Lost in the Wild

by Cary Griffith

  On the way to his lean-to he sees a long pine bole, perfect for a walking stick. It is at least something he can use to defend himself, should a raccoon, moose, or bear come foraging in the night. He reaches down, picks it up in the dusky light. He breaks off the branches and snaps the top. He weighs it in his hands. Then drops the narrow part to the ground. The thicker end fits the grip of his hand.

  He lays it beside his shelter, within easy grasp. He is careful to note the last rim of light on the western world, a dull blip of illumination with enough in its center to identify west. He lays the stick in a due east-west position. He’ll use it in the morning to double check his position. He turns to crawl back into the grass, to lie down in darkness and the oncoming cold and wrap himself in the crude bundles of swamp rushes.

  Gradually the evening fills in with the muted whirr of the forest night and Jerry Wills hopes he was mistaken about the bear. Contemplation of the cry makes his skin rise in bumps across the back of his neck and down his arms. He tells himself he was mistaken, that the dark woods are playing tricks, that maybe it was a cougar’s caterwaul or a wolf’s howl. He and Tim try to put the best face on the cry, their predicament, their angry interchange of words that earlier in the evening flashed like kerosene out of the dark, leaving them both a little raw.

  The night stretches before them. For the first time, both men long for their own beds, where their wives would nestle close and their mattresses would assuage back and shoulder pain better than this hard northern ground. Even the Scouts worry about the long, dark night of little sleep and troubled dreams, though they finally know they have to turn in.

  As the blackness settles, Dan Stephens tries to sleep. But the bugs give new meaning to pestilence and swarm.

  7

  Deeper into Woods

  Near Ahmoo Creek, north of the Pow Wow Trail, Tuesday morning, October 23, 2001

  Sometime in the middle of the night, rain starts ticking Jason’s tent fly. He had been dreaming, though he cannot recall the details. He lies in the darkened tent, listening to the rain drops gathering strength. The wind increases. He feels warm and secure in his mummy bag. From somewhere, perhaps carried by the wind, he feels a rising vague concern. Before he can identify the source of his uneasiness, he rolls over, closes his eyes, and drifts back into a pleasant torpor.

  He awakens after daybreak, such as it is. Thankfully, the rain has stopped. But it is still plenty wet outside. Lying in his sleeping bag, coming awake in the cold, wet morning, he can smell the rain. The soft light on his tent flap tells him the sky is cloudy.

  But it feels good to be in the woods.

  He gets up, puts on his hiking pants and a fresh pullover shirt. He pulls the light jacket over the shirt and zips it. He needs to relieve himself. He steps into the cold boots and arches out of the tent without tying them. He walks ten paces and it’s like stepping with cold cinder blocks on your feet. He finds an open space in the brush and starts to pee.

  The trees and ground are covered with last night’s rain. His own warm stream spatters the low branches of a spruce. He finishes, turns back to his tent, and takes down the pack from where he had hoisted it. He opens the plastic garbage wrap, unties the top, rummages for his camp stove, retrieves it, and returns to the level rock beside the fire pit to fix himself oatmeal. His breath clouds in the early morning. He checks his watch and sees it is just after 8:30.

  By 9:00 he has heated water, filled his REI cup with instant oatmeal, mixed it over his stove, and admired the steaming ambrosia of cinnamon-apple oats. While the mixture cools he stuffs his bag and dismantles his tent. He shakes the tent fly in the dull morning light. Water droplets scatter over the camp. He does the same with his tent, shaking it before laying it on the ground on top of the fly and folding and rolling both into a compact ball. Then he stuffs it into its storage sack and tucks it into his pack. He is careful to leave room for the stove, gas canister, bowl, spoon, and cup. Otherwise, his pack is ready.

  After his long night in the tent he cannot believe how good the oatmeal tastes. He wolfs down the concoction in about two minutes, then makes himself another batch. The day is overcast, but tolerable. “At least it’s not raining,” he says out loud. It is the first time he has heard anything other than the quiet of the woods and an occasional bird chirp. He is surprised by how foreign his voice sounds.

