Crabbe

by William Bell

  “You see?” I concluded, wiping my eyes with an embarrassed hand, “I’ve got nothing to go back to — nothing and nobody. What the hell’s the point?”

  It was a measure of her wisdom, a quality I got to know and rely on as time passed, that Mary never contradicted this statement. Most people would have started to hand out advice, piling up cliches like old newspapers. But she just said, “You’re a very bitter man, Crabbe.”

  “How can you say I’m a man, sitting here sniveling like a baby?”

  “Now that’s the first really dumb thing you’ve said since you began your autobiography,” she said. Mary was nothing if not blunt. “Come on, that stew’s about ready.”

  I felt a lot better after supper — full, warm, and calm. It was dark by then. A good moon was rising and a cool, brisk breeze swept through the campsite, taking the smoke off at a sharp angle. We sat talking for a long time, our conversation full of long silences.

  Finally I said, “Mary?”

  “Yes, Crabbe?”

  “You don’t have to tell me anything. It doesn’t matter. I understand, I think.” I paused for a moment. “And I’ll leave if you want.”

  Mary put down her cup and leaned forward intently.

  “Crabbe, I can’t tell you much. It’s not a matter of trust; it’s just better if you know nothing about me. I’ll tell you this much: I’ve run away, too. It’s very, very important that nobody find out I’m here. I’ve been here a year now and I’m staying the winter. After that… I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  “But don’t you get lonely — and bored?”

  She picked up a little stick and stirred the coals sending little showers of red ash up. “Bored? Never. Lonely? Of course. That’s why I’d like you to stay for awhile, if you want.”

  I almost jumped up and kicked my heels.

  “You bet I would!”

  Conscious that I sounded like a five-year-old with a new Christmas toy, I shut up.

  Silently, she got up and went over to the tent, returning with a couple of warm shirts, for the night was growing chilly. She took up her position across from me. It’s funny, you know, how a fire will weld people together, as if the leaping flames and the warmth go to your heart.

  So when she asked, from nowhere, “Do you find it hard, Crabbe, living without the liquor?” I just answered her as if she’d just asked for the time.

  “Yes,” I said. “I get bitchy and full of anxiety. It comes in spells. Christ, I’m glad I wasn’t deeper into it. I’m almost an alcoholic.” (That was a greater confession than it sounds.)

  “What a bloody useless character I am,” I added, and looked into the fire, shame welling up from inside.

  “Don’t feel sorry for yourself, Crabbe. Guilt is just another form of escape.”

  My anger jumped, but I said nothing. She was right, so why argue? Guilt is another escape and so is self­pity. And so is booze.

  Although I was terrifically pleased that I’d been: asked to stay, I felt empty and a little afraid when I sacked out — as if, if I could open up my head and look into myself I’d see only empty space, a shred of darkness wrapped in skin. Layer by layer I was being stripped away: the ordeal with the bear; the waterfall; my breaking down tonight and admitting what I never before admitted to anyone, including myself. What would happen, I wondered, when the last layer was peeled off? What would be left?

  Crabbe’s Journal: 12

  I’ve been going to school all my life, like most people, but I learned more from Mary than in all those years put together. Useful things, too — not the accusative case or parabolas or 1867 or metaphors. Growing up in the city, I had a very idealistic attitude toward old Ma Nature; like: the wilderness is a beautiful, peaceful place, populated with cute little birds and noble animals. Well, that’s bunk. So is the opposite notion, that Nature is a monster-mother full of traps and vicious violence. The truth is, Nature is just there. All those cute little beings survive by eating other beings. On the other hand, you don’t need to think of the wilderness as a horrible threat waiting to gobble you up either. It’s the way it is and that’s that.” You can’t change it by wishful thinking or complaining.

  And I grew to like that fact after awhile, everything I learned from Mary was useful. When you live in the bush, everything you do is significant, it means something, because, if you don’t know what you’re doing or you’re not careful, you get wet or drowned or hungry or lost. Something will happen to you, that’s a certainty. Nature isn’t nasty. It is what it is and you’re part of it. You aren’t in control like you are in the city. You work with the environment not against it. Like a sailor. He doesn’t fight the wind, he works with it. And he can’t do that until he learns about it.

  In the city, nothing I did mattered. If I left my clothes lying around, somebody picked them up. If I forgot my raincoat I called a cab. I left my calculator on the subway once: I just bought a new one at the nearest store.

  But out there in the bush, as I said, everything mattered, and I learned that fast. Sure, life meant a lot of hard work, but if things are important you get a feeling of satisfaction when you do them well.

  A few days after our long talk, Mary and I were back in the bush setting some snares in an area she had never tried before. I walked along behind her watching her slim, lithe figure move gracefully through the sun­shot hardwood bush. She walked in long, easy strides, her sand-coloured hair swinging back and forth across her back. From time to time she stopped, checked her compass, turned and looked in the direction from which we’d come, then moved on, her boots barely rustling the dry leaves on the forest floor. Presently the land sloped and we approached copses of spruce and cedar and the ground was wet in patches.

  We set snares for an hour or so. When the last one had been carefully arranged, Mary straightened up, wiped her hands on her pant legs and looked at me, smiling. Her grey eyes looked mischievous.

