The middle-aged couple drove from the suburbs of their mid-western city—maybe Dayton, Indianapolis, or Detroit (it barely matters which one; so many couples from so many Mid-American cities had made the same drive)—to meet the man called the Babycatcher. They were desperate. They’d tried in vitro twice. Three adoptions had fallen through. They still had that hungry look in their eyes when they gazed upon other people’s infants—that voracious stare that made new parents smile at first, then frown, then clutch their swaddled bundles as they hurried away.
They’d been given directions by the Doula. She was one of those super high-end birth coaches who had the exact right pedigree to come up through the doula ranks and break into the wealthier suburbs—both a nursing background and time spent holding workshops in yoga centers and spirituality bookstores, dreadlocked, the whiff of patchouli. She charged top dollar. There was a rumor—had to be apocryphal, someone’s joke—that she’d once orchestrated a birth in a river, during which the mom-to-be held tight with both hands to a rope strung across a quick channel, letting the baby flow from her like a fish into the current, to be caught by the father with a net downstream. There were lots of stories like this about the Doula. She was a legend.
But the Doula had lost her own baby in childbirth and left town. When the ravenous couple spotted her, it was at a farmer’s market an hour away, where they’d gone to avoid the usual friends, the usual questions. It must’ve been the same for the Doula. But how was it she now had a perfect angel suckling at her breast, when she’d lost her own not months before? When the Doula saw the couple, she all but ran from them. They chased her down.
“How?” they asked.
“I don’t recommend it,” she said.
“We have to know,” they said. The hunger-desire gleaming in their eyes brought to mind that poem about goblin men selling goblin fruit.
“Some call him the Babycatcher.”
*
The directions were nearly impossible. They exited one of those rural, interstate off-ramps that features only the hollowed shell of a long-defunct gas station. Then they drove roads with no painted lines and no names—just numbers and cardinal directions (like East 700 South) that make little sense to suburban people. Then lanes with no signs at all, just covered bridges and barns to serve as landmarks. Then a gravel road, missing much of its gravel. They cut the chain across the road with bolt cutters, just like the Doula had told them they must. After passing it once, they reversed and found the lane—more of a path—disguised by brush. They hauled branches aside. The bumper of their SUV mowed down little saplings while they drive slowly through deep ruts. A few miles like this, and then they found him.
The Babycatcher (not what he calls himself; he doesn’t tell such couples what he calls himself) wore a leather vest with no shirt beneath it. His black hat sported a colorful feather. He was an extremely fit-looking man, if a hair too skinny. A handsome, chiseled, angular face, cheeks slightly hollowed. Seldom without a piece of grass or straw clenched between his teeth. The strip of hair running from between his chest muscles down into his rough-leather pants was both sexy and repellant, alluring and indecent.
He leaned against a corral fence, chewing his reed, while they approached him.
“Perhaps you are wanting one of these,” he said with a slightly rolled r, accent hard to place.
(He never referred to them as babies—was very careful not to call them anything at all).
The Babycatcher spoke like a man with supply and demand very much on his side. You wanted. He had. You were desperate. He was content. Any exchange would be in his favor. That was the beginning and end of it.
Later, they would vaguely remember a falling-down barn or two. Maybe a paint-flaking farmhouse. Maybe equipment, maybe a tractor. It was hard to see such things because the whole place smelled delicious—like fresh-baked bread and pastries and sugar cookies—a scent that can only come from a baby head, from the little things running circles in the man’s corral: adorable cherubs with the plumpest legs, with so many wrinkles. Around and around they went, in a kind of pack, laughing and giggling.
Beyond the corral, on a wagon (maybe hitched to a tractor, it was hard to remember) were stacked cages of lashed-together sticks or bones, and within these containers were more of the sweet little things sitting on their fat bums, eyes bright with tears. Several of them were wailing. The wife couldn’t take her eyes off them. The Babycatcher noticed.
“No, no, no. You don’t want those,” he told her. “They aren’t broken yet. It is one of these you want.” He gestured at the corral.
She couldn’t take her eyes off the crying ones. She imagined rocking each in her arms, saying “Shh, shh, shh,” until they fell asleep, one by one.
“These ones are ready,” he said, nodding to the corral. “Those,” he said, nodding to the cages, “are fresh and wild from the woods.”
The husband knew what to do. The whole world had disappeared to his wife, except the babies on that wagon. “How much?”