  He hoists the pack onto a nearby log. As he leans to get into it he cannot help but kneel in the wet humus. The damp, rich smell comes up to him. He can feel the cold soak through his pant leg, but knows it will be fine in about five minutes, as soon as he is warmed by the hiking.

  Jason picks up the trail where he left it. It runs down to the boggy creek before rising into dense woods just ten feet across the other side. The place where the trail crosses the bog has been reinforced by fallen logs and boulders, and he carefully wends his way across.

  This morning, he realizes the path is not as clear or wide as yesterday’s. Still, it appears to be wide enough, shooting off in a straight line through the woods—spruce, tamarack, jack pine, and low-growth alder. Up ahead it rounds a big spruce. Wet branches extend over it, but when he pushes through, the trail on the other side is clear again. As it rounds the tree, it starts moving in a northeasterly direction that gradually bends east—but its change in direction is difficult to notice.

  If he had been awake at dawn, he might have noted the dull glow of the eastern sky and been troubled by the trail’s direction. Now he follows the meandering path in the opposite direction from which he’d come—the wrong direction.

  He recalls the trail’s outline on the Fisher Map, how it started turning west. He suspects he turned west yesterday afternoon, well after the sky turned hazy, then overcast. He had been so preoccupied with setting up camp, building a fire, making and eating dinner, he hadn’t paid attention to the sky, or the direction of its last dull glow. And besides, the sky was dense and overcast, pregnant with rain. He had been comfortable watching the fire burn.

  Now he walks due east on the northernmost loop of the old Pow Wow Trail, believing he is walking west, past Pose Lake, starting his counterclockwise circuit of the proper Pow Wow Trail. Walking with a heavy pack in the morning can make you feel more alive than if you’d stopped at Starbucks for a venti. Despite the low weather, gray light, and wet world, Jason feels good.

  For the first hour of hiking the trail is relatively clear. But almost imperceptibly it becomes overgrown. On rare occasions he parts branches, and the leftover rain grazes him like the fronds of a painter’s brush. But he appreciates the pine bough sparkle.

  After an hour the cloistering brush has soaked the front of his thighs. But hiking with the heavy pack keeps him warm, and he enjoys himself. It isn’t exactly as he imagined. He came to the Pow Wow for a hike on an airy, wide trail bordered by solitary trees and bathed by a resplendent sun. This path is narrow and overgrown and the sky’s color is closer to unearthed bones than turquoise. But in the early morning it is still pleasant.

  Then up ahead the path seems to disappear into some black spruce and alder. Jason forges ahead, looking behind him to remember the direction of the path he has already passed over. He pushes through the thick brush and comes out the other side. And finds it. He locates the narrow path—little more than a game trail, but still clear through the woods.

  He continues walking. In another fifteen minutes the same mysterious path disappearance occurs. And his remedy is the same. He pushes through, around the wet brush. His pack catches on the branches, and he struggles forward. He turns the corner of a spruce. The path reappears clearly through the trees, and he keeps walking.

  It is much narrower here. Branches line both sides of the meager trail, swatting the outer reaches of his backpack as he passes. He continues hiking, trying to avoid getting lashed, and then the path peters out entirely.

  Damn, he thinks.

 
; But twice he has lost the path, only to push through brush and recover it.

  He forges ahead. He plows through more brush. The branches snap back behind him. He dodges left to move around a large popple. He steps to the right to avoid boulder rubble. He pushes forward, stepping carefully over mottled roots, but after several minutes he still hasn’t recovered the path.

  And here he turns around to consider where he has arrived. All around him the branches are thick. He stands in the middle of an unbroken patch of wood, with almost no room for movement, no visible way around or through the brush, and he is startled by the dense wall. He laughs, but it is a pallid humor. He has to take a picture of this. It is so foreign, so random, so unlike anything he has ever seen, so apparently impassable. And yet here he is, in the center of it.

