Birdwatching

This all started when I wanted to learn more about birdwatching. I had a friend who went fairly frequently. He was an office clerk by trade, but his hobby was birdwatching. He had moved away, but I used to talk with him regularly. His descriptions of going birdwatching always sounded nice to me but I had never been interested in it until I had the back problem. My girlfriend and I used to like to go to a little wetland nearby and just walk around. It was a pleasant place, filled with wildlife, and we liked to point out different creatures to each other.

I had spent the summer working for a moving company, and I must have lifted something heavy the wrong way – I don’t know exactly how I did it, but I had a couple of slipped discs in my back. They had made it difficult to walk for more than a few minutes – my lower legs would start to feel like they were asleep, and there was a pain that went along with it, a weird sort of crushing pain - it felt as though my lower extremities had been put in some sort of vise and squeezed until the bones were about to be broken. And sometimes there was this sensation like they were wet, covered with water. I’m not sure which was actually worse. The feeling they were wet was very disorienting.

Anyway, because of this problem with my back and my legs, I often had to sit down and rest while we were on these walks, just to let the pain subside a little before continuing, and she was kind of an independent woman, and would often go ahead. So I would just sit there by myself. And I started noticing more birds – I think because I was just sitting and being still. The first time it happened, it was a hawk that I noticed – actually, four of them. Now I think it was probably two mated pairs dueling over territory. I didn’t know that at the time, though. I watched them swoop and scream, and swoop and scream, these graceful things framed against the open blue sky, and it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. I think because I was missing the ability to move the way I wanted, it struck me that day how free they seemed, in the sky.

I became curious as to exactly what kind of hawks they were, or if they were even hawks. How would I tell when they were so far away? And that’s how it started, I guess. I called my friend and asked him about birdwatching. He gave me some of the basics, and I became interested in seeing birds firsthand, and tracking which ones I had seen. I had surgery not long after that, and it did wonders for me. Suddenly I could walk again without any pain. And so I bought a pair of binoculars, and started birdwatching.

I’ve never been what you might call a “nature-lover” or an “outdoorsman.” The last time I had been camping was when I was seven years old or so, with a local troop of scouts. It was cold and there were lots of insects, and I got food poisoning. All in all, a bad experience, you might say. So at that time I lost any interest I had in camping or going outdoors.

Now here I was many years later, going to college in my early twenties, and I suddenly wanted to reconnect with nature. All those things – the cold, the insects, and whatnot – ceased to matter to me when I saw a new or particularly beautiful bird. But I wasn’t sure where to go to see more, because I just didn’t know the outdoors in my area that well, or really how to identify a “good spot” for birdwatching.

I started talking to some of my acquaintances about it, asking around, and one of them, I can no longer remember who it was exactly, told me I should speak with Gavin Mabuz, a professor of ornithology at the university I was attending at that time.

I called and made an appointment with him. On the phone, he sounded cheerful, a little excited even. I pictured a small, plump, older man. It’s funny how we form pictures of people when all we have to go on is their voice, isn’t it? I read somewhere that it happens because the brain expects the visual stimulus that goes along with meeting someone before there were things like phones. The picture in my head could not have been more wrong.

When I arrived, his office door was closed. I knocked, but there was no immediate answer. I checked my watch, wondering if I had made some mistake, but it was the right time for our appointment. Finally I tried the handle and found it was not locked, so I opened the door and stepped in.

There were two people in the office. The first was a well-built man in his late twenties with black hair who was wearing a brown sport coat and matching trousers. The second was a doe-eyed young woman with a round face. She wore a sage green sun dress with a floral print and a black bolero jacket. He was standing, and the way the light was arranged, his shadow fell over her. They both looked up at me as I entered, and there was something about her expression that stuck with me. She looked terrified, as if she was about to be scooped up in a pair of cruel talons and carried away, and at the disturbance of my entrance, she stood quickly, gathered her books, and fled the room.

I looked over at the man and my initial impression was that he was furious, glaring at me with bright blue eyes. Either he softened his expression almost instantly or my eyes were playing tricks on me, but either way, in the next second, he was smiling broadly, showing straight white teeth, and gesturing for me to sit down.

I was a little flustered, but I managed to introduce myself as I sat in the chair so recently occupied by the doe-eyed girl.

