Mudwoman. Joyce Carol Oates

and brothers and Suttis was left behind stumbling and uncertain and out of nowhere amid the pine woods there appeared the doe about fifty feet away—a doe with two just-born fawns—pausing to stare at Suttis wide-eyed not in fright but with a sort of surprised recognition even as Suttis lifted his rifle to fire with a rapidly beating heart and a very dry mouth—Suttis! SuttisSuttisSuttis!—words sounding inside his own head like a radio switched on so Suttis was given to know that it was the doe’s thoughts sent to him in some way like vibrations in water and he’d understood that he was not to fire his rifle, and he did not fire his rifle.

      And most recent in January 1965 making early-morning rounds of the traps, God damn Suttis’s brothers sending Suttis out on a morning when none of them would have gone outdoors to freeze his ass but there’s Suttis stumbling in thigh-high snow, shuddering in fuckin’ freezing wind and half the traps covered in snow and inaccessible and finally he’d located one—one!—a mile or more from home—not what he’d expected in this frozen-over wet-land place which was muskrat or beaver or maybe raccoon but instead it was a bobcat—a thin whistle through the gap in Suttis’s front teeth for Suttis had not ever trapped a bobcat before in his life for bobcats are too elusive—too cunning—but here a captive young one looked to be a six-to-eight-months-old kitten its left rear leg caught in a long spring trap panicked and panting licking at the wet-blooded trapped leg with frantic motions of its pink tongue and pausing now to stare up at Suttis in a look both pleading and reproachful, accusatory—it was a female cat, Suttis seemed to know—beautiful tawny eyes with black vertical slits fixed upon Suttis Coldham who was marveling he’d never seen such a creature in his life, silver-tipped fur, stripes and spots in the fur of the hue of burnished mahogany, tufted ears, long tremulous whiskers, and those tawny eyes fixed upon him as Suttis stood crouched a few feet away hearing in the bobcat’s quick-panting breath what sounded like Suttis! Suttis don’t you know who I am and drawn closer risking the bobcat’s talon-claws and astonished now seeing that these were the eyes of his Coldham grandmother who’d died at Christmas in her eighty-ninth year but now the grandmother was a young girl as Suttis had never known her and somehow—Suttis could have no idea how—gazing at him out of the bobcat’s eyes and even as the bobcat’s teeth were bared in a panicked snarl clearly Suttis was made to hear his girl-grandmother’s chiding voice Suttis! O Suttis you know who I am—you know you do!

      Not for an instant did Suttis doubt that the bobcat was his Coldham grandmother, or his Coldham grandmother had become the bobcat—or was using the bobcat to communicate with Suttis knowing that Suttis was headed in this direction—no more could Suttis have explained these bizarre and improbable circumstances than he could have explained the “algebra equations” the teacher had chalked on the blackboard of the one-room school he’d attended sporadically for eight mostly futile years even as he had not the slightest doubt that the “algebra equations” were real enough, or real in some way that excluded Suttis Coldham; and so Suttis stooped hurriedly to pry open the spring-trap fumbling to release the injured left rear leg of the bobcat kitten murmuring to placate the spirit of his girl-grandmother who both was and was not the elderly woman he’d known and called Gran’maw and the bobcat bared her teeth, snarled and hissed and squirmed and clawed at his hands in leather gloves shredding the gloves but leaving Suttis’s hands mostly unscathed and raking his face only thinly across his right cheek and in the next instant the bobcat kitten was running—limping, but running—on three swift legs disappearing into the snow-laden larch woods with no more sound than a startled indrawn breath and leaving behind nothing but a scattering of cat feces and patches of blood-splattered silver-tipped fur in the ugly serrated jaws of the trap and a sibilant murmur S’ttus! God bless.

      And now it was the King of the Crows summoning Suttis Coldham unmistakably—SSS’ttissss! SSS’ttiss!

      Suttis froze in his tracks. Suttis stood like one impaled. Suttis could not hide his eyes and refuse to see. Suttis could not press his hands over his ears and refuse to hear.

