Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

by Cheryl Strayed

  “We’re not saying you have to leave,” she shouted, as if she were scolding a dog to hush up. “We’re saying you’ve got to pay.”

  “Well, I can’t.”

  “There’s a trail to the PCT that starts up just past the bathrooms,” the woman said, gesturing behind her. “Or you can walk on the side of the road, about a mile or so up. I think the road’s more direct than the trail. We’ll keep the lights on while you pack,” she said, and got back into the truck beside her husband, their faces now invisible to me behind the headlights.

  I turned to my tent, stunned. I’d yet to meet a stranger on my trip who’d been anything but kind. I scrambled inside, put on my headlamp with shaking hands, and shoved everything I’d unpacked back into my pack without the usual orderly care for what went where. I didn’t know what I should do. It was full dark by now, the half moon in the sky. The only thing scarier than the thought of hiking along an unknown trail in the dark was walking along an unknown road in the dark. I put on Monster and waved to the couple in the truck, unable to see whether they waved back.

  I walked with my headlamp in my hand. It barely lit the way for each step; the batteries were dying. I followed the pavement to the bathrooms and saw the trail the woman had mentioned leading off behind it. I took a few tentative steps onto it. I’d become used to feeling safe in the woods, safe even through all the nights, but walking in the woods in the dark felt like a different matter altogether because I couldn’t see. I could run into nocturnal animals or trip over a root. I could miss a turn and continue on where I didn’t plan to go. I walked slowly, nervously, as I had the very first day of my hike, when I’d been braced for a rattlesnake to lunge at me any second.

  After a while, the outlines of the landscape revealed themselves dimly to me. I was in a forest of tall pines and spruces, their limbless straight trunks culminating in clusters of dense branches high above me. I could hear a stream gurgling off to my left and feel the soft blanket of dry pine needles crackling beneath my boots. I walked with a kind of concentration I’d never had before, and because of it I could feel the trail and my body more acutely, as if I were walking barefoot and naked. It reminded me of being a child and learning how to ride a horse. My mother had taught me on her horse, Lady, letting me sit in the saddle while she stood holding a lead rope attached to Lady’s bridle. I clutched Lady’s mane with my hands at first, scared even when she walked, but eventually I relaxed and my mother implored me to close my eyes so I could feel the way the horse moved beneath me and the way my body moved with the horse. Later, I did the same thing with my arms held out wide on either side, going round and round, my body surrendering to Lady’s as we moved.

  I made my way along the trail for twenty minutes until I came to a place where the trees opened up. I took off my pack and got down on my hands and knees with my headlamp to explore a spot that seemed like a reasonable place to sleep. I set up my tent, crawled inside, and zipped myself into my sleeping bag, though now I wasn’t even remotely tired, energized by the eviction and the late-night hike.

  I opened up The Novel, but my headlamp was flickering and dying, so I turned it off and lay in the dark. I smoothed my hands over my arms, hugging myself. I could feel my tattoo beneath my right fingers; could still trace the horse’s outline. The woman who’d inked it had told me that it would stand up on my flesh for a few weeks, but it had remained that way even after a few months, as if the horse were embossed rather than inked into my skin. It wasn’t just a horse, that tattoo. It was Lady—the horse my mother had asked the doctor at the Mayo Clinic if she could ride when he’d told her she was going to die. Lady wasn’t her real name—it was only what we called her. She was a registered American Saddlebred, her official name spelled out in grandiose glory on the breeder’s association certificate that came with her: Stonewall’s Highland Nancy, sired by Stonewall Sensation and foaled by Mack’s Golden Queen. My mother had managed, against all reason, to buy Lady in the horrible winter when she and my father were finally and forever breaking up. My mother had met a couple at the restaurant where she worked as a waitress. They wanted to sell their purebred twelve-year-old mare for cheap, and even though my mother couldn’t afford even cheap, she went to see the horse and struck a deal with the couple to pay them three hundred dollars over the course of six months, and then she struck another deal with another couple who owned a stable nearby, doing work in exchange for Lady’s board.