“Yes, pleasure to make your acquaintance,” he responded “Doctor Gavin Mabuz at your service.”

“I’m sorry if I interrupted something,” I began, but he gave a dismissive wave of his hands. He was much younger than I had expected, and much bigger. He looked strong. He didn’t look anything like the picture in my head.

“No, no, not at all, not at all, that student has not been doing so well with the material and she showed up without an appointment, you see. She is in danger of failing my class, and was merely asking about extra credit. Now then, you DO have an appointment, and one that I have been looking forward to! Not that many people go birdwatching these days. It has become a bit passe, I guess, but I suspect that’s a consequence of all the technological marvels we have at our disposal now. Why go crawling through the woods for hours just to get a glimpse of a bird when you can look up a video that shows it in stunning high definition? But that’s the way of things. So you perked my day right up when you called and told me you were an amateur birdwatcher and that you wanted to speak to me about local places that are excellent for the hobby.”

I can’t recall the entire conversation, but among other things, he told me that spring and fall, the migratory periods, were the best in terms of seeing interesting birds, but that for some reason he thought spring was more exciting. He also told me that places near bodies of water were usually the best, and told me that in our local area, places near the lake were really active.

“There are some major fly routes that go over this part of the country,” he said, “Birds follow the lake. They would rather stay along the shore than fly across where there is nowhere to rest. So I usually look for areas where the woods comes almost right up to the lake to say hello, and if those areas are somewhat remote, away from humanity, then all the better.”

“You should keep field notes. Just something simple like date, location, maybe weather, and a list of the species seen.”

He hesitated for a moment, as if weighing something, and then continued.

“If you don’t want to go too far from the city, one of the best spots is a culvert behind a set of train tracks just over the border. Right between the big lake and a little pond named Lake Lupus. No one is ever there. It has never been well known and most of the area surrounding it is either forest preserve or zoned industrial. There's a small park nearby.”

He stopped again and looked at me for a short period of time before resuming. “Believe it or not, it’s the place where the victim of Andrews and Lyon was found. That, too, has kept a lot of people away.”

I remembered the names from somewhere, but couldn’t place them. Mabuz filled me in. “They were a couple of men who kidnapped and killed a boy back in the nineteen-twenties. It was highly sensationalized at the time. Kids themselves, really. Got a snoot full of Nietzsche and felt they must be ubermensch. Killing someone was their way of proving to themselves that they were beyond good and evil.”

He was smiling, a tight, forced smile that didn’t reach his eyes. There was something upsetting about it but I couldn’t place my finger on what it was.

“Of course, I have no problem visiting that site. There’s no place for superstition in science. But it’s interesting that Andrews was considered a top notch ornithologist at the time, don’t you think?” he went on, his smile widening as he did. He didn’t wait for an answer.

“He was a child prodigy you know. Andrews was. He was only nineteen at the time. When he and Lyon took that boy, Andrews was only nineteen. Lyon was barely any older, only twenty one. About your age maybe. But he’d already been published several times. He, along with a couple of other ornithologists, helped identify the Kirtland’s Warbler. He also published observations about the parasitic nesting behavior of the Brown-headed Cowbird that were particularly astute.”

“And Lyon wasn’t an intellectual slouch either. But he was less purely academic than Andrews, from what I understand. He studied law here.” Gavin gestured around himself, indicating the campus.

I wasn’t certain how to respond, so I just said, “That’s very interesting.”

He looked up at me. The smile had disappeared for a moment but now he put it back on. It struck me as false and horrifying, and I wanted to tell him he did not have to smile, but you know how it is. How does one say such a thing to another? It’s rude. So one keeps it to themselves.

“Lyon was a child prodigy too, you know. He skipped several grades and ultimately became the youngest person to graduate with a bachelors from this University, a record he held on to for fifty years or more if I remember correctly. And they both came from very, very wealthy families.”

“They were certain that their intellectual superiority justified the killing. They found a victim, a boy of about fourteen, and kidnapped him. Lyon stole some chloroform from the school laboratory, and they took him to this culvert. You’ll see when you get there – even today, it’s very isolated. A good spot for a murder.”

“Once they had him where they wanted him, they tortured him. They poured acid on him, on his genitals specifically. They thought it would be harder to identify him if no one could tell he was circumcised. Lyon took the boy’s right hand a slice at a time, counting to ten slices before it was gone. I’ve heard Andrews did something else, but it’s difficult to tell exactly what.”

