Keen

keen
verb, intransitive. To wail in grief for a dead person; to sing a keen. To make an eerie wailing sound.
Also a noun and adjective.

Lisa pulled her socks snug before she put on her rubber chore boots. She knew she was going to enter the woods and wanted plenty of protection for her legs and feet. After zipping her jacket, she picked up the night-vision scope and exited the house.

They had noticed the marker two days ago when they drove up the road toward home: a row of five empty glass bottles, half-sunk in the dirt just beyond the ditch. The following day, Jim had seen three men in the woods adjacent to the bottle landmark, studying the ground and obviously looking for something. He and Lisa had determined that soon, the men would return after dark to dig up whatever they were searching for. She wanted to spy on them, if they did. Hence, her rising at two in the morning and preparing for this nocturnal excursion.

She had never used the night-vision scope before. It was a monocular about the size and weight of a pair of binoculars. She experimented with it as she trudged up the dirt road, accompanied by the two dogs. When she turned on the infrared beam, both dogs stopped in their tracks and turned to look at her. "Interesting," she thought. She had not known dogs could see infrared light. She turned the beam off so it wouldn't betray her presence.

Lisa estimated that the distance to the bottles was about three-quarters of a mile. She reached the T-intersection of the road she lived on and turned right onto the more-heavily-traveled gravel road. An unexpected sound stopped her. She wasn't sure what it had been, and lowered the scope to better concentrate on what she was hearing. For a moment all was silent, then the noise recurred: a car's tires, crunching gravel underneath. "Rats," she thought. "Someone's coming up the road."

The last thing she wanted was to be seen by one of their neighbors, out at two o'clock in the morning with a night scope. How could she explain it? "I'm just going down to the drug-dealers' meeting spot, or their money drop, so I can watch them, if they happen to be there." It sounded utterly foolish, even though it had seemed a good idea before she had left the house.

She plunged into the woods and fought her way through the undergrowth until she was several yards from the road. She kept her back toward it so the car's headlights wouldn't reflect off her glasses and betray her presence. She waited until the car had sped past, reviewing her options. If there was one car, there might be more. Whoever it was hadn't slowed or stopped at the bottle landmark. The men who had placed it could return while she was on the road, and how did she know they didn't have night-vision scopes themselves? She was on a fool's errand.

She struggled back to the road and turned toward home, listening to every noise now, in case another car approached. Suddenly, a coyote keened, somewhere nearby. She froze and looked for her dogs. They were nowhere to be seen! "Thanks, guys," she muttered aloud. "I thought you were supposed to protect me." Scanning the dark landscape around her with her scope, she sped up, hurrying toward the lights and safety of her house.

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.