Three Dead Wolves

Three Dead Wolves

---

Chapter One: Three White Wolves

In my younger days, I was a park ranger, deployed in a particularly remote stretch of woods. I worked perimeter patrols and wildlife management for nearly ten years. I loved my job. I loved being outside, alone a majority of the time, out in nature. The career path was ideal for an introverted guy like me. I quit because of something that happened to me out there. Something I haven’t felt comfortable enough to talk about for a long time. And the entire damn saga started with those dead wolves.

I can distinctly remember the day we found them. It was snowing. I was on my way to a checkpoint to make a repair. I stopped about two miles from the main base cabin when my walkie buzzed.

“Uhh… Matt…”

“Yeah?”

“You might want to get back here.”

My partner for the day was a kid named Susan. She was twenty years old at the time, in college, working weekends to help pay for the books. I liked Sue. We formed sort of a sibling relationship in our short period working together. I definitely felt responsible for her. Call that what you will.

“On my way.”

The trip back to base took me past a steep hill and ravine. I turned my ankle and caught some thorns, so a thirty minute hike took forty. I hobbled up the main path and caught my partner a few feet from the doorway to our cabin. She was staring down into a ravine.

“You all right?” I asked. “Hello?”

“No,” she whimpered.

“What?”

“Look.”

I followed the direction of her outstretched arm. There they were. Three adult gray wolves, lined up in a row, deader than the leaves. Their eyes were open. Their mouths gaped. Their fur drifted in the wind. But they didn’t move.

“Who put them there?” Susan asked. “Did you?”

“No.”

“Is it hunting season?”

“No,” I snapped. “And you can’t hunt wolves here.”

We hopped down the ravine and examined the carcasses. Decomposition only partially obscured the bodies. They hadn’t been dead long. I looked for bullet holes and found none. I felt for cuts and came up empty. Their eyes watched me the entire time. The deep shades of orange and yellow and green looked so beautiful, even in death.

“I keep feeling like one of them is going to jump up and bite me,” Susan squeaked. “They just don’t look dead. Look at those teeth.”

“Where’s the blood?” I wondered out loud. “There should be some in the snow.”

“Maybe they were poisoned?”

“Maybe. We should still see something.”

I examined the mouths. They appeared malnourished. That would not be out of place in a modern world with shrinking habitats. I gestured for help and we rolled over each of the bodies. I dug deeper and performed a thorough check.

“Maybe not.”

“Not a single wound.”

“Nothing.”

Susan stared back at me. I hated this part – being the senior, the old head, the one who makes decisions. I didn’t know what the hell to do with them. I knew we had clear evidence of illegal poaching. The wolves didn’t line themselves up. But the poachers didn’t take anything. They didn’t shoot anything. They just left them here. I also knew we had about an hour until the next wave of snow hit the area. Maybe they knew that too.

“Alright, let’s get the tarp.”

Susan grabbed a large black piece of canvas. We covered the animals and buried the ends in the ground to shield them from the wind. By the time we finished, the sprinkles overhead turned into an onslaught, and my feet had begun to freeze.

“Alright, let’s get inside.”

We hustled for the cabin. Rain, snow, or shine – somebody had to be up on that mountain. But we had a game plan for storms like these. We suspended patrols. Sue downloaded a bunch of her favorite shows. I dug into my reading list. The night could actually be quite cozy if all went right. Of course, that night, nothing went right.

We locked up around daybreak. The storm escalated from there onwards. I stepped outside every now and again to track the snowfall. We tallied three feet by midnight. I turned the pages on my favorite novella. Sue snored through a telenovela. I drifted to sleep for an hour. Maybe more.

We woke up to a vicious pounding on the door.

Three AM.

I got to my feet. Sue stirred. I checked my alerts, but nobody called us. The pounding erupted once more before it quickly receded. Footsteps retreated down the steps. We waited.

“Should we answer?”

“I guess.”

“Maybe they need help.”

“Seems like a weird way to ask.”

I opened the door. I didn’t see it at first. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary. Snow caked up in the distance. Trees cracked and swayed. I smelled something burning. Then Sue screamed. In seconds… my entire world flipped upside down.

Flames danced from the bathroom. Smoke billowed out from the roof. The entire cabin was on fire. We darted out of the house and dove forward just as a massive wooden cross-beam collapsed behind our heads. We reached a safe distance and collapsed on the path.

