Into the Forest

by Jean Hegland

  She has complained of feeling sick recently. She’s pale and tired and doesn’t eat much. She says she is queasy all the time. When I make mint tea for her, she smiles and claims she feels a little better.

  Maybe more time has passed than I had thought. Maybe her labor is coming soon.

  I finally made myself read through the sections in the encyclopedia about Abnormal Changes in Pregnancy and Accidents During Labor. I read about gestational diabetes, heart failure, eclampsia, epilepsy, placental cysts, placental inflammation, hydatidiform moles, toxemia, hypertension, polyhydramnios, and placenta previa, abruptio, and accreta.

  I read about premature births, breech, posterior and transverse presentations, umbilical cord accidents, cephalo-pelvic disproportion, cervical edema, posterior arrest, shoulder dystocia, uterine rupture or inversion, fetal distress, retained placenta, postpartum hemorrhage, and neonatal apnea.

  When I began, I was sitting at the table across from Eva, but after a paragraph or two, I found I had to get up and move away from her, out to the deck, where I sat in the chill dusk and read with a horrified fascination.

  I never guessed that having a baby was such a risky business. I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s like the itch of poison oak—when you try to relieve it by scratching, it only intensifies the pain.

  Last night I stacked a huge load of firewood just outside the door and made a little nest for a newborn out of blankets and a dresser drawer. Then, in a desperate attempt to prepare myself to be an obstetrician, I tackled the encyclopedia once again. I was skimming past the drawings of female reproductive organs, past sections with titles like Anatomic and Physiologic Changes in Non-reproductive Organs and Tissues During Pregnancy, when the word anemia snagged my eye: If fatigue and nausea are present in the second or third trimester, anemia may be suspect; however, only a hematocrit can ascertain the type and severity of an iron deficiency. The parturient individual suffering from anemia has a much increased risk of labor difficulties, as well as postpartum hemorrhage. In addition, macrocytic anemia, caused by a lack of adequate B-12 in the diet, is associated with brain and nerve damage in the neonate. However, since B-12 exists in adequate quantities in almost all dairy and animal products, this type of anemia is typically a threat only to strict vegetarians.

  I felt the same sort of satisfaction I used to know when I pressed the final piece of a puzzle into place—we haven’t eaten meat since we finished the last can of tuna fish sometime last winter, haven’t even had eggs for almost a month. And Eva is nauseous, pale, and listless.

  Labor difficulties. Postpartum hemorrhage. Brain and nerve damage in the neonate. If I had to, I could kill Bathsheba or Pinkie. But they seem like friends after all this time, and anyway, how much B-12 would one old hen contain?

  Both feral hogs and wild boars belong to the species Sus scrofa, which evolved in India some thirty million years ago. Although Columbus brought swine with him on his second voyage in 1493, it was really the conquistadors who were responsible for introducing boars to the New World. When domesticated Spanish pigs escaped into the American wilderness, they adapted rapidly to their new environmerit,losing, within a few generations, their barnyard features, and reverting to the erect ears, long snout, straight tail, broad shoulders, and prominent tusks of their wild ancestors.

  Wild boars are quite fierce, although they seem to enjoy contact with their own kind. They are intelligent, have a keen sense of both smell and hearing, and are remarkably swift of foot. Wild boars are omnivorous and consume a large variety of plant materials, although they have been also known to eat snails, snakes, mice, insects, eggs, and carrion, as well as certain types of soil and rock from which they obtain minerals and other nutrients.

  There would be a lot of meat on a wild pig—much more than on a black-tailed deer. Smoked—or dried in the last of the autumn sun—a boar could last us a long time. Besides, there’s not much to love about a pig—they’re ugly and tough, rooting up bulbs and making muckholes in the creeks. It wouldn’t be like killing a deer, with its soft eyes and dancer’s legs.

  I think I could kill a pig.

  I think I have to try.

  Killing a wild boar is harder than it sounds.

