No travel brochure could have painted a more beautiful picture of New York State’s finger lakes. The October foliage was spectacular under a bright blue sky, a brilliant blend of reds and golds, broken up here and there by stands of evergreen trees The Robinsons, Kate and Brad, were enjoying the day, pleased with themselves that they had decided to take a drive and visit several of the area’s wineries.

Their last stop of the day had been for a wine tasting at the Random Harvest Vineyards on a hill high above Crooked Lake. While Kate was a devotee of Chardonnay, she had read somewhere that the region’s best wines were Reislings. So they had dutifully sampled what Random Harvest had to offer, both dry and semi-dry, and concluded that praise for the Reislings was amply justified. When they climbed into their car and headed home, a case of dry Reisling accompanied them in the trunk.

The road they were taking wound through acres and acres of vineyards. It was the middle of the grape harvest season, and many of these vineyards were filled with pickers. In some places, the pickers were human, small figures that stretched out into the distance as far as the eye could see. In other places, the pickers were mechanical harvesters, their paddles dislodging the grapes and collecting them in holding bins. Brad, who had never observed the process, found it fascinating and drove slowly along the upper lake road the better to watch it.

“It’s a wonder the birds don’t beat the pickers to the grapes,” he said to his wife.

“Maybe they would if it weren’t for those things,” Kate said, pointing to small, balloon-like objects which were attached to poles from place to place in the vineyards and seemed to be dancing around in the afternoon breeze.

“They must be some sort of newfangled scarecrows.” Brad slowed down to get a better look at the balloons.

“Hey,” he said, bringing the car to a stop on the shoulder. “There’s a real scarecrow. The old-fashioned kind. See it? Down the hill there to the right.”

It soon became apparent that whoever owned the vineyard had erected a variety of objects to keep the birds from the grapes. Some were no more substantial than old tattered shirts. But the one to which Brad Robinson was pointing looked surprisingly human.

“Somebody sure went to a lot of trouble fixing that one up,” he said. “I think I’d like to go down there and get a picture of it.”

His wife didn’t think this was a very good idea.

“Let’s not do that,” she said. “I don’t imagine they want people tromping around in their vineyards.”

“It’s not a big deal, Kate. Can’t be more than sixty, seventy yards down the hill. It’ll only take a few minutes. Just hand me my camera.”

Dismissing his wife’s worry that he might be trespassing, Brad left the car and, finding a path where there were no posts and wires, worked his way down the hill toward the scarecrow.

A cool autumn wind brushed across his face, and the view across the lake was even more impressive than it had been from the road. It was, he thought, a great day to be alive.

The scarecrow was now off to his left, perhaps twenty or thirty feet away, standing between two rows of vines loaded with grapes. It had obviously done the job for which it had been created. The birds had not gotten to these grapes.

Brad was about a dozen feet from it when he first realized that this was no ordinary scarecrow. It stood against a tall post, its arms stretched out at right angles to the body and lashed to a wooden cross bar. The effect was that of a crucifixion. Brad was momentarily reminded of the many depictions of Jesus on the cross he had witnessed over many years in the church. But the scarecrow did not resemble the Biblical Jesus. It looked more like scarecrows he remembered from Halloweens past. It was dressed in a pair of blue jeans, a dark blue work shirt, and a straw hat. The face beneath the hat did not, however, look at all like the familiar straw-filled sack with crudely painted eyes. What it resembled was a human head, and it took Brad only a few more steps to confirm that what he was looking at was indeed a human head.

The scarecrow in the vineyard was not some hastily assembled dummy whose sole function was to keep the crows away. It was a dead man. A dead man who in all probability had never imagined that he would end his life as a scarecrow in a vineyard high above Crooked Lake.