There was a familiar low moaning noise at Jack Erikson’s feet. Nothing was happening at the nest under the jack pine twenty yards away anyway, so he turned his head away from the eyepiece of the camera and looked down to see that Stas was sound asleep and lightly snoring. He often did that now that he was getting to be an old dog.

Jack started reaching out with his foot to give Stas a light tap and get him to quiet down, but stopped. Stas wasn’t really bothering anything, after all – might as well let him sleep. The old dog had spent many hours out in stands and blinds with him over the years, and a little light snoring was about as distracting as he ever got. It was going to be a shame to not have the familiar companion with him, but it was going to happen in the foreseeable future, so Jack figured he had better just get used to it.

Stas was Jack’s oldest friend, and for practical purposes his only friend. Most of the kids Jack knew considered him to be more than just a little weird for preferring to spend time out in the woods watching birds, than doing things more normal for a high school boy, like chasing girls or playing football.

Jack could never remember not having Stas around. As far as he was concerned, Stas had been his dog forever. Stas was the very model of a good-looking Siberian husky, down to the gray and white markings, the ice-blue eyes, the permanently curled tail, and inability to give a true bark. But there was one exception: rather than the thick, relatively long hair that would be found on a true husky, Stas’s was relatively short and thin, more like something that would normally be seen on a Labrador or beagle or something, but even thinner. Stas still apparently had the metabolism of a husky though; the thin hair meant that he didn’t do well in the winter, and more or less became an inside dog after the weather turned. He’d been booted out of a sled dog racing kennel while just a puppy for that reason alone.

Stas was smaller than what most people would have thought of as a husky, about forty pounds, but very intelligent and trainable. Except for the inability to talk, Jack thought that his dog was smarter than most football players, not that intelligence of that level was any trick, even for a dog. Although Jack knew his way around the woods near Spearfish Lake better than most people, even he could get turned around at times. He never worried about it as long as he had Stas along – about all Jack had to do was tell his dog, “Let’s head back,” and follow along behind, almost always on a nearly straight but usable route back to the car or his house, or whatever was appropriate.

“Good dog, Stas,” Jack mouthed soundlessly, then turned his eye back to the camera eyepiece. It was fairly dark in the blind, which wasn’t much more than a camouflage-patterned nylon tarp thrown over a couple bushes. Still, it was enough to keep him out of view of the nest, along with Stas and the tripod-mounted camera – an old Pentax Spotmatic Motor Drive probably twice Jack’s age, mounted with a 500-mm mirror lens with Cyrillic lettering. While in this day and age Jack would have preferred an electronic camera, those that could mount that much of a telephoto lens were a lot more expensive than the typical teenager could afford. When the old camera and Russian lens showed up on a table in the City Wide Garage Sale for $15, Jack grabbed it in an instant. Over the past couple years it had given him a lot of up close and personal shots of birds in the Spearfish Lake area, and a couple of those photos had even been published.

If the bird that he was looking for showed up to get its portrait taken, Jack expected that the photo might wind up in print as well. There were plenty of photos in existence of Kirtland’s Warblers, but the birds were pretty rare and mostly confined to the northeastern part of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, a good 250 miles and one Great Lake away. To see one around Spearfish Lake was downright unheard of, and Jack knew he would need more than just verbal proof of his sighting.

So far it had been hard to get. One of the problems with the mirror lens was that, even with high-speed film, it didn’t work real well in low light. To this point Jack’s only Kirtland’s Warbler sightings at this nest had been right around dark in the morning or evening, or in the air where it had been impossible to get the bird in the frame. What was more, Jack had only seen one of the birds, and suspected that it might be the only one around. Apparently the bird was out and around during the day, so his only hope of getting a photo involved the bird coming back to the nest in the evening, but while there was still light enough to get it on film.

Jack was nothing if not patient. Although he had the bird on his life and annual lists, he felt that his photographic life and annual lists were more important, especially on an occasional such as a Kirtland’s Warbler in this area. He didn’t have much else that he wanted to do this evening, and the TV would be blaring if he went home.

