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hoped Lositch would find hell.

Song in the Woods
    In two years as a tribal cop on the Keweenaw Bay Reservation in Baraga, three years as a Michigan state trooper, and the last fourteen as a conservation officer in counties below and above the bridge, CO Foresta Quinn had never seen so much debris from a two-vehicle crash, never imagined there could be so damn many pieces, and wondered if manufacturers were doing something differently and hiding it from consumers. It wouldn’t surprise her. Little did anymore.
    First on scene, she called Central, the multicounty dispatcher who covered city cops, county sheriffs, conservation officers, and state police for Mackinac, Chippewa, and Luce Counties. Quinn asked for assistance with victims and traffic control. She used her own truck to block the westbound lane, then asked a civilian to temporarily signal vehicles to turn around, go back up the hill to Epoufette, and detour north and west through Rexton on the Hiawatha Trail.
    Quinn went first to the eighteen-wheeler. The log hauler had been filled with two pups of ten-foot pulp logs, now spread all over the highway like squat pick-up sticks. She found the driver still seat-belted into his cab, multiple facial cuts, but nothing serious or life threatening. Still, he wasn’t conscious, and that wasn’t good. His pulse felt all right. He could hold for now. She glanced at the red oval Peterbilt logo gleaming on the ground, which she had first thought was blood.
    The conservation officer looked for a second vehicle and finally got her mind to reconstruct the remains of what appeared to be a small foreign-­model pickup. She used her imagination to guess where the pickup cab might lie in the debris field, went to it, and there found a body still pinned inside. She stretched her arm as far as it would go and got two fingers on the neck, but there was no pulse. A troop came up behind her. “What we got?”
    â€œThis one’s gone. Rig driver’s out cold but alive,” Foresta Quinn said as a large houndy dog went to the wreck, sniffed loudly at the body she’d just examined, whined ruefully, and limped across US 2, holding up a bloody front leg. The dog’s hindquarters were smeared in blood. The troop was seeing to the truck driver, EMTs from Naubinway were arriving, and a Mackinac County deputy and another troop were turning traffic back in both directions. Quinn saw the dog disappear into a copse of aspens to the north and made a decision. She told the EMTs she was stepping away and jogged after the animal, following a faint blood trail, which she eventually lost in dense ferns. She stopped to listen. In the woods your nose and ears were often better than your eyes.
    A voice sang, “I thank God for this amazing day.”
    The voice was sweet and high, soft as warm honey, and Quinn felt drawn to it, thoughts of the dog momentarily gone. The singing continued, “For the leaping greenly spirit of trees.”
    Foresta stopped in a small clearing, the floor blanketed with forget-me-nots, and the voice went on, “And a true blue dream of sky, for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.”
    The conservation officer saw a woman ahead and approached her. The dog was approaching, too, whimpering ever so softly, and Quinn saw the woman reach out to the animal and caress its forehead and ears. The dog settled down by the woman’s leg as she suddenly looked over at Quinn, smiled warmly, and sang, “Some say they’re going to a place called glory, and I ain’t saying it ain’t a fact.” The woman closed her eyes and eased the dog into her lap and sang in almost a hoarse whisper, “But we been told we’re on the road to Purgatory, and we don’t like the sound of that .”
    The woman hummed something Quinn couldn’t make out and looked over at her. “We’re okay, hon. She made it to me in time, and thank you ever so much.”