The Word for Woman is Wilderness

by Abi Andrews

  The tundra is so big and open that animals are exposed everywhere, so they keep one eye on me warily, but go about doing their thing as I walk on past. How crawling with life the rough grasses are. Hares rush around and stand sentry, ground squirrels run in little bursts, stopping to gather fruits and buds in their cheeks. A weasel slinks through the grass after the voles, so frantic to gather food for the winter that they let their guard down. Summers are so short that everything is fighting against time to prepare, the predation of winter overshadowing that of everything else.

  In Britain we used to have wolves and bears and lynx and bison and even elephants and rhinos a long time ago, but we are such a tiny island that we quickly killed them all and became kings of our little kingdom. Accounts for some of our colonial hubris?

  The tundra is specked with water where the frost melts. The permafrost lies underground, starving the drier parts. Lusher grass surrounds waterholes, and elsewhere the grass is hardy and coarse and shrubs are dead-looking. It gives the tundra muted but multifaceted colour. The way the light plays on it from the big sky makes its depth and tone flicker.

  As soon as I felt a tug I jumped up and had it over my shoulder before I even knew it and I am glad no one was around to see because the force from flinging it back brought the fish back at me and it hit my front as I turned to it, making me yell. The sound zigzagged away from me into the forest and took several birds with it. It took me a second to remember that there was no one around to hear, but when I realised I was alone, so utterly and completely alone, I laughed and laughed to myself, trying to hold the writhing fish.

  And I could feel all of Jack Kerouac’s ghosts of the mountain cursing at me for desecrating the art. But if the art is to demonstrate skill rather than a simple utilitarianism then I don’t want to be a part of it. It is a man’s sport, a battle just to collect its name, possess its specificity, like the Enlightenment exotic specimen collector (one for the collection, a big one for the wall). And to do so skilfully, whatever that means, probably with minimal splashing and squealing. They can keep their art.

  Once I had it still against the ground I had to stun it to knock it out before I bled it, like Larus showed me on the pilot whale boat. I worried about this part because perhaps it did have more culpability than pulling a trigger and watching a thing drop. The fish lay still for me, looking up at the sky through the canopy with its empty orb of an eye. I have thought for a long time that anything I am willing to eat I should be willing to kill. And although I back the philosophy all the way, in practice it is as hard as I hoped it wouldn’t be. I am not sure I will ever be able to kill anything without crying at least a little bit.

  After it was bled I laid it out flat and took out the Fauna & Flora of the Denali Wilderness book to identify it. It was an Arctic grayling, I could tell easy from the fin on its back like a Chinese fan. It was quite little for a grayling, but I can make it last me two meals.

  In the tundra I stumbled onto a spruce grouse sat on a clutch of eggs. It occurred to me that I could take her eggs to eat. She looked at me imploringly through one beady eye. I left her.

  Other birds seen today:

  Osprey

  American kestrel

  Pintail ducks

  Snow geese

  Tundra swans

  Ring-necked ducks

  Grey jay

  Horned grebes

  Plovers

  Mourning doves

  Cuckoo

  In the south the mountains stood resolutely, still and intangible as a painting, until at one point a light aircraft cut across them, a slow and deliberate finger through perfect dust. When this happens there is a noise with it, a loud droning that I noticed for the first time while watching the first plane. It was lucky that I did because I might have spooked from hearing it without knowing what it came from. I threw myself to the ground on impulse but it was too far away to make me out. From here you could not tell the cabin from the treeline.

  On the way back to the cabin I found my first bear print. It made my hairs stand on end; a first encounter. Its print a symbol of its self. A warning, a promise, a truth. But really it is just an imprint a big animal left without meaning to. How strange.

  LITTLE HOUSE IN THE BIG WOODS

  It confuses me to have nightmares about a thing I can barely remember now. I had thought it over so many times before that I could no longer tell what was memory and what got added or taken away. Then I stopped remembering it at all, but it came back last night in a bad way.

  In the nightmare I found myself cold and dark. I was in an ice cave. In the Arctic. The walls were blue and jagged. It smelled like damp old fish and dead things. My breath billowed in silvery wisps in front of me. Then it would crystallise and fall to the floor in tinkles. On the back of my neck I felt my hair brushed to the side and hot sticky breath ran across it slowly. A hand came from behind and clasped over my mouth, a stubby, sweaty troll hand.

  You are not in an ice cave. You are in the meat fridge at work. The hand is clasped tight over your mouth so your whimpering is muffled. The other hand fumbles with your small breasts over the top of the polka-dot starter bra your mum bought you because you are starting to blossom now. You can feel something hard pressing into where your thighs meet the crease in your arse. You know it will make it worse if you squirm but you want to get free. Then you get a chance because someone shouts at him from outside the fridge, his grip loosens and you dig your elbow into his bloated troll belly.

  He grunts a troll grunt. He puts his hand around your neck and calls you a little bitch. But then you know it’s over because she is shouting to him from the kitchen. He lumbers to the door and as he closes it he leans his face in and runs his tongue over his fat wet lips. The door bangs shut.

