by Karen Dionne
Rachel
I have to go back into the forest. It’s not a want, it’s a need. I need to go outside, breathe the air, feel the quiet, smell the soil, reconnect with the person I used to be. Now that I know I was in the forest the last time I shot my rifle, I am absolutely convinced that returning is the only way I will get my memories back—all my memories of that terrible day: what I did, what I saw, how I survived the following two weeks. I’ve lived with this gap in my memory for too many years, telling myself it was okay, and that this was as complete as I was going to be. Never suspecting that the thing by which I had always defined myself might not be as I thought.
I am standing over my mother with the rifle.
The M.E. ruled the daughter did not fire the rifle.
The forest will tell me which is true.
I check to make sure that Diana and Charlotte are still in their studios, then stash my suitcase and duffel bag under the bed and shut my bedroom door and go downstairs to the mudroom for a pair of boots and a warmer coat. The day might look sunny and inviting, but until all the snow has melted and the frost comes out of the ground and the ice in our lake is gone, the air will never truly get warm. My parents used to joke that living in the Upper Peninsula was like living in a freezer.
I pick out a tan canvas Carhartt jacket that reminds me of my father’s (and might well have been, it occurs to me as I put it on), add a thick woolen scarf, warm Sorel boots, and stick a pair of mittens in my pocket just in case. The room is so full of outerwear, if Diana or Charlotte comes back while I’m out, I doubt they’ll notice that anything is missing. At any rate, I’m not going to be gone long. All I want to do is hike out to my mother’s old observation blind, find a dry place to sit, listen to the forest, and wait for my memories to come back. Maybe have a chat with a bird or an insect if any happen to be around.
I sneak out the front door and detour through the woods so I can keep out of sight of the barn until I come to our access road. Every step brings back memories—happy memories from before my life fell apart. This is the time of year when my father used to set up his sugar bush. I loved tagging along when he went out to tap our maple trees and collect their sap. That this thin, colorless, and nearly tasteless liquid could be boiled down into the sweetest and most flavorful sugar imaginable always seemed like a miracle to me. I used to wonder about the Native American who discovered this amazing treat. I imagined him chopping down a maple in the early spring for firewood, though the wood would have been very green and hard to burn. He noticed the sap welling up from the stump, tasted it, and lacking water to make tea because there was no lake or stream nearby, he collected the sap and put it in a pot and put the pot on a fire to heat. Then he got distracted by something—say, a rabbit hopping by or a duck flying overhead—and forgot all about his tea as he went off to chase it. By the time he came back, the sap in the pot had boiled away and turned to sugar, and voilà—a new Native American food staple was born. My father laughed when I told him my maple syrup origin story and said he wouldn’t be surprised if one day I became a famous writer.
This is also the time of year when my mother and I used to gather up our rucksacks and her radio antenna and hike out to see how our bears had fared over the winter. A person who didn’t know better might think that bears can’t come to any harm while they’re asleep in their dens, but this isn’t always the case. One year when the temperature hovered for weeks near freezing, and the melt-and-thaw cycle that softened the snow during the day and refroze it at night coated the snow cover with a thick layer of ice, three of our bears suffocated in their dens. My mother used to quiz me on the names of the plants we passed while we walked to and from her observation blind, praising me when I got them right and promising that one day, I was going to become an accomplished scientist. Sagebrush lichen. Fairy cup lichen. Devil’s matchstick. Cushion moss. Rock cap moss. I even remember a few of their Latin names: Athyrium filix-femina, or lady fern; Dryopteris marginalis (marginal wood fern); and Cyrtomium fortunei, or holly fern, so named because the fronds are as dark as holly leaves (Ilex opaca). My father knew some of the names, but not nearly as many as my mother. Diana knew hardly any because she always said that plants were stupid.
Not all my memories are pleasant. There was the time I picked a handful of poison sumac berries along with regular sumac to make the refreshing summer drink my family enjoyed and everyone except Diana got violently ill because she was the only one who didn’t drink it; ditto for the Amanita muscaria mushroom I sampled on one of my solitary rambles because I saw a fox nibbling it and I thought that meant it would be safe to eat. It turns out Amanita muscaria can be eaten by humans, but you have to know how to prepare them; I did not.
