Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

By May, the vacation homeowners have returned to the mountains, and Janina is glad to see them. She finds her travel range expanding now that the weather is more cooperative. One day, she drives past Innerd’s fox farm, which is now abandoned.

Her thoughts return to the day she first encountered Innerd himself. Janina saw a large SUV parked by the side of the road with an attractive woman sitting in the driver’s seat. The woman said she was waiting for her husband, who turned out to be Innerd. Shortly, Innerd emerged from the woods in hunting camo gear. He warned Janina to keep her dogs off his land.

The conversation occurred two years before the man’s disappearance. Janina returns to her astrology charts, musing on the importance of seemingly insignificant events. She says,

It’s clear that the largest things are contained in the smallest. There can be no doubt about it. [...] an aluminum spoon whose atoms preserve the memory of the origins of life, of the cosmic Catastrophe that gave the world its beginning (143-44).