The Last Woman in the Forest

by Diane Les Becquets

  Jason checked on the horses each week after that, and on his third visit he asked me if I would play him a song and when I did he said I sang pretty and asked me if I would like to go to church with him. Jason and I started spending more time together. We’d go to church on Sunday mornings, and on Wednesday evenings I’d play my guitar for a small gathering of people that met in a classroom at the church. Jason and I would eat dinner together after the fellowship, and on other days we’d take walks together on the property where I lived. He’d help me feed the horses and put them in for the night. Sometimes we’d sit together at the picnic table and talk till midnight. I was falling in love with Jason. And though we’d never said the words to each other, we talked about it once. We were sitting in a couple of chairs outside my yurt. The air had the chill of autumn and we were holding hands. “I think love should mean something,” he said. “When I say it, it’s going to mean a whole lot.” I knew then Jason was the one I wanted to marry. I knew he was the kind of person I could go on loving for the rest of my life.

  It was a late Wednesday afternoon when I first saw you. I’d already finished my chores and had showered and dressed in some clean clothes for that evening’s fellowship service. I’d driven to town to pick up some beet pulp for the horses. Then I stopped to get gas before driving back to the barn. Because I used cash, I went inside to pay. You were paying with cash, also. You’d pulled out your wallet and removed some bills to cover a beverage you had on the counter. That’s when your license fell out. I was standing behind you and saw your name etched on the plastic. You stepped on the card, slid it toward you, and reached down and picked it up.

  After I paid for my gas, I drove the five miles to Greener Pastures. I carried the bag of beet pulp into the feed room. Then I walked the fifty yards or so to the yurt to wash my hands and freshen up. Jason would be coming by before long to give me a ride. When I stepped out of the bathroom, you were standing in my small living area, next to a table where I’d dropped my mail. “I’m looking for Lynn-Marie,” you said.

  It wasn’t unusual for people to stop by with questions about Greener Pastures or to want to have a look around.

  “I’m Lynn-Marie,” I said.

  You told me you lived up the road a short distance and had a couple of horses you needed someone to look after because you had to go away. I was happy to help you out. “I could stop by tomorrow,” I said.

  But you told me it was urgent, that you were leaving shortly, that your only sister had been in a car accident and she might not make it. I remembered seeing you at the convenience store and you dropping your card. I wondered if you had known about the accident then and that perhaps you had dropped the card because you had been upset by what you had just learned.

  You went into great detail about the car crash, about the drunk driver who’d swerved into your sister, Jay-Jay, and thank God your nephew and niece weren’t in the car with her, and you could give me a quick ride up to your place, it would only take a minute. You’d known the owners of Greener Pastures for as long as you could remember. They’d spoken highly of me when you’d called them, and they’d told you to stop by, that they were sure I’d be able to help you out.

  Of course I would help you. I still had a half hour before Jason would be there. “I can just follow you,” I said. “My truck is by the barn.” But your vehicle was right there and it would be faster, and finding my way to your property could be tricky, you said.

  Tully was smelling your jeans and wagging her tail. I may have even said, “Tully likes you. She’s worried about you.” You said what a funny name for a female dog, and I told you it was a variation of the Hebrew word that meant the dew of God. I left Tully inside the yurt and told her to stay. I told her I loved her and I would be right back. She whined a little and stopped wagging her tail.

  You told me about your sister as you drove. You told me about her two kids. You cried as you talked about them. I told you how sorry I was. I tried to assure you that she’d be okay. I asked you if you believed in God. You told me that you did. “We should pray for her,” I said. I closed my eyes and prayed out loud, and while I prayed, you said, “Yes, Jesus,” and “Yes, dear Lord,” and “Thank you, Father.”

  When I opened my eyes I knew something was wrong, because you were looking straight at me with those empty eyes, and I said, “Shouldn’t you be watching the road?” You turned your eyes back to the road then, and I asked you how much farther.

  “We’re almost there,” you said.

  Ten minutes later, we were still driving. “You’re not taking me to your property, are you?” I said.

  You said no, that you were taking me to see your sister, because you wanted me to pray over her.

  I didn’t say anything then, but I knew we weren’t going to see your sister, just as I knew you didn’t have any horses. I moved my hand onto the door handle, preparing myself to jump out. You saw my hand and locked the doors.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” you told me. You whipped out a knife from a sheath on your belt, and in no more than a second your right arm had me pinned against my seat, the knife so close to my neck, I was sure I could feel the heat of the blade.

  “I’m not afraid to die,” I said. “There’s nothing you can do to me.”

  You laughed and said we’d see about that.

  After a couple of hours you turned onto a logging road that switchbacked up a mountain. All the while I prayed that God would deliver me. I worried about my mother and my father and my brothers. I worried about Jason and Tully.

  You pulled up to a camping trailer, the kind that hitches onto the back of a truck. The hitch on the trailer was sitting on top of a couple of cinder blocks. You turned off your truck’s engine. Again I went for the door. You grabbed a handful of my hair with your left hand. Your right arm wrapped around my neck, the blade of the knife nicking my lip. And as I kicked and screamed, you pulled me toward you over the console, my hip catching momentarily. You dragged me out of the truck and toward the trailer, your arm choking me tighter, making it difficult for me to breathe. Then you reached behind you, pushed the door open, and shoved me inside.