  “She’s breathtaking,” my mother said each time she described Lady, and she was. Over sixteen hands tall, lean and long-limbed, high-stepping and elegant as a queen. She had a white star on her forehead, but the rest of her coat was the same red chestnut as the fox I’d seen in the snow.

  I was six when my mother bought her. We were living on the basement level of an apartment complex called Barbary Knoll. My mother had just left my father for the last time. We barely had enough money to live, but my mother had to have that horse. I knew instinctively, even as a child, that it was Lady who saved my mother’s life. Lady who made it possible for her not only to walk away from my father, but also to keep going. Horses were my mother’s religion. It was with them she’d wanted to be on all those Sundays as a child, when she’d been made to put on dresses to go to mass. The stories she told me about horses were a counterpoint to the other stories she’d told me about her Catholic upbringing. She did anything she could to ride them. She raked stalls and polished tack, hauled hay and spread straw, any kind of odd job that came her way, so that she would be allowed to hang out at whatever stable happened to be nearest and ride someone’s horse.

  Images of her past cowgirl life came to me from time to time, captured in freeze-frame moments, as clear and concise to me as if I’d read them in a book. The overnight backcountry rides she’d done in New Mexico with her father. The daredevil rodeo tricks she’d practiced and performed with her girlfriends. At sixteen she got her own horse, a palomino named Pal, whom she rode in horse shows and rodeos in Colorado. She still had the ribbons when she died. I packed them in a box that was now in Lisa’s basement in Portland. A yellow third for barrel racing, a pink fifth for walk, trot, canter; green for showmanship and participation; and a single blue ribbon for riding her horse through all of the gaits smoothly over a course lined with mud pits and tight corners, laughing clowns and blaring horns, while she balanced an egg on a silver spoon in her outstretched hand for longer than anyone else could or did.

  In the stable where Lady first lived when she became ours, my mother did the same work she’d done as a kid, cleaning stalls and spreading hay, hauling things to and fro in a wheelbarrow. Often, she brought Karen, Leif, and me with her. We played in the barn while she did her chores. Afterwards, we watched her ride Lady around and around the ring, each of us getting a turn when she was done. By the time we moved to our land in northern Minnesota, we had a second horse, a mixed-breed gelding named Roger, whom my mother had bought because I’d fallen in love with him and his owner was willing to let him go for next to nothing. We hauled them both up north in a borrowed trailer. Their pasture was a quarter of our forty acres.

  When I went home one day to visit Eddie in early December nearly three years after my mother died, I was shocked by how thin and weak Lady had become. She was nearly thirty-one, old for a horse, and even if nursing her back to health had been possible, no one was around enough to do it. Eddie and his girlfriend had begun splitting their time between the house where I’d grown up and a trailer in a small town outside the Twin Cities. The two dogs, two cats, and four hens we’d had when my mother died had either died themselves or been given away to new homes. Only our two horses, Roger and Lady, remained. Often, they were cared for in the most cursory way by a neighbor whom Eddie had enlisted to feed them.

  When I visited that early December, I talked to Eddie about Lady’s condition. He was belligerent at first, telling me that he didn’t know why the horses were his problem. I didn’t have the heart to argue with him about why, as my mother’s widower, he
was responsible for her horses. I spoke only about Lady, persistent about making a plan, and after a while he softened his tone and we agreed that Lady should be put down. She was old and sickly; she’d lost an alarming amount of weight; the light in her eyes had faded. I’d consulted with the veterinarian already, I told him. The vet could come to our place and euthanize Lady with an injection. That, or we could shoot her ourselves.

  Eddie thought we should do the latter. We were both flat broke. It was how horses had been put down for generations. It seemed to both of us a strangely more humane thing to do—that she’d die at the hands of someone she knew and trusted, rather than a stranger. Eddie said he’d do it before Paul and I returned for Christmas in a few weeks. We wouldn’t be coming for a family occasion: Paul and I would be in the house alone. Eddie planned to spend Christmas at his girlfriend’s place with her and her kids. Karen and Leif had plans of their own too—Leif would be in St. Paul with his girlfriend and her family, and Karen with the husband she’d met and married within the span of a few weeks earlier that year.