The only memory I can’t seem to call up is where the trail to my mother’s observation blind branches off from the access road. The vegetation has grown so tall during the years that I was away, I have to double back twice before I find it. This path was originally a game trail that my mother improved by placing boards over a small stream and laying down cedar logs in the boggy places topped with gravel. If I’m lucky, her improvements are still here. If not, well, this is why I’m wearing boots.
A chickadee calls, a clear, two-note mating call instead of its usual chick-a-dee-dee-dee chatter. I search the trees until I find both it and its intended. It pleases me that I haven’t forgotten how to read the forest. The play of light and shadow on the forest floor tells me what time it is; the diminishing piles of crystalized snow on the north side of the rocks and trees tell me direction. The moss and lichens growing in the tree stumps reveal the forest’s history; how long it’s been since the tree fell, and whether the tree was broken off in a windstorm or died of old age.
Then I come to the clearing where my mother’s observation blind used to be, and my good mood vanishes. The blind is gone. I didn’t expect to find it in good repair, but if I hadn’t known what this pile of sticks and scraps of milled lumber used to be, I never would have guessed that they were once an important part of my life. I poke at the pile with my foot. Seeing the physical remains of my mother’s life’s work in disrepair saddens me more than I can say. She should be inside this blind right now, making notes and collecting data, not lying in a pine box in our family cemetery. No matter what happens going forward, the past can never be set right. Even if it turns out I didn’t kill my mother and I take up her research on her behalf, her study will be missing fifteen years’ worth of data.
I sit down on a fallen log to clear my mind and settle my heart and wait for the forest to speak. Tiny voices: the shush of the wind in the pines, a thunk as a pine cone hits the leaf litter on the forest floor, the scrabble of a squirrel’s claws against the tree’s bark, a scurrying in the leaves at my feet that could be a mouse or a shrew. Larger sounds: the caw of a newly returned crow (only the ravens remain for the winter), the whump-swoosh of its wings as it flies over my head, a crashing through the brush that could be a deer. I unzip my coat, stuff my mittens in my pockets, and run my fingers over the deep claw marks on either side of the log I am sitting on. The claw marks tell me that this was one of my mother’s bait trees. I loved watching our bears come to feed. It didn’t matter how high she hung the meat scraps or how securely she fastened them to the bait trees; one swipe from those giant paws and the meat was gone.
I fed White Bear a piece of bacon in this clearing once, though my mother didn’t know and wouldn’t have approved if she had. She always said that a good researcher only looked and never touched, and while I understood the reason for her rule, I didn’t always do what my mother told me. Most of the time, I only stuck my fingers through the gaps in the observation blind when she wasn’t looking and petted whatever parts of White Bear that I could reach. But on this day, Diana and I had come out to the observation blind while our parents were away because Diana was bored and wanted to play Snow White and Rose Red, a fairy tale about two sisters who make friends with a big brown bear who turns out to be a prin
ce. We brought a chunk of bacon to coax in any bears who happened to be around, but before we had a chance to hang it, White Bear came along. Knowing what I do now about a bear’s sense of smell, I’m sure he was drawn in by our bacon, but at the time, his showing up exactly when I wanted him to seemed as though it had happened by magic.
We scrambled inside the observation blind and watched him while he stayed near the tree line and watched us back. By this time White Bear was a beautiful five-year-old, the same age that I was at the time, and while he hadn’t yet matured to his full height and weight (the largest black bear on record in the Upper Peninsula was seven feet tall and weighed one thousand pounds), he probably weighed at least four hundred.
