Greta had found what looked like a safe and comfortable place to spend the night: a stand of pine trees a few hundred yards from the cliff. The ground was covered with pine needles. They were piled so thick, they were like a mattress.

She spread Davis's jacket on them, then lay on her back and looked up at the stars. The sky was so lovely. She wished she could fly high above the hills and the forest, high above humanity - and inhumanity. Her eyelids fluttered. She was so tired. Something flew across her patch of sky. An owl, she thought. Then, as if on cue, she heard a soft hoot, hoot from nearby in the woods.



Greta dreams that she's lying in the woods, exhausted and confused. Someone is climbing on top of her, someone heavy and dark. She feels his phallus probe the lips of her pussy, then it plunges in. It's huge. She wants to scream, but his powerful hands are around her throat and his thumbs are crushing her windpipe. She is dying yet profoundly aroused, more aroused than she had ever been before. Her life is being squeezed out of her, and her body is shuddering with ecstasy.



She awoke covered with sweat and trembling with fear and desire. Then, as if someone else were willing it, her right hand slipped down into her shorts and began to caress her pussy. With her other hand, she rubbed her breasts. Her hips began gyrating and she moaned softly.

Someone, or something, moaned back.

Greta froze.

Again, there was that sound, like a low, soft moan. Then a rustling in the pine needles to her left. She dared not turn her head to look. Something touched her left shoulder, then moved to her exposed belly. Whiskers tickled her. The snout hesitated inches from her crotch before proceeding down her leg. Then whatever it was ambled off, back into the woods.

She breathed a long sigh of relief. She had been inspected by some guardian of the forest and found unthreatening, even a bit boring. She began laughing, then her laughter turned to tears. All the stress of the past 24 hours poured out in sobs. And so she drifted off to sleep again, and again she dreamed.



Greta is looking at the sepia photograph of her great-grandmother that she had seen at Grandpa Grabowski's house when she was a little girl. The family called the old lady Baba Sowa. In the photograph, she wears a glittering pince nez and has an aquiline nose. As Greta watches, Sowa is transformed into an owl. She turns her head slightly, looks straight at Greta with those glittering eyes and says, "You will die at the hand of no man."

Greta was awakened by a raucous band of crows, and by something else: an insistent electronic beeping. It sounded so much like the alarm clock back at her apartment in Youngstown that she was confused when she opened her eyes and saw blue sky and trees overhead. She sat up, and the crows began flying away - lazily, as if to show they weren't afraid of her.

She wondered what time it was.

Beep, beep. There it was again. It was coming from one of her shoes, a few feet from her. Then she remembered that she had put Davis's radio in her shoe the night before.

Beep, beep. Should she click it on and listen? Maybe they were trying to reach Davis. Maybe they didn't know he was dead. Maybe she could learn something that would help get through another day alive.

Or maybe once she clicked on, they would somehow know exactly where she was.

Beep, beep. "Here goes nothing," she said to herself, as she punched the "on" button. What she heard was a conversation between two or three other parties. They seemed unaware that she had tuned in. "Cleared Sector Nine. No sign of her." "Okay, we're clear down here, too. Let's move on to Seven." "Jimbo, how are things at your end?" "We've looked in and all around Bunkhouse Two. She must have been here yesterday, because we found a supply cart with a bunch of open boxes. But she's long gone. We're going to move south."

Greta smiled. At last, she had caught a real break. They were combing the Ranch, sector by sector, and the area around Bunkhouse Two was clear, as far as they were concerned. If she could just get back there, she could break into the bunkhouse, sleep in a real bed, and have all the cocktail onions a girl could ask for.

She headed north.

Which is precisely what McTeague hoped she would do. He knew she had taken Davis's radio, and he knew she had been to Bunkhouse Two. But where she was now was anyone's guess.

If they couldn't find her, maybe they could get her to come to them. The beeping and the radio conversation had been carefully planned. He wanted Greta to think she was eavesdropping. He wanted her to come out of hiding and make it to Bunkhouse Two. He wanted it so much that he had told the hunt crew, and that fatuous fat-head, Tom, to steer clear if they saw her.

Let her come to Papa, he thought. I'll reel her in like a lovely little trout.