The Last Woman in the Forest

by Diane Les Becquets

  “Stop! Please stop. I can’t listen to this anymore. Where is Marian?”

  “I was trying.”

  “That’s just it. You’re trying. You’re trying too hard. You’ve got to be yourself. What’s happened to you?”

  Marian’s frustration and disappointment escalated. She turned her face away.

  “You’re going to do this, Matilda. I’m not going to do this for you.”

  Tate’s voice had sounded kinder this time. Marian was able to relax enough to pull it together. And she wondered why everything had seemed so much easier in Alberta, despite the knee-deep snow. “What do I do?” she asked, her voice as calm as she could make it sound.

  “You can’t come in with so much force. It’s not going to work. You have to find your middle ground. If you’re too dominant, he’s not going to come to you. If you’re too excited, he’s not going to trust you. You have to find your confident voice.”

  And fortunately, Ranger had lost interest in whatever odor he’d picked up on and was back at their feet, ready to get going again.

  “Go ahead,” Tate said. “Lead him where you want him to go.”

  As Marian walked, with Tate following close behind her, she breathed in and out slowly; she watched Ranger closely. In what seemed like no time at all, Ranger had changed direction dramatically. He was onto something again. Marian thought his pace had slowed once more, as if he were being careful; she thought he was showing signs of curiosity instead of the kind of excitement Arkansas would show when she was on a target species. His head was up and then down and then up again. This time Marian didn’t wait for Tate. “There’s something cool over HERE,” Marian said. “Check over HERE.”

  “Don’t call him off. He’s actually on a target. You’re interpreting him incorrectly.” But this time Tate’s voice was barely above a whisper, as if not wanting to distract the dog.

  Ranger fishtailed back and forth. Tate had been right. The dog was funneling in on a target scent. His tail was wagging. He was becoming excited.

  “Look at his nostrils. Watch the way he moves his head, the way his breathing has changed. He’s processing the odor. The farther he is away from the scent, the more he raises his head. Watch him. Now he’s turning back into the scent. See his head lowering to the ground. He’s getting closer.”

  Marian stepped in Ranger’s direction.

  “Follow him, but don’t get too close,” Tate said. “Don’t distract him. Let him do his thing.”

  Though Ranger had not found a wolverine sample, he’d located a pile of black bear scat, a species odor Tate had recently trained Ranger to identify. The scat was no more than a few hours old and would provide a good layering sample when working with the dogs.

  Marian said, “You DID that. You’re awesome,” to Ranger, while concentrating on the tone of her voice and hoping she wasn’t sounding too excited. She threw the ball behind her about ten feet. Then, using two sticks, like chopsticks, because she did not want to waste a pair of latex gloves, she collected a portion of the sample and bagged it.

  “Should we be concerned?” she asked Tate, since the scat was fresh.

  “They’re coming out of their dens, all right,” Tate said. “And they’re hungry. But that bear’s already miles away from us.” Tate went on to tell her that the bears’ appetites were still waking up and that they’d be on the move and feeding mostly on sedges and grasses and insects for a while.

  Marian packed the sample and was ready to go but then realized Ranger had never brought the ball back. He was lying on a patch of moss and chewing contentedly on the thick rubber ball.

  “Bring it back,” Marian said. “Come ON. Let’s search over HERE.”

  But the dog would have no part of it. When she approached Ranger, he ran away from her, with the ball still in his mouth.

  “Drop it!” she said. That didn’t work either.

  And so Marian looked to Tate. “What am I doing wrong now?”

  “You have to visualize him bringing it to you and dropping it,” Tate told her. “You have to remain positive and know at all times that you are going to get what you want.”

  And so she visualized, and she visualized some more, but none of these visions were coming true. She tried to send positive energy out to the universe, but what she was sending was really just her WHEN IS HE GOING TO DROP THE BALL energy. She tried to pretend her frustration away. That did not work either. She knew Ranger could feel all of this, like when someone is waiting for a person to get ready, and the person waiting is discreetly tapping his foot, or staring at his watch—Marian knew that was how tense the energy between Ranger and her had become.

  “You’re unsure of yourself,” Tate told her. “He knows that. Think about it. Before you even asked him to bring the ball back, you were already anticipating a negative reaction. If you’re unsure, he’s going to be unsure of you.”

  Marian told Tate that was exactly what she had been thinking, and how did he know so much.

  And he laughed then, almost smug. “Let’s just say I’ve had a lot of experience.”

  Despite the rain, Marian lowered herself onto the wet ground. She wasn’t liking Tate very much in that moment. She wanted time to figure out on her own how to make things work with Ranger, to understand what she needed to modify. She wanted the experience to feel intuitive, because she knew she could never find that magical middle ground when she was trying so hard to please the man she loved.

  She leaned the rest of the way back until she was lying down. She let the thin drops fall onto her face, run over her cheeks. She closed her eyes and listened to the rain dripping from branches and to the rushing of a stream nearby. She smelled the redwood cedar and Douglas fir. And from somewhere in the distance she heard the long, haunting, high-pitched note of a male thrush. And then she smelled Ranger’s wet coat; heard his bell and his happy pant; felt him brush up against her. She opened her eyes. He was standing beside her. He dropped the ball next to her shoulder.

