Wicked River

by Jenny Milchman

  “Just a sec,” she said to Doug, hoping that chattering teeth didn’t cause her voice to tremble. “I need to get something first. It’s freezing out here.”

  She flipped open the trunk, and had just begun to dig through the contents of her pack, when a shout assailed her.

  “Aunt Nat, don’t go!” The voice was heaving, out of breath. “Don’t leave yet!”

  Natalie spun around to see her niece flying down the inn’s drive, all overlong legs and waving arms. Claudia followed in Mia’s churned-up path, and their father brought up the rear, blinking and stumbling under the load of bags he carried, which prevented him from joining the scrum Natalie and Mia and Claudia formed as they all hugged goodbye.

  The sun broke like an egg over the horizon, rendering the entire world a blushing, new-bride pink.

  Chapter Five

  In hindsight, Kurt Pierson wished he’d had some idea of his location when he went into the river. That way he could’ve climbed back up and pillaged the left-behinds of their disbanded group. Tools, gear, even the chickens would’ve helped him begin some sort of subsistence living, although Kurt quickly came to understand that he would’ve slaughtered every last one of those birds, rather than wait for them to lay eggs. The hunger that attacked when you didn’t have a single bite to eat was like a kind of madness.

  That had been two years ago, give or take—Kurt had no access to a calendar—but the memory of his suffering was as acute as if he were still experiencing it.

  His belly had been empty, gnawed apart by a thousand teeth, although his head was stuffed full of knowledge. The people with whom he’d come into these woods, intent on starting some sort of utopia, and armed with strategies for wilderness survival, had been forced to admit failure. The starry-eyed group of philosophers had met online, yearning after a mythical Walden, but didn’t even last one season, leaving Kurt to carry out their plan by himself in the woods. Doing anything alone was its own special brand of hell to Kurt, but for once in his life, solitude had been the least crushing of his burdens.

  His very ability to survive was in jeopardy.

  During those initial months, hunger undermined what had always been Kurt’s greatest asset: his mind. So he’d doubled down, dousing himself with cold creek water whenever wooziness took hold, locating vines to build a snare as he’d been shown. When he couldn’t tie the green strands tightly enough, he sacrificed a pair of laces from one of his boots, letting the lip flap around his ankle as he strode off to hide in a makeshift blind.

  By then it was fall, the carnival of color on the trees allowing for a fairly accurate estimate of the passage of time. A month or more since he’d separated from his group. He had lost perhaps twenty pounds, he figured, ten percent of his body weight.

  The first animal he trapped—a chipmunk or possibly a mole, something small and brown and skittering—was so close to life that had Kurt released it, it would’ve scampered away. Instead, Kurt pounded it into a mash with a rock, his arm growing more feeble with every strike, before he ate the creature raw, spitting out bits of fur. Without a single match, Kurt didn’t have any way to cook his kill.

  Because of how things ended, Kurt had chosen not to accompany his group out of the wilderness. Just call it a loss, and return to civilization? He couldn’t do that; he suspected what would await him there. Still, despite having mined his companions for knowledge, Kurt was finding that theoretical understanding stood far apart from actual application. Before too much time had passed, life proved itself sufficiently difficult that he began to consider an exit strategy.

  After snaring the chipmunk, he decided that if ever he was going to have the vigor to trek out of the woods, this would be the time. It took a full day of walking, but eventually Kurt came to a trail and followed the path to its outlet. There he jumped back, concealing himself behind a tree, hoping that his hunger-addled sight had been wrong. Kurt snaked back through this more trafficked region of the forest to find a second winding path. Then a third. One trail after another, in a kaleidoscopic whirl, expending calories he couldn’t spare only to confirm what he’d already guessed would be true.

  Posters were tacked up at every trailhead, each bearing a recent photograph of Kurt, along with two that had been doctored to show what he would look like with longer hair and a beard. Blocky letters demanded Have you seen this man? Surely they’d barnstormed the surrounding towns too.