Diana said that in order to make friends with the bear as the sisters do in the fairy tale, I should feed White Bear a piece of bacon. I took the piece she gave me and pushed aside the canvas flap that covered the opening and went out. White Bear chuffed a hello. I chuffed a greeting back and kept walking. When I’d covered half the distance between us, I tore the bacon in two and put one piece on the ground. I could tell that White Bear was nervous because he swung his head from side to side and grunted. But the pull of the bacon was strong, and I was a patient child, and eventually he lumbered over and picked up the bacon and swallowed it in a single gulp.
I held out the second piece. He took a step back and shook his head and grunted again. A person who didn’t know otherwise might have thought that he was refusing to eat it, but I knew he was only trying to make up his mind.
“It’s okay,” I told him. “I won’t hurt you.”
At last he opened his mouth and took the bacon from my fingers so gently that I barely felt it; just a slight tug and his warm, bacony breath on my hand. He gulped it down and lifted his nose and sniffed the air looking for more. I held out my hands to show him that they were empty, and he licked the grease off my palms. His tongue was raspy and soft. When my hands were clean, I dried them on my pants and put one hand on his head and scratched him behind his ear. I think my sister was impressed.
I stand up and stretch and look around the clearing where I spent so many happy hours. On the other side of the log is a set of bear tracks—fresh ones, made by an adult, probably a male judging by the spacing and the depth. My pulse quickens. Odds are these tracks weren’t made by White Bear; White Bear would be twenty-six now, which is a very long time for a bear to live in the wild even in an area as isolated and protected as ours. But the lure of the tracks is as powerful for me as the smell of bacon was for White Bear all those years ago.
I head out. Most people don’t go looking for bears. Most people, if they even think they might see a bear when they’re hiking in the forest—say they happen to come across a print, or they stumble on a pile of fresh scat—are going to turn around and go the other way, as they should. Black bears may be among the least dangerous, but if a person who doesn’t know better sees a bear and starts to run, not realizing that bears can run up to thirty-five miles an hour, and the bear chases him, there’s no way the encounter is going to end well. But I’m not most people.
The prints lead into the woods. The ground quickly turns mucky. Some animals don’t like to get their feet wet and make their way delicately through the forest, but bears are like bulldozers, plowing through the underbrush and making their own trails as they go. For me, the ponds and puddles are obstacles to navigate around. This bear splashes right on through. In no time, I am completely out of breath. My boots feel like lead weights and my jeans are soaked past my knees. When I think about all the hours that I spent effortlessly hiking these woods when I was a child, I wish I’d spent more time working out in the hospital’s weight room and less time watching television and smoking.
And the difficulty isn’t only in following the trail; I’m having more and more trouble finding it in the first place. A depression in a mat of wet leaves could have been left by the bear’s paw, or it could be a natural depression. A tuft of hair stuck in the bark of a red pine could have been shed by this bear as it passed through, or it could have been left days or weeks earlier by this bear, or by another. I flounder through the forest hoping the bear will be around the next corner, but when I come to a small pond and walk all the way around it twice with no sign that the bear either went in or came out, I have to admit that I’ve lost the trail entirely.
I turn around to retrace my steps, pausing first to orient myself, because the tricky part about following your own trail back the way you came is that you’re seeing everything in reverse. Any landmarks you noted along the way, whether it was an unusual tree or a distinctive pattern of lichen on a rock, is going to be the opposite of what you remember. Sometimes because of the changed perspective, you won’t see it at all.
Nothing looks familiar. Worse, the sun has gone behind the clouds, and the forest is so wet near this pond that moss grows on all sides of the trees, so I have no way to orient myself. I feel a flutter of panic. It hardly seems possible. I, who grew up in these woods, who spent nearly every waking hour tramping them with my mother and father and by myself, don’t know where I am. I’m so stupid. I was so happy to be back in the forest, so eager to track down this bear on the off chance that he might be my old friend, that I forgot my parents’ number one wilderness rule: presume nothing.
