Girl in the Woods

by Aspen Matis

  We decided we would stay in Cascade Locks another day together for the party. He also wanted to be with everyone else. He was unlike Icecap. I pitched my tent under a tree, my temporary shelter. Dash didn’t pitch his. Our tent was one of hundreds on the big green under tall pines along the river. We’d both heard of the party—both of us had always hoped to attend—but here we were, this was the morning of it, and Dash and I happened by great, good luck to be in Cascade Locks, no need to hitch back.

  As afternoon light brightened, a raffle was beginning. Gear and clothing companies gave away tents and sleeping pads, socks, the things hikers needed. Groups convened, quirky characters I’d heard about: the lost boys who hike the trail every year; the “trail celebrities” who set speed records hiking the PCT in just eighty days; the trail legends who had hiked the PCT in its earliest years, half a century ago. Two thousand people filled the green along the Columbia River. Last night it had been quiet.

  Someone had set up a projector to play onto a sheet in the woods and a younger mass of hikers was dancing. Sunlight cupped in the river’s dimples, shimmering; feet twisted on grass slick with red-brown pine needles, the sky a fierce blue. I was a part of this euphoric celebration of the distances our legs carried us, of making it. We gathered here to say goodbye before bursting northward and finally reaching Canada, proud we’d made it to Washington State. We were high on the anticipation of the final stretch. The raffle began—two bearded emcees with mics calling out trail names, their booming voices quick like giddy kids’.

  Dash bought forty dollars’ worth of raffle tickets for hiking gear. He was giving them all away to people—ten to a one-eyed ex-con named Yogi Beer; ten to me.

  I won a NeoAir, the Cadillac of sleeping pads. It was worth $200 and ultralight. Yogi Beer won an Osprey backpack. Dash won a daypack, the smallest prize among us, yet he seemed completely happy.

  I couldn’t believe our small group’s luck. I couldn’t believe my luck.

  Together Dash and I wandered past the concrete state park bathrooms, along the river cradling sunlight like pools of gold. My tent was olive green, for two people. It was at our feet.

  Wordlessly, Dash climbed in. Camping by the gorgeous border-river, together we disappeared from the big party that we were so perfectly paced for.

  He carefully undressed me, exposing the striking whiteness of my stomach, my pale shoulders tinted pallid by sunlight filtered through the green tent walls. Those first intimacies with him were different than those with others I’d known, even those with Icecap. There was no vulgarity. My body unclenched in his hands, warm and calm. Touched by his lips, how different the things I now wanted were—bigger, absolutely huge, because his warm touch made my nerves finally dissolve into trust.

  In the tent next to us a young, muscular guy named Buddha, one of the Thirty-Eights, was fending off an old woman called Sugar Mama. “You must be cold,” she said to him, drunk. “Come into my Volkswagen.”

  “No thanks,” he would say politely, always softly.

  Dash and I kept cracking up. Buddha heard us, too.

  We were still again, lying facing each other. I was euphoric, studying his relaxed lips. I asked him if we had just had sex.

  “What?” He smirked, confused.

  “Was that sex?” I asked him. Everything had felt so good, so easy—like I imagined sex should—that I actually wasn’t sure.

  His lips were smiling now, his eyes were bright with tender laughter. “We haven’t yet,” he said.

  The Trail Days celebration was raging and for once I was in the heart of the thru-hiking body. Icecap had forced me to be miles ahead of them all—he was probably in northern Washington now, nearly finished—maybe already done. I was surrounded by people who’d chosen to be homeless for five months, to have stones in their shoes, to sleep on strangers’ lawns or just on roots, constantly filthy. All these strangers bonded in the choice to take the cards they were dealt and toss them in the dirt. I had come to see: we all had reasons.

  But for now we were in a quiet center. In our tent. The party pulsed around us, but we spent hours inside making out, invisible, the eye of our own storm. We stayed at our spot under the tree beside the Columbia for three days, three exciting nights, sexless.

  The Columbia divides Oregon and Washington, states connected by the Bridge of the Gods—once a natural crossing created by a violent rock slide, long ago, though that mythic bridge has crumpled back into the water. Now the Bridge of the Gods is a smooth man-made arc.