  The trailer smelled like old cigarette smoke and dirty ashtrays. I remember a rust-stained sink built into cheap kitchen cabinets, and green cushions with yellow stains against a paneled wall. A single mattress lay on the floor at the other end of the trailer. The sheets on the mattress had a maroon and black geometric pattern. There was blood on the sheets, like the kind an animal might leave on the ground if it were wounded and being dragged across the dirt.

  I don’t remember everything you did to me that night. There are hours that I don’t recall anything at all. You asked me to take off my clothes. I unbuttoned the silk shirt I had worn for Jason. I balanced my weight on my right foot and removed my left boot. Then I removed the other boot also.

  “Take off everything,” you said.

  I unbuckled my jeans. I tried to pull the belt free from the belt loops. The buckle was large, like the kind someone might win at a rodeo, like the kind I could use to hurt you. But you were faster. You shoved me against the wall, held the knife to my throat. “Don’t get smart with me,” you said.

  Once I had removed the rest of my clothes you told me to turn around slowly. My body was trembling. I said your name. “You don’t want to do this.” I told you God loved you. My voice was calm, perhaps calmer than it had ever been, as if someone else were speaking for me. “Give me the knife,” I said.

  You handed me the knife, like you were in some kind of trance. But as soon as it was in my hand, I panicked, if only for a second. I threw the knife across the room. It fell somewhere behind the green cushions.

  Without a beat you told me to get it.

  I retrieved the knife. I handed it to you, and I began to pray, “Dear Lord, please help this man.”

  You grabbed me by the throat and shoved me onto the mattres
s. You pinned me with your right arm and raped me with your left fist. And was there gurgling; was there blood I heard from somewhere in my body? I thought of my family, especially my mother. Please, dear Lord, look after her, I pray.

  18

  May 2017

  MARIAN

  Cabinet Mountains, Montana

  Marian had not had much time with Tate since the two of them had celebrated her birthday, and she was beginning to feel their upcoming separation. Tate would be leaving for the wolf study in a couple of weeks. With the longer daylight hours and warmer temperatures, the staff often didn’t stop to eat dinner and shower until eight or nine o’clock. In addition, the upcoming projects had involved planning, such as locating housing for the handlers and dogs at the different job sites, even if that meant finding a garage with a plug-in freezer. These types of operational tasks were almost always taken care of late into the evenings.

  “Let’s take a day and go somewhere,” Marian had said when she and Tate were working with the dogs in the field behind the barn and the sky was full of a late-spring drizzle.

  As Tate talked over different destinations, he came up with the idea of a mock wolverine study. Marian was still a novice handler. The extra training would do her good. She would work with Ranger, who would be more of a challenge for Marian than Arkansas. Tate would be there to observe and offer guidance. It would be an instructional day for Marian, as well as time the two of them could spend together, Tate said. And because Marian had not seen much of Montana, Tate decided they’d spend the day in the Cabinet Mountain range, and said that the Selkirks, where he would be that summer, and the Cabinets were the two wildest mountain regions remaining in the contiguous states.

  He created an eight-by-eight-kilometer cell and went ahead and designed four transects that he wanted Marian to follow. They’d be working an area between the Clark Fork River and the boundaries of the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness. Each transect would take anywhere from one to two hours, depending on the terrain and how many samples Ranger found.

  They’d set their alarms for three that morning. Already there was a heavy fog and a cold drizzle, but weather forecasts predicted the fog would lift. Marian made coffee to bring with her. Everything else she needed—snacks, layers of clothing, lunch, field supplies—she’d packed the night before. Then she let Ranger out and fed him, while Tate hid several samples of wolverine scat around the barn for the purpose of reintroducing Ranger to the scent.

  Because Tate was eager to get going, he led Ranger on the sample odors, which Ranger found right away. And each time Tate threw the ball, Ranger retrieved it, brought the ball back, and dropped it within a few feet of where Tate stood.

  They left The Den by three thirty. They’d be driving west toward the Idaho panhandle and into the Kootenai National Forest. They didn’t play music. Tate’s radio didn’t work. There was just the intermittent sweep and thwump of the windshield wipers, the tires on the road, Marian sipping from a thermos-size cup of coffee, and every now and then Ranger’s heavy sigh or his nails scraping against the hard plastic of the crate in the back of the vehicle, and Tate’s silence.

  Ever since meeting Tate, Marian had thought of Arkansas as his dog, and she wondered how Tate felt about being assigned to a different one. “Will you miss her?” she asked him on the drive over. It was Lyle’s philosophy that the handlers should be prepared to work with any of the dogs. Each dog had its own personality, its unique way of communicating, its own skill set, its individual flaws. One might have a high play drive that could be difficult to control on a study; another might communicate too many finds that were outside the target species; one dog might like to eat scat or roll in it; another, presumably like Ranger, might not want to give the ball back. Handlers had to be prepared for all of that. No dog was perfect for all studies. Or a dog could become injured, as had been the case with Chester. And each dog would eventually retire. Lyle believed that to limit a handler’s exposure to one dog would greatly handicap that handler and the program.