  “Okay, Crabbe,” she said nonchalantly, “lead us home.”

  ‘Oh, yeah. Right. Sure.”

  “No, really,” she said, all innocence. “Take us back. Which way, Leader?”

  “Haven’t got a clue.”

  She then leaned against a windfall.

  “What would you do if I weren’t here, if we got separated?”

  I answered, “Oh, I don’t know. Let’s see. First I think I’d panic for a few minutes. Then scream. Then run around like a chicken with its head cut off. Then call a cab.”

  She laughed.

  “Okay, come on.” And off she went trailed by her faithful follower.

  That night, right after a supper of fish soup and bannock, we started compass school. And the next day, in a fine drizzle, Mary took me for a long walk in the greening woods and we practiced taking bearings. It’s pretty easy. The tricky part is taking the bearing and then staying on course over uneven ground and around obstacles — like swamps, for instance.

  After a week I could lead us into the bush and back with only a few corrections from Mary. I also learned a little about “reading” the terrain. Mary claims that if you live somewhere long enough you get familiar with the bush just like you get used to the buildings and streets of a city.

  I was amazed to find that you can use a map and compass to find out where you are if you are lost — where on the map, I mean. You use a process called triangulation, with some sharp eye-work and a little arithmetic. We even did it by drawing a map in the dirt.

  Then, one sunny morning after breakfast Mary announced in that out-of-the blue way of hers, “I think today’s the day.”

  She looked up at the sky, made a big show of looking around the campsite.

  “Yup. No rain tonight, no pressing work to do. It’s a good day for it.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. Definitely,” I said. I was used to the way Mary would say something with no connection to what you had been talking about. As if you’d been in her head all along listening to her thoughts.

  “A great day for the Big Test,” she co
ntinued. She stood and clapped her hands together.

  “Come on, Crabbe, exam time. Grab your bedroll, a knife, canteen and some matches. Wrap up that lump of bannock.”

  “I’m not moving,” I answered casually, and poured myself some tea. I lay back on one elbow. “You have clearly gone insane.”

  “Aren’t you F period Crabbe, school wonderboy, great scholar?” Her eyes were wide in mock wonder.

  “You got it. That’s me. And you are a crazy goddess, talking in riddles.”

  “Well, today you prove that compassing is one of your many accomplishments. So move your butt.”

  Half an hour later we were on the other side of the lake, standing on the tiny beach there. The sun still shone warmly and the merest ripple could be seen on the lake.

  “Turn around,” Mary commanded.

  I don’t know if you’ve ever been led, blindfolded, through the bush: believe me, it’s an experience. Mary led me for what seemed an eternity and finally stopped.

  “Sit.” I sat. The blindfold came off. After squinting against the light for a minute, I looked around. I was sitting on a large boulder in the middle of the bush. Of course, I recognized nothing. Suddenly I felt very uneasy: it had just occurred to me that only I had brought a bedroll.

  “Mary, I — ”

  “Don’t talk, Crabbe. Listen. Take this.”

  She handed me a piece of birch bark (how pioneerish, I thought) with writing on it, and her compass.

  “Read that later. It has bearings and directions on it. Now, follow the directions exactly. I mean, precisely. Got it?”

  “Yeah, right. Exactly.” I wondered if she noticed the tension in my voice.

  “And,” she paused dramatically to get my attention, “if you come across water, you’ve screwed up. Stop and make a smoky fire and stay put. Repeat that.”

  “Knock off the drama, Mary. I heard you.” She just looked at me till I repeated it all.

  “But where am I going, Mary? Back to the beach?”

  “You didn’t listen, Dopey. If you get back to the beach, you’ve screwed up!”

  “But — ”

  “Never mind. Do as I say. Follow your first instruction.”

  I read the bark. “60 degrees to big pine. Don’t look back.” That was it.

  Off I went, fighting the urge to look over my shoulder and say something to her. I lasted about fifty yards then turned to see her. She had disappeared.

  Mary had set up the trial so that I would have to spend the night in the bush and I realized after I’d spent most of the day following her directions that I wasn’t going to get off easily. I had some moments of doubt, too. She had said to me a million times, “Trust the compass, Crabbe.” Because many times I felt like I knew where to go but the compass didn’t agree. It was the same now, but I doggedly maintained my faith in the magic window with the needle in it. Basically I made out alright.

  It was what else was going on in my head that gave me trouble. On one level I was very logical following the directions and bearings as exactly as I could, making decisions about the landmarks. But below the calculations, like a dark, damp room in the basement under the computer banks, I was getting very uneasy: the further I went, the deeper I travelled into the bush alone.

  This was different from water travel. There, you move through open space. The sky is right there, over you; you are comforted by the horizon. And you can see where you’ve come from, how far you’ve travelled.

  But the bush, waiting quietly in the shore of every lake, the bush is different. Even in spring, when the buds are beginning to unfurl, it swallows you down. The trees crowd you and the sky is distant, held from you by millions and millions of strong branches. You walk and walk, growing more and more fatigued, sweaty and irritated as you slip and stumble or get slashed across the eye by the whip-like branch of a sapling. Swamps and bogs, dark, wet, and even more crowded, threaten you and cause time-consuming detours. And no matter how many hours you travel, you have almost no sense of progress. Not until you reach terrain that you recognize, if you reach such terrain at all.

