“Go on.”
And on they went. The man had to take a stroke or two before they made the other side. The woods now were almost impenetrable, but Agricola wedged his way under. The doctor’s wet clothes scraped the leaves from the mold, and moss from the logs. Repeatedly his gray shirt was torn by stilettos of balsam. At last he could go no farther.
“Wait a minute.”
The dog stopped but continued to whine.
“Keep still.”
Agricola closed his red mouth again and again, trying to swallow his noise, and in the intervals the doctor listened. He heard bits of cone falling from the lips of red squirrels. He heard the feet of nuthatches against the bark. He heard the borers in the balsams, grinding slowly. He heard a far-off elfin whistle of the government boat coming down to supply the buoy with new tanks of gas.
And then he heard a moan.
He noted the direction and crawled forward. Stumps of pine slowly crumbling. Fallen trunks slowly flattening into earth as a dead body flattens. Thick humus, with black pine needles like crystals of stibnite. Great trees, snapped off and piled above him.
Now a deer run. A spring was ahead, and presently there would be a clump of alders. Then, close to the ground, he caught a glimpse of fallow. With great effort he rose to his feet and looked.
His own Sempronia! She was only three years old, and stone dead. The bullet had taken her just behind the slender haunch that Marvin had noted.