A Portion for Foxes

by Daniel Mitchell

  I went without a fire that night. I wasn’t afraid anyone would see my light deep in the cave, but if my anonymous visitor was still around, they might’ve smelled the smoke. By the time false dawn lightened the sky, I was deeply chilled despite the smelly rabbit skins piled on top of my crusty sleeping bag.

  I was desperate to find out who’d been so near my camp. No one but my brother should have been able to find their way through the maze of cliffs and canyons between the nearest road and me. Hell, even Will and I got pretty confused the first couple of times we tried.

  When I couldn’t stand sitting in the cave anymore, I decided to head out and look for tracks. I was careful not to disturb the leaves much on my way, walking on rocks as much as possible so I wouldn't leave any more tracks than necessary. I walked a gradually widening circle away from the cedar I'd hidden in, creeping from one bush or tree to the next, looking for any sign of who or what had spooked me. Beside an ancient whiskey bottle, high on the cliffs above, I found a cat track as big as my fist. It wasn't some housecat gone wild and grown fat in the woods. It was a mountain lion print, and it was fresh.

  People often said no more mountain lions lived in Oklahoma, but they were wrong. I’d seen them more than once from a distance while hunting in the backwoods. Whether they were indigenous, or they just wandered in from surrounding states, or the stories were true about Fish and Game releasing them to try to deal with the skyrocketing hog population, it made no difference. A mountain lion couldn’t be good for my hunting if it stayed in the area, so I prayed it was just passing through, and I headed back to my camp to sleep until dark before walking down to the river to check my lines. I knew I’d waited too long, and anything I’d hooked the day before had probably gotten off or was turtle meat by then, but I crossed my fingers and checked them anyway.

  The hooks were all clean of catfish and bait, and two were gone completely. I was down to six hooks on one line and eight on the other. Both were disintegrating fast. I couldn’t exactly run down to the store for new lines, so I patched them as best I could. I rebaited the remaining hooks with cut-up chunks of perch I’d caught down the river in an old stock pond and settled down under a cedar for a bit more sleep before checking them again at first light. I was rewarded with a few small drums and a channel cat that must’ve weighed twenty pounds. It was nothing compared to the monsters I could catch by hand in May and June, but my father always said, “Waste not, want not,” and I wasted no time having the catfish for dinner back at Moron’s Rest, which was what I’d recently dubbed my cave home.

  After so much time in the woods alone, I’d started talking to myself. At first, it was silly, and I made fun of myself for doing it. Then I began to get angry because I was talking crap about myself. I always had something sarcastic to say, which really just went all over me. The tension built in the cave until one day, I just exploded and kicked my own butt pretty soundly. Since then, conversation had dwindled and had mostly been reduced to noncommittal grunts, expletives, and yelling “Moron!” each time I banged my head on the rocky roof. Since I was just too stupid to learn my lesson and had to yell it quite often, “Moron’s Rest” seemed to fit.

  The hard part about living in the woods wasn’t finding food and water, though I sometimes went a few days between meals—it was the loneliness. I was sick of talking to myself, so I started talking to birds, squirrels, and fish—basically anything that moved and some things that didn't. After a while, I even started believing I could tell from ear flicks and tail twitches what the squirrels were saying. They most often seemed to be laughing at my woodcraft or lack of it and my total inability to climb up the tree after them, so we didn’t get along too well. I often felt the need to badmouth their mothers’ mating habits and their own shoddy grooming. That might sound silly, but those little things kept me sane—maybe not living-in-town sane, but it beat running around naked and sticking flowers in my ears.