  He reaches into his jacket pocket, pulls out his disposable camera, and snaps a shot of the woods. In the foreground his lens is randomly framed by a couple of spare alders, barely taller than himself. More low-growth alders dot the landscape, intermingled with small six-foot firs. Beyond them, to the left and right, mature firs rise into an opaque sky.

  The picture is remarkable because clearly there is no path ahead of him, to the left or right. And when he turns around there is more of the same behind. He’s flummoxed. He turns again to try and figure out which way he should walk. He feels certain the trail is fifty feet behind him. He decides to recover it and check his direction.

  Jason’s view in the pathless woods (courtesy Jason Rasmussen)

  Jason bends and pushes through the swale the same way he came in. Then he hikes back, recovering his direction. But fifty feet doesn’t recover anything. He is still in the middle of the wood, with no discernible path in any direction.

  He shakes his head. For the first time he feels a dull edge of panic, as though someone has placed the back side of a blade against his stomach.

  He turns around. Through the thick brush of trees he sees a sparkle. He can barely discern the pleasant reflection of dull sky off water. He pushes toward it and sees the edges of a lake. It is the first big water he has seen since yesterday’s crossing of the stream near Isabella Lake.

  Last night he assumed he camped near Pose Lake. He remembers it is the only lake in the vicinity. And he remembers it has islands. According to his Fisher map it has one large island and two smaller ones, which he should be able to see from the bank. And if he is right about Pose Lake, he is close to the trail. It would only take a little more bushwhacking to recover it.

  He hikes forward to investigate. When he reaches the bank, his view of the rest of the lake is blocked by a wooded peninsula. He moves fifty yards along the shore until he stands at the peninsula’s edge and stares over the open water. Nothing. Nothing except water, and the clear border of lakeshore surrounding it.

  There is another tug, lower in his stomach.

  He finds a clear place to take off his backpack. The woods have crowded him, providing resistance as he fought his way to the lake’s edge. Though he hasn’t been hiking for much more than an hour (it’s around 10:00), he still feels like taking a rest and trying to figure out his location.

  When he consults the map, he doesn’t find anything resembling the apparent shape of this lake. He starts to worry, but only a little. He remembers the path behind him, how it was relatively clear and close, and he suspects he should be able to recover it easily enough. And of course, once recovered, he will continue.

  Jason remembers times in the past when he’s been hiking and gotten lost. Those times he could always recover the trail. He always retained a general sense of direction, of the way he should be hiking, and every other time he has been able to recoup his trail, find his way back, his way out.

  But those were in southern woods and state parks, where trails are as prevalent as a rat’s maze, and where the park has clear, close boundaries—not to mention being surrounded by roads. These woods, he reflects, are entirely different. This forest is on an entirely different scale. The Boundary Waters is over a million square acres, purposely void of any of the usual markings or signs. Still, he thinks he has a good idea of not only where the trail is, but the direction he should be hiking.

  He hoists his backpack and starts hiking in the direction from which he came. For about an hour he pushes through the woods. The branches rise up like a series of flexible walls. He pushes through one wall, and behind it, there is another green lattice of fir branches and low-growth alder. And behind that, another. On occasion there is a small opening, and he takes it, continuing to move in the direction his instincts dictate.

  This isn’t Jason’s idea of a pristine hike in the woods. He fights the entire way, getting wetter the more he pushes through damp brush. And the woods are thick. They are thicker than anything he’s been through down south.

  There is nothing fun about hiking through wet woods in October. The air is crisp. It is barely above freezing. The sky is overcast, and Jason continues to ruminate on how hard it is to bushwhack through dense forest. He has never seen anything like it.

  He is worried, but not yet distraught. He knows the direction, believes he will recover the path. And when he does, he finally concedes, he is going back home. He is going to return to his car, head down to the North Shore, have a bite to eat, and go home. He is tired of the struggle. This is very different from what he imagined. If he had found a better trail, more clearly marked, and been able to locate the appropriate campsite over Pose Lake—and if the weather had been better—then things would have been different. But as it is, walking in wet woods in October with a fifty-pound pack on your back is tiring and frustrating and not exactly on most people’s list of leisurely fall activities.

