A North Country Life

by Sydney Lea

  I'm not at all sure this gospel had any merit at all; I never could prove it myself, and I tried, believe me. Yet Tippy, it appeared, was a legendary local deer-slayer. And all these years later, I do believe in his theory in a way. That is, I think a hunter or angler inevitably develops personal superstitions, and if he believes in them sincerely enough, they'll work out. Confidence has as much to do with outdoor success as anything.

  I would later meet another mentor, a gruff Vermonter named Ray. He wouldn't even bother to fish the Batten Kill for brown trout if the barometer was headed downward. No point, he claimed. Even back then, I suspected that his dogma might be overblown, yet how could I challenge a man who, having implicit trust in it, killed eye-popping fish each time he waded that notoriously challenging stream?

  Ray, you will say, would have done the same under the conditions he deplored, given his endowments. But perhaps not. No matter his undeniable skills both with a fly rod and at the tying vice, the man's near-religious faith constantly reassured him; lacking it, he might not have been so productive.

  But now I've gotten as far off my story's trail as off that other trail, the one I stood on in a morning nearly fifty years ago. My point is that I hoped the dream of Little River Mountain would prove my own mystical secret to success.

  The day had started fair as fair could be. When I set out, I beheld stars in their millions through my windshield, each sharp as a dagger against the darkness. By true dawn, however, about seven o'clock, the wind turned and flew out of the east, cloud cover drifting in from the ocean forty miles distant. I remember thinking, At least it's not right at my back. I still had a notion that once the mountain materialized, I'd be climbing its southern flank, studying fresh buck sign, and I didn't want to be upwind when that happened.

  As things developed, my arrival there would again be interrupted. I came upon a heel-heavy track that crossed a patch of snow on the trail, auspiciously moving into the wind. I began another stalk to eastward, but before long I lost that track too. The animal had swung through a thick growth of softwood, and I didn't own enough savvy, the snow so spotty under the trees, to stay with it over the acre or two of needle spills.

  I say it wasn't long before I lost that track, but in fact I surprised myself once more. It seemed I'd spent the better part of an hour creeping after the buck—if buck it was, I'll never know. By now it was 10:30, and I could scarcely calculate for sure how far uptrail I'd come. The map's scale showed the mountain at about two miles from where I'd parked the car, but, preoccupied, I hadn't been thinking about such a matter at all.

  Of course, I'd been moving along slowly, more slowly than I eventually learned to do when not amid fresh evidence of deer traffic. Yet at last I began to see contours of the mountain through gaps in the trees. This slowed me even further, as if on gaining a full view of that hill I'd behold a ten-point whitetail, broadside in open woods.

  Some few hundred yards shy, I encountered a real obstacle: the wind had at some point swept together a great tangle of blowdown, which lay across the trail and extended fifty yards to the standing woods on either side. A line gale, I figured, had whipped off the big lake a mile or so to my right. I cut in that direction, hoping to skirt the whole mess, but I fetched up again at a beaver bog. To wade it would take me over my boottops. So I turned the other way, managing at length a half-moon scramble around the west end of the tangle and back to the footpath.

  This also took longer than I figured it might, but now at least the rise before me showed plainly. The woods on the sidehill, however, proved anything but open; they showed evergreen growth for the most part, and I saw no clear trail up. Making my way through the density, I grew more and more careful about where I put my feet, more and more attentive to any hint of game.

  I remember flushing a grouse from behind a rootball; I hadn't expected that explosion, and it about scared me silly. Once I settled, however, I began to discern scrapes and cuffings, the latter pretty fresh, not a single frost crystal yet in the riled earth; and after a matter of twenty yards, just that much higher from where I'd been treading, the track of a deer showed plain in the snow. A large deer.

  Carter White had told me that a hoof held about the same degree of body heat as a human hand. You could put your hand into the snow next to a track and time how long it took for the snow to melt to the same depth. That would tell you more or less how long it had been since the animal passed.