  What I missed most was girls. Not that I was any great shakes when it came to getting them even before I moved to the cave and gave up bathing for the winter, but after the first month, I’d have given an eye for just the smell of a girl walking by. One whiff of that almost visible, chokingly sweet mist that seems to follow some girls who use entirely too much of everything from hair spray to hand lotion would have made my entire month. I tried not to torment myself with thoughts of the girlfriend I’d had to disappear on. At first, the mere thought of Lauren made me ache, but having anything to do with her—even sneaking into Dougherty, a tiny redneck town ten miles away, for a quick phone call—might put her in danger. Truth be told, after a couple of months, I could barely remember her face. So maybe she wasn’t all that special to begin with. I made do with singing to the moon, which quickly came to seem a lovely girl smiling down. She wasn’t much of a conversationalist, but by then, I was doing most of the talking anyway. In fact, I was talking a lot. I talked to her. To Mike. To Eades. To myself before I pulled that trigger and killed a cop. No matter how much I pleaded, none of us listened.

  As the weeks passed, I felt the presence of an unseen watcher in my woods twice more, but other than the occasional cougar track and one smudged shoe print, I was no closer to discovering the identity of my stalker. At first, that really bothered me. Later, I figured I was entirely too slick for him to find me. I should have known better.

  #########

  Bushy and Red had been scarce for a while but reappeared one morning, giving me a thorough screechy cursing for still being alive. I knew squirrels didn't truly hibernate, but they must have been laid up on a nut stash somewhere since I hadn't seen them in over a month. I threw them the last of my scavenged nuts. They each grabbed a pecan and ran erratically through the brush, using limbs and rocks for highways.

  The rabbits grew fat and thick in the brush, and my snares paid off better than ever. I soon had more fresh hides to tan than I could easily deal with and spent my evenings working to soften them until sleep came. The old deer hides had lost most of their hair, so I cut them into thin strips and used an oversized needle I’d made out of a bit of leg bone to sew a rabbit-fur blanket and cape. According to the line of scratches on the rock outside Moron's Rest, I was fairly sure I'd been alone for a little under four months.

  March became April, and the river swelled with rain from farther north. I salvaged what was left of my trotlines before they could be swept away and watched for hours as raging red waves and tumbling trees swallowed the sand and stone banks of the river.

  Deer and wild hogs were thick behind the ridge, and I was making at least one kill every other week. Life should have been wonderful. I sometimes heard motors on the ranch or echoing down the valley and wanted more than anything to hear a voice, any voice besides the chattering squirrels and late-night wailing of coyotes. My dreams were filled with home, friends, and even school. One night, I woke from the most realistic dream of lounging on the beach at Lake Murray with Miss September from an old Playboy I kept stashed under my mattress at home. I was lying in a hammock I’d made out of an old net, some strips of cedar bark, and grapevines. When I realized I was still alone, I stomped around destroying things for the next two hours.

  I fought to be strong, to stay in my woodsy world, but the harder I tried to forget, the more I remembered what was lost. Days became a process of bargaining with myself.

  Just make it until dark.

  Until breakfast.

  Until lunch.

  Minutes dragged into hours, days into weeks, weeks into eternities. I relived the deaths of Mike and Eades so many times I lost track. What I could’ve, should’ve, would’ve done if I could go back slowly became unbearable until one day found me lying in the dirt screaming at the indifferent trees. I wouldn’t say it got easier after that. The guilt and crushing despair were always there, ready to pounce, but I did manage to push them down and just get on with things. Usually.

  May finally arrived. The river dropped back into its banks, and I made plans to noodle for catfish, rememberi
ng everything my brother had taught me in the last three years.

  #########

  Long before dawn, I left Moron’s Rest. I wished Will was with me that chilly May morning. I’d never gone noodling alone before. With Will, it had always been a redneck adventure. Alone, in the dark, it was slightly terrifying.

  I headed upriver past the rapids to start looking in the easiest, safest holes. On the way, I passed a massive drift of potential firewood freshly deposited by the spring floods and found a good beaver had gnawed down a sapling about seven feet long and a little thicker than my thumb.

  Another quarter mile through briars and poison ivy, I angled down to the river and stepped in. Goosebumps jumped up all over my arms and back. Some were from the sixty-five-to-seventy-degree water. Most were from the thought of having to explore an occupied hole alone.

