ELVIS BELLOWED, ACCOMPANIED BY A BURST OF BAWLING. She broke through the leatherleaf and bog laurel and came into a small glade. There in the middle sat a squalling baby in a blue backpack-style infant carrier.
A baby girl, if her pink cap and Hello Kitty long-sleeved onesie were any indication. A red-faced, cherub-cheeked baby girl, chubby arms and legs flailing against an assault of deerflies.
Mercy hurried over and fell to her knees in front of the pack, swatting away at the swarm. The baby appeared to be about six months old, but that was hardly an educated guess. Everything she knew about babies was based on her brother’s toddler, Toby, whose infancy she’d mostly missed, and the injured infants she’d seen in theater.
This little one seemed okay, but her tiny neck and face and fingers were dotted with angry red marks left by the mean bites of deerflies. Mercy reached for her pack and the bug spray but then thought better of it. Nothing with DEET in it could be any good for babies.
The baby kept on screaming, and the dog kept on barking.
“Quiet,” she ordered, but only the dog obeyed. She looked around, but there was no mom in sight.
The baby continued to cry, an escalation of shrieks.
“Okay, okay.” She unbuckled the straps on the carrier and pulled out the wailing child. The baby lifted up her small head, and Mercy stared into round, slate-blue eyes rimmed in tears and deerfly bites.
“‘Though she be but little, she is fierce,’” Mercy quoted, and the baby scrunched up her face as if to screech again, but hiccupped instead.
Maybe Shakespeare calms her the way he calms me, she thought. Mercy cradled the little girl in her arms and stood, holding her against her chest as she pulled the ends of her hoodie together under the baby’s bottom and zipped it up around her as protection against the flies.
Mercy bobbed her up and down until her sobs subsided. Within minutes the baby was asleep.
“Now what?” She looked at Elvis, but he just stood there looking back at her, head cocked, ears up, waiting for their next move.
One of the rules of the universe should be: Wherever there’s a baby, there’s a mother close by. But Mercy had seen plenty of babies without mothers.
“Where’s your mommy?” she asked the sleeping child. Maybe she’d gone off behind some bushes to pee. “Hello,” she called. “Hello.”
No answer.
The last time she’d held a baby over there, the child had died in her arms. But this was no time to think about that. She shook off the memory, and kept on rocking the baby and calling for her mother. The little one gurgled into her shoulder. Maybe her mother had fallen or hurt herself somehow. Mercy walked around the clearing, eyes on the ground.
She could see the trail they’d left behind as she and Elvis had barreled into the glade from the south. But leading out in the opposite direction, she saw broken branches and rustled leaves and faint boot prints tamped in the mud. Mercy was a good tracker; Martinez used to say she was part dog. Which part? she’d ask. One of their little jokes.
Mercy and Elvis followed the markings into a denser area of forest thick with maples and beeches in full leaf and hiked through the wood. The traces ended abruptly at a rushing stream some ten yards wide. Too wooded and winding to see much on the other side. Too far to jump across. Too fast-moving to ford holding a baby.
She yelled again. The dog barked. She listened for the sounds of humans, but all she heard were the sounds of the water and the trees and the creatures that truly belonged here. The baby stirred against her chest. She’d be hungry soon and tired and cold and wet. And those nasty deerfly bites had to hurt. Mercy was torn; she wanted to find the mother or whoever brought the little girl out here. But she knew the baby needed more care than she could provide deep in the woods. And she’d need it sooner rather than later.
“We’re going back.” She shifted her weight onto her left hip, holding the baby tightly with her left arm, and pulled her cell phone out of her pocket with her right hand. She turned it on.
No bars. Coverage was spotty up here. She’d have to try again when they were closer to the trail. At least she could still use the camera.
Together she and Elvis retraced their steps, Mercy snapping photographs of the footprints and other traces along the route as they went. When they reached the baby carrier, she carefully strapped the dozing child into it. She looked so sweet that Mercy took some shots of the baby as well. There was a large zippered compartment on the back of the carrier; she rifled through the baby bottles and formula and diapers and wipes and extra set of clothes to pull out one of the baby blankets, covering the infant lightly in what was probably a futile effort to keep away the flies.
Mercy slipped off her own small pack, tying it to the big one with the baby. She hoisted the carrier up onto her shoulders. The fit was good. The baby couldn’t weigh much more than fifteen pounds. Piece of cake.
If you didn’t count the squirming.
“She’s waking up,” she told Elvis. “Home.”
Now there was a command the dog actually obeyed every time. She never had to tell him twice to go where his bowl and bed were. He set the pace, blazing back the way they came. She stepped carefully in his wake to avoid jostling her dozing cargo. They headed for the Lye Brook Falls Trail, where she hoped her cell phone would work and she could contact the authorities.
Mercy wasn’t exactly comfortable taking the baby, not knowing where her mother was. But she couldn’t leave the child there, as someone else had obviously done. How or why anyone would do such a thing was beyond her. She knew that people were capable of all manner of cruelty. She just tried not to think about it these days.
They came to the blowdown where she’d first heard the child. Elvis trotted over to the very same place where he’d alerted before and dropped into his alert position.
“Again?” Mercy didn’t know why he seemed fixated on this spot. Maybe he detected explosives there, or maybe that was where he found the baby teether. Maybe he was just confused, his PTSD kicking in. Or not. Either way, she couldn’t bet against Elvis and his nose. Martinez would never forgive her. And if he truly was now in that heaven he had believed in so much, he’d be watching.
Mercy took more photos with her phone. Then she unhooked her small pack from the baby carrier and pulled out the duct tape and her Swiss Army knife, the two tools she never left home without. She used the duct tape to rope off a crescent around the area Elvis had targeted, using birch saplings as posts.
“Better safe than sorry,” she told him.
Elvis vaulted ahead, steering them out of the forest. When they reached the trail, Mercy taped the spot where they’d gone into the woods. She checked her phone again for service. Still no bars. They’d have to trek down to the trailhead for a stronger signal.
“Back to civilization,” Mercy said with a sigh.
The shepherd took the lead. As they began their descent, a cloud of deerflies fell upon them. The baby woke up with a start, and the wailing began again. Mercy swatted away at the miserable flying beasts, quickening her pace. Elvis stayed up front but close by.
They had a long walk ahead of them, and the deerflies seemed to know it.