“There was evidence the boy was raped. Technology was primitive in those days, but the city medical examiner was exceptionally good at his craft, and his report indicates that the boy’s anus was torn and filled with semen. There was no DNA at the time of course, but they did have blood typing, and they performed this using the semen. They determined there were at least two men involved, one with type O positive, and the other was AB positive. The kid was just entering puberty, so he barely had any hair to begin with, but it looked to the medical examiner as if someone had roughly shaved the boy’s genitals and head.”

The conversation was beginning to make me a little uncomfortable. Actually I guess it wasn’t just the conversation. That was morbid enough, but the combination of the topic with his horrible inauthentic smile put me on guard. Like an animal, I was picking up on something, but I couldn’t tell you exactly what it was. Just a sense of something wrong. I understood why the student had fled the way she did.

“I am planning on going there next week. I could take you,” he finished.

I didn’t like the idea of being with him longer than I needed to be, but his offer was generous. I’ve found some birders are very cagey and miserly with information, especially about the birding sites they like. A little like fishermen in that way – they want to keep the best for themselves. So I thought about it – maybe if I offered to drive. Not out of generosity, you understand, but because something told me to keep as much control of the situation as possible. But I ultimately decided to turn the offer down.

He shrugged his shoulders and said “Suit yourself. But there’s nothing quite like taking a companion to the culvert.” He gave me a smile I thought was somehow sly. Then he looked down at some papers on his desk and got out a pen. It was clear I had been dismissed.

I left his office, and headed over to the student union building, which housed a couple of restaurants, for some lunch. I had just gotten something to eat when I spied the doe-eyed girl. She looked a little like my girlfriend at the time. She was very pretty. So I decided to sit down near her and I introduced myself.

“Hi,” I said, “I saw you by Professor Mabuz’s office just now. Did he spook you?”

She looked up at me, and laughed a little. “I’m a bio major but I’ve really been struggling with that class,” she said, “so I went in there for help. I don’t know why but I got the eeriest feeling when I was with him. It’s not like he did anything wrong, he didn’t make a pass at me or anything like that, but I felt like he was about to almost the whole time I was there. Is that weird?”

“Nah,” I said, “It’s not weird, he unsettled me a little too. I guess some people are just like that, they put others on edge, make them uneasy, even when they haven’t done anything wrong.”

She laughed again. “My name is Emily,” she said, smiling, and offered me her hand.

We ate together, and made some small talk, and by the end of the meal we were friendly with each other. I considered asking her out, but I already had a girlfriend, and one was enough for me. So we went our separate ways, but we bumped into each other now and then and stayed friendly.



I continued to scout the little wetland for different birds, and I went to a few other places to see them – little patches of forest preserve sometimes, or a beach, or sometimes a little pocket of land near the big lake. Mabuz had been right about the birds sticking to the shoreline, and I saw all kinds of them – egrets, herons, gulls, loons, ducks, geese, and whatnot, but it wasn’t just water birds. I saw hawks – Red-tailed, Cooper’s, and Sharp-shinned Hawks, and other raptors – an American Kestrel a few times. A Peregrine Falcon, with its blue-grey back and barred white belly. I was even lucky enough to see it dive and understood why it was called the fastest member of the animal kingdom when I did – my eyes could hardly follow it. Once or twice I saw an immature Golden Eagle – I could tell it was young by the white marks on its rich brown tail and wings. And once I saw a magnificent Northern Goshawk, likely an older one that didn’t go too far south when migrating, judging by how the feathers on its back had shifted from a darker blue-grey to almost purely blue. It had a gorgeous striped underbelly.

And there were plenty of other birds, too. Downy Woodpeckers, White-Throated Sparrows, and of course more common birds, like Chickadees and Robins. Once I even saw a Wild Turkey. It was huge, much larger than I had imagined. I thought it must be someone’s escaped pet or something at first – I have never ever seen one before and have not seen one since – but there it was, standing in front of the tree line plain as day. A strange looking bird – but much faster than I thought it would be. And not a bad flyer, either. You don’t think of turkeys as being flying birds, but the wild ones are.