  But still, Marian thought. There was the human-to-animal bond. Surely there was that.

  “What are you going to do? They’re just dogs,” Tate said.

  Ranger’s tail thumped against the crate. Marian said something about the whole man’s-best-friend thing.

  “You disappoint me, Engström. You really do. If you’re looking for a best friend, you’re in the wrong line of work.” Tate returned to his silence, but after they’d passed another mile marker and the motor of the windshield wipers had whirred and Ranger had settled down again, Tate said, “A handler can’t be looking to bond with anything.”

  And Tate was referring to dogs, Marian knew, and besides she didn’t believe him; he loved Arkansas. And so she reached over and held Tate’s hand because she thought she understood.

  * * *

  • • •

  Tate parked the vehicle along a Forest Service road south of Bull Lake. They would be hiking into a wooded area in the Cabinet Mountains, just to the west of the wilderness boundaries. Marian got Ranger out of his crate. “Take care of business,” she told him, and at that command he ran off about ten feet, sniffed around, and relieved himself, then was back by her side, his tail wagging, his feet prancing. She fastened an orange vest around Ranger and layered his harness over the vest. Then she attached a bell to the back of the harness and inserted his GPS tracker in the pocket. Marian had already powered her GPS tracker and paired it with her phone.

  “All set?” Tate asked. And Marian said she was.

  Marian wore her daypack, along with a large canvas hip pouch. She reached inside the pouch and took out the blue rubber ball. “Hey, Ranger, you ready to find it?”

  Though the fog had lifted once they’d crossed the Kootenai River, the air was raw with freezing drizzle, and no doubt snow in some of the higher elevations. Marian didn’t mind the cold. The smell of swelling fern and damp earth and cedar was intoxicating. The woods were more dense here than around The Den, and everywhere was the sound of rushing water from so many streams and creeks, hidden in the forest, running high with frigid snowmelt.

  Marian tried to pick up the direction of the wind, but detecting it was difficult among so many trees, and the air was mostly calm that day. They’d started on a narrow game trail that switchbacked up the side of a mountain. Then Marian, looking at her map, began to hike northeast. Ranger caught on and, following her lead, moved several feet ahead of her, but after a few minutes, Tate said, “You’re too close. Give him more space.”

  And so Marian slowed and let Ranger open the gap between them. After a few minutes Ranger began loping back and forth in front of her in almost a zigzag pattern.

  “His direction has changed. What’s he telling you?” Tate asked.

  But Marian didn’t think Ranger’s direction had changed. “He’s onto something?” Marian said.

  “Are you sure?”

  Ranger had now headed off course to Marian’s left. And though he was still moving in a cursory pattern, his gait had slowed.

  “You’re sure he’s onto something?” Tate said.

  “I think so.”

  “You can’t just think so. You have to be sure. How would you interpret him? What is he telling you?”

  Ranger had definitely slowed his pace. His hackles were up. His head was to the ground.

  “There’s a lot to distract a young dog out here,” Tate told her. “This isn’t the tundra. Think about what you’re doing.”

  A big part of being a handler was knowing how to effectively read and understand the way the dog communicated: Was he onto something? Had he found a scent item? Was he looking to the handler for guidance? Marian knew she’d made a mistake.

  “Ranger, NO! Come back.”

  “You can’t talk to him that way,” Tate said.

  And Tate was right. Ranger wasn’t paying her any mind. He was venturing deeper into the
forest, almost in a stalking pattern.

  “He smells something dead,” Tate said. “You have to pick up on this sort of thing. You have to call him back. You have to give him direction in a positive way. You can’t scold him.”

  “Over here!” Marian called to Ranger, and already she could hear the waver in her voice.

  “Are you serious?” Tate said.

  Ranger turned his head back once but then continued on his way.

  “Over HERE!” Marian tried again.

  Though Ranger stopped this time, he didn’t come back.

  “What is wrong with you?” Tate said. “I thought you knew this stuff.”

  Marian felt paralyzed with frustration. This was supposed to be fun. This wasn’t fun. She could hardly hear Ranger’s bell from the sound of the water, and the fern was so tall and the woods so dense, she was afraid that if Ranger got much farther away she wouldn’t be able to see him either. She hoped Tate would soften. God, please let him soften.

  “You have to be commanding, but not harsh,” Tate said. “And your voice can’t waver.”

  Marian began walking toward Ranger.

  “Make him come to you,” Tate told her.

  Despite the cool weather, perspiration was running down Marian’s sides from under her arms. She stopped, wet understories of ferns and mosses and shrubs up to her calves; her pants legs were already soaked and dappled with droplets.

  “Lead him in the direction where you want him to work,” Tate said.

  Marian moved back in the direction of her assigned transect. “Come on, boy! Let’s have some FUN! Let’s check over HERE!” And Marian cringed at the high-pitched sound of her voice even before Tate corrected her again.