The Babycatcher laughed. The husband did not.
“Really, no joke?” the bare-chested man finally said. The husband noticed the man’s accent thickening just a little.
Maybe the Babycatcher was surprised. Maybe this wasn’t part of his sales pitch. Maybe the couple’s category of desperate was at a level even he rarely saw. But probably not. This was probably how it usually went.
The Babycatcher let out a long, low whistle. “The little ones you look at are spoken for. Your wife thinks she can only be happy with one pulled from the trees.” He shook his head. “I don’t recommend it.” He shrugged.
The husband’s whisper was barely audible. “Please,” he said.
The Babycatcher made a slight movement, just a twitch, and the ugliest dog anyone ever saw came bounding up behind him. It had black gums and black teeth and was nearly hairless except for patches of stiff bristles, and with strange extra nipples on its side, back, and rump. The mammary glands dribbled yellow milk.
“She’s ugly, yes?” he said. “It wasn’t my plan to go back this season. They are changing their patterns, beginning their migrations to hibernate. But if there is a wild pack of them out there still. Really bright ones. Really…” He seemed to be searching for a word. “…fresh. If they are still there then this, my beautiful, ugly sniffer beast, will find them.” The Babycatcher looked up at the sky and squinted. “It’s not too late, maybe? For a price.”
“Anything,” the husband said. From his jacket, he pulled out a little notebook and uncapped a pen. “Jot down your price.”
The Babycatcher took the writing implements and, holding the pen like a farmer holds his fork, scratched down barely legible numbers.
The husband laughed. “There are an extra two zeroes.”
The Babycatcher looked at it again. Squinted. Counted the zeroes out loud. Shook his head to say no, those zeroes were correct.
“But that…that’s a mortgage.”
“This is correct,” said the Babycatcher. “A trip to the woods this late in the season, for the wildest, freshest ones you’ve ever seen. You can take your pick. This is the first time I’ve offered this to anyone.”
The wife, who’d been fixated on the cages, shook with a startle, as if waking from a dream.
The couple glanced at each other. She made a face that told the husband it would be okay, they didn’t have to ruin themselves financially—not for happiness. They could live unhappily but comfortably. She touched his shoulder as she stared at the weeping babies. He would clearly spend twice as much to avoid whatever misery he imagined, whatever unhappiness his mind was conjuring that he couldn’t see. In other words, they made the decision together. It wasn’t her, wasn’t him. The combination of them—and the fact that they loved each other more than anything—is what did it. They say love conquers all, but the couple had no idea what all would end up including. And when was conquering ever a good thing?
The couple nodded in agreement. They discussed the fine details with the leather-vested man. It would have to be before the weather turned, at which time they (he was careful to never call them babies) went deeper into the woods, into the burrows and hollow trees where they wintered, where even the Babycatcher (not what he called himself) couldn’t fish them out. And jewels: he was a man who would only be paid in metals and gems, with a note of appraisal. That was the deal. He told them how they would need to dress—not like they were now, but for the deep forest. And he told them what to bring in their bags.
*
The car was sold. The second mortgage was obtained through a friend of a friend who rushed it for them, as people can do in the wealthier suburbs. Money was borrowed from an aging parent, with the promise to pay it back. The details might be boring, but the gathering of money—searching gem dealers, gold dealers—was a full-time job. They barely slept. They liquidated. They bought gold. They bought diamonds. The people they dealt with looked more acceptable than the Babycatcher, but there was also something similarly criminal about them, except without the man’s confusing sexiness.
They followed the directions he’d given them. They took a similar, rural interstate exit, but this time there was no defunct gas station, just tall weeds. They drove numbered and then not-numbered backroads. They unfastened the chain, which was unlocked this time, just as the man had promised. Although how could the same road be here, after driving in an altogether different direction? Probably all gravel paths look the same.
Forty-five minutes of bumpy driving and there he was, waiting for them. He had no vehicle. He still wore his leather vest with no shirt beneath it, his black hat with a feather, a fresh little twig between his teeth.
He inspected the gems and gold with a loupe he took from a pouch he wore on his belt. A giant backpack rested against a nearby tree, with nets and traps hanging off every which way. Plus a crossbow.
“Surely, there’s no need for something like that,” said the husband.
