Chapter 6

The Friend, The Cousin, The Uncle

Wilton's Final Hour

It was snowing lightly as the sun began to set, the ice age had well and truly set in now and the entire world seemed to be covered in a fine white powder that seemed to shine a brilliant golden yellow, as the sun disappeared and twilight set in.

Sarah was standing beneath a strange, mammoth shaped tree, looking up at the family that appeared to live there and watching as her uncle, Wilton, and his much younger, ten year old, cousin, who she'd come to know as Eddie, were tying the kid's twin brother, Casey, to the branch from which he was hanging, fast asleep.

"Casey won't be happy about this you know, he already cops heaps from the other kids," Sarah called up to them, unable to fathom what drove so many animals to be so unnecessarily cruel to Casey, "and I don't think Amy will be too pleased either. She was furious when you buried him under that snow drift last week; it took her ages to find him you know, and Wilton, your twenty-two, surely you'd be over this kind of stuff by now. "

Wilton and Eddie merely sniggered with this reminder of their previous prank, sure Eddie's mom hadn't fed him for a day and half, and had told Wilton to stay away from him, but it had been totally worth it as far they were concerned. After all no one liked Casey anyway, everyone except Sarah perhaps, who seemed particularly tolerant of Casey's unnusual problem.

"There," exclaimed Wilton quietly, as he finished tying Casey's tail to the branch, "Just wait till he wakes up, it'll be great.

Eddie chuckled at the thought of his brother trying in vain to untie his tail while hanging upside down and pictured his brother falling from the branch, landing with his head in the snow; the inevitable result should Casey somehow work out how to untie the knot.

Sarah watched the two pranksters climb down the tree and begin to cover themselves in snow, to avoid being seen by Casey when he woke up and found his tail tied to the branch and it didn't take very long for Sarah to find herself looking at what appeared to be two lumps of snow, with eyes that were focused completely on Casey, who was now beginning to wake up.

With a large yawn and only a quick look around to make sure there were no predators about, Casey reached up to the branch and attempted to climb over to the tree trunk, but ended up only reaching half way before he was stopped by his knotted tail.

"Hey what the heck?" he exclaimed, looking back and pulling his tail in an attempt to dislodge it before trying to turn around and climb back over to see why his tail was stuck, tripping over it in the process and ending up dangling beneath the branch again, looking extremely confused.

Sarah couldn't help laughing, even though she felt a little bad for Casey, his continuos attempts to climb back up to the branch only to fall back again were undeniably funny.

"Is that you Sarah," Casey called down to her, now noticing the small female standing beneath him, "Did you do this?"

"No Casey, I didn't," Sarah called back to him, listening to the sniggers emanating from the two small, snowy, lumps at the base of the tree, while trying to hold back her own laughter, "Hang on I'll help you."

Sarah ran through the snow toward the tree, throwing up puffs of white powder as she went, and began climbing up to help out Casey, who had given up trying to hold onto the branch and was now swaying in the wind with his arms folded and sulking.

Lucky for Casey, Sarah had also learned how to tie and untie the knot her uncle had used, after watching him do it time and time again on anything that could be tied, but as she untied the knot she failed, not completely by accident, to tell Casey to hold onto the branch first.

Instantly after Sarah pulled the last tangle in the knot, it began to unravel, far too quickly for Casey to grab on to anything and he ended up falling from the tree, landing head first in the two foot deep snow, just as Eddie had predicted; causing Eddie himself and Wilton to burst out of the cover under which they were hiding and explode into hysterical laughter.

Sarah climbed back down and walked over to Casey, who had, by now pulled his head out up and now sat in the snow sobbing looking utterly pathetic, which Sarah didn't find remotely amusing.

Upon reaching him, feeling immensely guilty for falling in with her uncle's plan, she attempted to put a comforting arm around Casey, who immediately pushed her away and began to run, on all fours, into the snowy evening. Sarah feeling somewhat responsible for his misery, instantly ran after him calling for him to stop, but she couldn't keep up in the snow and kept tripping, each time getting a face-full of the white powder.

Suddenly, as she tripped for what felt like the hundredth time, watching Casey get further and further away, she felt something grab her, hard, and push her downward, forcing her deeper into the snow.

"Stay still Sarah, don't move, play dead!" she heard her uncle's voice yelling, although she didn't know why he was saying it, she could tell he was not joking.

She didn't look up, playing dead just as her uncle had said and remained perfectly still trying not to shiver to much while lying in the freezing snow, all she heard was the snow crunching as her uncle Wilton ran off after Casey, most likely to get him to do the same.

Somewhere above she heard, what could only be a hawk call, echoing into the cold night air, filling her with immense terror, not for herself but for Casey, and what would happen if the hawk spotted him.

The question was answered almost immediately by a soft thud, of something hitting the snow, hard, followed by the sound of wings flapping nearby and the sickening, wet, ripping, sound of flesh being severed from a body, which was accompanied by someone's horrific, almost unreal, screams of suffering but these lasted only seconds before another awful ripping noise silenced them, permanently.

Sarah lay in the snow for what seemed like hours but, in actuality, it had only been about a minute, before she heard the flapping noises of the hawk taking flight, most likely carrying the mutilated body of its unfortunate victim, and deciding to wait while more before she felt it was safe to stand up to view the damage. First she looked around to see if the hawk was still around, though why it had been out this late astounded her, she had to be sure it wasn't about to swoop in and eat her.

Once she was satisfied that there was nothing to fear anymore, she brought her gaze downward to find out who had been killed. Although she didn't believe it, she kept trying to convince herself, the whole time, that the sounds she had heard had all been a figment of her imagination, conjured up by her mind through the terror of the moment and that no one was dead, injured or currently being picked to pieces somewhere out of sight.

Sarah looked to the tree first, to see if Eddie was okay, immensely relieved, she saw him sitting in the snow unmoving, with his mother hugging him for some unknown reason and his strange orange furred sister standing next to him. Over their mother's shoulder, Sarah could see Eddie was staring, his gaze transfixed on something immediately behind her.

She turned around slowly, even though she didn't want to see it, she had to, someone was dead, most likely having their flesh torn from their bones, in a tree somewhere right now, feeding a hawk who must have been out, hunting for a last meal before settling down for the day.

She didn't close her eyes, it would have been useless because upon opening them she would have seen the same sight, at which she now gazed, anyway.

Casey was still lying in the snow, unmoving, but still breathing, Sarah could see his chest rising and falling, but between them, only a feet from where she had been hiding, was a patch of snow which had been stained a deep red by blood. On which she could see a couple tiny pieces of what had to be flesh, the sight of which was nauseating and yet, she found, she couldn't look away.

There was only one person missing from the picture, her uncle, Wilton, whose fate was immediately obvious and, for her, unbearable.

Without any further thought about where she was headed or what she was going do to, Sarah tore her gaze from what, of what had once been, her only living uncle and, ever since her mother's death, the only person she had left of her immediate family and began to run, as fast as she could. Away from it, away from Casey and Eddie, away from the scene of the stupid prank that had cost Wilton his life and away from everything that she now, from this moment onward, abhorred.