  You can’t cry you can’t cry you can’t cry because they will shout and send you home, and then what? If you yell Sandra will hear eventually and she will open the door from the outside and let you out and laugh at you for being scared of the dark and getting yourself stuck in the fridge again.

  Was it as bad as the dream felt or was the dream just a collage from things the other girls had told you? No matter what you remember, it is nothing special, of course. Almost every girl you know has a troll to remind her that her body is not her own.

  It tipped it down today so I stayed cooped up inside. The cabin is cosy with the little fire going, the tapping on the roof and sides adding sound contours that make it feel particularly safe, so I felt better. Because I had the time I made the fire with sticks from my kindling pile. I am very proud of the fire. It took me about ten minutes to get smoke, then another five to get it going properly. I have guarded and fed it all day like a little pet. Kaczynski complained in his diary that he failed to consistently make fire without striking matches and that it annoyed him greatly. I am more authentic than Ted Kaczynski!

  I did go out just to see how bad it was and got a headache from the hammering of icy raindrops on my crown. It was too heavy to see much and I got soaked through, so I will have to stay put until it slackens off. I have enough food to last and a bit of fish. Hopefully it will have stopped overnight, though.

  I watched back and edited a lot of footage and it is coming together but in a way I am not quite sure about. Mostly when I watch things back they do not feel like I remember them. People seem to be very different to how they really seemed at the time. There is so much responsibility in putting the pieces of what has happened together to follow a story. And there is Rochelle, who will not fit into my story. And then there are the things that can’t and do not say anything at all and lie vacant for my projections.

  Am I pulling them out of the water like fish to look at? Like they are specimens and I am writing them into my field book? There is a gap between what they are and what I think they are and I am trying to talk about this gap with authority, declaring I know what I see and it is this.

  I did a lot of reading. Then I did a video diary entry. Then I got bored and decided to searc
h around the hut for hidden things. I had figured it must be at least fifty years old, maybe even one hundred. I had not bothered to check it properly for signatures like I had the tower, aside from a quick sweep. I felt sure I had missed something.

  I checked all the obvious places again first, the walls around the cot, the desk with everything taken off it. Then I found them in a corner of the room. Now I have found them I do not know how I did not notice them before. It was not an obvious place, sure, and most are really faint, but there were enough of them. They are mostly names and dates, the earliest being 1929 and the most recent P Harris again, 1999. I counted seven authors of six signatures and five quotes. Some of the classics:

  ‘Going to the mountains is going home’ – John Muir

  ‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived’ – Thoreau

  I checked, out of curiosity, behind the fox head (there is also the compulsion to leave a mark that no one will ever notice). It just said Caroline, in very tiny print, with no date. It was the only obviously female name in here. Even where the names were ambiguous, the handwriting on the wall was all very masculine. What I mean by this is that maybe the men who wrote on the wall had learned to express themselves as men, to express their man-sized ideas in a handwriting that was reflective of how they held and thought of themselves.

  Because they author these ideas like they belonged to them by virtue of being men. Thoreau and that bunch always talked, of course, in lofty terms of Man and He. In search of some inspirational wilderness quotes from women before I started the documentary most to be found came from low-brow memoirs of the self-help kind and had to do with inner journeys rather than the outer objective Truths of the Mountain Men, and had titles like The Single Woman: Life, Love and a Dash of Sass or Pink Boots and a Machete: My Journey from NFL Cheerleader to National Geographic Explorer.

  I wanted Caroline to know, if she ever came back, that I liked that she had hidden herself. I drew a little smiley face next to her name.

  MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE

  INT. CABIN, AFTERNOON – Erin is sat on the cot – daylight bleeds inside, casts light over dust motes – camera is hand-held – in shot are cabin cot, Erin from shoulders up, and window – it is raining heavily –

  ERIN: So this morning I found something really interesting.

  After the autograph wall that I found yesterday. And the signature behind the fox head. I was sure there could be other more hidden things but I wasn’t sure where else they could be. I was actually under the desk—

  – camera view turns towards the desk as Erin gets off the cot and directs the camera to it –

  ERIN: As you can see, there isn’t anything there

  – camera sweeps the underside of the desk –

  ERIN: But. In checking under the desk I found something else. If you look here—

  – camera view turns to the floor – Erin is kneeling, her right knee moves against the floorboard, which gives – the opposite end of the board rises, around one inch – Erin prises underneath with her free hand –

  ERIN: Oh. I can’t do it one-handed

  – camera is placed on the floor –

  ERIN: And underneath. I hadn’t thought to check under the floor because I was sure there was just the foundations underneath there. But here, as you can see—

  – camera is picked up and view is directed towards the floor – the floorboard now removed and placed to the side – camera takes two seconds to focus in low light –

  ERIN: Someone has dug out the ground underneath the floorboards. And they have left a little parcel

  – camera is now in focus – in the hole there is a package wrapped in tarpaulin, about the size of a shoebox – Erin takes the package out of the hole –

  ERIN: Isn’t this exciting? So I found this little package. And now I suppose I should open it

  – camera is placed on the desk with a view of the cot – Erin sits cross-legged on the cot with the package on her lap –