  The idea made no sense and still doesn't. A hoof-print is made by weight, not temperature. Could this have been another of those self-generated hunter's tenets? Or was it merely a practical joke? Carter surely had that in him. In the instant, I recalled a farmer who, when I was about thirteen, assured me that my mustache would grow out like a man's within a week if I smeared hen manure on my lip before bed every night. I won't go further into that, still a bit embarrassed a lifetime after.

  But I didn't worry long about the possible likeness of Carter's advice to that damned farmer's; anything Carter said inclined me to belief. He was a god in my estimation. I came up with a rough count of six minutes. My fingertips burned with the cold by the time I pulled my hand back— but six minutes were only six minutes.

  The deer's trail meandered. He seemed in no hurry. I saw a place or two where he'd stood on his hind legs to crop a hanging hardwood tip, others where he'd paused to leave his dark urine, tinged with a hue almost red from glandular secretions. My heart started to talk to me.

  The wind still came east, and I made sure to stay downwind of the whitetail's trail. I didn't know enough then, and never really would, to "pattern" him, but I hoped I knew how to keep that breeze above me.

  The hanging clouds now began to spit a nasty something between rain and snow, but not heavily enough to cover what I followed. I was mainly impressed by how the change in weather darkened everything. Inside the heavier thickets, it felt like night.

  By now my watch said one o'clock. How did that happen so quickly? In such a far northern place, at this time of year the sun would be setting by four. Again I tried to reckon how long it would take me to walk back to the VW, but I'd made so many detours, and that big blowdown had so delayed me, I still had no basis for figuring. And I hadn't brought a compass with me, a choice I'd made out of some absurd inkling that to carry such a device might take the edge off the kind of direct, unmediated outdoor experience I pursued, even then, almost as passionately as I ever have pursued my quarry. I'd never seen Carter consult a compass, and for some reason it didn't occur to me that that was because he'd trod this country for sixty years.

  No one knew where I stood at that moment, my family seven hundred miles away, people at the lodge not expecting me for the evening meal. It made sense to leave this critter for tomorrow, Thanksgiving Day, but sense hardly prevailed in my make-up back then.

  At eighteen, a man doesn't believe he'll ever die anyhow, really. Hell, I figured, I may not have a compass or even a light, but if worse comes to worst, I do have a sweater in my pack, along with a waterproof canister of matches and a poncho. And hadn't Carter once told me that a man didn't have all the experience he'd need in life if he hadn't spent at least one unplanned night in the woods?

  At last I swore I saw the twitch of a tail-flag, but, having inched along, eyes up and fixed, I found a young beech still clinging to its summer's leaves, which shimmied in the breeze. The encroaching blackness was playing loose with my vision. Yes, I needed to turn for the road after all. A little after three now; I had to move right along. I wouldn't see much of anything in an hour.

  When I came to that conflicted sprawl of blown-over wood, I knew which way to go to get around it. I could make out my own tracks from some hours past, if just barely, or rather my hands-and-knees scrapings.

  I remembered how the footpath broadened just past the snarl. If I could reach it soon, I'd have time to beat full darkness, fit and young as I was.

  Yet now my heart began to thump again, this time with a tinge of ominousness. These dog-hair woods w
ere no place to be caught once the light failed. I understood as much with all that heart just now.

  I'd been taught by my father and others that the worst thing I could do in a tight situation outdoors was to panic. But something very like panic was taking charge as I went down on hands and knees to slither under that wall of brush and timber. In doing so, worse luck, I managed to scrape my glasses off.

  It had darkened so, especially under that pile, that I couldn't even spot the glasses' gold frames and bright lenses among the rotted sticks and needles. I stayed in one place, still in a crawling posture, and groped on the ground with ungloved hands. Every few seconds, I believed I felt glass or metal. But with every shot of hope came the quick and sobering recognition that I'd merely latched onto a cold twig.

