by C. P. Boyko
Maury grunted. “The Muse helps those who help themselves.”
Before Lance could reply, he was thrown to the ground when the pony beneath him stopped dead. He was still absorbing this development when, not far from his head, Maury’s gun went off. This threw him into a state of total disorientation which seemed to last a very long time, though in fact it was only a few seconds before he was on his feet and staring at the belly of a grizzly bear.
The bear was in a bad mood, having been poisoned already that morning, and now shot. She did not know that she had been poisoned and shot, of course; at most, she understood that she had eaten some bad meat (a coyote carcass laced with arsenic and intended for the local tsish-o-poots population), and that an unexpected encounter with the noisy, earth-hardening animals had rendered her breathless and frightened. Her fear made her angry. She roared, and clawed the air with her forepaws.
Lance understood that he was about to die. He felt no fear—only a tremendous regret. His life did not flash before his eyes; he realized that continually his life had been flashing before his eyes, and that he had paid no attention, made no effort to grasp it or comprehend it. The strength of his remorse proved that there would be no afterlife. For the first time, he understood that he was his body; and his body understood, for the first time, that it was a unique configuration of matter subject to dispersion and decay.
And yet, for the time being, it continued to draw breath and to circulate blood. There is no stillness in life, only standing waves. No idea, no thought, not even the thought of death, can lodge itself permanently in the brain. Other ideas supplant it. Events supervene. Gradually Lance became aware of Maury’s voice. He was speaking to the bear.
“Lay down, old daddy. There’s nothing more for you to do. You’ve done your part, and done it well. Now you can rest. In fact, you’re asleep already—you just don’t know it yet. That bullet I put in you passed clean through like a needle. Your heart slowed it down a little. Your lungs slowed it down a little. But only the skin on your back could stop it. You’re all chewed up inside, brother. You’re all done in. Nothing to moan about. You’ve had your time, that’s all. Soon enough we’ll have had ours too. You’re hurting, I know, but not for long. Three minutes from now, no matter how you play it, you’ll be sound asleep. So you might as well take it easy as take it hard. Lay down and die, big daddy. Lay on down and die.”
Lance thought Maury was speaking to him, and had almost resigned himself to being eaten, when another gun went off behind him. Old Moose’s bullet, it was later discovered, passed miraculously through Lance’s armpit, tearing his shirts and jackets to shreds but not so much as scratching his skin, and lodged itself in the bear’s throat, just as the grizzly’s open mouth was about to come down on Lance’s head like a snuffer on a candle. That night at the campfire, Lance had plenty of opportunity to wonder why Maury, instead of standing there sermonizing, hadn’t simply reloaded his rifle. The reason, he decided, was that Maury was crazy.
He circled the campfire and planted himself before Maury, his body so rigid with defiance that he was bent backwards. With fists clenched, eyes rolled up to one side, and through lips pursed as tightly as a knot in thread, he requested to be shown their present location on the map; he would find his own way back in the morning. Maury chuckled and philosophized that the danger of maps was that a person tended to see only what was on them. Lance returned stiffly to his side of the fire, then drooped in despair. No map!
He decided to enlist the Indians in his mutiny. But, maddeningly, though he understood them, they could not be made to understand him, no matter how eloquently or emphatically he spoke.
“Chuck-a-luck back-track pronto,” he suggested.
They shrugged amicably and offered him the jug of blackberry wine. He slapped it aside, and tried again.
“Ding-a-ling a ping-pong. Zig-zag a bee-bop, big stick to Rocky house at itsy-bitsy sun-time. Chim-a-lim-a-lam-fram-jam, man!”
The Indians shook their heads and pantomimed bewilderment.
“Gah!” It was no use. It was as Maury had said: They pretended not to understand so they wouldn’t have to do anything. Lazy degenerates! He was on his own.
He swiped the jug of blackberry wine from Rocky’s hands and Maury’s gun case from the stump where it lay and withdrew with them to the solitude of his tent, where he got quietly drunk, on his own.
