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The Wild Inside

Page 4

by Jamey Bradbury


  The plate shattered when I dropped it, so many shards against the floor. My heart thundering in my chest.

  I didn’t mean to. The words come out choked, my throat like a pinhole. It just happened, I said.

  It’s okay. Dad was out of his chair and kneeling on the floor, picking up the bigger chunks of plate. Don’t cut yourself, he said. Get the broom so I can sweep up the rest.

  When I handed him the broom, he could see how my hands was shaking. I felt it inside me, too, like an earthquake happening in my guts.

  Hey, Dad said. Hey, it’s okay. He pulled me to him and wrapped his arms round me, stroked my back. The tremors inside me slowly went away, and soon all I felt was the solidness of him. I tried to think when was the last time he’d held me like this. Remembered him swinging me off my feet after the first time I run the dogs on my own. His arm a comfort round me after I had to scratch my second Junior Iditarod on account of dropping too many dogs. His hand on my shoulder as we walked to the truck after Mom’s funeral. Always solid, always there, no matter what happened or what I done.

  A thousand words behind my lips, like dogs in the starting chute. All of them desperate to tumble out, to make it all plain.

  You got your knife on you now? he asked.

  I always had it. I drew it from my pocket and offered it to him. I hoped he would keep it, not get rid of it even though I supposed it was proof of some sort. Once Dad told the VSO what I had done, I probably wouldn’t see that knife again.

  Dad nodded but didn’t take the knife. He started to sweep up the bits of broken plate.

  Good, he said. I know you think of these woods as your backyard. You know them so well, you think nothing bad can happen out there. You forget just anyone could wander through.

  He dumped the shards into the trash, leaned the broom against the counter. Put his hat on.

  Them chores ought to keep you too busy to do much running round the next few days, but when you go back into the woods, I want you to keep your knife on you. And if you see anything out there, you tell me, hear?

  I turned the knife over in my hand. You want me to keep it?

  He zipped his coat. You never can tell who’s going to come roaming through the woods, he said. Don’t go looking for trouble. But if you see someone— He shook his head. It’s just better you have a way to protect yourself.

  Not minutes before, I’d had so many things to say to him I couldn’t choose one. Now I didn’t have a single word.

  What’s wrong, kiddo? he asked. Is it the plate? It’s not a loss. Your mom always hated them plates, anyway. He tried to squeeze my shoulder, but I shied away. Pocketed my knife.

  It’s been a rough morning, huh? he said. You get after those chores, maybe we’ll take a walk later. Sound all right?

  I didn’t bother answering.

  Good girl, he said.

  Then he was out the door. I watched him through the window, seen him pause halfway between the house and the dog yard. It was still snowing, lighter now, and the clouds so low the mountains beyond the trees had vanished.

  I went on drying the dishes, the whole time aware of the weight of the knife in my pocket. All the relief and worry I had felt before drained away and got replaced by a buzzing inside me, I could hear it growing louder and louder, like a swarm of bees in my head. I stared at the plate in my hand. Used to be, I could tell him anything. Bring him a problem, he would tell me how to solve it. There wasn’t no secrets between us. Then I had one thing I couldn’t tell him. The problem with having one secret is that it turns into two pretty quick. Then three, then so many it seems like anytime you open your mouth you are in danger of spilling everything.

  I wiped the last plate dry.

  Good girl. That’s what he’d called me.

  I threw the plate at the floor.

  Long as I followed Mom’s rules, I could stay outside all day if I wanted. I run and wrestled with the dogs, watched chipmunks jump branch to branch and voles make their burrows in the grass. When Scott got big enough, I showed him how to climb the big tree in front of the house. We made swords from switches and chased each other round the yard till Mom hollered us in to dinner. Then I’d eat everything in front of me, seemed like I was always hungry. Dad would say, She’s a growing girl. Except I never seemed to grow much. I was always small for my age, muscular enough and wide across but never very tall. Scott would push his food round and whine about having to eat this or that, and Dad would say, Look at your sister, she doesn’t complain.