Though he kept a fair amount of attention on the warbler’s nest on the ground under the scraggly jack pine, his mind naturally wandered to other areas. There was only another few weeks left before school started, which meant only a couple of weeks for him to be out in the woods in pursuit of birds. The Kirtland’s Warbler would be gone soon, probably not long after school started, and that also meant the start of the fall migration, which was a big birding and photographing period. It was just too bad that he had to waste so much of that valuable season in school, when he could be out in the woods doing what he wanted instead. There were a lot of birds not common to the area that would be coming through, and sometimes a particularly interesting or rare species might only be in the area for a day or two. His life list and life photo list was getting to the point where he was going to have to get out of the local area if he hoped to expand them much, but there was always the possibility of some migrant coming through. School cut down the possibility of any such sightings.

Jack had, at best, mixed emotions about school. Thank God it was his senior year! Only one more year of that bullshit to get through! For the most part the classes were inane, and he was marking time. He’d briefly considered doing extra class work and seeing if he could test out of some of his classes, so he could get on to college. However he had basically been told that his butt in the seat meant an extra $6500 in state aid to the school, so there wasn’t much chance it would be allowed. That meant that about all he could do would be to kill time while trying to keep his grades up. He’d have to do that while he put up with all the shit that he took from kids who seemed to think that since he didn’t go out for sports he must be some sort of queer.

Though he considered athletics to be at best a pimple on the backside of education, at one time he’d actually given some thought to going out for some sport, solely as an attempt to end some of that horse shit. Since it meant that he’d have to waste valuable time putting up with some of those cretins he couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for the idea. In any case, the only thing he might have qualified for was track, and the practices and meets would have tied him up at the height of the spring migration, which was far more important to him.

If he could survive the horse shit of the next nine months, Jack figured he’d be off to college in the fall. He had plans to get a degree in wildlife biology, with a specialization in ornithology and minor in photography. Given a choice – and it was no sure thing – what he’d like to do for a living was just what he was doing at the moment – trying for a photo of a rare bird. From his research he knew that there were several different ways things could work out, and how they worked out was going to depend on how things went getting there.

The thing he most looked forward to about college was the fact that his being interested in something besides sports might be taken seriously. His interest in birds certainly qualified him as something odd at Spearfish Lake High School, and he knew from experience that odd wasn’t something good to be in high school, at Spearfish Lake or anywhere else. It was a good thing that he tended to be something of a loner, because his interest in birds had kept him from having much in the way of friends, except for Stas, of course. Thank goodness for Stas – he was someone that he could unload all his troubles and loneliness and know that he’d at least be listened to, if not necessarily understood. The fact that Stas listened was important enough; that was more than he could expect out of any of his so-called “friends,” mostly just people he could tolerate being around if he didn’t see them for too long or too often.

It would have been especially nice to have a girlfriend he could talk to, but there seemed to be even less chance of that happening, at least in the next few months. For the most part he’d even given up hoping it would happen while he was in high school. It was another carrot that college held out there in front of him: if he went to a college where wildlife biology was big enough and important enough, there was the chance that he might be able to find a girl who wouldn’t be too weirded out by the fact that he wanted to make the study of birds his life.

That didn’t mean that he wasn’t interested in girls, because he was. The problem was that for the most part he was interested in them at a distance. He could imagine going birding with a girl just as well as he could imagine more intimate activities, but somehow it was hard to put a face with the ideal he constructed in his mind. For example, he could imagine being in bed with, oh, a real looker like Mary Lou Kempa, but the fact of the matter was that Mary Lou was a blonde cheerleader who wouldn’t have anything to do with anyone not on intimate terms with a dried pigskin. Besides, the only bird Jack wanted to bet that Mary Lou knew about was the one that she flipped him every chance she got . . . All right!

There it was, the little blue-gray bird with the yellow belly, just landing at the nest. Almost instinctively he pressed his thumb on the shutter release cable, and heard the ka-chunk, grind, ka-chunk, grind sound at about one-second intervals as the camera snapped photos. The sound was not loud, mostly because he’d wrapped the lower part of the camera and the motor drive with foam rubber to deaden the mechanical sounds. The bird was oblivious to the slight sound – it pecked for a moment, turned around, pecked a little more, turned, then sprang into flight and disappeared from the viewfinder.

