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Dominique slipped the two wooden stakes under her arm and zipped her standard issue waterproof jacket up to the neck. It was still winter cold. Wet now, although the snow remained thick on distant volcanic peaks. She pushed off up the track through the trees. Pine needles lay thick in the mud, the smell of them filling damp air, a powerful, bitter scent of decay, like the smell of death that awaited her at the end of her climb. She felt the chill anticipation of it in her bones.

Beyond the treeline the hill rose steeply. The little track, bounded by a crumbling dry stone wall, followed its ragged contour before turning sharply to circumvent a stand of dark trees. There it rose again toward the summit where the hill flattened out and stretched away into the misted distance of the high plateau.

Dominique stopped at the turn and, looking back, was surprised at how far she had climbed. She stood, breathless, for a moment, and saw the blue flashing light of her van at the foot of the track, and the string of parked vehicles that snaked up the narrow road beyond it toward the auberge. She saw a group of tiny figures clustered on the road, an upturned parabole beaming its signal to the gods of some edit suite in Paris where its images, accompanied by some well-chosen sound bites, would be dissected for ease of digestion. A great story! A tragedy! A shock aperitif for prurient consumers of the evening news all over France.

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