  Scott stuck his tongue out at me. Mom cut his meat for him, and watched us, silent.

  I was seven when I got real serious about trapping and shelter building. Dad showed me how to make a basic snare, how to build a lean-to that would give you enough cover if a storm come up unexpectedly. I dug myself a snow pit round the base of a white spruce behind the kennel, packed the walls real good and laid down branches on the floor of the pit, and when Dad come to see my work, he said, Good job, Trace. Then showed me how to lay more branches over the top of the shelter to keep the heat in.

  The more time I spent outdoors, the harder it got to come in. Mom stood at the back stoop and hollered my name over and over, till I finally come out the woods, rubbing my hands against my shirt and leaving smears of blood.

  Clean up, she told me but then grabbed my arm before I could walk past her. What’s this?

  She dug into my pocket and pulled out the rock I had found near the creek. I had chipped away at it with a second, harder rock to make an edge, I hoped to get it sharp enough to cut through fur and skin since my own teeth could not break through a critter’s tough hide.

  Inside, she said. Don’t come back late again.

  I held out my hand, but she didn’t give the rock back.

  I should of been smarter and stuck by her rules. But when you are creeping toward the first lynx you have ever seen near your property, you move so slowly you don’t seem to be moving at all, it takes nearly half a minute to place your foot completely on the ground so that the weight of it does not snap a twig and send the animal running. A thing like that can’t be done quick. In the end it didn’t matter, I got close enough to smell its breath, musty and spicy and cloying, but then I lost my balance and had to put my hand out, and the sound of me stumbling spooked it. The lynx darted away, and the sun was long past set, and my dinner was cold.

  Mom told me I wasn’t to leave the yard for the next three days.

  I had learned pretty quick that a couple days without going into the woods put me out of sorts. It wasn’t just my head that suffered, neither. If I went too long without hunting, my belly ached something awful and my muscles went all trembly. I felt weak and woozy while I tried to do the schoolwork Mom put in front of me, the numbers floating on the paper and switching places.

  So by the third day, my stomach was like a hollow pit, nothing I ate would fill me up, and I shivered even as I sat close as I could get to the fire in the den. Scott on his belly nearby, coloring in his book.

  You want to do this page? he asked.

  Leave me alone, I said.

  He frowned. You sick?

  I didn’t bother answering. He only went outside if we was playing or helping with the dogs, and he’d never caught an animal on his own. He got cold quick when we played together in the snow, even though he was bundled in three layers or more. And he could stay inside for days on end, sounding out the words in his picture books and coloring all afternoon. He never seemed to get sick the way I done. It was hard to believe sometimes we was even related. Except for the way he could annoy me, only a brother could know just how to get on your last nerve, like the way he held out a crayon then and asked, Is this your color? When I didn’t answer, he held out the next one and asked again, teasing, color after color, each one closer to my face, and I thought about warning him, it wasn’t funny and I wasn’t in the mood, and then he held out the green crayon and asked, laughing, Is this your color? and got so close I felt the soft waxy tip poke my cheek.

>   My teeth wasn’t sharp enough to break an animal’s hide, but a person’s skin is not as tough.

  Then Scott was crying, and though my stomach already felt better than it had in days, it also sunk.

  I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I said. I didn’t mean to. I petted his shoulder, and he held his hand to his chest, the blood from it stained the front of his shirt. I didn’t mean to, I said again even as my mouth watered.

  Mom come in then. Out, she said and swept Scott up in her arms.

  But—

  She was already in the bathroom, prying Scott’s hand open to clean the bite. Tracy, I said go. Just go outside. She kicked the door closed.

  So that is how I come to catch my first hare, I didn’t wait to see if Mom would change her mind but run out the back door and deeper into the woods than ever before. Come upon some tracks in the snow I could not identify, then a tuft of fur caught on a twig. Then a pile of scat. I rolled the pieces between my fingers and tried to recall what animal it belonged to, these pellets was much smaller than moose scat, rounder and a little flat. When I come to a place where the tracks squeezed between two trees, I took my time setting the snare. Then I hid myself in the bushes.