I lean against a tree and shake out a cigarette. My parents used to say that if I ever got lost in the forest, I should find a dry place to shelter and stay put until they found me. But no one knows I’m here, and even if they did, the two people who might conceivably come looking for me are the same two I’m trying to avoid. If I can’t find my way back before nightfall, I’m going to be in real trouble. I’m already cold and wet. Once the sun sets, the temperature is going to drop below freezing. As hypothermia sets in, I’ll become more and more tired and disoriented as I stumble around in the wet and the dark until eventually, I will fall and won’t get up. I picture my carcass freezing and thawing as day turns to night and to day again, rotting where I fell as spring becomes summer and summer becomes fall, being nibbled on by foxes and weasels and torn apart by bears and coyotes until all that’s left is a handful of bones. Even my beloved ravens are carrion eaters. I think about the last time that I was lost in these woods. It’s hard to believe I wandered for two weeks with nothing to eat, no place to sleep, and no place to get warm. I have no idea how I did it. No wonder Trevor wants to write my story.
A raven calls now: Cr-r-ruck tok, cr-r-ruck tok, cr-r-ruck tok, cr-r-ruck tok.
I look up. The raven looks back at me. I have no idea if this is the raven who greeted me or if it is another, if it will talk to me, if it will help.
“Help me,” I beg. “Please. I’m lost.”
The raven opens its wings and flies off. It lands on a low branch a short distance away and looks back as if telling me to follow.
I toss my cigarette in a puddle and hurry after it. I don’t know if the raven is helping me intentionally, or if it’s only showing an interest out of curiosity. I want to believe the former. Ravens are incredibly smart. Ravens have been known to imitate a fox or a wolf to attract these animals to carcasses that the raven can’t break open because the hide is too tough, or because the carcass is frozen. They’ve been spotted pushing rocks onto people to keep them from climbing to their nests, and stealing fish by pulling fishermen’s lines out of ice-fishing holes, and playing dead beside a beaver carcass to scare off other ravens from a delicious feast. After bears, ravens are my favorite forest creature.
“Which way?” I ask when I come to the base of the tree where the raven landed, and it hasn’t moved.
Cr-r-ruck tok! Cr-r-ruck tok! it says and takes off again. But instead of landing on another branch and waiting for me to catch up to it, it keeps going, flying so swiftly that I have to run to keep up, splashing through puddles and stumbling over branches because I don’t dare take my eyes off it for longer than a second. I trip over an unseen something
and go down on my hands and knees. Scramble to my feet and keep going. I want to call after the raven to tell it to wait, but I don’t have the breath.
And then the raven is gone. I stop. The forest is silent. There’s no sound except for my ragged breath. I look for a dry place to sit while I figure out what to do next and spot a large rock beside a stream.
A rock next to a stream.
I am saved. This stream and all the others on our property empty into our lake. If I follow the stream toward its source, at some point it’s going to pass through a culvert beneath our access road.
I whisper a thank-you to the raven and step into the water. The water is bitterly cold. I walk straight up the middle because I’m already as cold and as wet as I could possibly be and this is the fastest way to get where I need to go.
When I come to the road after a ridiculously short hike and climb up the stream bank, I’m almost embarrassed to realize that I wasn’t nearly as lost as I thought I was. I’m also ashamed of how frightened I felt. I’d love to sit down and pour the water out of my boots and wring out my socks while I catch my breath and regain my equilibrium, but the diminishing daylight urges me to hurry.
At last I see the lights of the lodge. My heart sinks. Lights mean that Diana and Charlotte have finished work for the day and are settled in for the evening. I picture them sitting in front of a roaring fire while their dinner bubbles away on the woodstove, sipping a glass of wine or enjoying a cocktail, and head instead for the apartment above the carriage house. I tell myself it’s all relative; that I don’t need a hot shower and a hot meal, as much as I might want both. Spending the night in a dark, unheated apartment is a far better option than the one I was facing less than an hour ago.
The apartment is very dark. I put out my hands and immediately run into what feels like a wall of boxes. I pat them down looking for a way around them, and quickly realize that there are boxes everywhere: on a couch, on the kitchen counter, piled against the walls and covering the windows. Diana and Charlotte are clearly using the apartment for storage. The only way I could sleep here tonight would be if I slept standing up.