  I didn’t. I didn’t know where I was going or when I would get there. And there was always the chance that I wouldn’t get there at all.

  So by the time the forest began to darken and I spread my bedroll on a bed of piled up leaves on a piece of flat ground in the lee of a rock out-cropping, I was very tired and very uneasy. “Fear” isn’t the right word, although fear was a part of it. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt totally isolated, but that’s sort of what it was like. There was, literally, no one but me there — out in the middle of nowhere.

  As I lay rolled up in old blankets, set tied in for the long wait for dawn, I thought a lot about loneliness.

  How I sometimes felt alone in a crowd of other kids, in the school gym at an assembly The Beet called for some stupid reason like a pep rally, American style, for the football team. How I went through my day with no real friends. How our formal dinners at home were three people “in solitary,” condemned, it seemed, forever.

  How my life was symbolized by a mental picture I carry around in my head: a teenager alone in his room, staring into the T.V. screen, hating whatever programme is on, sipping on vodka, waiting for sleep.

  And how it was mostly my fault. Oh, I like to blame them, blame them all. But it was me.

  Nice way to spend the night in the bosom of Ma Nature, eh? I lay there all night, trying to figure the answer. Was my life very different from others’? Were we all alone, in spite of the illusion of comfort from other people? Or was I only depressed by the dark, alien bush that wrapped me like a cloak?

  By the time the bush was filled with soft grey light I was sitting up with my back to a big sugar maple. Naturally I had no answer to those questions, and naturally they seemed less urgent with the return of dawn. Who does have an answer, though? All I knew was that my loneliness was mostly my own fault.

  It was very hot by late afternoon. My shirt was glued to me. Grimy and bitchy, I sat down on a huge fallen oak that Mary had chosen for a landmark — the last landmark on the list of instructions she’d given me. I chewed hungrily on some bannock, took a pull on the canteen, and tried to ignore the few black flies that the heat had brought out.

  “About time you got here.”

  It was Mary’s voice. My head snapped back and forth.

  I stood up and spun around. I couldn’t see her.

  “Where are you?” I demanded, trying to keep the sound of relief from my voice.

  She stood up, not six feet from me. She’d been lying among a clutch of maple saplings.

  “Right here, Crabbe. You alright?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Nice to see you. I missed you,” I blurted.

  “Well, well, well,” she said, half seriously. “Do you know that’s the first time you’ve admitted to a positive emotion since I met you?”

  I smiled. “Yeah, well. I feel pretty good today, I guess.”

  As she turned and began to walk through the hardwoods she said over her slender shoulder, “Tell me.”

  “Tell you what?” I walked along beside her. Our feet rustled the dry leaves.

  “Tell me how you feel, dummy.”

  “Oh, well, I don’t know — sort of proud, I guess. Like I did something good.”

  “You did do something good, Crabbe. That was a tough route I worked out for you. I won’t ask you if you were scared because I know you were. I would have been. By the way, you were safe all the time. I had you working back and forth on a big peninsula. So even if you went off course you’d have hit water and I could get you out.”

  We came out of the bush — right onto the little beach we were at yesterday. I had ended up a hundred yards from where I’d started. That didn’t surprise me.

  “So all the time,” I said, a little disappointed, “that I was sweating about going off course and wandering up to the bloody North Pole, I was in a big, leafy playpen, safe as a baby?” I wasn’t mad. But my feeling of pride was
gone.

  “Yes, you were safe. But you didn’t know that, Crabbe. Don’t miss the point. Your accomplishment was the same. You did it. Now the forest needn’t be a terrible mystery to you.” She handed me a paddle and we lifted the canoe into the water. “You don’t have to be blind any more,” she added. “And listen, Crabbe, if you’ve got a good reason to feel good about yourself — and you do — then do it. You don’t need anybody’s permission.”

  Before we had paddled half way across the lake I felt good again. Living with her was like that.

  Crabbe’s Journal: 13

  That first month or so was pretty rough. Oh, I don’t mean the work or the demands Mary made on me to learn skills that would raise me to a notch above “useless” on the evolutionary scale, Mostly, I enjoyed that part. And I wasn’t, as you might think, having problems controlling my animal urges with this beautiful woman around. I had them, I’m not saying I didn’t, but Mary didn’t come on like the women on T.V. — either syrupy smiles, big fluttery eyes, and an air of helplessness, or more manly than a truck driver (to prove she was liberated) — no, she was just Mary. Hell, I was the helpless one, not her.

  The real problem was that I was still having trouble getting along without my “pal,” Silent Sam. It wasn’t easy, stopping dead like that, and I don’t know what made me think that I wouldn’t need it when I ran away.

  I never really lost the desire for a talk with Sam during the day — it was a bit like a slow burn. But once or twice, usually if it was in the afternoon and usually if I was taking a break, I’d really get the craving. I’d get jumpy and bitchy and lose all my patience. This state would pass after awhile.