  It was a hare. It had dark tips on its ears and big, furry feet, so I knew it was a snowshoe hare, it could move through very deep snow real easy. When I seen it, my heart stopped. I held my breath and watched it follow its own tracks toward the two trees with the snare between them. When the hare hopped, it covered so much ground with a single stride, I wished for a moment that I could move like that. Then it was between the trees, it was caught and struggling, the snare tightening round its neck.

  With no knife, I had a time killing it, but I managed. The blood come easily enough when I snapped the neck. I had my fill. The cold wind inside me stopped howling, and my own blood pulsed warm in my veins. I sat with my back against an alder, the midday sun finally inching its way into the sky and the trees all round me unveiling themselves in the weak light. The snow stained red from what was left of the hare, it was dead now but I could still hear it. It had squealed in its snare, before I snapped its neck, and I felt that squeal inside me, not just in my head but in my own throat, it tore at the soft lining there like I was the one who had screamed.

  This was how I learned what I needed to know from the critters I took. Some learning, I had got from books. You open up a book and absorb the words and from that you know how to make a split stick trap or how to shelter yourself in the snow. It’s like drinking, you take it in and it is part of you.

  The other kind of learning, you drink it in, too. It’s warm and it spreads through you, wakes up your muscles and sharpens your mind, and you can see clearly, not just with your eyes but with your whole self, and then you know what you didn’t before. How a squirrel plans its route from branch to branch. How a mouse will hear you before it ever sees you. How a snowshoe hare knows to run in a zigzag, not in a straight line, to confuse its predator. Every piece of knowing makes the next hunt easier.

  I watched light soak into the woods and learned what I could from the hare. But underneath the hare’s experience, there was flashes of something else. The hare wasn’t the only thing I’d drunk from that day, I could still taste what little I’d got from Scott, too. And with that taste come a burning shame, not my own, but Scott’s. Along with it, his memory, now my memory, of waking that morning in a damp patch of my own piss. Satisfaction from the idea that come to me to hide my sheets and remake my own bed so Mom wouldn’t know. Little points of anger that shot out at my sister when she wouldn’t color with me, and the giddy, dangerous feeling I got when I kept goading her, like poking at a sleeping bear.

  I knew my brother now in a way I hadn’t before. I had felt bad almost soon as I bit Scott, but now I felt even worse, like I had gutted him and looked inside and seen things he wouldn’t of wanted me to. I never felt that way when I learned what a squirrel or a vole had to teach me because how could I feel bad about being part of the natural way of things? But it was different with Scott.

  Mom was waiting for me at home, sitting on the stoop, wrapped in her red coat and a wool hat on her head. Her eyes bloodshot and her face flushed.

  She stood up. Fixing to say something or maybe yell or swat at me. Her face was a fast-moving cloud, changing second to second, it couldn’t settle on one emotion. Between anger and frustration and tiredness, I seen something else there, a look that happened so quick it was impossible to know what it might be. Except that for less than a second, when she looked down at the hare then right at me, it was like she seen a friend she recognized. Then the look was gone.

  We don’t hurt people, she said.

  I know, I told her.

  No, Tracy, listen to me, she said. You can hit. You and Scott are going to fight, I get it. That’s natural between brothers and sisters. You can wrestle and slap and pull each other’s hair. I’d rather you didn’t, but I know it’s going to happen. But—listen.

  She drew closer, took my chin in her hand. Locked eyes with me.

  You must never make him bleed, she said. And not just him. Anyone.

  Okay, I said and my voice was a whisper. My gut twisted in a knot. I couldn’t tell her I was sorry again.

  You know the other rules.

  I nodded.

  Then you can remember one more, she said. Even if you break the others, you can’t ever break this one. You promise?

  Okay.

  Let me hear you say it.

  Never make a person bleed, I said.

  Her eyes darted to the hare that I had brought back for Dad to skin.

  Good girl, she said.