When the first faint glow of dawn began at last to seep into the sky, Lance burst out of the tent and hurled himself down to the river—having waited for this moment most of the night, writhing alternately in agony from a full bladder and in terror of being eaten by a vengeful bear. He put the gun case down just long enough to relieve himself, then snatched it back up and spun around several times to make sure nothing had crept up behind him. He relaxed a little then, and with his back to the river, sat down on a log.
The woods were quiet now; the trees seemed held in place by mist. Only the river burbled behind him. Nothing moved, yet the scene was not still like a photograph, but seemed to quiver with movement too subtle for his eyes. Then a breeze soughed high through the trees, rustling the branches in swirling arabesques like the unfurling of cigarette smoke in a sunny room. For a moment, his personality drained from him as from a sieve; all that remained was the universe listening to itself breathe. Then he felt silly, and headed back to camp.
But camp was not where he had left it. He felt a spasm of doubt and fear: had he come the wrong way? But the river was not more than twenty feet from his tent; he could hardly have got lost in such a short distance. He decided that Maury and the Indians were playing a trick on him. While he was down at the river, they had moved camp. But when he looked for traces of last night’s fire, or holes in the ground where they had picketed the ponies, or the cedars from which they had stripped the boughs for their beds, he could find nothing, no sign whatsoever that the spot had been camped in. Still, the camp must be nearby; he had not travelled far enough to miss it by much. If he stayed parallel to the river, he was sure to find it. So, holding the gun case aloft like a staff to keep the branches and cobwebs out of his face, he pushed his way into the foliage at his right.
He stopped again after only a few feet. He was making too much noise; the bears and panthers could probably hear him miles away. Moving more slowly, but not much more silently, he turned back in the direction of the false camp. If the brush was not thinner on the other side, he would go back down to the river and find the correct path up to camp. But the clearing did not appear when he expected it to, and soon he realized that he was not backtracking at all but blazing a fresh trail. Panic rose in his throat like an air bubble; he swallowed it down. All he had to do was retrace his steps, one at a time, all the way back to the river. But when he turned to look for them, he could not find even the most recent. For all his crashing and hacking and stomping, he appeared not to have broken a single branch or crushed a single fern. He was hemmed in by a wall of dense, supple, virgin forest.
He panicked. He ran gibbering and thrashing through the trees, zigzagging as if dodging bullets. When his foot caught a root, he fell mouth first into a clump of devil’s war-club. Five minutes later he was still removing thorns from his lips and gums and nostrils and the moist corners of his eyes—but the pain saved him from flying into total hysteria. He took several quick but deep breaths and surveyed his situation with what felt like heroic honesty and fortitude. He was filthy, yes; he was bruised; he was punctured and bleeding and probably poisoned; he was lost and he was utterly utterly alone—
No, after all there was nothing to be gained by surveying his situation. He got to his feet and began walking at random, humming to drown out honest or fortitudinous thoughts.
Unfortunately, thoughts kept surfacing. The first was that he might be walking in circles—so he walked more quickly, to escape the orbit by centrifugal force. Then it occurred to him that he might be walking straight away from camp,
deeper and deeper into the forest—so he walked more slowly. Then he had the idea that he could plot his course by the position of the sun. The only problems with this idea were that it was too early for the sun to be above the trees, that it was too cloudy for the sun to be seen anyway, and that even if he were able to orientate himself, he did not know which direction he should be going.
