The mazzera stood erect, a solitary scarecrow of a figure, swathed in black rags whipped to and fro by the wind, exposing stick-thin legs stained by barely-dried trickles of blood, no doubt a scarring reminder of her recent journey through the barbed maquis covering much of Corsica.  The narrow dirt road that served as both front yard and thoroughfare for the sparsely settled hamlet of stone homes coughed up swirls of dust.  The only relief in this bleak landscape was an occasional stripe of whitewash encasing a window.  The inhabitants were nowhere to be seen.  The men were likely off tending their sheep on some high plateau, gone for the summer season.  But the women?  Did they so fear this lonely old woman that they had retreated behind their rough-hewn oaken doors?  At this very moment were they peeking out windows and crossing themselves? 

            Though well into her seventies, the mazzera came toward the strangers with a spring in her step.  When she arrived within speaking distance, she let go of the black scarf across her lower face,  held in her teeth, and revealed her high-bridged nose and deep-sunken eyes, the color of blue Arctic ice, blazing out beneath the swath of bandana still covering her brow.  The notorious, piercing stare of the mazzera looked through, not at the strangers, as though fixed on a destiny known only to her. 

            A white tape across her brow, mimicking the white-wash on the windows, suspended her only decoration…a small gold earring.  She fingered it as she spoke her first words, “To ward off evil spells on my eyes.  I need my eyes.” 

            Yes, thought the strangers, she indeed needs her eyes; eyes that perceive in dream-animals the faces of the living, those doomed to be taken from this world within the year, more often within days.

The mazzera spoke, almost chanted, like a mad gypsy intoning some incomprehensible magic incantation.  Her cryptic words were spoken in the Corsican language, but with barely a trace of the harsh tones affected by those frequenting the urban areas of this scented Isle. 

She revealed more than the strangers expected to hear.  She needed no prompts.  She anticipated their questions.  Her ageless spirit, her penetrating gaze commanded them to listen, to understand the unfathomable.

“It happens that I go out at night…over there, on that mountainside.  I tear my flesh and my clothes.  The need to hunt is stronger than I.  The blood wills it so.  Often I see the moon run its course and the sun rise without shutting my eyes.  I hunt, but I am not a killer.  May the Blessed Mercy hold me as a witness, I speak only what is written.”

She pointed across the valley dotted with holm oaks and chestnut trees and littered with granite outcroppings, an expanse now darkened by the shadows of early evening.  “There…I hunt there.” 

Suddenly, her body became tense, her movements restless as she looked back to the spot at the edge of the village where she had first stood.  Without explanation, she strode away, off through the maquis, the aroma of its thick brambles of rosemary, thyme, arbutus, lentisk, and incense-scented immortelle unable to mask the stench of death in the nostrils of the strangers.

*   *   *

The screen in the lecture hall flashed a series of reversed numbers as the film reached its end, flapping noisily in the projector.  As the lights came up, Elizabeth Rettig squirmed in her seat, with an apologetic smile to her neighbors for having slipped in next to them during the showing.  She checked to make sure the suitcase and backpack she had dragged in with her and stowed against the wall were still in their place.  The last thing she wanted was for someone to trip over her luggage and call attention to the fact that she had overslept at her hotel in Ajaccio, Corsica’s coastal capitol, and stupidly missed her train to Corte, in the heart of the island.  Catching the next train meant that she didn’t have time to check into her hotel before the lecture.  Instead, she rushed straight to the University of Corsica campus from the train station.  Running into the darkened lecture hall, out of breath, her long brunette hair had escaped its braid and ended up plastered to her sweaty neck.   

Assured that all was in place, Elizabeth turned her attention to the speaker for the evening, the world-famous expert on Corsican culture and the occult, Professor Sylvia Nicoli.  No one understood the mystique of this fig-shaped island, dropped into the Mediterranean just above Sardinia, than the Professor.

At least Elizabeth hadn’t missed Professor Nicoli’s filmed encounter with a real mazzera, recorded some forty-five years before.  She hoped that Professor Nicoli, the diminutive, gray-haired woman, hadn’t noticed her late arrival.  The entire purpose of coming to Corsica was to meet and interview the Professor as part of her research project on occult practices in the Mediterranean world, a study that Elizabeth had first undertaken two years ago.  She hoped that the resulting publications would elevate her from lowly Assistant Professor to Associate and then on to Full Professorship in the Department of Cross-Cultural Studies at UC Berkeley.  Being thirty-two and female, the chances were slim even so.

Professor Nicoli’s low-pitched, melodic voice floated out over the appreciative, almost adoring audience.  Men and women, young and old, seemed entranced by her words, as was Elizabeth. 

“What struck me most about this woman, this mazzera,” the Professor was saying, “was the sense of nobility that her words engendered.  She was so enslaved to her calling that she had suffered social exclusion, even physical maltreatment at the hands of the villagers, without a thought to her own well-being.  If she had believed that she was possessed by some kind of evil power, she could have sought exorcism.  But, no, she felt her dream-hunting, this strange power to bilocate, to be asleep and at the same time be out hunting wild prey by taking on the form of an animal herself, was ordained by God, a Christian God to whom she owed obedience.  When, in a flash of vision or prophecy, the face of her prey turns, in death, to the face of an acquaintance, even a relative, she feels she has received a message from that God, a message she is obligated to pass on to the living victim, even though that person is being given notice of his or her impending death.  My photographer and I found out that she had nearly been killed when she had prophesized the year before that two coffins would leave the same house within the week.  When two brothers died of the Spanish flu almost simultaneously, their relatives dragged her to a nearby stream and tried to drown her.  Only her incredible strength and agility allowed her to escape.”