A couple of months passed. My girlfriend and I broke up. It hadn’t been serious, really, but I missed having a companion on my walks through nature. I would see Emily now and then. Sometimes running to one of her classes, sometimes at a party, you know, just around. At some party or another, I learned she had a boyfriend – she had brought him along. He was an affable, likeable guy. Roy was his name. It seemed like they got along well, and Emily told me that she had been seeing Roy for a couple of years. I was glad I hadn’t embarrassed myself by asking her out that day at lunch.

I kept on checking out different places to see birds in my spare time, and was really gratified to see some quite rare ones. I saw a place where there were five nesting Fulvous Whistling Ducks, with their long legs and beautiful buff feathers. I saw a Townsend’s Solitaire in late fall, drinking from snow melt off of someone’s roof! At first I wasn’t certain, but as I got closer I saw the white eye ring and later I looked it up. And I saw a Scissor-tailed Flycatcher with it’s incredibly long tailfeathers – not very rare in some places, but we were way too far north for it, and I wondered if it had gotten off course somehow. What could have brought it here?

I also started to get better at recognizing birdsong and learned how distinctive some calls could be. For example, the Mourning Dove’s nest call is how they got their name, and it sounds so sorrowful, almost nostalgic, filled with a kind of beautiful longing. You never forget it once you know what it is.

The seasons changed, and autumn became winter which started to turn into spring. I continued with classes, and continued to go birdwatching in my free time, more or less whenever I had a good opportunity. During the long cold months it was mostly Black-Capped Chickadees, and White-Breasted Nuthatches, occasionally Northern Cardinals, and it was not unusual to hear the screech-call of Blue Jays. I passed the days that way, and they became weeks, which became months. It was sometime in early spring that I had the dream and learned Emily had gone missing.

The dream started with me entering Mabuz’s office, that moment when I first opened the door and he was standing with his shadow almost covering Emily. In this dream the shadow grew and grew and soon it had become a massive accipiter with great black wings. She fled, just as she had from the office, only now we were on the plains, and there was nowhere for her to run to, just flat ground in every direction. The giant bird swooped down on her again and again, each time giving a chilling war-scream, each time tearing through her jacket and sun dress and into her fragile flesh and taking pieces of her into the sky, only to drop them and dive downwards again for another part of her. Soon her skin and muscle were in tatters, hanging from her shoulders, arms, breasts and face in red ribbons, and still she ran. Finally she could go no further, and dropped to the ground where she was. As the great raptor dove yet again, she rolled on to her back, tearing the remnants of her jacket from her and pulling the dress down to offer her bare, mutilated breasts to the shadow that came for her.

I awoke, jerked from my sleep, with two words echoing in my mind – “Irrevocably Lost.” I was breathing hard and covered in icy sweat, and almost screamed. It took a few seconds before I got my bearings – the dream had been unusually vivid. When I was trying to sleep and I felt worked up, I had a habit of putting my hand on my girlfriend’s thigh or on her shoulder. Something about that simple touch, that body contact, always seems to help relax me. But this time there was no one there. I kept picturing the strips of sliced flesh covering Emily and the anguished look on her face as she looked skyward and the great shade descended. Finally, I decided I wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep, and so I went ahead and got up. It was a little past four in the morning, and quiet in the darkness before dawn. I took a shower and dressed silently, then went to the kitchen to have breakfast and a cup of coffee. I decided to go out birdwatching, since early morning was such an active and good time for doing so.

I thought about the culvert that Mabuz had described, and almost went there, but decided against it. It was pretty remote, and I wanted to visit somewhere closer, since I had plans with a friend that day.

It was a fairly uneventful trip. I saw some Juncos and Pine Siskins. I took field notes carefully as usual, noting the place, which was a large park not far from where I lived, as well as the date, time, temperature, and weather conditions. As I walked through the park, occasionally spotting a flicker of movement in the tree line and using my binoculars to make out better detail, I slowly forgot about the dream. About noon I went back to my apartment for lunch, and that afternoon I went for a run, and it had faded away completely at that point.

A few days later, I was at a party hosted by a couple I knew and I ran into Roy, Emily’s boyfriend, but he was obviously with another girl. Seeing him reminded me of the dream, though, and when the girl he was with slipped off for a moment, I asked him what was going on, where Emily was. I didn’t tell him about the dream, or that I was interested in dating Emily myself.

“It seemed like you two got along really well,” I said, “what happened? Where is she?”