Jack checked the field in the viewfinder again, satisfied that the bird had been in the frame. All right! went through his mind again. He relaxed from the frozen position he’d held behind the camera while the bird had been in view, and moved slightly to see how many frames he’d shot. Eighteen, as it proved in the little window on the top of the camera. Just to be on the safe side, he took another reading from the light meter, and from what he could tell the settings were about right. He’d spent almost two weeks – admittedly off and on – getting to this point, and assuming the photos came out it would be worth all the effort. About time, he thought.

What to do now? The logical thing would be to do nothing, to just sit there and let Stas snore while he waited to see if the bird might come back to the barren nest so he could run some more film through the camera. Against that, he had what he came for, and the day was getting on. It would be a while before it got dark, but he couldn’t see much point in stumbling back to the car in gathering darkness. While he trusted Stas to get him back to the car, he’d rather not depend on the dog if he didn’t have to.

Besides, the nest was falling into shadow, and if the bird came back, any pictures he might be lucky enough to get would most likely be pretty crappy. He probably had about the best he was likely to get today. Maybe the best thing to do, he thought, would be to take a different route back to the car to see if he could find something else interesting. Though most people saw the pine barrens as just that – fields of scrub pine, mostly young trees, not very high and not very interesting, Jack knew better. There was a lot to see out there, and though it was a little early for migration there was the chance that something interesting might be coming through early, and some species would find place like this a fine place to stop off.

That pretty well made up his mind. He was tired of sitting scrunched up in the blind anyway, and now that he probably had what he’d come for, any further sitting around seemed rather useless. Besides, a nice walk would work out some of the kinks brought on by hours of inactivity. Once the decision was made, it didn’t take long to pack up. The lightweight nylon tarp went into his backpack, as did the tripod and his water bottle, along with a few other odds and ends. Without much thought, he decided to carry the camera on a short neck strap, rather than put it in the pack as well. After all, who knew what he might find on his way back to the Jeep – the sun would be more or less behind him, which made for good lighting, and if he didn’t have the camera ready when he needed it he wouldn’t be able to use it.

The activity woke Stas, who stretched, yawned, and stood up as Jack packed the last of his things. He figured he probably wouldn’t be coming to this exact location again, but he knew he could find it if he needed to. One last look around the place to make sure he hadn’t left anything and it was time to go.

It wasn’t a terribly long walk back to the Jeep, so he had some time. On a whim, he decided to head off toward the southeast for a ways, and then turn east when he felt like it. Heading east would bring him out somewhere on the two-rut lane he’d used to drive in on, so a simple left turn when he found the lane would take him back to the Jeep without having to depend on Stas’s internal navigation system. “OK, Stas, let’s go,” he said softly, the first time he’d actually said anything in several hours.

There was no need to hurry, so they took their time. Most people galumph through country like the pine barrens making almost as much noise as a freight train, but both Jack and Stas were used to moving silently and unobtrusively through the woods, making about as much noise as the average ghost. Though not much could be done about Stas’s white and gray markings that would turn him near invisible in the winter, Jack was wearing camouflage and would be barely noticeable at any distance, at least if he stayed still.

It was a pleasant walk, with much to see if, like Jack, someone had an eye for what there was to look for. The sun was getting down a little now, so it cast a golden light on the scrub pine. It was open and easy going, with the tallest of trees not much more than twice Jack’s height and the majority of them a lot shorter. Here and there a tall, blackened spar stood out well above the sea of green pine – these scrub lands weren’t all that old, having been burned over by a forest fire sometime before Jack had been born. While fire can be destructive, it also brings a new cycle of life to places like these.

