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boulders. He needs to sit down, to take the weight off his feet, because it feels as if the backs of his hiking boots have eaten their way clean through to the bone. But as he nears the boulder, he sees that it is not a boulder at all, but some kind of shrub. Closer still and his light reveals that it is more like tumbleweed, though more densely constructed and much bigger than any he has ever seen. It reaches almost to his waist.
    “Emma , come take a look at this,” he says, raising his light to shoulder height and aiming the beam downward like a mechanic inspecting the guts of a troublesome vehicle.
    “What now?”
    Despite the cold sensation of dread that crawls like the rain down the back of his neck, Mike is fascinated at his discovery.
    The object before him is a rough oval composite of grass, sticks, and coarse thin fibers he identifies as animal hair, and as he runs a tentative hand over the top of the tightly woven mass, the twigs like hard, slick tendrils in the rain, he is once again transported via memory back to his youth, this time to Mrs. Edgerton’s biology class on the day when she got them all to study owl pellets. He recalls being repulsed as he pulled apart the small, hairy brown orb of compacted waste matter, only to find his sense of wonder inflamed at the sight of what was revealed to him: several smooth tiny stones, desiccated insect remains, and the skeleton of a mouse. Indigestible material, Mrs. Edgerton had informed the class with her trademark haughty, holier-than-thou delivery , which in its excretion also helps cleanse the gullet of the animal.
    Mike sha kes his head. What he is looking at couldn’t possibly be the same manner of thing, could it? Not unless they have birds the size of my Toyota up here . Deferring to that sense of childhood wonder again, he pins the flashlight under his chin, the light angled toward the top of the tumbleweed-thing, and braces his knees against the object for support—thereby discovering that it is heavy enough to resist being moved by his weight—and, carefully slipping his fingers into the latticework of branches of which the outer shell is composed, pulls the thing apart. It opens easily, the top portion splitting wide with the sound of firecrackers, and Mike stumbles back a step as a noxious smell of methane rises in an invisible cloud to envelop him. Coughing, he waves a hand before his face, eyes wide with incredulity, and, the flashlight trembling in his hand from the cocktail of cold, fatigue, and terror, leans over to inspect his handiwork.
    “Honey…” he says, his voice very small. “You ’re not going to believe this…”
    His efforts have not sundered the object enough for him to see straight down into its center. He has only managed to yank open an upper section of its bulk, but it’s enough. On the tightly woven bed of straw, wiry animal hair, and undigested plant matter he has exposed, the light shows a large portion of bone, and perhaps it is only because he has already summoned the memory of his high school biology class that he understands that the bone, scratched and striated and shiny in the rain, does not belong to an animal.
    But the red collar with the little silver bell most certainly does.
    He straightens, moves away from the giant pellet-thing and slowly sweeps his juddering flashlight beam to his left, to the three other “boulders” he registered on the way in, then to his right, where there are two more, laying on their sides like giant, dark Easter eggs. From one of them pokes what he earlier took to be the dead branch of a silver birch and now acknowledges is more likely the leg-bone of an animal, probably a deer. A cold current floods his body. And in his shock, the only thing that runs through his mind is a simple, logical fact, a ridiculously obvious observation that nonetheless terrifies him to his core.
    Waste follows feeding .
    He takes another step backward, his throat clenching against the magnificently