  “We should get going,” Tate said. He was standing about three feet away from her with his arms crossed over his chest, and she had the feeling he’d been watching her the whole time. “I think you got this now.”

  The rest of the morning and the early afternoon went much better, with fewer interruptions from Tate. Marian’s commands felt more natural. If Ranger circled back to a target sample, Marian would casually say, “Hey, you got that. Good job. Let’s keep going.” Or when she needed to bring him back in the game, she’d tell him, “Something is really cool over here,” again keeping her voice casual and calm.

  And Marian had been able to notice the white-flowered trillium that dotted the forest floor, and in the areas where the snow had only recently melted, the spikes of pink shooting stars and wide patches of glacier lily. When the forest opened up and became less dense, Ranger began locking onto target scents more frequently, and led Marian to at least five wolverine samples by the end of their second transect. Each scat sample was full of bones and feather and fur.

  Tate had knelt beside Marian while she was picking up one of the samples. “Imagine the jaws on these guys. They’ll eat anything,” he told her. “They’ll snap a deer’s femur in half. They can chase away a cougar or a grizzly if they have a mind to. And the amazing thing is, no one ever sees them. They could be all over these woods, and you’d never even know they were watching you.”

  Marian asked Tate if he’d ever seen a wolverine.

  “Once,” he said. “Feeding off some corpse in an avalanche path.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Though they took a couple of short breaks at the end of each transect, the hiking had been long and arduous and covered much of the Berray Mountain area, thickly forested terrain with ponderosa pine and western larch and Douglas fir and darkly canopied footpaths that for brief moments left Marian without sight of Ranger.

 
; But by late afternoon during the final transect, he was loping through moist alpine meadows, his coat shiny from the day’s rain. The Bull River was close, its current a loud rush. They made their way through another patch of forest land that descended sharply to the river’s bank, thick with reed grass and willow and black hawthorn, and from there, a rocky outcrop collected into a small peninsula that jutted into the river, creating a twist and funnel in the water that pulled floating debris, loose bark, and clumps of river grass and branches beneath the surface, only to propel the debris upward farther downstream.

  Ranger was waiting for them on the rocky pier. He lapped water, then cast his eyes back at them and wagged his tail.

  “How would you interpret him now?” Tate asked. Even though he’d been less critical and commanding since earlier that morning, he’d still continued to ask her this question.

  “He wants to know if he should cross the river,” Marian said.

  Marian was becoming comfortable with her new mind-set, as if she had learned how to put herself in the canine’s place, to see how the world looked and felt through his eyes, to feel his anticipation of playtime upon a successful find, or the excitement upon distinguishing a scent in the air, or the coolness of water lapped up against his tongue. The whole approach felt seductive and sure and continued to send a thrilling twinge down her spine and no doubt a confident light to her green eyes.

  Tate was standing behind Marian. “Nice work,” he said.

  Marian removed her cap and shook the droplets from its brim before placing it back on her head. “Hold on, Ranger,” she called. “We’re not going swimming today.”

  She and Tate walked onto the rocky point. The dog wanted to play and was leaping off his hind feet with his front paws reaching toward the sky. “Settle down,” Marian told him. He stopped jumping but ran a tight circle around her instead, brushing his wet coat against her legs, and all the while panting and taking in excited gulps of air.

  Marian put the ball away in her side pouch and zipped the pouch closed. She and Tate then removed their packs and sat on the cool rocks. Though they’d taken short breaks between her transects, they hadn’t eaten lunch and she felt starved. She pulled out a couple of slices of beef jerky. Tate broke a Clif Bar in half. And so they shared each other’s food and drank from their water bottles, with Ranger stretched out in front of them, his head on his front paws, his eyelids now struggling to stay open.

  “You did really well today,” Tate said.

  “Yeah?” Marian turned her head toward him, her elbows on her knees, which were pulled up in front of her.

  “You should give yourself more credit,” he said.

  “You were hard on me,” she said. “Why?”

  “You needed to learn a lesson. This isn’t easy work. You know that.”

  “It wasn’t like this in Alberta,” she said.

  “Things were different in Alberta. There weren’t as many distractions. We were breaking trail for the dogs. In this country, the dog breaks trail. It’ll be the same in Utah.”

  “You made me really nervous,” Marian said.

  “You made yourself nervous,” Tate told her. “Think about it.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You’re reactionary. You feel too much. If you didn’t care about me one way or the other, if you didn’t care about what I thought, you would have been fine. It was only when you stopped giving a damn about what I thought that you were able to tune me out.”

  “It sounds cruel,” Marian said.

  Tate said, “Cruel but necessary. You can’t react under stress. You can’t get frustrated with the dog, no matter what is going on. I needed to see how you would react. I needed to know what you would do when the stakes are high.”

  Marian felt Tate’s hands on her back. He squeezed her braid, and when he did she could feel the water drip down the back of her shirt.