He looked up at me quickly and from his expression I realized I had touched a nerve. “She’s gone,” he said.

“What do you mean gone?” I asked.

“Gone. Vanished. Missing. One day we were at dinner, and the next day I couldn’t get through to her on the phone. I went to her place and her roommate had not seen her for two days and had assumed she was with me. We called the police and filed a missing persons report. That was two and a half months ago. As far as I know, no one has seen her or heard from her since then.”

He continued. “She left her purse, keys, wallet, phone, everything, so it’s not like she was planning on going anywhere, whatever happened. The last person to see her as far as we can tell was her roommate, Cassie. She’s not a suspect.”

He hesitated, and then said, “There’s something else. I’m not sure why I’m telling you this, but I feel like you should know. Cassie got a phone call a few nights ago. The voice on the other end was a man. As soon as Cassie picked up, he said ‘Tell the police to stop looking for her. She is irrevocably lost,’ and then he hung up. Cassie said the man’s voice gave her chills, like it was coming through a vast glacier and carried all that time and cold with it. She tried calling him back but just got a message indicating that the line had been disconnected.”

“I’m only telling you this because you were her friend and she liked you,” he continued, “but after Cassie told me about this, we went to the police and let them know about the call, of course. But this is the weird part - when they pulled the phone records, there’s no record of that call. Nothing. It’s like it never happened. But Cassie insists it did, and I believe her even if the police don’t.”

My head was spinning. I then realized that the phone call coincided with the night I had the dream. The dream came back in vivid detail and I felt like I was going to throw up. The look on my face must have betrayed me. Roy actually helped me get to a chair and sit down. He sat with me there for a minute. Before he excused himself, he told me he was in touch with the police, and he promised he’d let me know if there were any updates in Emily’s case. Then he vanished into the crowded room. I stayed in the chair there for a while longer, avoiding eye contact. My mouth kept filling with saliva like I was going to be sick, and I kept swallowing it down. I don’t know how long it took, but at some point I struggled to my feet and got out of there, went out into the cold night air.

For some reason, I didn’t tell anyone I knew about Emily’s disappearance. Or I didn’t want to. I’m not sure which it was, now.

But in private, I obsessed about it. How could someone just vanish? Especially in this day and age? With all the computers and cameras, and everything? How could someone just disappear? Where could she be? Who was the man who had called and why was there no record? What did he mean when he said she was irrevocably lost? Did that mean she was dead? Or something else? I kept thinking about the dream, and seeing the shadow of Gavin Mabuz cover her. And I think that’s when I started to seriously feel compelled to visit the culvert he had described.

I justified it by telling myself I had seen every one of the birds in the little wetland my ex-girlfriend and I liked so much, and in some of the other places I had identified. I needed somewhere new to find new birds. That’s what I told myself, but I think deep down, I had a feeling that I might find her there, at the culvert. I don’t know why I got this idea into my head, but somehow the way Mabuz presented himself and the story he told about Andrews and Lyon, the dream about the shadow, and the conversation with Roy all rolled together in my head and I became convinced that Emily was at the culvert and that I would find her if I went there and looked. That’s what my heart said. I was really only justifying it to myself by telling myself I simply wanted to see if I could find some birds I had not yet seen. But the more I thought about it, the more certain I was I should go there. It was perverse – I didn’t want to find Emily’s body. I told myself I didn’t even know she was dead. But I became convinced she was and I guess some of us just have this kind of perverse attraction to things like that, and I am one of those people.

So finally, I became determined, and I checked maps to find the culvert. After a while, I found a park just across the border between the big lake and Lake Lupus, a smaller body of water, and sure enough, right by the park it looked like there was place where there were nothing much at all. A kind of forgotten area between the interstate on one side, the park, an industrial section of town, and a massive series of train tracks. A piece of land that was sort of isolated, where nothing would ever be built because of what was around it. It looked lonely and grey on the map.
Early the next morning, my alarm woke me. I packed a thermos of coffee and a little lunch, just a sandwich and some grapes. I was in the car by four in the morning. It took me a little over half an hour to get to the park, and I arrived just as the sun was coming up.

I knew I would have to walk through the park for a while before I got to the culvert, but it was shaping up to be a warm and beautiful spring day, a rare thing this early in the season. Some of the larger snow piles were still melting, so there were white and grey mounds here and there in the parking lot, but the grass had started to green right up and was covered with sparkling moisture. There were some early blooming flowers out as well. I couldn’t tell you what kind of flowers they were – I never learned as much about them as I did about different kinds of birds – but I think there were crocuses and violets. It was really pretty.