  I guess I had thought that once I resolved to do it, I could just pick up the rifle I’ve never used on anything but pickle jars, go for a little walk, and shoot the nice, obliging piggy that was waiting for me by the side of the road. But all day I wandered through the forest, nervous and jumpy, seeing nothing but sparrows and squirrels. The gun awkward on my shoulder, I scrambled up and down the steep hills, breaking my way through the tangle of trees, looking for the pigs who entered these woods with the first Europeans. I followed the narrow grooves of animal trails and found nothing but more trees.

  Finally I sat down just where I was—halfway up another hill—sat on the earth with my gun by my side, surrounded by a tight weave of light-starved trees, and tried to think like a hunter, tried to think like a pig. I sat a long time, watching patches of light open and fade on the leaf-littered floor, listening to the sound of a distant woodpecker.

  I wanted to get up, to go home. I thought, I can’t do this. But a kind of inertia kept me sitting. Finally I rose, climbed up the hill and past our stump to the little creek. I hiked upstream until I came to the wallow I thought I had remembered there. It was a hole large as an old-fashioned bathtub, its black muck churned with the cloven prints of pigs’ feet.

  I hid above it in a thicket of hazelnut bushes until the light began to fade, but nothing came except a late hatch of mosquitoes.

  The next day I went back before sunrise. In the dim first light, I hid again among the hazelnut bushes, determined to wait for a pig. I crouched there until noon, till my fidgets had come and gone and come again like a fever that rises and falls and returns, until the juncos were confident enough to go about their business at my feet. Once I heard a distant crashing. Adrenaline jagged through my stomach and brain, but nothing else happened. The crashing veered off and faded away. I sat until my butt ached and my back was stiff and my legs screamed, but nothing came.

  “Maybe they’re nocturnal,” Eva said at supper.

  “I don’t know. The encyclopedia doesn’t say.”

  “Why don’t you give up?” she asked listlessly. “We’ve got plenty of other food.” She poked at her stewed pumpkin and tomato slices and applesauce while I ate. Finally she pushed her plate towards me, asking, “Do you want this? I’m feeling a little queasy.”

  I thought, Labor difficulties. Postpartum hemorrhage. Brain and nerve damage in the neonate.

  I said, “Maybe they smell me.”

  The next morning I hiked up to the wallow carrying the tee shirt in which I had been sleeping. It was one of my father’s, worn shapeless and soft from years of use, and it reeked pleasantly of my own night smells. I spread it carefully on the mud of the wallow, and I came away.

  A day later, it still lay stretched and flat across the mud, though brown water had seeped into the fabric, leaching across it like patches of mold. I stared at it for a moment before I turned and left, a harsh sense of failure biting into me.

  When I reached the wallow the morning after that, I was so prepared for more disappointment that at first I thought the shirt had simply vanished. But then I noticed a clot of cloth trampled into the mud. For a second it was a shock, a tiny violation, to see my father’s shirt—the shirt I had worn as I slept—torn and filthy and wadded in the muck, but a moment later I felt an elation so fierce I had to restrain myself from shouting. Instead, I unbuttoned my threadbare jeans, took off my ragged underpants, and laid them on the mud. Then I squatted and peed and went back home.

  The following morning my underpants were churned into the wallow.

  “I’m going to take a nap,” I told Eva when I got home.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Yes. I just need to rest. I’m going to climb a tree by the wallow tonight and wait for them.”

  “At n
ight?”

  “Sure,” I shrugged, saying it before I could think about it. “Why not? The moon’s full,” I added, as much for my benefit as for my sister’s. “I’ll be fine.”

  I set off just before dusk. In the pack on my back I carried our father’s whetstone, the boning knife from our mother’s kitchen set, the hatchet, and a bottle of water. My jacket pockets were bulging with dried apple slices and bullets. The rifle felt companionable on my shoulder as I climbed up through the cooling woods, past the hulk of the stump with its trove of food, and along the streambed until, just as dark was falling, I reached the wallow.

