by C.G. Banks
*
If one had the inclination to lie flat a transparency across a map of the area and mark with a red X all locations where animals and/or humans had happened upon misfortune of one sort or another, the area would appear to bleed. There were, of course, the natural deaths: wild horses trapped in unexpected brush fires, deer broken legged in deadfalls, wooly pigs snorting out their pitiful rage as muckpits dragged them to their depths. And then, the metaphysical ones: Indian tribes slowly, surely losing ground to defeat at the hands of the Wasicun, ritually disfiguring themselves amid other fruitless tortures in the vain attempt to placate and tame their stern and deadly gods. Or finally, and perhaps the most stigmatizing, the purely mysterious: hunting parties gone missing, sometimes single men, but other times complete organized parties. Leaving nothing to herald their passing except short passages in newspapers of the time, scattered bones in gullies and creek beds. And always thereafter, the forgetfulness as people, the living, got on with their lives. Leaving the dead to whatever spaces they would inhabit.
And so time went until, eventually, with European settlements and all the accoutrements of modern living creeping down from the northeast corner of the continent and up from the south, the area, which would one day become Leszno’s Acres, claimed the rather blasé nom de plume of haunted. The term was implied in newspaper accounts on the occasion something strange happened within its boundaries; it was proclaimed in bold type in the popular serials of the day, huckstered by ‘professional’ clairvoyants and their specious castes; it was warned by parents to their children to by all means steer clear of the area whenever possible, and if not able to avoid it, then to arm themselves with accomplices, and never, never after dark.
But the plague of misfortune continued.