  “I should have brought a rain shell,” Marian said. Tate had not worn one either. Weather forecasts had predicted a break in the clouds with afternoon sun, but even now, the cloud cover was a dull white and the temperatures had remained in the forties, and the rain had continued to fall at a light but steady pace.

  “You cold?” Tate asked her.

  “Chilly,” she said. As she spoke her legs and body shivered. She thought back to that morning and the complete blunder she’d made of things. But she also remembered the moments when everything seemed to come together, when she stopped focusing so hard on herself and became aware of the world around her. And so she told Tate about that moment, when it all came together, about the water dripping through the conifer branches and the call of the thrush.

  “You became the observer,” Tate said. “I get that. I’ve been doing that all my life.”

  Tate took a bruised apple out of the side pocket of his backpack. He offered it to Marian but she shook her head. “Animals, people, what’s the difference?” he said. “It’s all the same. You watch something long enough, you become that thing you’re watching. You understand its every move. When it hurts. When it’s afraid. You learn how to respond to that.” Tate nudged Ranger with his foot. “Isn’t that right? You know what I’m saying.”

  Tate took another bite from his apple, then offered Ranger a bite, too. Afterward, he pulled his arm back and, like a sidearm pitcher, threw the apple across the river. Ranger was quick to his feet and ready to leap in the water.

  Marian grabbed him by his harness. “NO!”

  “Good reflexes,” Tate said.

  And Marian asked if that was part of the training.

  Tate laughed. “No, seriously, I wasn’t thinking.”

  But then Tate wasn’t laughing and Marian sensed his seriousness again.

  “This is a nice spot,” he said. He picked up a rock, turned it over and over. “Give me your hand,” he said. And so she did.

  He placed the rock in her open palm and folded her fingers across the rock’s smooth surface. He cupped both of his hands over hers and clasped his fingers together.

  “I want you to keep this,” he told her.

  “What do you want me to do with it?” she asked.

  Tate let go slowly, as if balancing the rock and her upturned fist on the pinnacle of her knee. “I want you to remember,” he said.

  When he didn’t say anything else, Marian asked him, “What do you want me to remember?”

  “I want you to remember this spot. When I die, this is where I want my ashes to end up. It seems fitting, don’t you think? The whole river-of-life thing.”

  And of course Marian was taken aback because she didn’t know why he was talking about dying. “Why are you telling me this?” she asked.

  “We’re all going to go sometime,” Tate said.

  Marian had not moved her hand.

  “At some point,” Marian said.

  “That’s right,” Tate said. He picked up a different rock and pulled his arm back. Ranger was already in a sitting position and wagging his tail. Marian grabbed him by the collar with one hand and wrapped her other arm around his chest.

  Tate let the rock fly. It sailed downriver and skipped along the water’s surface four or five times before disappearing. “Just like that rock,” Tate said. He stood, then lifted his pack onto his shoulders and buckled his sternum strap. Marian zipped her pack shut and stood next to him. She slipped the rock he had given her into her pocket.

  Tate called for Ranger, and by the time Marian had lifted her pack onto her shoulders, Tate and the dog were already climbing through the thick brush on the riverbank.

  The day had shifted, as if even the air were different. And perhaps it was the fatigue from the early morning, the work, the day’s hike. Ranger was tired. Marian was tired. She never finished her final transect. Instead, she followed Tate, even struggled a little to keep up against his long strides. And as they climbed the p
itch, as they moved against gravity, her muscles warmed, her body was no longer cold, and she was certain that the sun was burning brighter and the clouds were lifting, despite the heavy mood between her and Tate. He was right. She felt too much. She felt everything.

  The western larch needles were a fulsome green, and from all around, Marian heard the birds, their flutter of wings from up high in the branches, their occasional calls: robins and mountain bluebirds and wrens and warblers. She caught flashes of bright yellow from low-growing violet, and in those damp woods she found her first morel mushrooms. She stopped to gather some, and when she looked up, she could no longer see Tate, nor could she hear Ranger’s bell over the sounds of the river that was now behind her, or the nearby creeks and the natural drainage ditches.

  She was irritated that Tate had not waited for her. She was irritated that she had fallen behind. She took out her phone from her hip pouch so that she could navigate her way back to the vehicle. And then she realized she did not hear the birds anymore. She did not hear the squirrels in the trees. Despite the sounds of water, the air was still, and for the first time that day she felt afraid, as if something were watching her. The muscles across her shoulders wound tight. Slowly, she looked all around her for some kind of movement, her heartbeat drumming loudly in her ears. She was not alone. Something was out there, electricity moving down her spine and her legs. She had been quiet while she’d been picking the mushrooms, and now Tate and Ranger weren’t around. The first rule in bear country was to make noise.

  “Hey, bear!” Marian called out, the protocol when hiking alone. She moved slowly ahead and looked around her. The ground was too thick with vegetation for her to notice tracks, and the woods too dense for her to see very far in front of her. “Hey, bear!” she called again.

  But then she came to the alpine they had crossed earlier and she breathed a little more easily because she had better visibility and because the area felt familiar. The sky had opened up to a magnificent cerulean blue. The sun glared down, creating steam off the ground, and the clearing was wide enough for Marian to view the peaks to the east, still draped in snow.