Then he remembered the river. If he could only find it again, he felt certain that he could follow it back to the campsite. He stood stock-still, a trembling antenna, and listened with all his might for the sound of running water. But all he could hear were the creaking of trees, the swishing of their leaves and the clattering of their branches. When for a moment the wind died down he thought he could hear—yes—something. It could be the river! But where? He closed his eyes, clenched his teeth, and squeezed his fists. There! No; there? He twisted his head minutely, homing in on the signal … A bird began squawking and twittering like a drunken idiot at a boat race; he swore and brandished the gun case at it. Then the wind returned. With a despondent whinny, he set out in the probable direction of the river, stopping and listening again every ten or twenty steps. At times he was sure he heard it; more often he could hear nothing but the infernal racket of the forest. At last he came to doubt that he had ever heard anything. He gave up listening, but trudged on in a straight line till the ground began to slope uphill and he knew that he was going the wrong way. Discouragement flooded through him like fatigue. But wait! If he knew the wrong way, he also knew the right way. All he had to do was keep moving downhill and he must eventually reach the river. Unfortunately, the ground was uneven and it was not easy to tell which direction was more downhill or went further downhill than the others. Eventually he reached a spot where the declivity, interrupted by a ridge, forked in two opposite directions. He went left.
The trees here were very tall and widely spaced, like a colonnade in a cathedral. There was less undergrowth—sunlight must almost never penetrate to the forest floor here—but the ground underfoot was spongy and squishy and impeded his movement. He realized that he was walking on years and years of putrefying leaves and deadfall—that he was slogging, indeed, through a giant midden. Once, as a child, after a heavy snowfall, he had tried to make an igloo out of the cook’s scrap heap; but his shovel had produced a living cutaway diagram of the interior, rife with rot and teeming with worms and maggots and beetles and millipedes. Now he imagined swarms of such creatures clinging to his boots like honey to a spoon, and the thought made him gag. He walked faster, or tried to, and nearly fell. After that he walked carefully, his face screwed to one side in disgust at the thought of his fate if he were to stumble here. Probably his skeleton would be picked clean, as if by a school of piranhas, in under a minute.
Then he saw something amazing. A single stalk of green, culminating in a delicate yellow flower like an infolded flame, sprouted from the rotting offal. And then he spotted another, and another. The amazing thing was that they did not look blighted, but perfectly healthy. These plants were thriving! He crushed one under his boot in disapproval. But a minute later, when he emerged from the dark cathedral and encountered a thicket of brambles, the lesson was brought home to him. These bright red spiny shrubs shot out in every direction from the tangled nest of last year’s dead and dried remains. So it was the same everywhere. The forest fed on itself; the forest grew out of its own corpse. Yuck!
He staggered on, not knowing what else to do. For three nights he had hardly slept; he was so tired he could not even lift his thoughts. The woods closed in on him till he seemed to be clawing his way out of a wet prickly sack. He would have lain down and slept, or died, but there was no place for him to rest so much as a foot without fear of its being nibbled by insects, overgrown with rootlets, or dissolved in ooze. He yearned wretchedly for someplace warm, dry, and soft—even something warm and dry and soft: a cream bun fresh from the oven, or a single square inch of the carpet by the fireplace in his library—anything to remind him that there was comfort and beauty in the world. Ah, beauty! If only he could hold in his hands for one minute a watercolor by Burne-Jones, or press to his chest for one minute a volume of Meredith’s, or nuzzle for one minute a single sheet of Mozart, he might find the strength to carry on.
What he found instead was a stream. He was slowly coming to terms with the unwelcome prospect of having to cross it, when he remembered that he had been looking for a river, once. This one did not seem so large as the one he had sat beside, ages ago, at dawn. But rivers, he understood, were like streets: they intersected. This one should eventually meet the bigger one. But in which direction? His mind provided the answer in the form of an image: He saw a wide swollen river overflowing its banks, like a canteen springing leaks; these offshoots in turn drained into smaller tributaries. So, if he followed this one upstream, he must come to the parent river.
It was not, however, as easy a matter to follow a stream as he had imagined. The forest had no respect for boundaries, and came right down to the edge of the water, and indeed spilled over into the water. He was able to make some progress by swinging the gun case like a machete, and temporarily flattening the largest ferns and saplings by stepping on them at their base. Eventually however he came to a spot where the growth was so dense that he could scarcely peer into it, let alone penetrate it, and he was forced down into the stream itself. The water was not deep, but looked cold and dirty, and he did not trust his boots; so he hopped from slimy rock to slimy rock, snatching at branches and pinwheeling his arms to keep his balance while he calculated the next leap. He was just beginning to marvel at his own dexterity, and almost to enjoy himself, when he slipped.
