NOW
I took my rod and stepped into the cold river. I wore jeans, my wool jacket and Diana’s hip waders. Mark had been gone for two days, and this morning Diana found blood in her underwear. Angela said that spotting was normal during the first trimester of pregnancy and that rest was her best option. Diana said rest was no option when starvation was hard on our heels and insisted on going out to hunt. I said I would fish.
The breeze hushed through the trees and water tumbled over and around the boulders in the river. I walked downstream to a deep spot near an overhanging rock where I’d had success before, although Diana had said the water was almost too cold to fish anymore. I chose a fly I thought would work and cast my line over the slow-moving water; then I watched the drift. Nothing. I cast again and again. It was like meditation.
Somewhere nearby, a hermit thrush sang its “oh holy holy ah” refrain. The sun slanted rays through the spruce branches as if Mother Nature were posing for a calendar photo. Twenty minutes later, I caught a nice grayling. I thought how it would make a good soup and said a silent thank-you, clubbed it over the head, strung it on a line and staked it in the water.
I still wondered why Mark had chosen to keep Rudy hidden from me. He would have known that I wouldn’t have objected to his having had a child before he met me or to his sending money to the boy when he could. I think it was more his need to control his narrative, to write our lives the way he wanted them to be. When I looked back, I realized that all our big decisions had been made by him and that I had always played the role of a good wife by going along with whatever he said. I was so worried I’d lose him.
Maybe that Kai Huang guy had been right about needing to free yourself from the thing that’s most precious to you.
A raven flapped overhead and I moved a few yards downriver to a spot that felt promising. I’m not sure how much later it was—I’d caught another grayling and staked it with the other—when I saw movement on the opposite bank. I squinted into the trees and saw a flash of brown just before everything fell silent. A moment later, the grizzly came out of the brush above a rock face that sloped into the water. He was huge, filled with a menacing power that seeped from strong muscle and thick bone. My heart thumped and I stilled, hoping he wouldn’t notice me. He stopped, sniffed the air and then started down the rocky slope to the river as easily as if he were stepping off a front porch. We were about fifty yards apart—a distance, according to Diana, a brown bear could cover in a few seconds. I took a step backward.
I reached for the bear spray I usually had on my belt, but remembered too late that I’d left it behind when I grabbed my fishing gear from the container. I could picture it sitting on the floor where I’d set it down to sort through the fly box. I cursed my stupidity and continued to move backward slowly, keeping my eye on the bear.
Fear fluttered like a small bird in my chest.
The bear waded into the water.
I thought of the graylings I’d caught and the fact that I probably reeked of fish, and I quelled the urge to run—Diana had said that running was the worst thing you could do with a bear. I set down my pole and again backed up slowly, trying not to trip or move too fast, one foot behind the other.
The grizzly’s eyes were dark, like death.
I knew the bear’s path and mine would intersect if I tried to get to the willow trail to the cabin, so I edged backward down the narrow beach, feeling for obstacles with my feet and hoping I didn’t fall. There was a sharp bend in the river ten or twelve yards downstream and I thought if I could just get around it, I might be OK.
The bear was halfway across the river, swimming now. His gaze seemed to laser in on me.
I knew it was my imagination but it seemed like he was taking my measure. How easy would I be to kill? Would doing so be worth the effort?
I readied myself as I moved backward, keeping my eyes on the animal.
Water dripped from his fur as he came out of the stream. He sniffed the pole I’d left behind.
Take the fish, I urged silently. Forget about me.
I stepped backward. This time, however, my foot disturbed a smooth, melon-sized rock, causing a loud clack. I hissed in a breath.
The bear’s head rose.
I stopped dead. A chill ran down my spine.
There was a moment when it seemed as if the world had narrowed to only this moment, this place.
“Please,” I whispered. I wasn’t sure whom I was talking to. God? The universe? The bear?
I waited. So did the bear.
Finally, his head dipped and he padded toward the fish I’d staked in the stream.
I turned and began to walk toward the bend in the river, moving quickly but not running, looking over my shoulder every few seconds. One of the fish was in the bear’s mouth and he was pawing at the stake as he tore it from the line.
The bend was six feet away, then four, then two. I rounded it and scrambled over the broken rocks and driftwood logs scattered along the shore. A few yards farther, a huge slab of dark stone dropped steeply into the water and blocked my way. I climbed up the embankment into the woods instead.
I sensed a presence behind me and the hairs on my neck prickled. Panic took over now and I began to run. Twigs cracked under the waders that covered my feet and branches tore at my hair.