“He did this,” Susan spat. “That fucking asshole.”

“Who?”

“The guy who killed the wolves.”

“How do you know?”

She pointed. An empty gas canister sat an inch from the burning remains of our porch.

“Now what?”

We watched the cabin burn down in silence. I pulled out my walkie (thank God) and radioed for help. Dispatch said it would be hours to get through the storm. We expected as much.

But we didn’t have any weapons. We didn’t have any shelter. We were sitting ducks for whatever this psychopath planned next.

Once the fire felt safe enough to examine, I got up, and found a post-it note tacked to a tree.

Three white wolves

Dead in the snow

Three white wolves

All in a row

Catch him! Catch him! And don’t let him go!

‘

Three witchy women

Dead in the snow

Three witchy women

All in a row

Catch him! Catch him! And don’t let him go!

Chapter Two: Three Witchy Women

In some parts of the woods, the difference between life and death is often just four well-built walls. That’s it. A front door and a lock is all that separates you from Pale Death and a puckered butt. There’s lots of ways it can happen. Most people blame animals, but the cold is a more likely murderer. When you can feel the freeze on the other side of your skin, when you can’t cough it out of your lungs, you’ll know that’s about halfway there. That’s when you remember the importance of those four walls. That’s when you enthusiastically cuss the fuck who burned them down.

We didn’t have food that morning. We didn’t have fresh water within a mile. We didn’t even have a reliable weapon, outside of a pistol who’s handle burned a hole into the snow burrows. Susan spent the better part of the morning fishing it out. I kept trying the radio.

“Hi. This is the rangers from the burned down cabin calling again. Can anybody get the hell down here?”

The first two or three conversations were hopeful. Dispatch claimed the storm should blow over by evening. We just needed to hunker down for a few more hours. Then they called back and said a chopper was damaged. After that they wanted us to wait a day.

After that – the radio died.

We tried salvaging some gear from the fire. Sue found a jacket and some other clothing that managed to dodge the flames. I found a tin water bottle and a rusted Bowie knife. Everything else was torched or smoldering. I couldn’t believe the awful luck.

“We need to get away from high ground,” she chirped. “We’re sitting ducks out here.”

I thought about that for a long while before answering. I didn’t love the idea of leaving the campsite. Without the radio, we had no way to contact the rescue crews who expected us to be in that spot. But the point about cover did have some merit. The Park Service cut and maintained a thirty feet diameter around the cabin. That meant no trees, brush, or foliage of any kind. Anybody could be looking at us from virtually any direction. I could feel unseen eyes from every angle.

“Okay,” I conceded. “Let’s go. Not far.”

We took the path down a familiar ravine which led to a nearby hot spring. The snow – which had mercifully relented in the hours of the fire – returned in full force to peck at us along the way. We stopped every quarter-mile to adjust clothing and cover body parts from the wind. Our feet sunk deeper and deeper into the fresh covering. Soon enough, the walk turned into a shuffle.

“I can’t do this,” Sue moaned after the third or fourth stop. “I don’t want to die out here.”

I think the only thing that kept me going was the hope of that hot spring. I didn’t have much faith in the rescue team. I didn’t have much faith in myself. I guess I just figured, if this guy is going to kill me, maybe he’ll at least allow me one last moment of warmth.

“We’re almost there.”

We tried to pick up the pace and Susan fell down a hill. I rushed to help and face-planted myself. It would have been funny at a ski slope – maybe with an added Benny Hill soundtrack to boot – but that afternoon, the fall took everything we had left. Twigs and branches smacked my face on the way down. Sticker bushes pricked and ripped away at my already tattered pants. I rolled end over end for what felt like an eternity. The tumble stopped abruptly at a tree stump which cracked a rib in the process.

I sat up and looked around.

The spring sat an inch from my crooked nose.

I entered the water face first. The warmth of it sent a rush of blood that arced painfully and then pleasantly down my spine. I dove in deeper and let the water reach into my mouth, into my cold lungs, driving out the freeze that nestled into every inch of my insides. I surfaced and choked out air anew as sensation coursed through my arms and my legs and my toes and my fingers. All of it felt so fucking good. I felt more alive than ever before.

I looked around again.

Susan was gone.