One of the things that made the pine barrens so interesting at this time of year was the fact that mosquitoes were few and far between. The soil was loose and sandy, so any rainfall quickly soaked into the ground, not forming any puddles for mosquitoes to breed in. In deeper forest this time of year they could be thick enough to carry off small animals, or so it seemed. The relative lack of mosquitoes on this open, sunny ground made the barrens a comfortable place for many birds and animals, if they could adjust to the lack of water. It was one of the reasons Jack had been out here a couple of weeks before when he’d first noticed the Kirtland’s Warbler.

A small rise in the land a quarter mile or so off caught Jack’s attention. It would be hard to call it a hill, but it offered the prospect of a slightly better view of the area. That was as good a reason as any to head that way. It took a few minutes of moving quietly to reach the top of the hill. Jack didn’t notice anything particularly interesting along the way, although Stas stopped a couple times to sniff at things that he apparently found curious, but not enough such that they required further investigation.

There was a little clearing at the top of the hill – well, not a clearing, but the jack pine was sparse there. Most people, on climbing the hill would have headed right for the top, but Jack knew that doing so would silhouette him against the skyline, something he didn’t want to do unnecessarily as it might scare off something worth watching, like a deer. At first, Jack didn’t notice anything, but apparently Stas did – Jack saw the dog’s ears perk up, saw him stiffen and turn to one side, and heard the vaguest trace of a whine.

“What is it, Stas?” Jack whispered as he peered in the direction that the dog was facing. He didn’t see anything strange with his naked eye, so raised the camera to have a closer look through the ten-power telephoto lens, but that didn’t reveal anything either. “Let’s go see,” he said in the same tone, his curiosity aroused. If there was something out there, it wouldn’t be the first time that Stas had been the one to first catch wind of it.

It proved that the hill was more than just a hill, it was sort of a ridge that extended off until it was lost in the clutter of the jack pine. Still moving quietly, the two of them headed down the ridge below the level of the crest, this time with Stas leading the way. After a ways, the dog stopped and looked down the hill, clearly on point, or what passed for it for a husky. Jack looked down the hill, expecting to see anything at all from a dead body to a UFO. What he saw still was a surprise: a woman’s back. She had hair that hung down to her shoulder blades, standing there, facing away from him, perhaps fifty yards off. Though Jack could only see part of her body through the screen of the trees, through the camera viewfinder he could clearly make out that she was naked. From the way her arms spread it seemed to him as if she must be holding hands with someone on both sides.

“What the fuck?” he whispered. Seeing a woman naked was a big thing to him – he was still a teenage boy, after all, and he’d never had that happen to him before, certainly not out here in the middle of the pine barrens. Yet something else seemed to be going on. Since the camera was at his eye, he squeezed off a couple frames, then took it down and looked around. It seemed like there was a spot off to his left and down the hill just a little bit where he might have a little bit better view of what was happening.

Keeping low and moving as stealthily as he could – which was pretty stealthily – he moved across the gap. The spot he had picked proved to not be quite as good as the first spot, but a few feet farther on he had a better view of the proceedings through the intervening trees. From here he could see that it wasn’t just a naked woman, but a circle of them. He couldn’t see the full circle, but most of it. If he was right, there must have been seven women in the circle, although he could only see five of them. In the middle of the circle he could see two more women facing each other. One of them was almost facing him, but he couldn’t make her out clearly because she was obscured by an older woman – at least he guessed she was older from her shoulder-length gray hair.

He raised the camera again. Through the viewfinder the circle of women just filled the frame. Automatically, he fired off another frame, the ka-chunk, grind of the camera and film advance almost making his ears ring with the noise, now not muffled by the foam rubber it had worn earlier. Though it might not have been heard from more than a few feet off, it seemed loud as thunder to him now. Keeping his finger off the shutter button, Jack watched things proceed – after all, the novelty of several mostly nude women wasn’t something that happened to him every day, not even ever. Idly, he wondered if the women had something to do with the nudist resort over on the other side of Spearfish Lake, but that was a good twenty miles away, so what would they be doing around here?