  I felt ill as Paul and I pulled into the driveway a few weeks later, on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. Over and over again, I’d been imagining how it would feel to look out to the pasture and see only Roger. But when I got out of the car, Lady was still there, shivering in her stall, her flesh hanging from her skeletal frame. It hurt to even look at her. The weather had turned brutally cold, breaking records with lows that hovered around 25 degrees below zero, with the wind chill plunging the temperature colder still.

  I didn’t call Eddie to ask why he hadn’t followed through on what we’d decided. I called my mother’s father in Alabama instead. He’d been a horseman all his life. We talked for an hour about Lady. He asked me one question after another, and by the end of our conversation he was adamant that it was time to put her down. I told him I’d sleep on it. The next morning the phone rang shortly after dawn.

  It wasn’t my grandfather calling to wish me a merry Christmas. It was my grandfather calling to implore me to act now. To let Lady die naturally was cruel and inhumane, he insisted, and I knew he was right. I also knew that it was up to me to make sure it was done. I didn’t have money to pay for the veterinarian to come out and give her an injection, and even if I did, it was Christmas and I doubted he would come. My grandfather described to me in specific detail how to shoot a horse. When I expressed trepidation, he assured me this was the way it had been done for years. I also worried about what to do with Lady’s corpse. The ground was so deeply frozen that burial was impossible.

  “Leave her,” he instructed. “The coyotes will drag her away.”

  “What should I do?” I cried to Paul after I hung up the phone. We didn’t know it, but it was our last Christmas together. A couple of months later, I’d tell him about my infidelities and he’d move out. By the time Christmas came again we were discussing divorce.

  “Do what you think is right,” he said on that Christmas morning. We were sitting at the kitchen table—its every crack and groove familiar to me, and yet it seemed as if I were as far as I could be from home, alone on an ice floe.

  “I don’t know what’s right,” I said, though I did. I knew exactly what I had to do. It was what I’d had to do so many times now: choose the best of two horrible things. But I couldn’t do it without my brother. Paul and I had shot a gun before—Leif had taught us both the previous winter—but neither of us could do it with any confidence. Leif wasn’t an avid hunter, but at least he’d done it often enough that he knew what he was doing. When I called him, he agreed to drive home that evening.

  In the morning, we discussed in detail what we’d do. I told him everything our grandfather had told me.

  “Okay,” he said. “Get her ready.”

  Outside, the sun was bright, the sky crystal blue. By eleven it had warmed to 17 degrees below zero. We bundled ourselves in layers of clothes. It was so cold the trees were cracking open, freezing and exploding in great bursts that I’d heard from my bed the sleepless night before.

  I whispered to Lady as I put her halter on, telling her how much I loved her as I led her out of her stall. Paul shut the gate behind us, trapping Roger inside so he couldn’t follow. I led her across the icy snow, turning back to watch her walk one last time. She still moved with an unspeakable grace and power, striding with the long, grand high-stepping gait that always took my mother’s breath away. I led her to a birch tree that Paul and I had chosen the previous afternoon and tied her to it by her lead rope. The tree was on the very edge of the pasture, beyond which the woods thickened in earnest, far enough away from the house that I hoped the coyotes would approach and take her body that night. I spoke to her and ran my hands over her chestnut coat, murmuring my love and sorrow, begging her forgiveness and understanding.

  When I looked up, my brother was standing there with his rifle.

  Paul took my arm and together we stumbled through the snow to stand behind Leif. We were only six feet away from Lady. Her warm breath was like a silk cloud. The frozen crust of the snow held us for a moment, then collapsed so we all sank up to our knees.

  “Right between her eyes,” I said to Leif, repeating yet again the words our grandfather had said to me. If we did that, he promised, we’d kill her in one clean shot.

  Leif crouched, kneeling on one knee. Lady pranced and scraped her front hooves on the ice and then lowered her head and looked at us. I inhaled sharply and Leif fired the gun. The bullet hit Lady right between her eyes, in the middle of her white star, exactly where we hoped it would. She bolted so hard her leather halter snapped into pieces and fell away from her face, and then she stood unmoving, looking at us with a stunned expression.