I splashed through the spring frantically. I dove to the bottom and felt along the rocks. Moments later, I saw her motionless body lying on the shore. I rushed over and carried her into the spring. She didn’t respond at first. At first, she didn’t even breathe. She just seemed so cold, like all the warmth in the world couldn’t bring life back home. But then she coughed. Her chest rattled. She opened her eyes – pale blue ones that radiated in the reflection of the sun on the water. She smiled at me.

And then she screamed.

It took me a minute to inject the fresh shock. I turned around and saw it. Two big bodies floated in the spring about three feet away. A gentle breeze pushed them our way. Susan hopped out of my arms and pulled the gun out of an unknown pocket. She shot one of them. Fat and tissue erupted into the air. I fumbled around for my knife.

“What the hell are you doing? I snapped. “He’ll hear you!”

She fired again.

“He knows!” she retorted. “Don’t you get it? He knows. He knew we would come to the spring after the cabin burned down. He knew we would get in the water. He put those fucking bodies in there on purpose. To mess with us. To fuck with us. Two witchy women! Don’t you see it? He is playing a game. He is playing with us before he kills us. Like a fucking animal.”

“Three witchy women,” I corrected.

“Huh?”

“Three witchy women. The letter said three. You said two.”

“Okay. So who are they? Who are these two?”

We examined the bodies as best we could. The stink was overwhelming. Bloat set in. I recognized outfits common for girls my age. An obnoxious tattoo with a heart on one arm gave a birth year. 1993. We saw a lot of thrill seekers who liked to camp out on the higher points of the mountain. But those folks were usually more prepared-looking than these two.

“We can’t stay in the water forever,” Susan insisted after a point. “How far is the reserve cabin?”

We kept a secondary cabin in the area for emergencies such as this one. It wasn’t anything special outside the aforementioned four walls. But it was our best shot at finding some shelter.

“Too far,” I responded. “I don’t think we’ll make it by nightfall.”

“We have to try.”

I thought about it again before answering. It was true that we couldn’t stay in the water – for the same reason we couldn’t stay by the cabin – it was known to the killer. We needed somewhere random. We needed somewhere secure. We needed a good hiding place, but none of that existed at the time, so we decided to keep moving.

We took the path that led to Reserve Cabin A. The snow cracked and crunched and melted under our freshly heated boots. We made progress during the first leg of the journey. We stopped when a mother grizzly and her two cubs happened across the path. I kept still and prayed that my partner remembered to do the same. The bears approached and got to about ten feet apart. The mother sniffed the air. The cubs rolled around gleefully. I envied them. We kept our heads down. The family eventually moved on. So did we.

We picked up the pace and made it about halfway through the journey by nightfall. Susan wanted to keep going. I wanted to scale a tree. We argued about that for a little bit. I couldn’t understand why she would want to travel in the dark.

“You are completely blind out there,” I insisted. “Animals, killers, not to mention the cold…”

“You’re just as vulnerable to that as me,” she snapped. “Especially sitting still.”

“The trees give us cover!”

The sun fell sometime during that discussion. A pack of wolves started howling nearby. Susan took that opportunity to hop up the tree.

“What if he has a chainsaw?” She asked while we got settled. “He would knock us right over.”

“Who carries around a chainsaw in the woods?” I laughed. “Kinda inefficient.”

“You know who.”

“I guess.”

“What do you think he wants?”

I didn’t know.

“Maybe he’s protecting the woods.”

“From what?” I asked.

“I don’t know. From us,” she muttered. “You know, people. People are awful. Look at all the shit we’ve seen them do here. Fires. Pollution. Gender reveal parties…”

I thought about it.

“Doesn’t seem like the right way to go about it.”

“What?”

“He started a fire himself.”

“To get rid of us.”

“And the women?”

“Who knows what they did?”

“He killed them.”

“We don’t know that,” she insisted. “Maybe they were already dead.”

“I guess.”

We sat in silence for a bit.

“You know… we are probably going to die out here.”

I nodded.

“Yeah. Probably.”

She sniffed.

“But there’s worse places to die, you know, than in the woods. With you.”

That caught me off-guard.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“Almost twice your age, you know…”

“Please stop.”

“Happy to.”

We fell asleep like that, laughing dumbly, arguing over our survival chances against a killer whilst twenty feet in the air hiding from one. I woke up a little while after and she was snoring on my shoulder. I woke up again and she was gone.