As I hiked to the culvert I kept an eye out for birds. First there was a Red-Winged Blackbird – that brilliant spot of red on the dark wing made it obvious – and then I saw a Ruby-Crowned Kinglet, again a spot of brilliant red, this time on the head mixed amongst the dun feathers, giving me what I needed to identify what I was seeing. I saw Chimney Swifts and Rough-Winged Swallows, Field Sparrows and Pine Warblers, and I saw one Blue-Headed Vireo. I saw a pair of Blue-Grey Gnatcatchers with soft blue bodies and long tailfeathers, black in the center with a stripe of white on either side.

As I kept going towards the back of the park, I saw that there was a wall of trees and brush that had been allowed to grow as a sort of natural barrier between the park and the things surrounding it, including the culvert. I headed for it anyway. As I approached I saw a thrush – but I could not tell if it was a Hermit Thrush or a Veery - they both have light brown backs and white bellies, and it was too fast for me to spot whether it had a circle of white around the eye.

Now I was in the brush. It was thicker than I first thought, and caught at my clothes. I saw that behind the wall of vegetation there was a chain-link fence blocking access to the culvert as well, with barbed wire at the top. I could have climbed it, but the barbed wire looked nasty. I saw that some of the grass and brush had been trampled along the fence and I followed it, touching the chain links with one hand like it was a playing card stuck in some kid’s bicycle spokes. Sure enough, I came to a place where the fence had been cut and a man could get in. Taking a deep breath, I pried the cut sections of fence wide enough to allow entry and slipped through.

The ground I found myself on now was not pretty. There was no grass, just dirt and mud, dotted here and there with small white mounds of melting snow, with a small, dirty stream running through a ditch in the middle of things. As I looked around with the park to my back I could see train tracks off to my left, and I could hear the highway to my right. Ahead, standing in front of the big lake, was a series of what looked to be abandoned factories and warehouses. They seemed to stare back at me malevolently with broken-window eyes.

I shuddered. This was a forgotten place. A place where you could scream and scream and no one would come. My eyes fell on the ditch in the center and were led to the culvert itself, and the yawning grey edge of a corrugated metal pipe buried under the dirt. The mouth of the pipe was black, and it seemed to me to be a hole to another reality, a portal to some hell.

I approached the stream and the mouth of the pipe and could see a thin sheet of still-frozen water filled the ditch, a stream that went through the culvert which had not thawed quite yet. I came closer and closer to the entrance and as I did my heart rate began to increase. I was scared. Why was I scared?

I knew suddenly that I would find Emily laying in the blackness of the pipe.

I don’t think I had fully realized it until now, but that was why I was here. It was to find her. As I reached the frozen stream, I stopped walking and began to work my feet back and forth as if I was skating or skiing, sliding along the icy surface until I was just outside the mouth of darkness. The daylight seemed wan here – moments ago the sun had been full in the sky and the day had been beautiful, but now it was suddenly overcast and the thin light seemed to barely penetrate into the pipe.

But. It was enough for me to make out a hand and a wrist before the darkness swallowed vision.

The hand and wrist were so white I almost thought they were snow mounds at first, but I could see the nails on the hand were painted a vibrant crimson, and this helped me identify it, just like the red-winged blackbird I had seen earlier. The back of the hand lay pressed into the mud, and the fingers looked as though they were relaxed. I was shaking, and didn’t want to go in, but why else had I come here if not to do so? I forced one foot in front of the other as I proceeded slowly into the darkness. I felt compelled and repulsed at the same time.

As I crept into the storm pipe, the pale light seemed to follow me. The hand with the red nails and the wrist led to an arm, the skin unblemished, perfect, and white with the whiteness of death. The arm led to a shoulder and a head of brown hair. There were old leaves tangled in the woman’s mane. I looked down at her face.

For a moment, I was convinced it was Emily. The girl had the same doe eyes, though they were wide and staring, and the same soft, kind features and round face. But as I looked closer I saw it wasn’t her. It was a woman who looked a lot like her, but it wasn’t her. And as I beheld her so, I saw the indignities that had been done to her.

