Man in The Woods by Scott Spencer Page A

looks like the man in the woods. Next he must look at the pages containing images of bodies the police have yet to identify, but before the site will allow him access to these images there is a warning: Some of the content profiled in the Unidentified section may be disturbing and contains postmortem photographs that are not suitable for children. Do you wish to continue? Paul has no choice but to click Yes and, through a frightened squint, as if his eyelashes can soften the blow of those thumbnail pictures, he looks for the evidence of what he has done in the photos of the horribly decomposed faces, or, in some cases, the graphite renderings of the suspiciously deceased, when the body, once discovered (most often by hunters, joggers, or dog walkers) has been pulled too deeply into the vortex of decomposition to photograph.
    There is a tap at his door and Paul quickly closes his computer.
    “Paul? Are you in there?” Kate says in a dry, cracked whisper. She opens the door and gives him a quizzical look. “I rolled over and you weren’t there.”
    “Well you found me,” Paul says, rising from his chair, taking her in his arms. She smells of the bed, and the lingering lilac scent of her evening bath. Even as he holds her he feels as if he is remembering her. “Thank you for finding me,” he whispers.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    Walking through the woods, it’s step by step, one foot in front of the other. What could be more fundamental? It’s like breathing—inhale through the nostrils, exhale through the mouth, the taste and tickle of your own mortality coursing over your lips like running water over stones. We are under a sea of air, to which we have adapted just as fish have adapted to their life underwater.
    A walk in the woods is like wading through a river; you can’t walk in the same woods twice, no matter how you may try. You can tread the same path and at the same pace and at the same time of day, you can measure your steps so that Tuesday’s walk matches Monday’s as closely as possible, but no matter what, the walk will be singular and unique. Leaves will have fallen since your last time here, pinecones, acorns, berries, shit, a beer can, a candy wrapper. Procreation will have taken place, pursuit, death, shoots will have been eaten, brush will have been trampled, bark will have peeled, roots will have grown deeper. Decay and regeneration are a wheel that will not stop turning, even now, autumn by the calendar, winter by the bone, the gray wash-water sky, the liquefying leaves underfoot, even now the wheel turns, slower than in the warmer months but with a bleak grandeur.
    “My soul,” Paul says, “there’s steam coming off this pile of deer shit.” My soul, my soul , he repeats to himself. It was his mother’s phrase, a verbal keepsake now. She used to deliver it full of irony, just as she did Land’s sake , and Lamb’s sake , too, because both seemed right to her, she just wasn’t sure which was which, and it didn’t entirely matter either because it was all a part of an act, the part she liked to play of a good country woman hanging on to her Christian principles in an evil, crazy world, a pose among many and no less or more true than her other assumed identities—the antimaterialist wild child, the fallen American aristocrat full of frontier virtue, the self-sacrificing mother hen, the natural artist, the woman with a surfeit of common sense.
    Shep is hovering over the fresh scat, his bristly muzzle less than a quarter inch from the soft pile, which looks like a mound of plump raisins. “Don’t do that, boy,” Paul says, but the dog only half-listens—he hasn’t put any deer shit in his mouth yet but his nostrils dilate and contract as he takes in the full sensual delight of his find. His thin black lips part, his tongue emerges to taste nature’s bounty. “Shep, that’s no good,” Paul says, this time pressing two fingers on the back of the dog’s neck.
    “Something to bear in mind the