After a few seconds, Jack realized that he was watching a ceremony of some sort. The older woman had been saying something to the woman in front of her; now, she stepped back, and took an obvious knife from a small table to one side. Now that she had stepped back, he could see that the other woman was young, and blindfolded. Her hands were behind her back, and a cord that ran around her neck gave Jack the idea that her hands were tied loosely behind her. A chill ran up Jack’s spine – was he about to witness a ritual murder?

There was no way of telling, and if that was what was going to happen there didn’t seem to be anything he could do about it – he was too far away. If that was what was going to happen he figured he’d better get it on film. Ka-chunk grind. Knowing that he only had another dozen frames or so left, he held off on the temptation to take another frame as the older woman held the knife out in front of her, turned to one side, and said a few words.

Through the viewfinder Jack could see her lips moving, and he almost thought he heard her voice but couldn’t quite make out what she was saying. He wished he had ears as sharp as Stas’s. Then the woman turned ninety degrees toward him, giving him a clear view of her face, so he again touched the shutter release. Ka-chunk grind echoed in his ears as the woman mouthed a few words again, then did the same thing in the other two cardinal directions. Then, she turned back to face the blindfolded woman, and Jack figured that he’d better take another frame, just to be on the safe side. Ka-chunk grind.

The older woman raised the knife, slid it under the blindfold at the side of the other woman’s head – ka-chunk grind – and used it to raise the blindfold. Now Jack could clearly see the face of the other woman in the viewfinder – oh my God, it was a classmate of his, Summer Trevetheck! What in the living name of fuck was going on here?

Even though he knew he was well hidden behind a couple bushes, and with his camouflage clothing helping to keep him inconspicuous, Jack tried to make himself even smaller as he attempted to figure out the scene he was seeing through the viewfinder. What in hell was Summer Trevetheck doing out here in the middle of nowhere, naked in the middle of a circle of naked women, while what was obviously some sort of weird ritual was going on?

Like most kids who grow up in small towns, Jack knew most of his classmates to a greater or lesser degree. While he’d gone to school with Summer since kindergarten, he didn’t know her particularly well. Summer was, well, sort of average. She was decent-looking if not spectacular, medium height, not cheerleader-thin but not heavy. A fairly quiet girl, blonde haired, (and apparently a natural blonde from what he could see), an A and B student. She was certainly not a girl Jack would have expected, or even hoped to see naked, especially not naked in the middle of some sort of a – well, pagan ritual, for the lack of a better description. Nothing of what little he knew about her would have allowed his imagination to put her in the scene he saw in front of him.

Well, there was one thing, he thought as his mind flipped through the possibilities. Summer’s family didn’t celebrate Christmas. He remembered from sometime back in elementary school that Summer had said that it was something their family just didn’t do, no tree or presents or anything like that. Jack remembered feeling a little sorry for her in that she was missing out on the fun, but Summer said it was just how things were and they made up for it at other times. In any case, Summer didn’t strike him as one of the Christian girls running around school who tended to wear a cross on their sleeves – or at least on their necklaces. It was pretty clear that she wasn’t a passionate churchgoer like some other girls he could have named.

In any case, it seemed that this really was some sort of ritual, pagan or whatever. Though he wouldn’t have thought of Summer being involved in such a thing, it seemed clear that this was some sort of private affair, not meant for outsiders – especially outsiders wearing camouflage and carrying a camera with a big telephoto lens. In only a few more seconds, Jack realized that he might be in some big trouble if his presence was discovered. That meant that there was no time like the present to be absent. Since he was still staring through the viewfinder, he pressed down his finger just on general principles – ka-chunk grind, ka-chunk grind, ka-chunk grind, ka-chunk grind – then let the camera hang from its strap. “Stas, let’s go,” he whispered to the dog, who was standing next to him. “I don’t think we should be here.”

Keeping low, the two of them sneaked across the gap to the place where he’d first caught sight of the women, and from there on Jack knew that he was out of sight of the group. Still, the two of them moved quietly and deliberately until they were back on the far side of the hill before Jack felt like that he could relax a little bit.