  I worked my way along in the shallows, poking my beaver-gnawed stick under banks and boulders, hoping to find lunch. The first few holes I found were mostly full of mud. I could tell a really clean hole from one that nothing was living in yet just by the feel of the muck in the bottom of the opening as I dragged my stick through it. A hole with soft mud in the bottom rarely had fish. When I felt hard-packed clay or sand, I knew a fish had moved in.

  The first clean hole I came to was at an old cypress tree. A fish had been there every time Will and I checked over the past three years. The tunnel usually went at least ten feet back, all underwater, and had an escape route branching off that opened on the far side of the tree, another eight to ten feet away.

  I took a deep breath and went under the surface, feeling my way back. After several tries, I finally managed to find the back of the hole. It was silted up eight feet in, so they were still cleaning it out and hadn’t laid eggs yet. I felt around to be sure the fish weren’t floating up in the roots the way flatheads often did, but I found nothing. In the pitch darkness of the hole, the jagged roots that formed its roof scratched my back and caught on my belt. For an impossibly long eight or ten seconds that seemed minutes, I was caught. My lungs started hitching, trying to suck in the air that was still out of reach, and I freaked out a little—okay, a lot. I was convinced I would end up feeding the fish in a black hole. I reached for my knife to try to cut through my belt before my air ran out and the black water closed in forever, but the motion of twisting and torquing my body to reach the knife in the cramped space did the trick. The root slipped free, and I squirmed backward from my would-be tomb into the suddenly blessed light and air.

  I spent a long minute trying to pretend I hadn't panicked. Then I realized I’d left my stick in the hole and decided I didn't want it badly enough to go back in. I pulled myself up the roots and found a decent replacement in the brush. The escape hole on the far side of the cypress was silted completely closed, so I lay back and floated on downriver to the next good spot, the Whirlpool.

  It wasn’t some monstrous, ship-sucking pit of death. It was a rounded hole of water eaten out of the bank by a swirling current that often hid good spawning holes and a couple of old drainage pipes smaller fish used for ready-made dens.

  The holes were still dirty, so I edged out into the current and found the end of one of the ten-inch PVC pipes. I had barely gotten my arm into it when I felt a sharp bite right at the tip of my middle finger.

  Same to you, you son of a bitch, I thought. I knew it was a fish and not a beaver or turtle, since both ends of the pipe were underwater. Also, I still had a finger when I pulled my hand out and did a quick check. I reached back in, fingers flat together and thumb pointing down. The fish didn’t immediately attack, so I had to take a breath and go under, ramming my arm in all the way to the shoulder. I used my free hand to hold myself in place against the current threatening to sweep me out into the rapids, and my legs flapped uselessly behind me. The fish came out far enough to bite the ends of my fingers again, give them a vicious jerk, and retreat. Cussing underwater was tough, but I managed it.

  I went back up for a long breath, blew sand and water out of my nose, then slipped under again. I was just running out of breath when the fish made the mistake of coming out far enough for me to get half my hand in its mouth. I clamped down on its bottom jaw and dragged it partway out so that it was still pinned inside the pipe but I could get my feet under me and my nose above water. I quickly worked the stringer through the bottom jaw, wrapped the free ends around my wrist a few times, and dragged dinner out into the open. The fish went into its expected spin at the surface, and I saw it was a flathead somewhere between fifteen and twenty pounds—not a monster but still a welcome addition to cave cooking. I tied it off to my belt and continued downriver, poking the bank and feeling pretty good about myself.

  I worked my way along another half mile or so, stumbling over unseen rocks and barking my shins more than once until the good banks on that side gave out. I lay back in the water and was floating in the cold current when I looked across the river and noticed a slide.

  Beavers often slid into the water in the same spot long enough that a foot-wide depression was left in the mud and grass. Nearby was usually a spot where they’d torn the ground up when clawing their way back up the bank.