  ERIN: It’s like Christmas

  – she looks down at the package with her hands placed on top – pushes hair behind her ears –

  ERIN: I’m kind of nervous. I hope it’s not a letter bomb

  – she looks at the camera – pulls one corner of her mouth down in mock-nervousness –

  ERIN: Okay, then

  – she starts to unwrap the parcel – carefully, particularly –

  ERIN: I wonder how long it’s been down there

  – having undone the parcel string and peeled away each corner of the tarpaulin she takes out a fabric bundle – she carefully unwraps the fabric bundle –

  ERIN (ABSENTLY): I suppose they wanted to make sure it kept dry

  – inside the fabric bundle is a parcel wrapped in newspaper –

  ERIN (ABSENTLY): It’s like a game of pass the bloody parcel

  – she stops with a piece of the newspaper in her hand – studies it –

  ERIN (ABSENTLY): Oh, I’ll check afterwards

  – she lifts the objects from inside the paper one by one and lays them out on the cot very carefully –

  ERIN: Okay, we have a roll of paper. A book. It’s maybe a diary. A folded piece of paper. Some postcards from Alaska

  – she picks up the book and opens it –

  ERIN: It’s a diary. The first entry is dated the 14th of May 1986. It’s signed Damon. Then inverted underneath. Nomad

  – she brings the book towards the camera and holds up the name, pointing with her forefinger – in spidery handwriting DAMON is written, then backwards underneath its mirror image – DAMON –

  ERIN: I don’t know if that’s an alias or just a happy coincidence. Or a self-fulfilling prophecy

  – she sits back on the cot and picks up the scroll – unscrolls it –

  ERIN: Okay. This is a manifesto. I won’t go into it now. We’ll look at it in detail later

  – she studies it for a second then turns it to face the camera, holding it closer for inspection – then she turns it around and considers it again –

  ERIN: Some kind of Ted Kaczynski manifesto

  – she carefully rescrolls it and places it back on the cot – picks up the folded paper –

  ERIN: And finally

  – she unfolds it and pauses, brow crumpling – studies it for seven seconds –

  ERIN (ABSENTLY): Damn it. I should have known it. (REMEMBERING THE CAMERA) Erm. It’s a map. Predictably

  – she frowns at it some more –

  ERIN: It’s better than my map (LAUGHING). Goddammit

  – she folds it pedantically and tucks it into the back of the diary – she places the diary back on the cot – she sits with her hands in her lap then distractedly places the newspaper over the top of the diary –

  ERIN: That’s exciting. What an exciting find

  – she looks directly at the camera, holds her gaze for four seconds – fidgets –

  ERIN: I’ll have to take a look at it all in more detail. Figure out this guy’s story

  – she touches her face absently –

  ERIN: Try and figure out if anyone found the package before

  – she twists her hair round a finger –

  ERIN (ABSENTLY): Yeah

  – she stops twiddling her hair and stares into space, caught in a thought – five seconds – snaps out of it –

  ERIN (SUDDENLY/BRIGHTLY): Anyway. Today is day three of the floods and the rain is still relentless

  – looks out of the window –

  ERIN: Doesn’t seem like it will subside very soon so no meat for Erin for a while. I’ll have to get outside today, though, because I’m almost out of water. I’ll wear my anorak. It will be nice to go outside. Yes

  – she sits for a few seconds looking out of the window then snaps to – approaches the camera –

  ERIN: Okay. Over and out. (MUTTERS) That was st
upid

  – she fumbles with the camera to cut –

  CUT

  HOW THE MOUNTAIN GOT ITS NAME

  I attempted a video diary entry and retook it about five times. None of them seemed right to me. I am thinking about how far I have come now and whether I am passing Leopold’s test yet. I certainly feel more ‘in tune’ with the ‘rhythms of life’. It is hard to talk about something so personal and unspecific. I was shooting a sequence on the map that was in the parcel. In the first cut I was saying that I had to burn this map too, like I did Stan’s pocket map, had to burn it as quickly as I could before it embossed on my mind and corroded the claim of pure invention so that this place could still be mine. Then when I had the lighter to it I just could not do it. And the more I held it out with my thumb, scratching at the friction wheel, ready to light it, the more I looked at it. And the more I looked at it the more it embossed on my mind. Then the integrity was gone anyway so I figured I might as well not burn it. My thumb hurt from rubbing and rubbing the lighter without actually striking it.

  So then I had to soliloquise about why I was not going to burn the map. But the map glared at me, making itself more and more familiar, and as I got madder at it I thought that I might still get rid of it like I did the other map, because I had seen that one too. Besides I could not just leave it, knowing it was so heavy. I mean like the heaviness you must feel when you find Roman vases in the dirt and you just know that they are not any old broken pottery because you can feel their heaviness from just looking. I had to acknowledge it, like holding a tiny funeral for a mouse that the cat brought in because it does not feel right to just let it be.

  But Damon had made it and it was his time capsule and yet he would never know any better. And then again he left it here in the eighties and he could very well be planning on coming back for it one day. Maybe he really never meant anyone but himself to find it.