  I wasn't even sure I'd be able to see my wristwatch if I looked at it now; I scrupulously avoided that, however, fearful of what I might find on the dial. Still I knew I simply couldn't wait any longer. I rose and blundered back toward the trail, or where I believed it lay.

  My eyesight weakened, I must have crossed that trail unaware. After a few minutes, convinced this was exactly what I'd done, I walked one way and then the other, making myself move deliberately, scanning what little I could of the ground for the way out.

  None of the old woodsmen I've known ever told me they'd been lost. They admitted only to being "turned around." That seemed euphemistic but accurate for my situation. I couldn't really be certain anymore which direction was which, though I'd have hiked to the road easily enough had daylight lasted.

  Which it hadn't. So I decided just to follow my gut idea of south, to walk a direct line in that direction even if this meant crashing through all but impenetrable brush whenever I ran into it, which was plenty. The straightness of my progress would be essential; I didn't want to wander around like an ampersand. I hoped at length to come out somewhere on the Little River Road. Then, half blind or not, I'd follow it east or west, eventually finding my car in one of those directions and heading home, squinting over the dashboard to keep to the rough track.

  Home: it seemed my heart's desire in that hour, though for a year and some, home had been no more than my messy room in a dormitory—a room that nonetheless glowed in my mind now.

  I began to wish for a moon, that flat-topped one of late fall, perhaps not enough to light my way but enough to prove it the right way. I knew no moon would be showing so early, though, nor would it later—not through that cold mizzle.

  I just kept walking, abraded at every step by branches, stumbling and more than once falling into a pothole or tripping over rock or root. I could have struck a match to check the time, but I didn't want to waste one of the too few I'd brought. And I still didn't want to know how late it had gotten, or how early, depending on the perspective I chose. The hours I might be spending alone out there would no doubt pass as slowly as my grammar school detentions, which I'd endured in abundance. Why not? I was a bad kid, and was being punished even now.

  I may have staggered along for half an hour before I acknowledged that my stay would indeed be an extended one. Feeling with my feet for a level plot, I took the pack from my shoulders, lit one of those matches after all. There remained some luck in the world; I was in the midst of a clump of cedar, dense enough for shelter, and each lower branch dead and dry enough for a blaze.

  I took my knife from its sheath and, fumbling a bit in the dark, cut a fringe of shavings along one of the sticks, as my father had shown me to do in those school days. I covered the frayed stick with a witch's hat of twigs and touched it off. The fire kindled with gratifying speed, and before long, using thicker and thicker pieces to feed the flame, I had something that would do me.

  By the firelight I saw a fair amount of downed deadwood, and I made it my business to fetch every last bit I could right away, making a substantial stack close by. I'd be free from the chill at least for a while. Mercifully, the frozen stuff had stopped pipping on the canopy. Things seemed to be going my way, at least compared to how they might have.

  Maybe some hunter driving in late from farther out of town would see my rig, I dreamed, and lean on his horn to guide me out. Or maybe the folks at Weatherby's would after all notice I hadn't returned, no light showing in my rented cabin. I knew this was a faint hope: I'd made a point the night before of staying at Chick's for at least an hour after supper, listening to the talk, drinking endless cups of coffee, my bladder and my sleep unchallenged by caffeine and liquids at so young an age.

  Chick's didn't close till 8:00, and the drive back to the village from there took all of forty minutes. By the time I got in that first night, Alice and Bev Weatherby and all their staff had been in bed an hour, and would be again tonight, needing to get up before dawn to accommodate their other hunters. Come morning, they might send someone looking—and they might not: I didn't eat any breakfast at the lodge either, or anywhere else.

  From right then until whenever the Weatherbys noticed my absence— perhaps after a chambermaid reported my unmussed bed—would feel like an eon. But with any good fortune I'd be on my way out come false dawn anyhow, using the pale eastern sky, no matter the overcast, in place of the moon, or the damned compass I should have carried.

  I knew enough, at least rationally, not to worry about wild things. The bears were all asleep by now, and none had ever killed anyone in New England anyhow that I'd heard tell. We didn't have coyotes in those days, but they're no threat either, at least not to humans, now that we do.

