The News in Small Towns (Small Town Series, Book 1) by Iza Moreau Page A

direction of the sound, but what I saw made my skin shiver down to my very cells.  It was a rattlesnake, larger around than my forearm, slithering slowly forward.  When it sensed my presence, it stopped, raised its head, and threw out its tongue like a tiny flame.  Its tail rattled like maraca. 
    An icy fear in my belly froze me solid for a few precious seconds.  But I shook it off; my time in Baghdad—where every step outside the safe zones was a step into danger—had prepared me for fear.  I knew that if a snake that size struck me, I would never make it back to my truck.  The cedar was an old one, with dozens of low-hanging limbs, but I could see the snake clearly through a break in the foliage.  I watched it coil itself up slowly while, at the same time, I reached out for an arrow.  It had only a target point and there was no time to reach into my fannypack and change it out for a broadhead.  It would have to do.  It occurred to me as I slowly and quietly nocked the arrow, that I had been preparing for this shot all my adult life, that all my trophies and accomplishments meant nothing if I wasn’t equal to this moment.  This was for the entire wheel of cheese. 
    Very slowly, I pulled the string to my anchor point and sighted down the arrow, hoping the snake wouldn’t sense the movement and strike.  But just before the arrow rolled off my fingers the rattler’s head came up a few more inches.  I released the arrow and jumped sideways with every ounce of strength I had left, trying to get the log I had been sitting on between me and the snake.  Too late I realized that my foot was caught on a root or vine, making me lose both my balance and my direction.  The last thing I saw was the end of the log coming toward me like a truck toward a bicycle.
    Sometime later I was roused to consciousness by a sound I hadn’t heard since that morning in the Baghdad zoo—a soft whinny.  The top of my head hurt like someone had buried a hatchet in my skull.  I made an effort and opened my eyes but everything was blurred and red.  But there, towering miles above me stood a gray horse.  It was looking at me curiously, cautiously with its very large, brown eyes.  The horse seemed to be asking me questions I didn’t know the answer to.  I tried to raise my head, to reach out and touch the horse, but the pain made me pass out again.
    The next time I woke up it was in a hospital bed.  My head still ached, but not as much as before.  I raised a hand and felt my head wrapped in bandages.  I was more than a little groggy, and heavy with sedation.  I was thirsty, though.  And hungry.  “Hey!” I called, but the word came out slurred and made me a little dizzy.  The response came almost at once from a lanky figure who was slumped in a chair in a corner of the dim room.
    “I’m here, Sue-Ann.”
    “Clarence?”
    The worry on Clarence’s face was obvious.  “Hey, Sue-Ann,” he said.  “How’re you doin?”
    “I don’t know.  Where am I?”
    “County hospital.”
    “How did I get here?”
    “I drove you.”
    “You?”
    “I saw your car parked out back of the market.  When you didn’t show up after an hour or so, I figured you’d gotten a burr in your bra about that goat and gone in the woods lookin for somethin.  God’s gonads, Sue-Ann.  What did you expect to find out there?”
    Then memories began flooding in: the path, the couple with the backpacks, the clearing with the circle of blood, the . . . “Clarence!  There was a rattlesnake, I shot at it but . . . I don’t remember any more.  Ohhh,” I moaned, “What happened to my head?”
    “You conked your coconut on a log and sliced the top of your scalp open.  They had to shave off some of your hair to put in stitches.  I found the snake, though.  Somebody’d put an arrow smack through its mouth and nailed it to a tree.  It was as dead as I’ve ever seen a snake.” 
    “I hit it?” I asked happily.  The dizziness was wearing