  I looked around for something to climb, but none of the trees had branches I could reach. The trees closest to the wallow were the tanbark oaks that grow on these crowded hillsides, tall, slender, and almost branchless until they reach the forest canopy. Beyond them were redwoods whose lowest branches were thirty feet above my head.

  Slowly I circled between their trunks, thinking, Well, I tried. It’s not my fault there were no trees I could climb. It’s not my fault Eva’s pregnant. She probably doesn’t have anemia, anyway. I’m just being paranoid. Her labor will go fine. The baby’s probably fine. Or if it isn’t, it isn’t. It’s too late to fix it now.

  Light was failing quickly, and perhaps the thought of trying to make it back home in the dark kept me where I was. I didn’t want to spend the night on the ground, so finally I tackled the most promising tree I could find—an oak that grew uphill of the stream and curved back over the wallow. I slung the rifle alongside my pack and set my hands on either side of the oak’s trunk. It felt chilly, damp, and raw. It was surprisingly solid.

  I heaved myself up. The first branches were little more than twigs that snapped in my hands as I tried to hold them. But I was able to reach one sturdy enough to act as a ballast. I grasped it and pulled myself higher, the gun barrel bumping my cheek. Finally I reached a branch thick enough to hold my weight. I clambered onto it, straddling it as though it were a horse. I was higher up than I would have liked, and skewed to the wrong side of the tree, so that I had to lean out and twist my shoulders to face the wallow directly. But it was too late to try anything else.

  Clinging to the trunk, I wiggled until I had the gun off my shoulder and cradled in my lap. I loaded it, triple-checked the safety, worked out a way of bracing my elbow and shoulder against the branch I was perched on, and then practiced sighting down at the wallow. When it got too dark to see my imaginary target, I wedged the rifle between me and the tree and reached in my pocket for a slice of dried apple.

  The last light fell. I was alone in the dark with a mouthful of apple pulp, perched in an oak tree above a muddy hole in the middle of a forest whose edges I no longer knew, with all the night pressing down on my shoulders. Above me there was a dark web of branches, and beyond that I could see a few specks of starlight. I felt a tickling on my shin and reached down to slap at it, trying not to think what it might be. The forest floor had vanished. I clung to the smooth, cool body of the oak and waited for the moon to rise above the tree tops.

  It seemed to take forever. I hung in the darkness a long time, listening to the weary chirping of a few final crickets, stiffening at the occasional scuffling beneath me, brushing at real or imaginary spiders. My legs began to grow numb, and I started to worry that the pigs might come and leave before the moon would let me see them. Then I became afraid the moon wouldn’t rise at all. Maybe I had been confused about what phase it was—or maybe there was an eclipse. Perhaps the moon had disappeared.

  Eventually the shadows began to deepen. At first I thought my eyes were just inventing something to look at, or that they were only adjusting to the night, but finally I was sure it was the moon coming after all.

  A full moon is much dimmer in the middle of a forest than in a clearing. Cool and imperturbable, the light it cast was broken by the ceiling of trees so that it fell in silvery patches, leaving the shadows thick and black.

  I slipped my hand into my pocket for another slice of apple. I tried to shift my weight off my thighs, tried to shrug the pack into an easier position, tried to lean against the branch that cradled me, twisting and shifting until I was momentarily almost comfortable. I watched the moon ease itself into an open circle of sky, and, to pass the time, I tried to review everything I had learned about it. I remembered that the moon orbits the Earth at an average distance of 238,000 miles, that its surface area is about the same as that of North and South America, that the basalts in the Sea of Tranquillity are 3.7 billion years old.

  But I have learned something the encyclopedia doesn’t know—if the moon is waxing, you can reach up and cradle its outer curve in the palm of your right hand. If it is waning, it will fit into your left palm.

  A little wind shivered through the leaves. Rock-a-bye baby, a voice in my head sang. In the treetop.

  When the wind blows, the cradle will rock.

  When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,

  and down will come baby, cradle, and all.