  Another branch lashes his pack, swings back behind him, and he stumbles forward. And finally, he is rewarded. He crosses the path. It is clear, straight, obvious. Thank God! He feels a momentary rush of relief.

  He stops for a minute, looking in both directions. He gets out his compass, holds it flat, and waits for the needle to resolve itself. Jason thinks he is at the top of the Pow Wow Trail loop, somewhere near Pose Lake, where he camped last night. By now he may have hiked well west of the Pose Lake spur. He believes he has recovered the east-west trail. Now, if he really wants to return, he suspects he will have to hike east.

  He looks at the needle. This section of the trail moves in a west-southwesterly, east-northeasterly direction. Jason gets out his map and has another look. He knows he is somewhere near the top of the loop. He knows he must be close to Pose Lake. It is not necessary he find the lake, though it would be a good verification of his position. Still, he is almost certain he’s at the top of the loop. To return to his car he will have to continue east along the trail.

  He puts away his map and compass and starts walking east—exactly opposite the direction he should be hiking. The trail is reasonably clear. It is a lot like the trail he crossed this morning, before he lost it. It moves in a relatively straight line, and for the first twenty minutes, whenever he loses it in the trees and brush, he comes out the other side and recovers it.

  He keeps walking, hiking along the trail, pushing through the deep woods. His mind wanders to his car’s interior. He sees the Saturn where he left it in the lot. He sees himself taking off the burdensome pack. He finds his keys, remembering where he stowed them. He opens the trunk, drops his pack in, comes around to the front seat, and starts the engine. In five minutes, moving along the gravel roads, the inside of the car heats up like a warm blanket.

  He is tired, and by the time he reaches his car, he reasons, he’s going to be dog-tired. But it is going to be a sweet reunion. He can feel the way the car heats up and makes him drowsy. He will have to stop and get some coffee, maybe in Finland. With luck, it will only be early afternoon, still plenty of time to get back to Highway 61, have an early dinner along the North Shore, and return home.

  Jason pushes t
hrough more woods. He has to constantly look down, watching his feet. One misstep and he could be in a world of hurt. This would be no place to break an ankle or twist a foot. He steps carefully, lost in his warm car daydream.

  After two hours of fighting through the woods he pauses, knowing he should be closer to where the path opens up. Then he looks up and realizes the path has again disappeared. He has been looking down at his feet so long, not paying attention, struggling to get through the next section of brush, that he has lost the damn path again. He can’t believe it!

  A percussive cry gives voice to his frustration, loud enough to silence the red squirrels and ruffed grouse for at least a fifty-yard radius. He turns around, trying to recover the trail, trying to decide which way to move.

  And then he sees it. There is a clear sparkle of water through the dense branch weave. At first he thinks it could be Pose Lake. But by now, hiking this long, he should be much farther east than Pose Lake. And there is something about this water, the way it shimmers through the branches, that is eerily familiar.

  He cannot put his finger on it, but he suspects the airy tumult in his stomach is because this scene—the sparkle through the branches—looks so similar to the water he saw earlier this morning.

  He takes a few more steps toward the lake. He looks at the water, peering through the branches. And then it hits him, not in a pleasant way, or with mild surprise. It hits him like someone placing a well-positioned fist in the center of his abdomen.

  “Christ!” he thinks. “It’s the same lake. I’m in the exact same spot I was in two hours ago!”

  Something like a slow burning panic starts to unravel him. Now he is genuinely scared. When he thinks about how far he’s hiked, pushing through the damp woods for the last two hours, hiking in some kind of big circle that has brought him back to his exact point of departure, he’s dumbfounded. It is like some kind of science fiction movie in which the universe is confined to the narrow reaches of a wild wood, and there is no way out. He is condemned to walk in huge circles through wet woods. He laughs to think about it, how it could be some writer’s sense of hell. Only there is no humor in his laugh.