She was nude, and posed face up and legs spread wide, knees bent. There was brown and black bruising around her neck. I am not a doctor, but it was obvious even to me that she had been strangled. Her right hand had been severed – only the left remained, the arm thrown back above her head. That was the hand I had first seen. Words had been cruelly and crudely carved into her with a blade – one on each breast just above the areolae and one on the stomach just below the ribcage. They formed a triangle:

MAY                          DAY

PREY

I wanted to look away but felt like I was paralyzed until I noticed something lower on her body that I thought was mud or dirt at first. I wish it had been – I leaned in closer to have a look and slipped on the ice, and landed on her. She was so cold. I’ll never forget how cold her body was.

The dark patch turned out to be blood. I had fallen almost face first in a vertical slit that ran from her belly button down through the plump flesh of the pubis mons, right through the pubic thatch and into the vagina. The skin had been peeled to either side like a pair of grisly curtains and a thick, black branch, the end broken off and bare of bark, had been laid inside the wound, an unholy stand-in. It was an obscenity that hurt me just to look at. Some things you can’t unsee.

I ran, then, slipping and screaming, away from the corpse. I didn’t stop until I was back in the park. And I called the police and waited for them to come.

The questioned me, of course. What was I doing back there in the first place? I told them I’d been birdwatching and had just stumbled into the culvert. What was I going to say? That I had a dream that told me to go there? They let me go pretty quickly.

I heard later that they pulled eight other bodies out of the culvert. Some of them had been there for years. One of them might have been Emily. The decomposition apparently made it difficult to tell.

I took the next week off of school. I spent most of it in my bed, in the dark, weeping. I didn’t let anyone come over. I wanted to be alone. I felt tainted somehow, by what I had seen. Eventually I got myself together. I guess people really are pretty resilient about things like that.



I bumped into Gavin Mabuz on campus after I finally went back to school. I worked up my courage and went to go talk to him. I had some idea I was going to confront him, I think. But when I stood face to face with him, I realized – I didn’t have any proof. Still. Part of me felt like I had to know.

So I said, “I went to your culvert the other day.”

He looked at me levelly, unblinking. “Did you see anything nice?” he asked lazily. That smile was back, the one that didn’t touch his eyes, the one that was just teeth and lips.

My own mouth had gone dry at the sight of his smile. I couldn’t speak, so I settled for shaking my head no.

“Oh? That’s too bad. That’s a great place for raptors. Birds of prey often visit,” he spoke slowly, calmly, but there was something hard in his voice. “In fact, that culvert is one of the few places you might see carrion birds in the area.” The smile had vanished like a heron fading into the background across a lake, but now it returned, and there was something mocking in it.

“The bare earth of the culvert makes a good hunting ground, you see. Lots of insects and worms come up from the ground there. Because of the placement of the two lakes nearby, it’s a wonderful place to feed, and prey draws prey. Some carnivores are pickier than others, and it’s not unusual for a corpse to be left partially uneaten there. That’s what the carrion birds are after. They love the flesh of the dead.”

Now a cruel light in his eyes joined the smile, which seemed more of a sneer than anything else to me at this point.

“Carrion eaters are in an interesting place in the cycle. Right in the middle, where they finish the dead and begin new life. They are the May Queens of bird world, ushering in new life with the death of the old.”

I wanted to scream at him, to tell the whole world that this man was a killer, right then and right there. But what proof did I have? So I turned and left, Mabuz’s cruel laugh following me as I did so.



I told the police about my suspicions. And they promised me they would look into them. But that was a long time ago now, and I never heard or read about Gavin Mabuz being arrested. As far as I know, he was never even questioned. And Emily has never been found. They brought me back to the station a few times, though. Said they had found my DNA on the body. I explained to them about slipping on the ice. They didn’t seem to believe me, seemed very suspicious of me, but after a while they stopped bringing me in. I guess they had asked me the same questions and heard the same answers enough times.

I still go birdwatching. And my favorite time of the year to go is still early spring. I keep pretty good field notes, and since that time I have seen hundreds of different birds, some of them quite rare. I like it even more when I have a companion. I can be a little choosy though. There’s a particular type of doe-eyed girl I like to bring along. Sometimes I see a girl who looks so much like Emily it makes my heart feel young again, like it’s May and the world is beautiful.

When I find one like that, I ask her to join me.