thrill. The buck swooped its gaze toward the tall grass bursting with yellow wildflowers in someone’s backyard. Golden ragwort. Picturesque, but its smell was weedy, warm, and dense.

He stepped across the gravel into the gorgeous spread of golden flowers, and something cracked through the air, loud and sharp.

Instinctively, I dropped to my belly. Pain burst through my shoulder.

Thump.

The deer was on the ground, its body mostly in the grass. It stared at me with its black marble eyes wide open, its head on the gravel in a growing puddle of dark liquid.

Oh my God.

A golden retriever sprung out from the golden ragwort and stopped hard at the dead deer, sniffing at it, his fluffy tail wagging. He trotted to me with a stupid grin, droplets of blood clinging to his beard. He touched his wet nose to my cheek and licked me.

“Yuck. Go away.” I shooed him and wiped my cheek.

“You’re OK, miss. I saw ya there. Sorry to startle.” The gravelly voice came from beyond the yellow weeds.

Don’t tell me I’m OK, motherfucker.

Rifle in his hand, he stepped along the gravel path in his jeans and boots and walked right up to my face. It crossed my mind that he might kick me in the face and dump me in his trunk so I wouldn’t report him.