=17=

Neena pauses, breathless, by a tree. Ideally, it would be a white birch, a dead one, lightning-struck, perhaps(?), with a few tattered yellow leaves flickering in the frosty autumnal predawn air, but, in all reality, it’s probably just a trusty, run-of-the-mill oak. There being so many oak trees in these parts, it being, you know, an oak forest, and all. This particular oak is an old one, too, with a wide trunk covered in a thick, calloused bark bearing the graffiti of four or five hundred winters. Or maybe it's spring. In that case, it's a cool green morning, “fresh” would be the word, I guess, and the woods would be quiet, some birds chattering high up in the canopy, but they fall silent as Neena passes down below.

She stands, head slightly bowed, panting hopelessly, her breath visible in the air, somehow cognizant of the fact that she has, at best, maybe one more good sprint left in her, and then only if she forces herself to move, now.

Over the hill, maybe another hill or two away, she hears the baying of the hounds, large, grey, long-muscled beasts loping in a lovely synchronicity, as they bound effortlessly and one-pointedly over the ever-decreasing distances separating, though not for long them and her.

Neena is off and running again, her pale feet moving over the spongy mattress of decaying undergrowth, her naked legs splashed with cold, stinking mud, flicks and flecks of black muck spattering her breasts and belly, her anklet of bells a-jingle-jangling. In his imagination, the observer cuts back and forth between these alternate views: the hounds’ graceful gallop and Neena, stumbling forward, dogs, girl, dogs, girl, back and forth, point, counterpoint, until the naked girl veers off to the left in a kind of prolonged, staggering fall, as if only the forward momentum of her previous flight were still keeping her, if only momentarily, upright.

Cresting a slope, she is weeping, gasping, scrambling forward on hands and knees, cruelly lashed by brambles, and, suddenly, stunned, finds herself without warning in a clearing of stubble on a kind of bald hillock, with a view of the open sky. High white clouds pass swiftly overhead, like ghostly galleons, towards what is presumably a stunning expanse of sea hidden just over that last verdant slope, and now, quite unwittingly, she is struggling to her feet the better to savor this sudden oasis of liberation. Thus, tragically, as destiny and fate proscribe, she presents herself to anyone who happens to be sizing up a shot: there she is, the perfect target.           

The shot, when it does come, seems, (doesn’t it always?), to come from out of nowhere. She is spun, halfway around by a slug of indeterminate caliber (Determine it, Pinker. Make sure what follows isn’t complete nonsense), which shatters her left shoulder-blade like a fine Japanese sushi dish, and drives her, twisted, to her knees, or, perhaps she simply stares, in total disbelief, at the sudden appearance of the steel tip of an arrow extending four or five inches from the lower left side of her abdomen, the shaft behind it slick with gore. After some brief seconds, the shock and pain catch up to her, at which time she sinks, inevitably, to her knees. Either way, it’s a “blooding shot” as the hunters like to say, and although not technically fatal, it is clearly penultimate to fatal, the beginning of the final fifty yards or so of the chase that will mark the distance remaining in her life.

Somehow, Neena rises once more, unsteadily, heartbreakingly, the steps she takes now careless and haphazard, looking almost drunken, as if she were setting down footprints with adhesive-backed vinyl, the steps of a deliberately anti-climactic dance—The Slaughter of a Faun (Who Mistakenly Sought Shelter Upon God’s Altar), perhaps? No, too derivative, but something of the sort—in an experimental postmodern ballet, a difficult virtuoso passage where it’s impossible to determine if the performer’s contortions are the manifestation of a spectacular skill, an inspired improvisational reverie, or if the dancer has simply lost control of her body (to a seizure of ecstasy brought on by….?).

There is a general sense of the pitiful to her efforts, beautiful as they are, if the “efforts” she makes now can even be called “efforts,” as in “willed” by her at all, and the expression in her eyes is one of helpless horror, (and, alternately, horror at her helplessness) but not, please note, in the expectation of the inevitable second and finally fatal shot, already being lined up out of her sight (and mind), but in the drowning realization that she is trapped, with no way out, inside a trophy body whose arms and legs, though lovely, won’t obey her anymore.

Ah, and here is the second shot even as we speak, expected and yet always still a surprise, and, almost simultaneously, maybe even a third shot, absolutely gratuitous, almost reflexive. It seems really really  unlikely, even unthinkably excessive,  but could there be a fourth and fifth shot…(don’t even say it!) even a sixth shot? (Pinker, you animal!) An outrage! Absolutely criminal! After all, she is, in theory at least, a taxidermist’s dream (needless perhaps to say, a necrophiliac’s as well): in either case, it really wouldn’t do to blast her all to pieces.

The dogs are on her first, of course, ripping away her Achilles’ tendons, along with various other tendons essential for further flight, severing this and that, leaving her “hamstrung,” as the saying goes—they are blameless, after all; they are hunting dogs; it is what they’ve been trained to do. There are dogs at each of Neena’s wrists, two or three more are sinking their long white teeth into her thighs, and powerful jaws are clamped around her graceful swan’s neck, but whether the alpha male has already torn out her throat and broken her neck, or merely holds her, obediently, for his master to do the honors, to deliver the coup de grace, it is a matter at this point beyond Neena’s comprehension, and frankly, interest. (Is it beyond ours, though, I wonder?).

Soon Neena hears the horses that carry the hunting party galloping quickly on their way, already not far off, and she feels a surge of adrenaline rising through her like an immense and swelling wave lifting her above hopelessness and she thinks, deliriously, that there is still time and energy for one last attempt at escape, even though there isn’t—in reality what she is experiencing is  the hoped-for appearance of the brain’s oft-mentioned “natural” endorphins, Nature’s form of mercy in horrendous times like these—and soon, in point of fact, she lies slung, tied inside a burlap wrap, wrists and ankles lashed, face-down over a sweating horse’s rump, as the hunting party ambles peaceably through dew-laden meadows at a leisurely trot, taking the long way back to the lodge.

The hunters, sitting easy in their saddles, are smoking expensive cigars and discussing sports scores and stock performances and what’s to be done, hypothetically, about the “Albigensian Crisis” and the “Broeder Revolt” and, finally, what position, if any, to take on the disclosure of certain highly sensitive and potentially compromising, but perhaps equally hypothetical, tape-recorded conversations in the (hypothetical?) Hexagonal Office where the influential Dr. Claw, advising the President, has lately advanced some rather wild and certainly highly questionable interpretations of such red-flag words as “atrocity” and “vivisection”…