  Kurt Pierson was a badly wanted man, and having emerged, dripping and reborn from that river, he had to confront the facts. If he couldn’t make a life for himself in this wilderness, then he would spend the rest of it in a prison cell.

  Things had gone wrong for their troupe in the woods, yet only Kurt had acted, and if he slunk back to the real world as his compatriots had, he would be leaving to face murder charges. He owed the fact that he hadn’t yet been captured—for surely his former group members had given him up without a qualm—to the impenetrable density of this region, the low likelihood of locating a target within it.

  That first fall and winter, staying alive was Kurt’s only goal. He made do with dry, crackly leaves spread across the bare ground during the remaining clear days, then boughs strapped to the trunk of a tree with pond grasses to keep out the autumnal rains, and a snow cave forged after the first blizzard.

  The bout of hunger Kurt experienced once everything froze made the one that had hit before he’d trapped the chipmunk seem akin to skipping a midday snack. He could hardly stagger to his feet in the mornings; during the nights, his body contorted itself into the shape of a fetus. There wasn’t a single animal to snare, no grasses to suck green juices from before spitting out a rough mat of stems. The snows came unceasingly, without the sky pausing to catch its breath. The worst moment arrived when, while gnawing at his nails, Kurt accidentally bit a piece of flesh off the tip of his finger. He chewed and swallowed it, savoring the morsel. A plan occurred, making sense in the state he was in. He would cannibalize himself until there was no more of him to be had.

  If an off-season hunter hadn’t arrived, Kurt would’ve died that day or the next. Alerted by the clap of gunfire through the silent snow, Kurt first trudged, then fell to his knees and crawled, winding up near the hunter who was dressing his illegal kill.

  Kurt crouched, undetected, beneath an overhang of branches until the hunter left. Then he emerged to scoop up each clump of innards left steaming on the snow. Kurt parceled them out, knowing he would throw everything up if he ate it at once. He consumed the leavings like bloody ice pops until they ran out some days later, at which point Kurt was spurred onto his feet again for a second shamble through the woods.

  If he’d had the energy, he would’ve jeered at himself for how little distance he had to cover in order to change his destiny. An abandoned ranger’s cabin had stood nearby in a thicket all along. The tiny structure was windowless and falling down, but a few items—tinned food and kitchen implements mostly—had been left behind. These and some Swiss-cheesed wool blankets enabled Kurt to endure long enough for spring to poke its mossy snout out of the ground. At that point, snowmelt collapsed the cabin he’d called home for the last days, weeks, months—he had little idea of time by then—and Kurt barely crawled out in time to avoid being crushed.

  He was so shrunken and frail that he lay blinking on the wettened soil, not registering for a while that a deer, also winter weakened, had stumbled into the trap Kurt had never dismantled, and which was now exposed by receding snows.

  Kurt knelt beside the animal, gnawing at its hide until he bore down to a heated swath of flesh. He tore a hunk off the deer’s body with his teeth while it still lay expiring, and as the deer’s life ran out, Kurt felt his own begin to return.

  Spring turned out to be a lazy man’s banquet: all those helpless, mewling young. Kurt feasted on minute birds in their nests, baby gophers that he consumed in one bite, even a litter of bobcats. He had to kill the mother when she app
eared—more feasting—but by that time he’d pilfered a machete in addition to other essentials from the first backcountry hiker of the season, who had strayed too close to Kurt’s lair.

  The hiker returned from a dunk in the creek to find his pack lighter, thinned out, and as he stomped off—cursing about there being no place left where a man could be alone anymore, and since when did backpackers steal from each other—a nearly forgotten hunger awakened in Kurt.

  He had always fueled himself, satisfied the deepest portion of his appetite, with succor derived from other people. That was why he’d chosen to enter the woods in the first place—what better source of study than living in a small pack of people utterly dependent upon one another? How Kurt had enjoyed those initial days spent together, a time of intimate wonder during which he’d borne witness to the ways in which a flock of differing folks adapted to having their entire lives dismantled, and adjusted to a life devoid of possessions and creature comforts.