The Babycatcher half-smiled, half-sneered. He pocketed his payment. He made a small motion, and his hideous, long-snouted, bristle-haired, mammary-mottled mutt bounded out of the woods, paused, dripping yellowed milk onto the leaves, snorted, and then bounded back into the woods. “This way,” the man said.
There wasn’t really a hiking path—just a series of game trails that would fade in and out of existence. They walked an hour into the woods like this, the couple struggling to keep pace.
“I told you not to wash,” the man said. He sniffed each of them.
“We didn’t. We haven’t washed since we saw you.”
“The stink of the world is still on you.” He gave them a bottle of something. Made them squirt out droplets, rub it on their skin. “Rub it all over,” he said. He motioned to their underarms, their crotches, their feet. “All over.”
At first the liquid smelled like death and decay, but that soon faded and it only smelled earthy, like rotting leaves, mushrooms, soil.
“Here,” said the Babycatcher a short while later. He crouched near a trail like all the other game trails they’d seen, inspecting something that was invisible to the couple. He summoned the balding, dripping dog. He gave it an order in a language the couple couldn’t understand. It didn’t seem to want to obey, whining, snarling. The man said his command in a harsher, almost violent tone, and the dog slunk away through the trees, back the way they’d come. “It would eat too many of them,” he explained with a shrug and a smile.
The Babycatcher set his nets. His snares. A series of them. Then he arranged the biggest one, which he carefully hid just off the trail. This one he could work with a pulley from up in a tree.
He put on spiked boots to climb into the canopy to rig his contraption. He descended partway down the tree and motioned for them to join him, and they all waited up in the branches, in extreme discomfort, backs and asses aching. The Babycatcher chewed his twig and held on to a thin rope, not much more than a string, which disappeared up into the canopy, likely connected to the pulleys and rigs and tackle that worked the biggest net down below. Watching him rig it so high up on thin limbs was like gawking at high-wire acrobatics with no safety net. Maybe that’s just what it took. Maybe it was a kind of show he put on to make them feel like he’d risked his neck to earn their fee.
They were crepuscular things. At dusk they came running down the trail. Just three at first. The Babycatcher knew they were coming. He clamped a hand over the wife’s mouth, correctly anticipating that she would gasp.
The beauty of them! Oh, perfect naked cherubs running down the trail through the trees! Their bare, fat little legs moving in such a way that it looked like they would fall and tumble. The husband reached out both arms from his perch, mentally trying to catch one should it fall. Their faces bright, eyes almost glowing with happiness! They were running fast along a rough trail, at an age when surely no regular baby could do that. The couple didn’t think about it. Later, they wouldn’t be able to remember if the woods had been filled with bright giggling, or if it was the jolly way they moved that made the human heart hear peals of baby-laughter in the silence.
The three little ones quickly disappeared into the flora. Before the couple could open their mouths, the man put his fingers to his lips. Not a minute later, the three came back. They gathered around one snare after another, poking them with little sticks, springing each trap except for the big one. They smiled gummy, toothless smiles. Some of them had hair, some were bald. All had deep dimples in their butts that made you need to pinch them. You wanted your fingers tickling them, you wanted to kiss their every chubby fold. You wanted to love and be so loved. The three ran back down the trail, going back the way they’d originally come.
The Babycatcher gave the couple a look as if to say Here they come.
A herd of babies came tumbling down the trail now. The giggles! The toothless gums! The dimples! There must’ve been fifty of them. When the path was dense and overflowing with chubby legs and bellies, the Babycatcher sprang his big net, lifting seven of them high into the air. How they cried, how they squealed! The rest of them gathered right beneath the trap, reaching up with pudgy arms and the tiniest fingers, eyes suddenly dripping tears. They screamed their little hearts out. For hours they did this, like the worst late-night colic you’ve ever seen. Babies above screaming, babies below screaming.
“Can’t we do something?” husband and wife whispered, clutching each other.
The man twirled a weighted knife in his fingers and looked down with cold eyes that quieted the couple. There was something to it. What would happen if you descended the tree into that pack? The way the Babycatcher spun his blade and shifted on his perch told the couple the cherubs below weren’t as defenseless as one might think.
Only when darkness deepened did the things on the ground run down the trail again to wherever they made their nightly nest. Who knows what kind of predators might hunt them in a forest like this? The Babycatcher descended the tree, waved the couple down the trunk after him. They hauled the net back through the woods by the faint yellow beam of a light affixed to the man’s forehead. By the time they got through to where they’d parked their car, the chubby, sobbing things were shit-smeared but still beautiful.