It was daylight.

I climbed down the rings of the tree and re-entered the forest. The prior night’s snow had turned into melts which made mini streams at every hill and slight incline along the way. The rushing water obscured most sound. I listened closely and heard footsteps.

Somebody was running.

I shouted into the morning stillness and let the birds scatter. Then I started to run too. I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t even think about it. Then I found a hill. I ran to the top and looked out into the woods about fifty feet below. I saw a flash of red. The jacket from the fire. Susan’s jacket. She stopped.

She turned a corner abruptly and fell down into the snow. She made a horrible sound as she tried to get up. She screamed and cried and begged. I wanted to help. I wanted to save her more than anything in the world. But then I saw him.

He slipped out from the tree line as easily as the tide. He didn’t stop. He didn’t slow down. He had a horned-mask over his head and a machete in his left hand. Susan shouted right until the moment he took that knife and stuck it in her head. It stayed pinned there like an ax in wood.

Then he looked at me.

I waited in dumbfound shock as the man dragged Susan’s dead body up to the base of the hill. He left it there. He stared for a second.Then he raised one hand.

Two. Two from the creek. Plus one. Susan. That makes three.

Then he pointed at me.

I ran.

Chapter Three: He Stole From the Woods and Never Went Home

It’s one thing to be alone in the woods with a plan. It’s another to be lost. A lot of soon-to-be dead people don’t get the difference between the two. Either that or they just realize it too late. The tallest mountains and the deepest caves are full of fucking assholes who thought they could do something when they couldn’t. I’ve seen the aftermath myself. Bodies frozen in position… naked from the waist down… eyes still open and staring off into the distance like they’d just seen a friend from work. I didn’t want to be one of them – just another pair of bright pants for the hikers to spot.

And so I couldn’t save the girl. I could barely save myself. I ran from a killer as fast as the snow banks allowed. I didn’t stop until I reached the burned down remains of the ranger cabin. A familiar log by the aforementioned ravine with three dead wolves felt like home. I collapsed into the bark like a La-Z Boy as a thin trail of smoke receded into the early morning sky.

It was raining. The lonely patter mixed in with the cracks and groans of the forest. I tried to forget, if only for a second, just to reset, but that didn’t work. I kept picturing Sue’s face when she saw the animals. The conversation ran over and over again in my head. There was something that went unsaid. I just couldn’t place it.

You alright?

No.

Clink, clack, clink.

Clink, clack, clink.

Part of me wanted to quit just then. A larger part was angry. I got up and sifted through the cooled remains of the cabin fire. I found a charred stick (used to turn on an inexplicably high light switch on the wall) and attached it to my knife like a bayonet. I swung into the air to test my weapon on a would-be attacker. The apparatus collapsed.

Great.

The sun slowly but surely rose in the distance. I guessed the time to be a little before six, maybe later. I figured I had a couple hours before the first rescue crews arrived from the Valley. They might have called folks down from Follaton. Maybe even out in the Hills. Someone should have seen the smoke by now. It wouldn’t be long.

I still refused to be a sitting duck, primed for murder, so I headed down to the tree-line in search of better weapons. Melted snow clung like butter. It took a while to maneuver. I found a larger branch and set about hollowing a hole for the knife. I wrapped the blade tight with strands of bark and roots. I swung it three times. This time it held.

I moved on in search of a better tree to scale. My reasoning for climbing was not just that I was good at it – I was great – but the high positioning and downward slope of the path made it possible to see much further ahead than on the ground. After a good hour of searching, I found my target, another massive oak with low hanging branches leveled all the way to the top. I hopped one at a time and made it around three quarters of the way up.

I could see the hot spring. I could see my own path of footprints. But that was about it.

A strange but familiar sound echoed in the distance.

Clink, clack, swoosh.

Clink, clack, swoosh.

The minutes turned into hours. I waited. My plan was pretty simple. If the masked man went this way, I would ambush him. If the good guys arrived, I couldn’t miss them. Time dragged. Every passing glow of sunlight looked like a plane. Every rustle of leaves brought up the stick-blade. I waited and waited some more. Then it happened.

Three hours after my initial descent, something large moved through the woods, big enough to be a person. I crouched behind some leaf covering. I kept still. Footsteps approached twenty yards away. Somebody was whistling.

