The worn boots crunched through gravel and broken glass. They held out their thumbs to a truck that didn't slow down. Tires as tall as their chests left them at the curve.

"That one gave us a good bit of wind."

"Who's gonna pick up four guys cut to shit and covered in poison oak?"

"Four girls?"

"Some fucking raunchy ones"

"That's the point. Rules of the road."

"We're gonna get fucking killed out here. Let's head back into the brush."

"You gotta cuss so much?"

"The fuck." They all turned to him for an answer. "Yes," he replied, "Fuck yes, actually. Now can we go back into the woods?"

They all stopped, looking to one another.

"I don't want to get lost again."

"We're not lost. Just not there yet. Better than this fucking road with these hillbillies tearing through every five minutes. I'm telling you. We're not lost."

"Fuck it, let's go back into the wild."

The missing persons report listed them as last seen on the side of Highway 6 along the Wilson River.

I had been waiting for her, or any of them it did not matter, to open it. Even as she struggled with the package, I smelled it. No, I felt it. I knew it, and I knew they would waste time with the haze and the heat and they'd play with it there and it smell better and stronger and they'd all be in a better mood except for me who saw it all as torture. A couple of end pieces while they scarfed down the rest.  I dreamt of the old man and the small stove that was fast and without haze that kept me happy on the warm rocks by the relief water where I slept mostly or kicked freely. That man knew how to party.  Even now, they were laughing. "Real fucking funny," I thought, "Just let me have that package of smell and you can laugh all you want."

Oh! The noise. It rang her heart out. It shook her innards. It made her liver shudder, her kidneys too, and it weakened her grasp on her bladder. It came again. The trees shook. Her feet were bleeding. They gripped tree and dirt and rock in desperation, but they could not escape the sound. She was hyperventilating when she reached the field. "They're getting closer," she thought. She lay down amongst the tall stalk.  There was only time now to feel the grasses, to feel the fear of the roar as it got closer.  The Earth shook, and she felt cold. She thought about how much she loved this field and these grasses. She remembered growing up in them, and raising her own young there. She now had time to think, as cold swept over, and she grew happy and stopped breathing. "What lovely grasses," she thought.  The hunter picked her body up by the legs and threw her in the bucket with the others. 

"Fine day," he said aloud.

The other man shouldered his shotgun, and agreed.

They attacked with the morning. Fresh light gleamed off blades in bright white, until later on, when even the trees took on the reddish hue.  The men who survived would speak of the smoke mixing with the clouds, and the blood with the due, and the calls of the dying with those of the eagles, who watched from the treetops.  Hell came to all who ran through those trees in that morning light. As the brutes hacked at the corpses, they grew lost in their own demons.  The honest among them wept. The fools sharpened their blades between victims and continued on, wearing scalps, and fingers, and toes as evidence to their sense of manhood. One side called it a battle and a victory, the other a slaughter of a peaceful people before they had risen for breakfast.  "Look around you, for only the attackers lived on, and you are their descendants." The children gasped at each other, and turned back around to find the storyteller gone, a puff of green smoke where he had been sitting.