Every stretch, every shallow, sullen yawn as the hours broke across the top of yet one more turpentine forest morning. There were saws coming this way, chained and skeletal chanting, easing down the trees in a line of least resistance. The startling flower in some dark, foreign soil that called this fresh field holler…
'Just like a tree, planted by the waters, I shall not be moved.'
Yet he was circling her, scratching out the ground in deep longing. He watched them pass and she danced like fine-spun dew as the skeletal chorus chanted …
'I'm choppin' in this bottom with a hundred years,
Tree fall on me, I don't bit mo' care.'
He marked his territory carefully, claw-cut patterns sundered in the bark, repeating the colour of the glistening flanks he would deem possess. The feral perfume traces still lingered in his nostrils, musky beckoning.
The skeletal party now no more than the dying echoes of raddled chain in an oily, mosquito haze, he advanced. She was there, sunning as he pounced, pinned to the warming mossed ground. Flying fur and bloodshot eyes roiling under the lashes. She was taken, howling.