      SSS’ttisss come here! Here!

      The King of the Crows was the largest crow Suttis had ever seen. His feathers were the sleekest and blackest and his wingspread as wide as any hawk’s and his yellow eyes glared in urgency and indignation. Like a hunted creature Suttis made his way along the riverbank, as the King of the Crows shrieked in his wake, flying from tree to tree behind him as if in pursuit. For it would not be true as Suttis would claim that he had followed the King of the Crows to the child abandoned to die in the mudflat but rather that the King of the Crows had driven Suttis as a dog might drive cattle. Suttis could not hide, could not escape from the King of the Crows for he knew that the King of the Crows would pursue him back to the Coldham farm and would never cease harassing and berating him for having disobeyed him.

      Suttis stumbled and staggered along a three-foot-high embankment that jutted out into the vast mudflat. Not long ago the last of the winter snows had melted and the mudflat was puddled with water, as the Black Snake River was swollen and muddy and swift-rushing south out of the mountains. Everywhere was a buzzing-thrumming-teeming of new life, and the rapacity of new life: blackflies, wasps, gnats. Suttis swatted at the air about his head, a cloud of new-hatched mosquitoes. Underfoot was the ruin of a road. Ahead was the ruin of a mill. Suttis knew the mudflats—the Coldhams hunted and trapped here—but Suttis had no clear idea what the purpose of the mill might have been at one time, or who might have owned it. His grandfather would know, or his father. His older brothers maybe. The ways of adults seemed to him remote and inaccessible and so their names were blurred and of little consequence to him as to any child.

      Come here! Come here S’ttis come here!

      SSS’ttisss! Here!

      On the narrowing embankment Suttis moved with caution. The King of the Crows had so distracted him, he’d left his trapping gear behind—the burlap sack which bore the limp broken bloodied bodies of several dead creatures—but still he had his knife, sheathed in his jacket which was Amos Coldham’s Army-issue jacket of a long-ago wartime, badly stained and frayed at the cuffs. On his head he wore a knit cap, pulled down onto his narrow forehead; on his lower body, khaki workpants; on his feet, rubber boots from Sears, Roebuck. Passing now the part-collapsed mill with its roof covered in moss that made him uneasy to see—any building, however in ruins, Suttis Coldham was inclined to think that something might be hiding inside, observing him.

      In the mountains, you might be observed by a man with a rifle, at some distance. You would never know how you were viewed in a stranger’s rifle-scope even as the stranger pulled the trigger and for what reason?—as the Coldhams liked to say For the hell of it.

      Suttis cringed, worried that he was being observed and not by just the King of the Crows. Entering now into a force field of some other consciousness that drew him irresistibly.

      Broken things in the winter-ravaged grasses, rotted planks, chunks of concrete, a man’s single boot. A shredded tractor tire, strips of plastic. In the vast mudflat tracks ran in all directions with a look of frenzied determination—animal tracks, bird tracks—and on the embankment, what Suttis identified as human-being footprints.

      Suttis’s eye that gazed upon so much without recognition, still less interest, for instance all printed materials, seized at once upon the human-being footprints on the embankment which Suttis knew to be, without taking time to think, not the footprints of his brothers or any other trapper or hunter but female footprints.

      Suttis knew, just knew: female. Not even the boot-prints of a young boy. Just female boot-prints.

      There were other prints, too—mixed with the female. Possibly a child. Suttis knew without calculating, with just-seeing.

      Not that these tracks were clear—they were not clear. But Suttis understood that they were fresh for no other tracks covered them.

      What was this! Suttis whistled through the gap in his front teeth.

      A piece of cloth—a scarf—of some crinkly purple material, Suttis snatched up and quickly shoved into his pocket.

      SSS’ttisss! Here!

      Atop a skeletal larch the King of the Crows spread his wings. The King of the Crows did not like it that Suttis had paused to pick up the crinkly-purple