Prairie Gothic Read Online Free

old Maddox place, now Mad Dog’s. The land there sloped gently down toward where Calf Creek joined the Kansaw. One minor drainage curled through an edge of the section with a tiny stream that stayed wet in all but the driest years. Another, dryer slough zigzagged from the northwest corner down to meet the creek. Those were the hunting grounds Tommie Irons dreamed of stalking again. And he had built a pond near their confluence, grading up a small dam just below where the slough turned damp and natural springs seeped sweet, clear water. It was the only mound Irons had ever made, and a perfect destination from his perspective.
    Getting there took Mad Dog time. The roads that were clear of the last snow tended to get used. The Saab was remarkably nimble on snow and ice, but it wasn’t a four-wheel drive. It had limitations. And the county’s infrastructure had seriously deteriorated. Old bridges seldom got repaired or replaced when they wore out or washed away in spring floods.
    Mad Dog parked the Saab just short of where the trees along the slough became thick enough to allow snow to drift across the road. No one had driven through there since the last storm and that seemed a good indication that Mad Dog could finish his business uninterrupted.
    Tommie Irons was stiff as a board. Rigor was already at an advanced stage by the time Mad Dog picked up the body. A long drive on an icy morning hadn’t done anything to soften him. Because he was unbendable, Mad Dog had been forced to dangle Irons’ feet over the rear bumper. They were probably frozen solid by now. Mad Dog could sympathize. Most of him felt similarly chilled.
    With Hailey delightedly investigating the slough for something to chase, Mad Dog dragged, towed, and slid Tommie down to the grove of cottonwoods above the pond. The concept of Bone Picker/Buzzardman seemed to indicate that birds should handle the task of defleshing Irons’ bones. Mad Dog wrapped him in the mesh hammock he’d purchased with that in mind, chose a high branch unlikely to be spotted by humans, and started climbing. It wasn’t easily done while wearing two layers of clothing and a quilted down jacket of a thickness to make him resemble the Pillsbury Dough Boy. Good handholds were scarce for thickly gloved fingers, but the cottonwoods cooperated. One leaned inward at an angle suitable for scaling, then another offered massive limbs at conveniently ladder-like intervals. Irons’ final perch was difficult to view from below and out of the reach of coyotes, bobcats, and other carrion eaters without wings. Come spring, when the birds had presumably finished their work, Mad Dog would return, move the bones a few yards south, and plant them in the side of the dam. Tommie Irons, Choctaw Moundbuilder, would finally rest in peace.
    By the time the job was done, Mad Dog was exhausted. You’re too old for this, he thought. It wasn’t something he liked to admit. In his mid-fifties, Mad Dog could still pass for a decade younger. He jogged, he exercised regularly, and he ate right—except for an addiction to chocolate. There were plenty of men two decades younger who couldn’t have done what he was doing for Tommie Irons. Still, that didn’t help Mad Dog find the reserves he needed to climb down and return to the road. He sat, for a moment, in the crotch of a tree, behind a massive trunk that blocked a little of the wind that had already turned Tommie Irons into a frozen pendulum, counting its way from now to forever.
    What would anthropologists call this, Mad Dog wondered? Was there such a thing as an extended tree burial?
    If he hadn’t been so cold and exhausted, Mad Dog would have appreciated this view of Tommie’s Happy Hunting Grounds. Even in the frozen grip of the harshest winter in a decade, the stream and sloughs were an enchanted place, crisscrossed with game trails, prints, and spore. It was the kind of location Mad Dog would have enjoyed