  “Shoot her again,” I gasped, and immediately Leif did, firing three more bullets into her head in quick succession. She stumbled and jerked, but she didn’t fall and she didn’t run, though she was no longer tied to the tree. Her eyes were wild upon us, shocked by what we’d done, her face a constellation of bloodless holes. In an instant I knew we’d done the wrong thing, not in killing her, but in thinking that we should be the ones to do it. I should have insisted Eddie do this one thing, or paid for the veterinarian to come out. I’d had the wrong idea of what it takes to kill an animal. There is no such thing as one clean shot.

  “Shoot her! Shoot her!” I pleaded in a guttural wail I didn’t know was mine.

  “I’m out of bullets,” Leif yelled.

  “Lady!” I shrieked. Paul grabbed my shoulders to pull me toward him and I batted him away, panting and whimpering as if someone were beating me to death.

  Lady took one wobbling step and then fell onto her front knees, her body tilting hideously forward as if she were a great ship slowly sinking into the sea. Her head swayed and she let out a deep moan. Blood gushed from her soft nostrils in a sudden, great torrent, hitting the snow so hot it hissed. She coughed and coughed, tremendous buckets of blood coming each time, her back legs buckling in excruciating slow motion beneath her. She hovered there, struggling to stay grotesquely up, before she finally toppled over onto her side, where she kicked her legs and flailed and twisted her neck and fought to rise again.

  “Lady!” I howled. “Lady!”

  Leif grabbed me. “Look away!” he shouted, and together we turned away.

  “LOOK AWAY!” he hollered to Paul, and Paul obeyed.

  “Please come take her,” Leif chanted, as tears streaked down his face. “Come take her. Come take her. Come take her.”

  When I turned, Lady had dropped her head to the ground at last, though her sides still heaved and her legs twitched. The three of us staggered closer, breaking through the snow’s crust to sink miserably to our knees again. We watched as she breathed enormous slow breaths and then finally she sighed and her body went still.

  Our mother’s horse. Lady. Stonewall’s Highland Nancy was dead.

  Whether it had taken five minutes or an hour, I didn’t know. My mittens and hat had fallen off, but I could not bring myself
to retrieve them. My eyelashes had frozen into clumps. Strands of hair that had blown onto my tear- and snot-drenched face had frozen into icicles that clinked when I moved. I pushed them numbly away, unable even to register the cold. I knelt beside Lady’s belly and ran my hands along her blood-speckled body one last time. She was still warm, just as my mother had been when I’d come into the room at the hospital and seen that she’d died without me. I looked at Leif and wondered if he was remembering the same thing. I crawled to her head and touched her cold ears, soft as velvet. I put my hands over the black bullet holes in her white star. The deep tunnels of blood that had burned through the snow around her were already beginning to freeze.

  Paul and I watched as Leif took out his knife and cut bundles of reddish-blonde hair from Lady’s mane and tail. He handed one to me.

  “Mom can go to the other side now,” he said, looking into my eyes as if it were only the two of us in the entire world. “That’s what the Indians believe—that when a great warrior dies you’ve got to kill their horse so he can cross over to the other side of the river. It’s a way of showing respect. Maybe Mom can ride away now.”

  I imagined our mother crossing a great river on Lady’s strong back, finally leaving us nearly three years after she died. I wanted it to be true. It was the thing I wished for when I had a wish to make. Not that my mother would ride back to me—though, of course, I wanted that—but that she and Lady would ride away together. That the worst thing I’d ever done had been a healing instead of a massacre.

  I slept finally that night in the woods somewhere outside the Whitehorse Campground. And when I did, I dreamed of snow. Not the snow in which my brother and I had killed Lady, but the snow I’d just passed through up in the mountains, the memory of it more frightening than the experience of it had been. All night long, I dreamed of the things that could have happened but didn’t. Skidding and sliding down a treacherous slope and off the side of a cliff or crashing into rocks below. Walking and never coming to that road, but wandering lost and starving instead.