  3

  All that weekend, Dad roused me soon as he was awake and handed me a list of chores. At first he stuck to his guns and give me only indoor chores, but I didn’t complain. I waded through piles of laundry and scrubbed the kitchen floor till it shined, cleaned every window and polished every stick of furniture and run the vacuum so much I couldn’t get its whine out of my ears. The whole time wondering what had happened to the stranger. Tom Hatch. If he was healing on a clinic bed in town. Or if he’d been healed and bandaged and was on his way back to wherever he come from. Or if he was gone altogether.

  Eventually Dad run out of indoor chores and let me shovel snow off the porch and even tend to some of the dogs. I brushed Homer and Canyon, clipped their nails. Made my rounds through the dog yard dropping kibble into bowls and shoveling shit. In the evenings, I wrestled with whichever racing dog we’d let be the house dog for the night. Then I settled down and done the schoolwork Scott picked up for me each day. Even though I was expelled, Dad was set on me keeping up with what I ought to be learning. I kept my mouth shut, done the work. I could still be good, even if I had nearly killed a man. Even if I’d wished him dead.

  I did slip away when I had the chance. I couldn’t stay gone from the woods, even if I couldn’t tell Dad why. When I heard the table saw whirr to life or when Dad backed down the driveway with the plow fixed to the front of his truck, headed off to clear someone’s road, I dropped my shovel or my broom and dove into the woods. Checked the traps closest to home or followed the freshest set of tracks I could find. I run a mile or two down the trail, then turned round and come home before Dad got back. In this way, I kept my belly from aching and my mind calm.

  Sometimes, I got as far as the clearing where Tom Hatch had come upon me. By now the handprint he’d left on the tree was faded, you wouldn’t of noticed it unless you knew to look for it. I placed my hand over it then pulled away, quick, as if it burned me.

  Back home, the stranger’s pack still hid under my bed. I hated to think of it, waiting on him to come back to find it. I shouldn’t of brung it home in the first place. Instead of returning it to the woods, though, I drug it out most nights. Counted the money, there was almost four thousand dollars. Enough to pay for the Junior and the big race itself.

  I inspected his other belongings. The tarp, a twist of jerky, a handful of uncooked rice in a
bag, a tin coffee mug. I reached past it all and unearthed the book.

  Like me, the stranger had folded the corners of his favorite pages and underlined whole paragraphs. But unlike me, he seemed particularly interested in details I’d barely paid attention to whenever I reread the book. I stayed in Seattle long enough to earn the money I needed to continue north, becoming an expert at cleaning fish in the meantime. It wasn’t the kind of writing you could learn anything from, I usually skimmed them parts so I could get to the hunting and trapping and hiking bits faster. I didn’t even remember Kleinhaus had stopped in Seattle for a spell.

  Inside the book, the pages was covered with words, not just Kleinhaus’s familiar words but Tom Hatch’s handwritten notes.

  If I do nothing else before I die, I will see the northern lights.

  black bear = tall ears, short claws, no shoulder hump. brown bear = short round ears, long light-colored claws, shoulder hump.

  Most effective snare?

  “Small mistakes are magnified in the wild.”

  to do—1. learn about trapping 2. get map 3. best way to sharpen knife?

  It had been a good few months since I’d reread Kleinhaus, and that feeling sprung up in me again, the feeling like looking at someone else and seeing your own self reflected. Except it wasn’t Kleinhaus’s words that spoke to me this time. Tom Hatch’s handwriting was tiny, and he’d crammed his own words into every space. What I’d read so far all had to do with learning something new or reminding himself of a fact. I didn’t write in my books, I liked the margins to be clean. But I had done the same kind of learning, specially at first, drinking in the words of my guidebooks and memorizing the parts of a Paiute deadfall or the shape of a lynx’s tracks.

  I read some of what Hatch had wrote, then closed the book, shoved it back inside the pack. But minutes later, I found myself reading again. Nodding when he come across good information about trapping or way finding. Wishing I could set him right when he got something wrong. Then shaking my head and throwing the book into the pack again. This stranger, Tom Hatch, wasn’t someone I could let myself be soft about.

 

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