  This slide was at least three feet wide. Years before, Will and I had surprised a seven-foot alligator in this same stretch of river. I had seen only its tail, but that was enough to get me out of the water and twenty feet up the bank in seconds. From the looks of the slide and the huge patch of claw-torn ground a few feet past it, the gator had been eating well. Just downriver was a large pile of snagged driftwood with a rock-lined hole underneath, a few feet above water level. Game wardens and park rangers swore no gators lived in Oklahoma except maybe in the far-southeast part of the state close to Louisiana, but every lake in the state had sightings reported yearly. I guessed the truth was bad for tourism.

  I had no desire to find out just how big the gator had gotten or how hungry it was, so I drifted quietly downriver, watching everything, and continued my search for fish. I found a few more holes in the process of being cleaned out, but nothing was home yet. I spent more than a little time looking over my shoulder for logs drifting the wrong way. Chances were if the gator wanted me, I'd never see it coming, but I figured it couldn't hurt to look.

  I climbed a rusting iron ladder someone had tied under the old trestle bridge and circled to come around behind the grave ridge. Near the cave, I hung the fish from a handy limb, and after fifteen minutes or so, I ended up with two five-pound fillets and a couple of smaller chunks to cook first. I stripped off my dripping clothes and draped them over rocks nearby. After rinsing off and soaking my sore hands in the spring, I decided the meat was done enough.

  Eating fish off a stick while wearing only what the Good Lord gave me might not have been the most mannerly way to dine, but it sure was satisfying. Exhausted from the current and the long walk, belly bulging, I stretched out on a flat rock to soak in the sun and was soon snoring.

  Chapter 6

  I’d had the sniffles and a raspy throat for a few days when my stomach began to act up. Maybe I hadn’t boiled my water long enough, because diarrhea set in, and things got ugly. Before long, the cliff face below the cave was a mess since I couldn’t make it all the way to my usual latrine, in a hole upstream. Hanging my backside over a cliff edge with the wind blowing across my naked cheeks and wiping with dry leaves was about as fun as it sounded. By the third day, I was vomiting too, and my eyes were sore and hot as if I had a fever.

  Back in the real world, when I got sick, I didn’t think much about it. I would spend a day or three drinking lots of juice and maybe some Theraflu while Mom made me soup and Dad forced me to take massive amounts of vitamin C. If that didn’t work, a quick trip to the doctor would solve the problem. I had no vitamin C except what I could get from my cedar-needle tea and no aspirin but what little I could get from scraping and boiling willow bark. I had no Theraflu, no soup, no warm bed, and no doctor. Mom hovering around, supplying my every whim, used to drive me crazy
when I was sick or just pretending to be so I could take a day off from school and chores. But soon, blurry eyed and whining, I would have done almost anything for the feeling of her hand on my forehead.

  My back was achy, my hips hurt, and my head felt as if it would explode soon if I didn’t get some relief from the endless pressure. I could find no comfortable position on my cedar-bough bed. The first few days, I wasn’t too worried, but as I got weaker and weaker, I got scared, wondering if I might have problems bigger than the Stanglers.

  By the fifth day, I was too tired to move much. I made myself take a drink every time I thought of it and tried to chew some jerky and nuts, but I was having a hard time even caring anymore. I wasn’t eating enough to really vomit or mess myself. When the need to lose it from one end or the other did kick in, I just crawled to the other side of the cave and used a crack in the floor, not trusting myself to balance on the edge of the cliff. That wasn’t doing much for the smell in there, but I couldn’t remember ever having felt so bad, and the stink was the least of my worries. I started coughing from deep in my chest and was hacking up some white goop that didn’t look healthy. I thought I might have pneumonia or TB or something.

  Time began to slip away from me. I couldn’t really tell if I was asleep or awake. My dreams seemed more real than the glimpses of rock over my head: the knife sliding through Mike’s throat, the exploding gas tank, bad days in geometry class, forgotten chores, and childhood memories bled together, forming tangled and nonsensical nightmares. Sometimes, the rock of the cave seemed to be moving, breathing, pulsing around me. Dimly, I thought I might be dying or going insane. To tell the truth, I felt so bad I started to pray for death just to feel better. I cried constantly and begged God to end everything. I couldn’t imagine even hell being much worse.