  It was something Kurt had come to miss back home: that close surveillance of others. Kurt’s son was getting older, eleven then, less needy and dependent. Bizarrely enough, he’d begun to express an inclination to spend time on his own. That one had come out of nowhere, and Kurt had been ill-prepared for it. In addition, his wife had filed for divorce, saying she’d always felt held at a distance by Kurt, a claim that was patently absurd. Kurt had never observed anyone as deeply as he had his wife. The chance to live in the sort of proximity that building a new society would require served to appease Kurt, allowed him to get past the loss of his family.

  Exposing people’s most intimate aspects, sucking on their skinned meat as he did the wildlife that were restoring him to health, gave Kurt a depth of satisfaction, one that made him pity men who didn’t have the same. And with the physical deprivations of winter relieved, Kurt needed his other form of nutrition more desperately than ever. He was alone out here. No wife, nor son, not one member of the group with whom he had originally come to these woods.

  Why had he not thought to take the hiker along with the pickings of his pack?

  The more terrain Kurt covered, the greater his risk of discovery. It’d be safer to remain still, wait for somebody else to come along.

  In this new life of his, Kurt didn’t have a good way of marking time, and granularity finer than big chunks of months, the passing of the seasons, eluded him, an artifact of the world he had lost. Rain had washed clean the char marks Kurt had slashed onto a boulder for a rudimentary calendar, and the cabin wall he’d carved a tally into during the winter collapsed. But as the days began, undeniably, to pile up, Kurt started fearing that another hiker might never venture this far off the beaten path, into this particular pocket of wilderness.

  Spring had turned to the flesh of his first full summer before he was given an opportunity. A female hiker, making her lone way through the woods, businesslike and methodical as she traversed the difficult terrain. She stopped and spoke when Kurt approached her, not unwary—nowhere near as blithely unaware as the utopians had been—although Kurt did catch the faintest hint of a smile beginning to bloom on her face while they conversed.

  For a few blissful minutes, the woods held the prospect of becoming the Brigadoon Kurt’s fellow woodsmen had imagined but failed to create. Bushes clustered with berries, a laughing, crystalline stream, the crackle of a freshly lit fire—all should’ve combined to seduce Kurt’s new companion, the source of lasting study he needed to procure lest he perish from loneliness.

  Although Kurt was typically able to predict moods, thoughts, and behaviors in others with unerring accuracy, he hadn’t anticipated how fiercely this woman would try to leave. How much of a fight she’d put up.

  Or what he would have to do to stop her.

  During the yawning emptiness of the days to come, Kurt had ample opportunity to debrief, rehash, figure out what had gone so terribly wrong.

  He had tried to keep the hiker here by dint of brute force, instead of relying on what had always been his truest skill set, his special talent. Which was digging out—like a dentist did rot in a tooth—the weak, sore spots people had, then positioning himself to fill them. That kind of finesse had nearly been lost to starvation and cold, but it could be regained. And although such maneuvering took time, time was all Kurt had now.

  When next somebody came along, he would be prepared to make them stay.

  Chapter Six

  It was supposed to be a three-hour drive. Not terribly many miles, but the roads were slow and winding, and they’d been warned of construction along the way. The window of time during which roadwork could be completed in the Adirondacks was brutally short, thanks to the length of the winter season. Every half hour or so, Doug either had to grind along at an even slower speed than was warranted by the crooks and bends in the roads, or else stop altogether and wait for the other lane of traffic to clear and the DOT worker to twirl his sign, allowing them to progress again at a crawl.

  After five such pauses, during which Natalie managed to leaf through each of the guidebooks they had brought, perusing pictures of edible plants and methods for starting a fire in the rain, she began to take the signs figuratively as well as literally. Something was slowing them down, trying to prohibit their arrival.

  This was a different world from the one they had left behind in the city, or even the mannered wedding-in-the-country scene to which they had just bid adieu. The inn had offered a polished sort of rural, prettied-up and—insufficient cell signal aside—made workable for people who were used to instant gratification and delivery in a thousand different forms. But the region into which Natalie and Doug were now traveling was the real deal. Shacks sinking low in the soil, abandoned farms, places that achieved the status of town without benefit of a school, a post office, or even a grocery store. Darkened, empty buildings so completely devoid of hope that no for sale or for rent sign was thrust into the ground outside. Here was a land where survival was not a given.

