If humans were anything like deer, she couldn't have been dead more than a day and a half. The marks and bruises on her throat made it obvious: she had been strangled and dumped. Ermal set his galvanized coal bucket down, leaned his rifle between two branches of a small ash, and knelt beside her body. He prodded the cold white flesh of her cheek and then wiped his fingers on his haunch, smearing the chill of death with coal dust and grease. There would be no trains for several hours, but Ermal looked around and listened intently for any signal that there might be someone else in the area. A slight breeze through the branches and the shrill whistle of a cardinal across the field were the only sounds. With some hesitation he looked back at the girl, at the pale white flesh that was made somehow milky by death. He looked at her breasts, which were high-set and firm, but no longer able to incite any sexual longing in Ermal. There was nothing sensual about this, there was no life to it, no blood to heat her flesh and bring a flush to her cheek. This was little more than meat.

Ermal looked around again, judging that the girl could not be seen by the conductors that piloted the coal trains through the mountain. If he had not gone into the field to get a shot at a rabbit, he never would have seen her hand propped up against the tree.

He took another glance at the girl and then used his rifle to lift himself out of his crouch, wincing as his knees popped. Ermal twisted his back in each direction, cracking it in a series of snaps that seemed especially loud in the silence. He picked his bucket up and headed back for the tracks, following them once again up and to the north, higher into the mountain, closer to the mines, gathering the coal that had fallen from the huge mounded coal cars. All the while he kept watch for game in the small open fields east of the tracks just below the still-healing scars of long-abandoned mines. Occasionally he would stop to rest his back and lean out against a tree to look down the western side of the mountain at the odd shack, or to catch a glimpse of rutted, washed-out road snaking up into the hollows of the mountain. By the time the bucket was full he had a rabbit and two squirrels tied to his belt and he turned back along the tracks. When he reached the spot on the tracks nearest the girl's body, he stopped and squinted off into the field, made certain she would not be found, and headed south once again until he reached the swinging bridge that would bring him across the Pike River at Ford's Branch to the hollow that led up the mountain to his own house.

Ermal cut away from the road and took a narrow footpath which shortened his walk by almost a mile. The wild grasses were waist high on either side, and the morning dew still clung, somewhat hopelessly, to the lower portions of the stems. Ermal's pants' legs were wet where they brushed the grass, but he hardly noticed. His thoughts kept returning to the girl. Across the mountain the world was full of color - the bright yellow and deep, rich brown of wild daisies, the red velvet of sumac, the pale lavender of clover - but the only color that registered for Ermal all the way home and up the scrap lumber steps was the gelled-white paleness of the girl's lifeless flesh.

Ermal hung the game from a porch rafter and went in to dump the bucket of coal into the wooden box beside the stove, using the empty bucket to carry the ashes from the house to the ash barrel; he would use the ashes later, leaching out the lye to make soap. With the stove tended, Ermal began to clean the game.

As his hands performed the familiar task of slitting bellies, peeling the skin off like a sock and stretching it over long wooden forms to dry, he watched a pair of cardinals flitting in and out of the branches of a small tree down by the creek that ran along the edge of the road. They had been hanging around for a couple of days, and he figured they would be nesting somewhere close by. There didn't seem to be as many cardinals around now as there were when he was younger. Or perhaps, now that he no longer spent the majority of his days a mile beneath the earth, jackhammering a long black vein of coal, he was no longer so attuned to the brightness of color. He had been too long in the light.

He wrapped the rabbit in newspaper and placed it in the freezer, took the squirrels and put them in a pan of salt water to soak for his dinner, then switched on the old Philco black-and- white, turning the volume up loud enough to hear on the porch. There was a flour tin full of stones outside the door and he picked it up and placed it on the two by four that served as a porch railing. He took his rifle in one hand and a stone in the other. He threw the rock on top of a pile of sheet metal that sat in the middle of the yard and readied his rifle. The snakes came out in a tangle: copperheads, rat snakes, and garters, all together beneath the sun-heated tin. Ermal fired in a series of well-aimed shots, hesitating only a moment between rounds to watch as each snake flipped into the air, like a rubber toy tossed by a boy. He shot five copperheads before he lost sight of the rest, which was good. Though he had gotten as many as eight snakes before, he had never shot more than four copperheads at a time.