The ground rose upward and I clambered over trees that had fallen in the storm; then I detoured around a stream gully and headed in the direction I thought was home. I heard a branch snap behind me and stumbled forward through stabbing branches and whipping brush. The ground rose more steeply now. My foot slipped and I felt the sharp tug of a ligament in the knee I’d hurt before. Sweat dripped into my eyes. Finally, I had to stop.
There was nothing except my breath and a thick silence that filled my ears. I looked up. And realized I was lost.
I turned in a slow circle, seeing nothing but slanting hillside and dark forest, and I cursed myself for forgetting the bear spray and for running off like a crazy woman. I searched for a glimpse of something familiar: the peak that looked like a Shriner’s hat, the meadow. There was nothing but choking brush and trees. I wished for a machete, then thought that if I was making wishes, I should wish for something better: a helicopter to haul me out of there; a hunter with an ATV who would drive me to the cabin and then maybe help Xander and me escape. My throat was dry. A blister was forming on my heel.
I thought of the stories of people who’d set off on a day hike in places like the Grand Canyon or Glacier National Park and hadn’t come back, and of the ranger in Arizona who, after heading out on a trail in the park where he worked, had never been seen again. I thought of Xander growing up without me. In this place.
I shoved back the sob that rose from my chest. I would not cry. Crying helped exactly nothing.
Moss wrapped the tree trunks in cloaks of green. The dirt was rich and fertile-looking, fed by death. Everything—animals and plants—dying and decomposing over the ages so that others could live. The more time I spent in the wilderness, the more I saw that life required death. Was that how I would end up: food for mushrooms, for scarlet paintbrush?
I took deep lungsful of air. Somewhere above me a woodpecker hammered out a staccato beat. I looked up and found him three-quarters of the way up a lightning-struck spruce; he was a handsome brown bird with a black collar. His insistent knocks felt like some kind of message, nature’s Morse code. Even a small bird has power, it seemed to say.
I watched his pecking and told myself not to give up, to toughen my resolve just the way he was doing against that hard tower of wood. I heaved another breath and stumbled forward up the forested hillside; the waders were damp with my sweat. Finally, the woods seemed to open and I felt a slight breeze. Ahead of me, at the very top of the hill, was a clearing with a huge, thick-trunked spruce in the middle of it and there, nailed high on the tree’s side, was a faded orange-and-black metal sign. The first indication of civilization. I hurried toward it.
Attention, it read. To willfully destroy, deface, change or remove any Government Survey Corner or Monument or to willfully cut down this Witness Tree marking the line of a Government Survey is punishable by a Fine of $250.00 or Six Months’ Imprisonment or both.
The threat and capitalizations seemed oddly old-fashioned and yet welcome, because apparently they had deterred anyone from messing around with what was going to save my life. For there, in the right corner of the sign, the date “7/21/72” had been scratched and, on the left side, the single word “south.”
Relief bubbled up inside me. Alvin’s land was laid out like a tilted rectangle with its shortest side abutting national park land. I’d studied the parcel before I set out for Alaska, and knew all I had to do was walk north and I would find the cabin.
The tree might have borne witness to winds and time and boundaries but it was now a witness to my survival.
I leaned my forehead against its rough bark.
A breeze rustled the spruce and I straightened. Something bright was in the branches. I stepped closer, my tired legs stumbling over the uneven ground, my knee reminding me again of the twist I’d given it. Hanging from a branch was a Saint Christopher medal on a tarnished silver chain. Beyond it was a fire ring made out of blackened stones with a larger rock set nearby on which someone could sit to warm themselves.
I wondered why the medal was in the tree and who had left it. Some wanderer like the guy who had died in that old school bus up north? A hunter who’d camped here and forgotten it? The fire ring looked old. I didn’t spend too much time thinking about it. I hurried north, past the circle of stones, and came to the edge of a steep hillside. Below me in the distance was the cabin. A thin ribbon of gray smoke curled from the chimney and dissipated quickly in the wind. Laundry flapped on the line. I looked toward the river and realized I’d run in a great sweeping circle and that if, instead of climbing, I’d stayed along flatter ground, I would have arrived at the cabin.
A faint zigzag trail led down the hillside to my left and I followed it until it joined another trail that then branched into a larger track that I realized ran from the meadow to the cabin. I hurried in that direction.
I wasn’t going to tell anyone about what had happened. However, Diana found my gear by the water when she came back from her hunt, and when I explained the reason at dinner that night, she said, “You may have been lucky but you were still a fool.”
Angela said, “That’s not nice, Diana.”
“Neither is dying,” Diana snapped, and stood. “I’m going to bed.”
The next day I found a small tarnished brass compass in my jacket pocket. I wondered if that was her way of apologizing.