A Fountain Filled With Blood

She swallowed the tepid water and rubbed her hands dry on her T-shirt. She squinted into the trees. The raucous cries of the birds increased in volume, and then a wide-winged black shape rocketed through the forest cover, breaking the air over their heads and diving down, swooping through the cleared space of the trail. It skimmed overhead, so close that Lawrence could have jumped up and caught a tail feather, and then disappeared over the next rise, like a supernatural messenger from an Edgar Allan Poe tale.

His wife, who taught biology to premed students and was not the sort for fanciful imagery, said, “The collective noun for ravens, you mean? That was a raven. Crows are much smaller.” She eased her pack off her shoulders with a grunt. “They’re making God’s own racket down there, aren’t they?”

Lawrence jerked his attention away from the raven’s flight path. After twenty-eight years of marriage, he could take a hint. They had left the bed-and-breakfast in Millers Kill over four hours ago, and Donna was ready for a break. He unbuckled and dropped his backpack. The ravens couldn’t be seen, but they certainly could be heard, guttural cries and sharp knocking calls that sounded as if they were demanding, “Talk! Talk!”

Donna fished a granola bar out of her waist pack. “Probably fighting over a carcass.”

“Yeah? Cool! You think there might be bones? Some bones would be a great prop for my class next semester on ritual and imagery in premodern societies.”

Donna stuffed the rest of the bar into her mouth. “I fawt you were gon’ have ’em paint rocks,” she said around a mouthful of oats. She rolled her eyes at him and swallowed. “Okay, let’s go have a look. It’s probably just a raccoon. I can’t imagine too many premodern societies worshiped raccoons.” She struck out toward the sounds. He followed after, occasionally slowing himself on a tree trunk as the angle of the mountainside increased. She was a good sport, his wife.

This part of their hike was through mature forest, tall trees and little underbrush, thick dark humus composted from decades of fallen leaves quieting their steps. The day was hot and heavy, even here underneath the shade of the forest cover, and no breezes stirred the crowns of the beeches and maples. The ravens’ screams sounded unnaturally loud in the stillness.

“Whoa! Honey!” Below him, Donna scrambled back, her legs kicking against the downward slant of the forest floor.

“What? Are you okay?” He let go of the trunk he had been clasping and jogged down the slope sideways until he could reach her.

“It’s a drop-off. Not terribly high, but it startled me.” She pointed to where the rich earth of the forest floor crumbled into air. Lawrence leaned against the pebbled trunk of an old black-cherry tree whose roots thrust through soil and rock into the air. “Be careful, honey,” Donna said.

He could see the striated rock beneath him, a gash in the mountainside maybe ten or twelve feet high. Below them was a brook, brown and speckled as a trout, running between two narrow banks of shaggy grass, the closer side growing right up to the rock, the farther side petering out into the deeply shaded hardwood forest.

At the water’s edge, a small tent was staked out next to a stand of paper birch gleaming in the midday sun like fragile polished bones. The flapping, quarreling ravens nearly obscured its dun-colored fabric, perching on the aluminum ridgepole, strutting on the ground, plucking at the window flaps. “You’re not going to believe this.” Lawrence glanced back at Donna. “It looks like The Birds down there. I think someone’s in trouble.”

To her credit, Donna didn’t think twice. “How can we get down?”

He took in the lay of the land. “This drop narrows down to just a couple feet if we follow it west a few more yards. We can jump from there.”

“West?”

“Go left.”

They trotted as fast as they could along the gash in the mountainside until they reached the area Lawrence had spotted from above. Donna jumped first and was splashing through the shin-deep water of the brook before he had eased himself over the rocky ledge. “Shoo! Shoo!” she yelled, windmilling her arms as she charged the ravens. With a chorus of croaks and calls, they lifted into the air in a dark whirlwind and settled in the stand of birch trees. Their shiny black bodies tipped the thin branches down, and they looked so much like a caricature of vultures that Lawrence would have laughed if it hadn’t been so damn creepy.

“Honey…” Donna’s voice was uncharacteristically hesitant. “I smell something.”

The tent, the narrow one-person kind ideal for long hiking trips, was zipped up tightly. But Donna was right. As he got closer, he could smell it, too, sickly sweet. He wrinkled his nose. They looked at each other. “I’ve got my cell phone in my backpack,” she said. “We could…”