  Natalie reached out and touched Doug’s hand on the wheel.

  “You hungry?” he asked, a smile opening up on his face although he kept his fingers locked around the steering wheel and his eyes on the road. “I found a diner on Yelp. Home cooking, our last for a while. Should be coming right up.”

  “Diner breakfast, yum,” Natalie murmured. They were bargain-basement foodies in the city. Doug loved to find sources of cheap eats, which they would review together. Their profile name was WRFF: will review for food. The joke was a bit insensitive actually. Natalie wondered why that hadn’t occurred to her till now.

  Doug shifted then. “Anything wrong?” he asked, his forehead creasing.

  After a moment, Natalie replied, “Maybe we’re not cut out for this.”

  Her husband’s frown eased. “A little late to be having cold feet, isn’t it?” he said. “It’s already like our sixteen-hour anniversary.”

  “Ha-ha,” Natalie responded absently. “I didn’t mean our marriage.”

  Doug reached out and squeezed her hand. “I know you didn’t,” he told her, his tone still humorous. Then his attention was required by the road: a spiral turn around a chiseled cliff. When the route straightened out, he adopted a Cockney accent to ask, “It’s the canoe trip you’ll be referring to then?”

  “Unless you have tickets to Tahiti hidden in there,” Natalie responded, pretending to pat the pockets of her husband’s cargo shorts.

  Doug placed one hand over hers, giving it a nudge. “Watch it, Mrs. Larson,” he said mildly. “Or I’ll have to pull over, and Mark and Brett will have no idea why we’re late.”

  “Oh, I bet they’d have some idea,” Natalie replied. Her voice was breathy, and for a moment their gazes met and didn’t release.

  Then Doug looked back at the road. “Nat, the trip’s going to be great,” he said. “Really. The guide made sure it’s totally manageable even for a novice. No whitewater over Class II or III, and not ev
en any very long portages.”

  Natalie glanced away. They had gone rafting together before, so it wasn’t the prospect of paddling or the carries that was throwing her. They’d also camped out a few times. Outdoor adventure may not have been her natural bent, as it was Doug’s, but wasn’t that what marriage was all about? Sharing pieces of yourself, trading them back and forth, until you became another person in a way, some sort of merged being? The notion struck her as suddenly disquieting. What did she know about marriage anyway? By the time she was a toddler, her father was already a widower. She let her gaze rest on the window, keeping her face averted from Doug’s.

  The landscape at the Blooming Garden Inn had been lovely: bucolic and pastoral with sloping meadows that surrounded the canting structure like long skirts. But the terrain into which they were traveling had changed, become mysterious and tangled. It was all sharp dips, causing Doug to tap the brakes repeatedly, and tall columns of trees. Tunnels into forest so deep, their outlets could hardly be imagined, much less glimpsed.

  • • •

  Off Road Adventures, the outfit Doug had enlisted for help planning their trip, had a storefront in a town with a peculiar, menacing name. Wedeskyull. Doug had to pronounce it for Natalie. Weeds-kill. She suppressed a grimace. She was seeing omens, when in fact this day had taken on an almost-paradisiacal quality. Her handsome new husband’s arm looped across her shoulders as he drove one-handed into the town, sun shafts shining down through the trees, spilling like lemonade over the streets.

  The countryside they’d just driven through was vanquished by this place, a village out of a storybook, charming and quaint. Peaked shop rooftops, main street running alongside a sparkling lake, curbside plantings bright with blossoms. Natalie stared out the window as Doug spun the wheel, easing into a parking space—no endless circles around traffic-choked blocks, or fifty-dollar price tags for garages—and felt peace settle over her like a parachute. For the first time, she understood why people decided to live up here. For the briefest of flashes, she couldn’t imagine leaving.