Without any assistance on his part, his rear foot came nimbly forward and planted itself beneath his slewing center of gravity. He might not even have fallen had his boot come down on flat ground, instead of a rocky, mossy riverbed.
He yelped in pain—then in surprise, then again in self-pity. He had twisted his ankle, possibly broken it. He crawled, on elbows and one knee, out of the stream and into a narrow opening between two entangled bushes, then collapsed blubbering, too hurt and miserable to roll onto his back or lift his face from the mud. When, some time later, a bug crawled across the back of his neck, he did not even slap it away.
Unfortunately, he did not die from his injury, nor from grief; and eventually hunger and thirst goaded him back to life. He wriggled down to the stream again and examined the water. A white froth collected in the slow-moving eddies, but even when he scooped water from the center of the stream in his cupped hands he could see a greenish scum floating on top. He could crudely filter the water through his fingers, leaving the scum behind in his hands, if only he had another receptacle. He looked at the gun case. It too had fallen in the stream, but did not look damp now. And when he removed the rifle and the mesh pouch of cartridges from the interior and placed them on a bed of twigs and leaves, they did not appear to be wet. Perhaps the bag would hold water as well as keep it out. So, placing the open bag between his knees, he trickled water into it through his hands. It was a slow process and his hands were soon numb, but if it spared him malaria or cholera he supposed it was worth the trouble. The end result, however, looked even dirtier and tasted like grease, but he slurped till he had exchanged his thirst for queasiness. He refilled the gun case with water to take with him, tied the cartridge-pouch to his belt, and—using the rifle as a sort of crutch, with the barrel wedged in his armpit so that it would not get clogged with mud—tried to stand.
It was no good. The pain was too much for him; he did not like pain. He could neither put any weight on the injured ankle nor let it dangle in the air. And any movement of any part of his body seemed to entail a complementary movement of his ankle, so that all movement hurt. It was clear that he would not be able to walk—not over this terrain, not for any distance. A sense of his isolation came over him. Though he had realized intellectually that he was “in the middle of nowhere,” he had not truly
felt it before now. At no point in the journey had he been overwhelmed or awed by the exoticism of his surroundings, perhaps because that exoticism had been achieved gradually, step by tedious step. Even yesterday he would not have been so surprised if they had bumped into someone he knew. But now, suddenly, he felt as if he had been dropped into the forest from a balloon—or onto another planet from a spaceship.
“Help,” he said, at first without much conviction. “Help. Help me.” But each repetition brought with it a little more sincerity, and soon he was shouting, then hollering, then screaming wordlessly till his throat was raw.
The only reply was the incessant chittering of birds.
The trilling of one little finch, half the size of his palm, caught his attention. He watched it call shrilly in one direction, flick its head anxiously to and fro, then hop around on its branch and call in the other direction. He felt its desperation; he shared its fear. And he understood, for the first time, the true purpose of “birdsong,” that blithe misnomer. Birds did not sing; they cried for help. This little fellow had obviously been separated from his friends and was begging them to come back. The entire forest resounded with these cries of terror. Nature was not an opera house, but a colossal slaughterhouse.
He remembered what he had supposedly learned yesterday: that he was going to die. But now he could muster no resignation towards this fact. He was not ready to die. He did not want to die. Why should he have to die? His body quailed at the idea, like a dog cringing at the threat of a kick. Even discomfort, even pain was preferable to non-existence.
He would fight. He would gobble the pain like macaroons and ask for more. So, cussing and wincing and writhing with each step, he leaned into the bush till it yielded. It was slow going, but each anguished step filled his consciousness completely, leaving no room for notions of past or future. There was not even room for self-awareness; he did not even realize how tough he was being.