  If I had small reason to fear the wildlife, however, in this circumstance reason scarcely ruled the game. Something would shuffle dead leaves close by, and the roots of my hair would tingle. At one point an owl's eight-note report from a limb just above seemed the hooting of the Devil himself as he broadcast my sins to the world. I needed more than a few minutes to calm after hearing that yammer.

  Looking back, I see that even at that age my life was as much literary as anything else. Someone—I wish I could remember who—has since described me as "a man in the woods with his head full of books, and a man in books with his head full of the woods." Sitting by my glowing coals, small drops from the boughs above me now and then plummeting into them with a modest hiss, I began to imagine myself as the unnamed man in Jack London's famous "To Build a Fire."

  I had no dog, of course, to contemplate murdering, as I wouldn't have had to do in any case. It was about 38 degrees where I sat, as opposed to negative 75; my wilderness was a pretty small one compared to London's Yukon; and even if those droplets were to douse my fire, as they would not, I'd find myself in no danger of freezing.

  And yet, having read "To Build a Fire" as a freshman in high school, I discovered I could import the sense of doom that the story had so vividly evoked. There seemed a sort of tonic excitement in that literary allusion, though under my shiver and despair lay my wiser self, which mocked such bookishness; that wiser part of me was subtle enough as barely to be perceptible, but at length it sufficed to bring me back to my actual circumstance—which soon became an exquisite tedium. There I lay, my shoulders against a soft, rotted stub, stirring only to flop another piece of tinder onto the fire, which endured beyond my expectations.

  But that success proved slight comfort at best. Thinking back on the indescribable creeping by of those hours, I imagine a long jail sentence. How can some felon bear the time bearing down? He can read, I suppose, a recourse that so often gets me through an otherwise idle span, and whatever the circumstance, frequently feels transportative. But to our inmate, mere literature, whether refined or common, must seem so artificial and ultimately so non-redemptive that it simply melds with his boredom. Of course I didn't have a book in any case. Why in hell would I? I had no more than my thoughts.

  I don't know how often I lapsed into sleep or half-sleep, nor, when I did, for how long. I'd bet, however, those respites were far briefer than the periods of wakefulness. During the first few of those, already a man of words, or rather a boy, I tried to recite such poetry as I kne
w by heart. I was dismayed by how little that amounted to. Worse than knowing none, I halfway knew a lot, and the frustration of having three of four stanzas, say, or almost all the words of a concluding couplet, proved food itself for insomnia. I gave up after four or five efforts.

  But my mind soon went in other unhelpful directions, whose sole virtue lay in disrupting the dullness. My father, for example, was an unusually good man, and in my better self I knew it.

  I remembered my mother telling him, "The trouble with you is that you're a damned saint!"

  "It won't hold up in court," he replied.

  If I never saw my dad again, would I be satisfied that I'd shown him due affection, even reverence? As it turned out three years later, the answer was no, but I could hardly predict as much in '63.

  What about Mr. Roller, that teacher my peers and I so abused in sixth grade that he had a nervous breakdown? Where might he be now? Too late, I wished him well and meant it.

  And what about my most recent girlfriend? At the end of the preceding summer, I'd broken up with her. Like so many young romances, ours didn't prove stout enough against protracted absence. Margot's college was in New York State, mine in Connecticut.

  I remembered part of the letter she sent me: "With you I was only a satallite." Satallite? Good Lord. Good riddance. Anyhow, by now I'd started wooing Ginny, a student at another institution. (My own had not yet gone coeducational.) She could claim, at the very least, to be my intellectual equal.

  I pointedly corrected my ex's misspelling of satellite in a brief and snide return note. It didn't occur to me, though, to contemplate her charge that I'd somehow dominated the relationship. Or rather I did consider and dismiss it. I took the misspelling to suggest, as I made clear, that my efforts at instructing her had failed. She'd do well, then, to look for someone more on her own level.