  I uncurled my fingers from the gun and dug in my pocket for another slice of apple. My legs ached, and I tried to remind myself what I was doing, clinging to a tree in the middle of the night. I remembered my sister and the baby she would be having. I realized I always thought of it as a girl, and tonight I felt certain my intuition was right. I knew Eva was carrying a daughter, and I was even beginning to feel a grudging fondness for that little girl who will so complicate our lives. I imagined that she would be a composite of my sister, my mother, and myself. We would name her for her grandmother, I thought, and once again a Gloria would inhabit our lives.

  I imagined the stories I would tell her about the way things used to be, when lights could be switched on at midnight, when there were boxes that made music and washed clothes and cooked food, when people could travel while sitting down. I imagined the games we would make of gathering acorns, digging potatoes, planting seeds. I imagined showing her wildflowers and herbs, and which hand holds the waxing moon.

  Eva would teach her to dance, I thought, and I would teach her to read and write, and as I clutched the oak and planned my niece’s future, it seemed I could feel generations of women receding behind us and stretching out ahead. I felt a connection with both my fore-mothers and with the future, and I knew—despite all odds—the bone-deep satisfaction of continuance.

  Gradually the crickets ceased their song. The moon hung above the trees, a serene circle it would take both hands to cup. While it was overhead, I could see the wallow clearly, and I held my breath and tried to send a silent plea for the pigs to come. Once I heard a crashing in the woods behind me, but I didn’t dare turn around, and the sound never came closer. Once I was startled to see a dark shape standing at the edge of the stream. An equal mixture of excitement and dread stirred in my veins. I was trying to silently ease the gun to my shoulder when I realized that something was wrong. The creature was too small, its tail too long. While I hesitated, it moved out into a patch of moonlight, and I saw the white stripe.

  “We don’t want skunk,” I whispered.

  Hour after hour I dozed and fidgeted. My legs hurt, my thighs cramped, my back and hands grew stiff, and nothing happened. The moon inched along the sky and vanished in a maze of branches. After that I sat in darkness, hugging the tree, hugging the gun, dumbly waiting for morning. I felt the dew, gentle and cold, condensing on my cheeks and hair and hands and along the barrel of the gun, and then slowly light began to reappear, slowly shape and color returned to the forest.

  Shivering and aching, I watched the dawning and felt a sort of guilty relief—I had tried my best, but the pigs were smarter. As soon as it gets just a little lighter, I thought, I can go home to bed, can sleep all morning, and work in the garden this afternoon. I’ve done all I could. It wasn’t my fault the pigs didn’t come.

  Then they came. They were quieter than I had expected. Always before when I heard them, they were startled and racing away. But now they came in their own time, came t
o drink after a night of foraging, came down to wallow before their day’s rest, and the noise of their coming was little more than a few cracking twigs and gentle grunts.

  There were three of them, one slightly larger than the other two. I had been afraid my scent would warn them away, but the wind must have favored me or maybe my smell was familiar to them, because they gave my underpants a cursory sniff and then snorted, walked on. They drank from the pool where the skunk had drunk. The forest grew lighter. I could make out the leaves on the trees across the wallow.

  I held my breath, watching them, those monstrous, ancient creatures, blunt and—in this moment—startlingly beautiful. I could see their stiff backs, could see their pointed ears and straight black tails. I heard them muttering together in the mud below me, and I felt honored to see them like that, relaxed and naked and unaware of my presence.

  I remembered I was supposed to kill one of them.

  Just to see what it would be like, I eased the gun to my shoulder. Without breathing, I twisted around and positioned myself in the oak, one elbow braced against the branch, my stiff knees clinging like barnacles to the trunk. While I tried to find the pigs in the sights of the rifle, they wove around each other in a tender dance, snuffling and nuzzling. They like each other, I realized. And then it came to me, more immediate, more visceral than thought—It’s a mother and two sisters.

  That idea sent me reeling, and for an instant I was afraid I would tumble from my tree, would land in the wallow in their midst, where they would trample and tear me as they had trampled and torn my clothes. But I hung on, forced myself to think of Eva and her daughter.