“Take your pick,” said the Babycatcher. For half an hour he was quiet, patient while they deliberated. “I don’t have all night,” he finally said. “Most know which one at first sight.”
It was true. They did. The one they chose—their baby, as they already thought of it—was the same one they’d both set their hearts on from the moment they’d seen it lifted from the trail hours ago. They’d already raised it up a thousand times in their minds. It had already visited at Christmas in their old age, with grandchildren in tow.
They strapped it into the car seat. They’d come prepared, they had all the equipment ready. They mixed a bottle of formula and evenly heated it in a bottle warmer plugged into the SUV’s USB drive. She sat in back while he drove. She fed it warm milk. It gulped. It slept. You could say it slept like a baby.
*
How to describe those weeks of happiness? The relief? They were tired. It ate constantly. Not only that, but it ran fast and nimble—at an age that should’ve raised eyebrows. They were happy, they told themselves, but also stressed. They were in a pickle. How to unveil a child that they didn’t have before to friends, family, and coworkers? You can’t stroll an infant that looks, say, nine to twelve months old already—and not just walking but running, running fast—down a block as if nothing has happened. How to say where they’d gotten it? They emailed the Doula to ask: What does one do—what are the next steps? She did not reply. The email bounced back. Her social media accounts and all those tens of thousands of followers she’d carefully curated over the years had vanished. She had changed one life for another. That must be the only way.
In any case, they had to sell the house. They’d been too optimistic about how to make ends meet after paying the Babycatcher’s fee, liquidating their retirement accounts, financing the second mortgage. They’d been too swept up in just getting to their goal of a baby, thinking that would be the end of it all. Now, it cried all night—a kind of cry that told them it missed its pack, missed its forest. In their new, rented, more affordable house there was no sleeping, no way to clearly crunch numbers and make things work. Parental leave wasn’t on the table. There was no doctor to sign the papers. She quit her job. He got a negative review at work. How to explain it all to someone on the outside, what their world had become?
The baby did not calm, did not acclimate. It did not grow. It bit them. It learned to open the doors—to unlock them—and would run out in the middle of the night. The husband once had to tackle it, and twisted his ankle, limped for weeks rather than see a doctor. They bought salvaged fencing with money they didn’t have and fenced their rented backyard. The baby gnawed on the wood posts. They found it eating a still-warm bird, gumming the still-warm heart of a mouse.
They didn’t regret it. The baby was theirs. Their happiness, their very own problem of their very own making. They still loved their problem with all their hearts. “Why did we need a wild one?” they whispered at night, between bouts of colic. “We should have let him train it”—they couldn’t say break, as he had—”in his corral.”
“Will he help us?”
“He’ll train it.”
“Yes, all that gold.
“Yes, all those jewels.”
But how to find your way back to the Babycatcher? They drove down rural lanes, to dirt lanes, looking for his barn and corrals. They followed the directions they’d written down from the Doula—who they couldn’t find anywhere now, not through old web pages, not through old social media pages gone inactive. Direct message after direct message unanswered. Then, the old pages disappeared, and they had to make a whole new account to see that they’d been blocked.
They woke to find the baby high in a tree branch, dismembering a squirrels’ nest. They found stray piles of guts on the doormat, on the kitchen floor, like a cat would leave. The thing left steaming innards at the foot of their bed, a whole pile—several cats’, several dogs’, several something’s worth.
As the piles of guts increased, the pets in the neighborhood decreased. Missing posters were tacked to telephone poles. It was becoming uncomfortable, the way their child looked at neighborhood children from the window. It wanted to play. This worried them deeply. It had wanted to play with the neighbor’s sock-footed cat, too, and now it was gone. They knew their child’s looks by now.
The husband woke up screaming in the middle of the night, his inner thigh bit so hard it turned black. This, even though they’d taken to locking its bedroom door from the outside. They had forgotten the attic access in the closet. There came a moment—probably before the husband dragged the child, gnawing on his gloved hand, through attic insulation—when things shifted like a plank laying across a fulcrum, weight placed on one end. Happiness went away. Sleep was all they could think about. It would be nice to have friends over, but when you locked the thing in the dryer and pushed something heavy against the door, it banged and banged and rocked the whole machine and thumped and howled.