I didn’t recognize the song at first. The high notes were wistful and the low notes foreboding. Almost like it might sound better on a flute. I sat there on the branch, like a dumbass, desperately trying to place the tune. Took me twenty years to realize it was Dixie.

I moved to adjust my footing.

Something broke.

I hit the branch below and snapped it upward. I tried to steady myself and flipped. The stick-blade lacerated my leg and caused blood to spill so fast that some of it fell into my mouth on the way down. I must have mashed ten more branches before the last one left me to the ground.

The next few moments were kinda blurry. I remember feeling for the blood. I remember trying to walk. I couldn’t. I crawled off into some shrubbery and looked for something to stop the bleeding. I didn’t find it.

Then the lights went out.

“

More whistling.

The sound of metal connecting with dirt is very distinct up close, but from miles away, it could be anything. At that moment, I recognized it immediately.

Clink, clack, swish.

Clink, clack, swish.

Okay. He’s digging my grave. Time to pray.

Clink, clack, swoosh.

Clink, clack, swish.

“Please…” I mumbled.

“You ‘wake?” he answered.

I couldn’t see the owner of the voice in front of me. I blinked a dozen times. I felt around blindly and my fingers brushed a piece of cloth and knot. He took the time to give me a tourniquet. I relaxed. I opened my eyes again and looked dead into an elaborate horn mask.

“The fuck?”

I fought with all my might. I got up and darted backwards, slamming into a tree and loosening the tourniquet in the process.

“No-no-no.”

“What? What do you want with me?” I screamed. “You want to kill me?”

“I am notta de bad guy.”

I stared at him.

“I know I looka like de bad guy,” he chuckled and removed the mask. “This is just for protection. Ima Zak. I-a save your life, my friend.”

I nodded slowly. He looked normal enough. Long black hair. Clean shaven. I couldn’t quite place the accent but my ear for that sort of thing is terrible.

“Looka ‘round you.”

I brushed the silt off my eyes and sat back down. Zak knelt beside me and readjusted the dressing. Blood oozed out spectacularly so it helped to take my mind off the wound.

“Looka all de graves,” he mumbled. “Look at the writing.”

I examined them one by one. Most were single names. Otis. John. Dipper. There must have been thousands of headstones in that one little alcove, jutted purposefully above the snow. Some dated back to the early 1800s.

“Okay,” I muttered. “Dead people. So?”

Zak shook his head.

“No people.”

I leaned down and brushed some snow to get a better look. There were drawings underneath.

“Jack… the mountain lion?”

I moved onto another.

“Marcelo the wolf.”

Zak grunted.

“I gotta lil baby squirrel over there.”

I was dumbfounded.

“Why?”

Zak smiled.

“She really lika these animals.”

It didn’t make any sense to me.

“How long has this been here? How did we miss it?”

Zak grunted.

“We way outsidda patrols now,” he offered.

I stared at him.

“Who are you?”

He looked back at me for a little while. Something about his clean kept features appeared trustworthy. He sighed.

“Yo friend is a witch.”

I laughed. Zak didn’t.

“Ima logger. We are-a taking down this here section of wood.”

He gestured behind us.

“And I see dem… these three girls, dancing in the woods with de wolves. Dem wolves are fine one moment… calm, docile, the like. Very strange thing to see a big beast cozying up to a woman likka dat. Then they all fall dead. One, two, three. Just like dat. First the wolves, then the girls. Like dominoes. I saw it happen, my friend.”

“So somebody shot them?”

“No-no, you see the bodies, no bullets. I try-a to show you the wolves. I couldn’t carry de two girls close enough…”

“That was you?”

“Yes.”

“And the fire?”

“I try to warn you!” he exclaimed. “I knock!”

“Some warning,” I seethed. “We could have died.”

Zak grabbed my arm and squeezed.

“Listen to me. That girl… that girl witchu… she de only one to get up when they fall. The rest of dem stay dead. But that girl get up and walk down to yo cabin like itsa Monday.”

He looked scared.

“She a witch. Through and the through. My best guess is… she sacrificed dem. The wolves and de other girls. She sacrifice dem for the woods. To keep me out.”

I laughed again.

“Susan?”

He nodded.

