Her sputtering thoughts were snapped off by a movement in the trees that caught the corner of her eye. Might that white fluttering be Rebecca’s dress? The girl had worn white today! She stopped the car, and sat for a moment considering. She never much liked going into the woods alone at night, and they said they sprayed today, though she’d smelled nothing. But there was something there, in the trees, ahead to the right, bobbing around. What would Rebecca and Ruth be doing there? Helping some animal out of a trap? Hunting was against the law, but some of the summer kids were tempted.

Hilda Cannon got out of her car purposefully. With her eyes glued to the moving white object, she missed a hole and twisted her ankle a little. She sat on a rock at the edge of the woods to rub the pain out. In the quiet of the night, she thought she heard a rustling noise behind her. She got up with a start. It came to her that there was no sound of the crickets that usually made a commotion in the Yarkie air at this hour, no hoot of an owl. She listened harder. The rustling sound was distinct. She sat down again, relieved. It was mice, she nodded, or the muskrats she knew lived in this part of the forest. But then it was almost as if her ears rather than her nose picked up the faint, foreign odor. It wrinkled her nose with both its strangeness and its pungent unpleasantness.

She rose again, and followed her new curiosity toward the movement in the trees. She wondered whether the bitterish taint in the air might be the new poisons at the dump, or the stuff the town had sprayed on the trees. Strange they would do that on such short notice, but she was glad she remembered. It was another reason not to go too far into the woods. The heavy woman’s mind kept circling as she walked on, sniffing. The foreign smell couldn’t be from the dump because the wind was southwest, as usual, she knew that very well. It might be some dead animal rotting in the forest.

As Hilda Cannon neared the target of her inquisitiveness, she thought she heard a human sound ahead. As if someone couldn’t catch his breath. She quickened her pace. It might be one of her girls, at that! Maybe a foot caught in a trap! She was running now.

There was a human body in those trees! It was covered with a blanket of leaves except for what appeared to be—oh, impossible!—appeared to be the back of a man. A man thrusting up and down as if in the act of—!