With a million questions running through his mind, Jack looked around. The two-rut where the Jeep was parked was off to the east, and at this time of day, this time of year, the sun was almost dead in the west. Good enough for what he needed; he turned toward his shadow and kept moving through the woods, with Stas tagging along, sometimes ahead of him, sometimes behind, neither of them making a sound or even being very conspicuous. Jack kept his eyes open, sometimes stopping to survey the view ahead of him.

It was good that he did, for on one such stop, Jack saw a bird sitting in a tree, facing him. His sharp vision was enough to tell him that it was the Kirtland’s Warbler again, beautifully lit by the low sun. Moving slowly and deliberately, he raised the camera again, focused the long lens, slowed the shutter speed a click for the low light, and pressed the shutter button until he heard the whirring noise from the camera’s drive. The bird sat there for a few seconds looking at him, and then in the blink of an eyelash flew away. Great, he thought. That’s going to be even better than the earlier shots.

The second set of shots of the Kirtland’s Warbler made Jack feel good but wasn’t enough to get his mind off the scene he’d observed with the women a few minutes before. What the heck were they doing out there? The pine barrens were a long way from anywhere, a good ten miles out of town, much of it on forest two-rut roads that you had to know where you were going to be able to get anywhere. Jack didn’t know this particular patch of pine barrens all that well, but he didn’t know of any two-rut that led back that way. Obviously, they wanted privacy, but he couldn’t believe that the women would have made a long hike to get in there, so there had to be cars parked around somewhere – probably up the two-rut from where he’d parked the Jeep.

Why here, in the middle of the pine barrens? Oh, stupid, he thought. Of course. He had no idea of how long he’d watched the ritual – two or three minutes most likely, certainly no more than five. It had obviously been going for a while and might go on for a while longer, and if someone was going to be naked in the outdoors this time of year, the pine barrens were a pretty good place to do it since the mosquitoes would be less troublesome. There might be other reasons, privacy among them, but just keeping the bugs at bay was as good a reason as any to be out here.

But Summer Trevetheck being involved? That just didn’t make a whole lot of sense, unless Summer was involved with things that he hadn’t thought that she would be interested in – not that he knew her well enough to know, anyway. When he got right down to it, he probably knew more about Kirtland’s Warblers than he knew about her. She was just another kid, not particularly special in the way that most kids weren’t any too special, at least from what he could see. But obviously, appearances were deceiving.

Jack knew that Summer had an older sister, Spring, and a younger one, Autumn. By themselves, none were totally uncommon names, although when you stopped and thought about it three sisters with those names implied that their parents had to be just a little weird. Jack knew the parents slightly, mostly from school activities. From what he knew, her father, Mike, seemed to be like anyone else, but on reflection it struck him that her mother, Rowan, seemed to have a little bit of a new-age aura around her.

Her mother?

Jack came to a stop and thought hard. His attention had mostly been on the gray-haired woman and Summer when he’d been checking out the scene, but now that he thought about it, Rowan Trevetheck had been one of the women holding hands in the circle around the two. At least he was pretty sure she had been. As far as that went, Summer had been the youngest woman he’d seen – everyone else he’d seen ran from a little to a lot older than she was, although there was no telling about the women in the part of the circle he hadn’t seen. Once again he wished that he had an electronic camera, because he would have stopped and checked right then, but since the obsolete old Pentax was a film camera he wouldn’t be able to check his memory until the film was developed.

Nothing to be done about it now, he thought, getting moving again. The two-rut couldn’t be far off now, and in a couple minutes he burst out of the scrub pine and found it. Unless he’d gone way off course, the spot where he’d hidden the Jeep had to be off to the left, so he turned onto one of the ruts and picked up his pace, with Stas trotting along beside him in the other one. He’d only gone a couple steps when he realized that he wasn’t seeing the tire tracks from the Jeep very often. Every now and then he’d see impressions of the Jeep’s knobby tires, but there were tracks of a car that had obliterated most of them – maybe two cars, it was hard to say. Most likely two, in fact; nine people would be a little much for one, unless they’d brought a full-sized van and Jack didn’t think that the Trevethecks had one of those. He could be wrong, though; God knew the last few minutes had proved that he’d been wrong about a lot concerning them.

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