“He never called it a baby,” they said. “He was careful not to.”
The baby itself wasn’t doing well. It had ceased smelling like cookies. Now, it smelled like whatever oily droplets the baby catcher had given to them in the woods—the way they’d smelled at first, before they mellowed into mushrooms and dirty leaves. Their child was not growing. Its plumpness was waning, its folds disappearing. Its skin looked yellow, and sometimes ashen.
*
They sat on the couch, in silence, until the Benadryl mixed into the bottle took effect and it stopped hurling itself against the closet door. As soon as it was out, they put it in a dog kennel, added a padlock, and set it in the backseat of the car. They drove.
At first they followed the grid they’d made on a map, covering two areas where they were sure they’d met up with him. They drove each row, each column. They abandoned the grid and drove in a widening concentric pattern. They abandoned and drove haphazardly. When it woke, they spiked the bottle again and let it suck through the locked gate of its cage. They slept for a few hours in the foul-smelling car. They woke early, drove all day.
They asked around. At every small-town tavern and barbershop. At little country stores in the middle of nowhere. They described him. Mostly, they got strange stares. But then, in a far-off region—had they crossed state lines?—people began to nod at them. One of the tiny towns had a grandiose name from founders’ high expectations, and it was in this village, named for some Greek or Egyptian god (Serapis, maybe? Osiris?), people knew of the Babycatcher.
“I don’t know his name,” the woman at the diner told them. Many people in many little shops told them the same. “But I know who you’re talking about.”
“Tell him we’re looking,” they said. “If you see him, tell him we’re desperate. The baby’s life is at stake.” The couple left their emails, their home address, their cell phone numbers.
The first message arrived for them at a butcher’s shop, on a small scrap of paper handed to them by the bloody-aproned man behind the counter: No refunds, it read.
They left their own note: Please just take it.
They checked at the butcher’s the next day, but there was no response. They left another note: We think it’s dying
They couldn’t find Wi-Fi or cell service, so they stopped at an ATM to check their bank balance. It was dangerously low. A bank teller from inside handed them a scrap of paper: No guarantee. No refund. No returns.
They scrawled their own note on a deposit slip: We will pay you to take it.
The local jeweler stopped them on the street as they passed his shop door. He handed them a map, drawn in what they now recognized as the Babycatcher’s spidery script.
They followed it to the familiar gravel road, where they parked and continued on foot, carrying the kennel down game trails. When they got to the X, there was another set of directions drawn on a scrap of paper nailed to a tree. They followed these new directions, down more game trails, down a tire-rutted dirt path.
They heard a motor and hid. A conservation officer in a jeep bumped slowly along the path. She wore a big Smokey the Bear hat, shotgun propped in the seat beside her. She stopped near where they crouched. She stood up and scanned the woods with binoculars. They knew what this meant. They did not move. It would be jail. The most horrible kind of jail. “But it’s not really a baby!” they would argue. “It doesn’t grow up!” Likely it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t live long enough to prove what it really was. They were sure she had seen them. They were sure she was deliberating how to apprehend them. But then the ranger drove on. Maybe she knew? Maybe once a month a couple walked through these woods with a kenneled thing (not a baby, as much as it looked like one) and there was nothing to do but let the couple leave it. Maybe she didn’t blame them, considered them victims—maybe they were like addicts, the Babycatcher like the dealer. Maybe he was the poacher, they were the prey.
In any case, the conservation officer drove on.
The couple walked through the woods with the baby in the kennel. They followed the man’s directions to where he’d drawn an X in the middle of a field, where there was a tree that had grown around and enveloped an old bicycle. Leave it was written in his strange chicken scratch on the note. In the middle of the field? They did. Next to the tree. With what little money they had in an envelope atop the cage. They waited. No one came. They couldn’t just abandon the small thing in a kennel in the field. They still had no cell service. They watched from the woods. They checked on it once, squeezed food between the bars. After that it wailed for two hours. The couple dozed like babies in the leaves—that cry, that wail, had become their sleep trigger. Months and years later, the nights would seem so quiet they couldn’t sleep.
When they woke up, dew drenched and mosquito-bitten, the kennel was gone.
__________________________________
From Lost in the Forest of Mechanical Birds by Christian Moody. Used with permission of the publisher, DZANC. Copyright © 2025 by Christian Moody.