Furmidable Foes

17

June 4, 2019

Tuesday

The early corn pushed up shoots already over a foot tall. Harry had organized her fields by projected harvest data. Corn could be harvested into late September some years. The sunflowers would usually be in full bloom mid-August. The rest of her flatter lands hosted various mixtures of orchard grass, clover, timothy, and alfalfa. Alfalfa seed, expensive, guaranteed it would be paired usually with timothy. Whether two-footed or four-, everyone had preferences.

Harry walked through the fields abutting the mountains, where she planted fescue. Fescue could cause a pregnant mare to spontaneously abort. However, fescue could tolerate heat and cold. It was a native Virginia plant, made good hay. As this part of her farm received a bit less light due to the mountains and a bit more cooling temperatures, fescue thrived, but she never put a pregnant mare in these pastures.

Walking with her, ever-present notebook slid into her jeans back hip pocket, was Susan.

Mrs. Murphy, Pewter, Tucker, Pirate, and Owen sniffed delightful odors: bobcat, deer, Canadian geese. The geese resting on those pastures closest to the fast-running creek paid no attention to the little convoy. The animals had learned the hard way as youngsters that geese can be aggressive. Tails had been hurt by those beaks. Tucker wouldn’t even look at one in the eye.

“Come on. You’ve dawdled over your hay, your corn, your sunflowers. Let’s get up there and measure some of the timber,” Susan grumbled.

“You’ve been a good egg.”

“I have. I am always a good egg.” Susan began the climb using the farm road.

A quarter of a mile up, the grade still easy, Harry fetched a measuring tape from her other hip pocket.

“Good thing we marked some of these last year.” She moved to a fine hickory, wrapping the tape around the trunk.

“Number one. Thirty-one inches. Right on the silver line.”

“Yeah. A bit higher now. She’s growing. M-m-m. Just a hair below thirty-three. Good growth.”

Susan wrote down the figures. “Given almost eight months of rain last year, she should be getting a bigger waistline.”

Every hundred yards, give or take, for the two had not measured distance that precisely, they would measure a tree with silver painted around the trunk. Spray paint proved so easy to use.

The climb steepened. Progress slowed. While in good shape, both breathed a little harder. Susan, who ran daily, felt a twinge in her calves that surprised her.

On and on they toiled until near the top of the lower ridge of the Blue Ridge Mountains. At fifteen hundred feet, it set against the taller mountain behind it.

Westerners mocked the Blue Ridge. “Hills. These aren’t mountains.”

To which a Virginian would reply, “These were once the tallest mountains in the world. You are looking at the power of time.”

That usually shut them up. Harry loved mountains, any mountains, but her heart rested with the Blue Ridge. Right now her heart was beating.

“Five minutes’ rest. The closer we get to the top, the more it gets me. Once when I was in Sheridan, Wyoming, I drove up the Big Horn. As I didn’t know the terrain, I figured I’d better drive. The high meadows are beautiful and as I parked and sat there, up came a herd of cattle being driven by cowboys and women, too, to their summer pastures. The only way we could do that here is to fence them. Too close to 250 or 64. Damn roads.”

Susan, glad to sit on a cut trunk for a moment, nodded. “That was the trip where we split at Salt Lake City. We don’t do that anymore.”

“Only if we plan. At twenty, summer vacation felt like heaven.”

“It was heaven,” Susan reminisced.

The dogs stayed with them. Mrs. Murphy and Pewter, noses almost as keen as dog noses, caught a whiff of those not so old bones.

Moving east to the rock outcropping, they found the rib cage after passing the well-hidden still.

“Not much left.” Mrs. Murphy observed the whitened ribs.

“Hey, look at this.” Pewter headed for the partial skull, baseball hat still in place. “Let’s tell Harry.” Off she shot.

Tucker’s ears drooped. She knew exactly what had happened, as did Pirate.

“What’s wrong?” Owen licked his sister’s face.

“Damn cats. They found what’s left of that human,” Tucker answered.

“Follow me!” Pewter hollered as Mrs. Murphy came up behind.

“Pewter, don’t take them there. It will start a mess,” Tucker warned.

“A dead person. I found it! Wait until you see what’s left. Dead. Dead. Dead,” Pewter gleefully announced.

Pirate, confused, inquired, “Why is Pewter so happy about a dead human?”

“Because she found it. Harry and Susan will follow her.”

“Yes?” The Irish wolfhound’s ears lifted.

“Pirate, if they are still fussing about the bones in the old grave at St. Luke’s, think how they’ll be now. They have no sense.”

“But the person is dead,” Pirate rightly said.

“They will have to find out why, if possible. Was it a natural death or murder? And don’t forget, Pirate, the still is not far from the remains. That will set them right off.”

Owen chimed in. “Pirate, you haven’t seen these two, um, on the case.”

Puffed up like a broody hen, Pewter would run forward, run back, claw Harry’s jeans leg, and run off again, with Mrs. Murphy by her side.

“A still!” Harry spied the small shack-like building.

“Damned if it isn’t,” Susan agreed.

Being country girls, they had seen stills, none of which resembled the high-class apparatus for beer Mags and Janice used at Bottoms Up.

The cats kept going. The dogs followed, too.

“Here!” Pewter triumphantly stood by the opened rib cage.

“What the hell!” Harry exclaimed.

Then Pewter ran to the skull under the boulder. “Heads up!”

“Very funny.” Mrs. Murphy did laugh, though.

The two women came over.

“Black hair. What’s left. You’d think some animal would have torn the cap off,” Susan noted.

Over the years both Harry and Susan had seen a few corpses or skeletons. Again, being country girls, death did not offend them. It was part of life. Cause of death did provoke them, though.

“A man?” Harry half asked, half declared.

“Don’t know that many women with hidden stills.” Susan plucked her cellphone out of her shirt pocket.

“Ned?”

“No, the sheriff.”

Within thirty minutes Sheriff Shaw and a deputy, Dwayne, drove over the high meadow, stopped, and walked over to them. For once, GPS had routed them correctly.

The two women told their story while Dwayne inspected the still.

“It’s intact,” he announced.

Sheriff Shaw, kneeling down, touched nothing. “Hard to say but I’d bet whoever this was died early fall.” He stood back up. “Get forensics out here. We need to photograph everything undisturbed, then send this to Richmond.”

“Not much left,” Harry said.

“Those folks are the best. You’ll be surprised at what they deduce.”

“I found this! Me! Me! Me!” Pewter crowed.

“She’s going to be impossible,” Tucker predicted.

“She’s impossible now,” Owen remarked.

“There are police dogs. I should be a police cat!” Pewter bragged.