“What do you think it is?”

“I don’t know.”

“Could it be—”

Just then the object moved, slowly at first, then abruptly, as if it were about to fall out of the tree.

“Holy cow!” said McAteer.

“How the hell did he get up there?”

The question went unanswered as the two men started running down the road toward the tree.

* * *

He could feel the breeze blow through his hair. But it was also blowing through his clothes, and his legs and feet were cold. The usually comfortable feeling he felt each morning was absent, as if instead of a bed, he were lying on top of a woodpile with branches and pine needles sticking into his body from head to toe.

And his head.

Lord, did it hurt.

His head felt like it had been dealt a half-dozen hammer blows. But how could that be? He tried to remember back to the night before. It was hazy, but there was some recollection of the beasts. Yes, there had been creatures. Hairy things that had come to him in the night and spirited him out of his trailer and away.

Impossible. It couldn’t have been real. Perhaps a dream. Yeah, that was it. A dream, a nightmare. Yes, with monstrous creatures…all conjured up in his mind because of the stress and pressure he’d been under the past few days.

The wind picked up and he could feel himself being rocked, almost like a child in a cradle, or an adult in a hammock. But then something cracked and his body dropped several inches.

Ceballo opened one eye.

I must still be dreaming, he thought. How else would I be hundreds of feet off the ground and tied to a tree?

A pause for a moment of thought.

Hundreds of feet off the ground?

He opened his other eye and glanced around. Trees. That’s odd. And then he turned his head slightly and looked down. The ground was so far away.

Just then a piece of branch broke free and he watched as it fell, bouncing off other limbs, tumbling and drifting down to the ground, where more than a dozen people stood, gazing up at him. Some of them had cameras for photographs and television.

What on earth had happened last night? In the dream the creatures had spirited him away. Now that was an odd choice of words. Spirited. Could it be that the Indian was telling the truth? Had the spirits he’d talked about taken him from his bed and put him up in the trees as a warning?

The wind rocked him again, the sound of the breeze was punctuated by the sound of snapping wood.