Chapter 1

Amy was still surprised at the fact she had gotten into the free-tuition city college at a time when she had already made peace with the fact she would be stuck in the relative wilderness of the sparsely settled north woods for the rest of her life.

Her foster parents, the Hamilton’s were delighted for her because she was always an obedient child and never caused any problem in the local school. In fact, she was quite unlike the previous wards that the Hamilton’s had raised with pristine care in the small town. She had come to the caring family via a court order that awarded them the sponsorship of the young girl at the tender age of nine after being found in the wreckage of a horrific accident at an isolated railroad crossing in the middle of a blizzard-prone winter.

The household never had less than a half dozen foster-care children being tended in a way that was certainly by the book in every respect. Some of the children were more difficult than others but they all received nothing but the finest care and more hot meals than the average home environment for regular folks in the area.

Amy was without a doubt the prettiest foster child they had ever cared for in their sprawling home on the edge of the wastelands to the north. She had blossomed over the years into a stunning beauty at the age of eighteen and had seemed destined to flower in relative obscurity in the tiny settlement at the edge of civilization. Then, the letter from the college arrived and everything changed. She was bubbling with enthusiasm and was still humble enough to doubt that it was really happening to her. Her newly recognized boyfriend Donald was all mumbles and sour looks and she understood that he was happy for her but knew deep down in his heart that it spelled the end of their budding romance.

She felt badly about leaving Donald behind but plotted behind his back by shoving her best friend Doris right under his nose where he was bound to find her waiting for his kisses in the back row of the movie house. Doris was somewhat on the simple side and she never suspected for a moment she was being set up to replace Amy in the circle of Donald’s muscular arms. In fact, she felt a bit guilty about stealing the sturdy fellow from her best friend’s loving thoughts.

Donald, once he had Doris’s lips trained to open and give him her wet tongue was hooked harder than one of the delicious eating trout in the river that flowed down through the middle of town. That river provided for the residents like manna from heaven for anyone with a bit of time and a length of string.

The local folks didn’t go out into the woods to hunt anymore because of the spate of dreadful accidents and disappearances almost a generation ago when hunting season was a signal for the sound of the guns to boom out morning, noon and night as residents stocked up for a hard, cold winter. That run of bad luck was enough to set the town folk to depending on their crops and the river for sustenance and the forest animals were left to their own devices in the matter of survival.

Amy was one of those die-hard outdoors loving people that found the thrill of the hunt more exciting than eating corn raised in the field behind the house. She would often clean and take Mister Hamilton’s long rifle from the hooks in the den and head out for the deep woods to stalk for meat. Every time she went on one of her hunting weekends, she brought back as much meat as she could carry in the storage backpack she shouldered like a pro. She did all her own skinning and her own butchering with none of the fussy qualms that most teenaged girls seem to experience as a designated genetic trait.

She would look around in the light of the campfire and when she was certain no eyes were on her, Amy would gobble down the raw meat like some forest animal starving for her dinner. She always double-checked the little steel mirror to make certain she was showing no blood traces around her lips or on her delightfully pretty face that looked both pale and innocent in the flickering light. All of the other resident foster children were grateful to her for the change in their diet, but Mister and Mrs. Hamilton were not overly pleased with her little expeditions. It was most likely from their disturbing memories of the time when hunting was a source of sadness at loss and fear of retribution from the hordes of forest creatures that surrounded them with the danger of overwhelming superiority of numbers.

For some reason, Amy seemed at home in the woods and she never shot an animal that she considered a waste of tasty food supplies and followed a ritual of prayer to celebrate the animal’s contribution to human survival. It was something that she seemed to remember from a different time and different place before the terrible accident that claimed her family and made her a foster child in such an isolated location.

Now she was on the bus heading to the big city and the program of engineering design that she had selected from the brochures distributed to all the incoming student’s current addresses. She was excited about the prospect and was pleased that her best friend Doris had announced earlier that day that she was pregnant and would wed Donald the following month after Amy was away at school studying engineering design.

Amy was conflicted about that news flash because she had never actually allowed Donald to enter her gateway to paradise and she regretted in a fashion that his juicy thing belonged entirely to Doris now and was forbidden territory for a college-bound girl with a need that could not be denied much longer. She was certain she could never make it through four years of schooling without having some sort of relationship that would make her a woman in reality as well as in her own mind.

She tried to push her guilty thought about her urges to eat raw meat from a fresh kill out of her mind with the same vitality that she assigned to her unladylike instinct to sample Donald’s tempting manhood before her departure. Neither subject was appropriate to a young lady going to college for the first time. Of course, she stayed as far away from Donald as possible because she didn’t want to leave any recriminations behind to haunt her when she visited her childhood home.