"You bastard!" I screamed at him. "This is because you're too cheap to pay the bills for that last hellish expedition you sent me on, isn't it?"

He tapped my chest implacably with the envelope of plane tickets, maps, and biliously-hued Romanian currency. "Eight grand," he sneered. "That's what you owe me just for the bread crumbs. Either cough it up or get your ass on the plane. I own you, and your lawyer will tell you the same thing."

So here we were, careening madly down a narrow, rutted track in the Carpathian mountains, in search of yet another kid who'd disappeared into the woods and never come back.

An insane village elder, ancient and pockmarked like the road through his village, had babbled at me from the old gasoline can he was sitting on outside the Town Hall while we picked up Bogdan, our interpreter and guide. "American!" he shrieked, his skull cap slipping over one eye. I stared at him, my mind reeling from the meth and the oxygen-depleted mountain air. The only other words I could make out were "wolves" and "G.I." "He says don't go into the forest," Bogdan told us, shrugging. "He says the forest will swallow you."

"Really?" asked my illustrator nervously, fingering his stem-winder and patting his hip pocket to make sure his flask was there. "Is it dangerous, do you think?"

I didn't listen to the answer. I knew it was dangerous. There is a particularly ugly strain of retribution and punishment in the stories told in these villages, and it's been that way since long before satellite t.v. arrived. Death is Real here.

The kid was doomed, of course, from the minute she set out. Maybe the red cape was supposed to be some primitive form of protection; maybe the basket of goodies was meant to include defensive weaponry that somehow got left out during the hustle and bustle of packing for Grandmother's. But from the grand perspective it's clear Red never had a chance. No one has a chance when they set out alone to face Nature. Because Nature, my friends, despite what you may have heard, is no one's Mother. Nature scoffs at maternal instincts. Nature will eat you and your little baby children alive, and she won't even slow down when she shits out your bones.