- shortly after dawn, October 9, 1663 - (population: 53)
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!" A woman's blood-curdling screams broke the tranquil silence of the morning from somewhere deep within the woods that encompassed the small community of Maplewood Village. More, terrible screams of "NOOOOOOOOOoooo! Nooooo! Jamie?! JAMIE!?" in a harsh repeating cry echoed through the forest and fog. And then another terrifying set of screams - the woman's thoughts and fears confirmed. "OH, GOD! God, NO!!! Nooooooooooooo!! Jamie! Jaaamiiee!" The forest air was quite cool in the early October morning, but it was made even colder by the screams and sobs that cut through its otherwise peaceful depths. "Nooooooooo!! Noooooo! Oh, Jamie! Oh, God! Whyyyyyyyyyyyy? God, nooooooo!...nooooo!!!..." She wept and screamed in an awful agony of loss and terror for, what seemed for the moment to her to be, the rest of her life. She felt like she was dying from the shock and the sudden grief.
Everyone within the vicinity who was outside in the early morning hours - chopping and gathering wood and kindling, getting the early morning fires started to begin cooking for the day, tending animals, gathering water from their wells, and some simply sitting on their porches smoking a pipe or playing an instrument or enjoying a cup of tea or coffee before getting to the day's work - heard the awful cries come through the woods. Each stopped what they were doing and listened at first, and once the screams continued, most set off running into the forest and fog in search of their source.
One of the villagers had been up with his eight-year-old son on their way to go fishing. They dropped their gear and set off running toward the sound of the screams. The boy had run along with his father after the first set of screams, but upon the second set of screams, which confirmed just how dire whatever had happened probably was, the man told his son to run to The Community Home and ring the bell to gather the rest of the villagers there. He told him to tell them of the screams and to wait for him to come back to tell them all what had happened, and then they both set off running into the woods in opposite directions.
-
-
A handful of the villagers arrived within moments of each other to the sight of a loudly-sobbing woman. A few more people who had heard the screams arrived, and then the rest who had heard her all found their way to the sight within a few more minutes of each other.
They found Sandra Miller, covered in blood, kneeling in a pool of a dark sticky mass that was mostly guts, bone, and blood, holding a few small pieces of what could only be shredded human - a limp, bloody mass of skeleton plus, mangled and beyond recognition. By the size of the remains and from the long, seemingly blonde-colored hair (there was no face, and the hair could barely be seen because of the blood), and more certainly because of the identity of the owner of the screams, most at the scene quickly came to the realization that it was Sandra's eldest daughter, Jamie, whose remains Sandra held and was sobbing over. It didn't look as though a single inch of Jamie's soft pale skin remained.
Sandra's brother, Earl, was one of those who arrived to the scene with the rest. He knelt in front of her at a pace and gently reached for her hand and drew her attention up to his face. She was in such shock she had not seen that anyone was even there up until that point, and with his quick distraction he was able to deftly remove the remains from her arms without resistance. He set them on the ground at their side, and quickly wrapped his arms around Sandra. He began to sob with her as their embrace tightened, and everyone else waited quietly and respectfully while they all took some moments to process and feel their pangs of sorrow and loss that they all felt to varying degrees. After several minutes of her wailing into his chest and him holding her and crying with her, he spoke.
"Do you have any idea what happened?"
She was able to stop her sobbing briefly and she looked at him with a dead blank stare.
"I... " She looked around at the others gathered, grasping for any sort of explanation from them as much as they were from her. "I...just found... I was looking for... I found..." She looked back down and noticed she no longer held the remains of her daughter. She saw them on the ground at her side, almost as she had first found them and she reached for them, again, as she had the first time.
"NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!" Again she screamed and broke into a heavy weep. Earl grabbed her again, stood her up, and gave her a quick shake before she got too lost in her sorrowful wails.
"Look at me," he said as he shook her. "What happened?" She broke from her resumed cries.
"She...she had gone off to collect mushrooms...very early, before sunrise..." she gasped for air to continue "...and, then she, she didn't show up to help start breakfast..." *gasp* "... she had been gone too long and...*gasp*, she started speaking faster "and I got worried, and I started looking for her..." *gasp*, and faster "...and I called, and she didn't answer, and...I got this horrible feeling, and I started running, and I just ran, and then...I...I....found..." She broke. She looked down at her daughter's pieces of nightgown in her hands again, and again began weeping. Earl just stood there and held her while the others began to talk among themselves.
-
"Was it a bear perhaps?" suggested someone from the group of villagers that had gathered to be witness to the aftermath. Another villager knelt down beside Sandra and Earl and looked around the pool of blood and pile of bones to see if anything else could be determined besides what was already obvious.
A couple of the others looked around for signs of anything. "I don't see any tracks of anything" one person said, and others agreed that they didn't either. The scene gave no indications either way of anything that happened other than Jamie Miller having been horribly mutilated and seemingly devoured from head to toes.
"A bear wouldn't do this." Added one person as they assessed what they could on their own.
"Could it have been something rabid?" A woman from the group asked.
"I think something rabid would have just killed and ran, not..." he spoke in a quieter voice so as not to be heard by Sandra "not, eaten practically
all
of the flesh. It looks to me like something, or things, was very hungry."
Someone else added: "It's so fresh, and it doesn't sound like she'd been missing for long. Even starving bears would have taken longer than that to eat even a small child, I think, and bears aren't aggressive like this, not normally."
"It's seems impossible to tell what happened," added another from the group.
Just then, wolves howled. They sounded close, within a few hundred yards, and it could be determined that there were at least three of them, but there could have been more, no one was sure.
"WOLVES!" A man half-shouted it as the revelation came to them all. The word came out louder than he intended and it startled him and everyone else. They all went still and looked out into the cold depths of the forest, all more scared than any of them ever recalled being before. The man's shout of "WOLVES" echoed through the woods and they all paused in the silence, ears sharpened to hear anything they could.
Minutes passed.
More howls came from deep within the cold fog. This time they were farther away.
"I haven't heard wolves around here before ever." A man whispered to the others as quietly as he could.
It was true, there had been a complete absence of the spotting or hearing of any wolves anywhere around the area ever before, as far as anyone knew. There had never been any evidence showing that they'd ever had a presence anywhere near here, and probably never anywhere within the entire 100 miles down to Benton and probably even farther north in the entirety of the time people had been living in the area. It had even been noted several times over the years by various people that it was perhaps a bit odd that there weren't ever any wolves around, and yet the deer and moose populations never seemed to get out of hand, either.
Most in the village simply didn't think about it much or just felt lucky to be in an area that was not inhabited by wolves and didn't give it a second thought.
"Wolves shouldn't act like this, though. And if we haven't seen them around here before, well, I think something could be wrong with these wolves." Someone from the group shared their thoughts on the matter.
"WHERE would the wolves have suddenly come from?" Someone else from the group asked, though not as if he was expecting anyone had an answer.
"Where indeed?" Said another.
There was certainly plenty and all manner of wildlife around, but never before had they seen or heard any sign of wolves, which
was
a bit odd.
Suddenly, again, they all startled as wolves howled from a far away distance and the sound echoed through the forest to them, as if to make sure their presence was known to the villagers. There were wolves here now, they all knew it, and the wolves seemed hungry enough to eat a little girl, and that wasn't normal.
Sandra spoke. "WOLVES?! I did hear them this morning! I didn't even..." She looked at the blood all over her and the ground and began to cry again.
"Come," Earl said. "Let's take her back to The Community Home and tell the rest of the villagers what we know."