“If yo’ call her dat,” he mumbled. “I want to know why. So then I come down here and see de graves. She remembers dem. All of dem. Every lil animal. Every bunny she find. How do you think she feels ‘bout me? About de people who take de trees and de homes of bunnies?”

He whimpered a bit. I struggled to believe a word of it. We stood awkwardly for a moment. Zak disappeared into the brush. He returned a couple moments later with the motionless corpse of my coworker.

“I cut offa de head o’ de witch.”

I vomited.

“I’m sorry. But I have experience on dis! Local experience. You gotta trust me. Dis a berry bad girl. A berry, berry bad girl.”

Zak pushed back Sue’s hair.

“I see her picture in an old book. A very old, one hundred year old book. But she young like dis,” he continued. “How she stay young like dis?”

The noises of the woods appeared to grow louder. I stared blankly into Susan’s lifelessly pretty eyes. I thought about our conversation only a couple days prior. He knows.

“Okay.”

I still didn’t believe this story. Not a word of it – as you probably don’t. I knew we were destroying evidence. I knew ‘dis guy’ could still be ‘de bad guy’ and all of his plans could just be a ruse to let my guard down before the rescue crews arrived. But I thought I’d play the little game. I thought I’d bury poor Sue’s head (they could always retrieve it later) and use the newfound trust to mount my revenge. That was my plan – just as you might expect – right until the moment she blinked.

That’s right.

The fucking head blinked.

I thought it was a trick until Zak saw it too. He screamed. He grabbed the mask (sorry, no good explanation for that yet) and set it on his face before he took off into the woods.

Susan’s eyes strained and looked around after him. Then they found me. Her lips smiled. Fresh blood dropped down from the gash in her forehead. She licked it.

I watched in horror as the head dribbled along the ground, as if moving on imaginary legs, towards the torso in the grass five feet away.

I didn’t wait for it to reattach.

I ran too.

Again. Because that’s what a real person does when faced with the inexplicable. Fight or flight might favor the bold when granny is confronted by a mugger. But the instinct definitely does not cater to bouncing heads and human sacrifices. I ran until my legs couldn’t carry me anymore. I ran through snow and sitting water. I ran up ravines and down hills and kept going after my legs screamed from the pressure. I ran into the God-blessed ambulance waiting at the charred remains of my cabin. I babbled this exact story to every medic and doctor and police officer who asked it of me.

How do you think it went?

“

The doctors gave me a bloated IV and a battery of little white pills. The police hooked me up with an arson charge. I bounced from hospitals to psych wards to county jail. I lost touch with my limited family. My work friends excommunicated me. When I got out, I got a place by the beach, away from the woods. I took up fishing.

There’s probably one detail you’re wondering about, if you’re still with me, and it’s the same one that extended my stay in Valley General.

Where are they?

I used to ask anyone who would listen.

What the fuck happened to Susan? What happened to Zak? What happened to the women?

I couldn’t understand why they weren’t looking. Regardless of how they felt about my mental state, these were still missing people out there, four of them in total. Their loved ones should be concerned. They should be blaming somebody (probably me) for their deaths. But nobody cared.

One night, a detective visited me in jail. He didn’t have any reason to lie, I guess. The case was over. The state won. He told me that his office didn’t have any records for a girl named Susan at the Parks Department. There also weren’t any local logging companies with current bids. But they did have one, twenty years back, where a guy went missing on the job.

“A foreign guy. Strange accent. They didn’t have good paperwork on him. Went out into the woods one day and never came back. I talked to the manager, the guy’s still alive….. And they said his name was Zak.”

He hesitated.

“I’m not saying I believe this shit. But I’ve lived in White Valley long enough to know about the Witch. If you really say you saw her… really saw her… I’ll tell the judge to go easy.”

And so they did,

“

A few years later, two papers arrived in my mailbox. The pages were unaddressed and missing an envelope. The first piece was a Kodak picture of Zak – or at least – what used to be Zak. His face was cut down the center and his ears were missing. The second piece was a poem. It’s titled,

The Thief of the Woods

Three white wolves

Dead in the snow

Three white wolves

All in a row

Catch him! Catch him! And don’t let him go!

‘

Three witchy women

Dead in the snow

Three witchy women

All in a row

Catch him! Catch him! And don’t let him go!

‘

One measly man

Dead in the snow

One measly man

Alone in a row

Stole from the woods and he never went home.