  Dash and I crossed the Bridge of the Gods holding hands. Cars flashed in both directions, and the metal bridge constantly vibrated. I was walking with Dash at last.

  We passed the tollbooth but didn’t have to pay. At the northern end of the bridge, a dark Mexican man behind a wooden fruit stand waved to us.

  We walked to him.

  “You walk here from Mexico?” he asked.

  I was beaming. We told him that we had.

  The man handed me a fat doughnut peach, then one to Dash.

  Later, back in forest, I told Dash, “That was the Berry Man we saw.” I said it boldly, as if the statement explained something greater.

  “He gave us peaches though,” Dash said.

  Walking with Dash, everything felt distinctive. Up the trail he found a special pair of jeans, folded neatly on the dirt. Dozens of hikers had signed the pants in black Sharpie. He tried them on, and they made his butt look good. He looked like a gritty advertisement for boyish youth. Everything felt ridiculously flawless. I could not stop dumbly grinning.

  We signed them with the black Sharpie, folded them, and left them there.

  Our first night on the trail together, I built our tent while Dash set up the stove and cooked us Annie’s mac and cheese. For four months I had subsisted mostly on granola bars, cheese, and chocolate. I hadn’t brought a stove. Everything I’d eaten on the trail before Dash had been cold.

  We sat by a dark lake, night air chilling, smelling the powdered cheese melting. He pulled a navy goose down vest from his pack and draped it over me.

  He offered me a spoon of cheesy macaroni and my heart stopped.

  That night in our tent he called me pretty, just as I was at my most comfortable, snuggled against him makeupless and dirty, in the woods. It was so easy. I could just be who I was.

  I was scared of Dash at first too, but in a tingly way. He wanted me to want him, I felt it vividly.

  We kept walking toward Canada together. Each night, I set up our tent; he cooked warm dinners. He always wanted to share, to make me happy. I did some work, he did some, harmoniously. I felt how different this connection was from what my relationship with Icecap had been. We were like a tiny family. If we both did what we should, we would survive.

  He began lighting a stick of Nag Champa incense in the tent’s vestibule each night, a small tent ritual, our first. Dash fiddled each night with the stove, lighting the flame, lighting the incense he’d stick in the dirt floor of our vestibule to scent our slow evening. Fire is not essential. Fire is warm comfort. From fire, cultures are born.

  Sometimes when the air was clear we cowboy-camped directly on the dirt, under the galaxies. One of these nights, sleeping soundly deep in middle-night’s early blackness, a chipmunk ran across my face and woke me.

  I cried out, “Dash!” I sat up. “A fucking something just ran over me.”

  He didn’t respond, he was still as silence, but then he sprang and tackled me, dashing fingers over my face and body, running them, not stopping. I was laughing. He was laughing too. Happy people have everything to give.

  Dash and I trotted up the trail, down a dip like a bike jump, up. Hot rain drizzled, then poured like a sky-wide waterfall, poured out empty. Dripped. Gray-hot mist rose.

  Douglas firs and Nootka rosebushes hung in the haze of the rain. Roots bulged like doorknobs I’d turn to open the ground. I was soaked. The rain-weighted air was warm but in two weeks it would freeze into flat crystals of soft snow, burying the way
, erasing my good trail. It was seven o’clock, dusk dimmed the forest’s details, and we walked, faster. Toward flat ground, camp and sleep.

  In the hanging fog and still, I could feel in my wrist and thumb and right eyebrow my pulse, hard, like a beat-drum. This was September in Washington. The bears and squirrels eating huckleberries and nuts, fattening, as is their pattern, as they’ve been taught, as they will teach their young to do when the days’ light shortens and mornings bite with frost. A large squirrel slipped up a thick trunk, her cheeks bulging with acorns for winter, for her babies. I blinked. I stumbled on slick roots, swayed upright, sad. I thought of my mother: she supported me in the way she knew how, had given me everything—but it wasn’t enough. My mother provided for me the things she was taught I needed—food and shelter and money and even art lessons—but she didn’t know I needed more than these things to thrive. I couldn’t find the name for what she’d failed to offer me, but walking now, in fog, through dim green woods, I felt alone. My eyebrow twitched. We stopped hard, nearly collided.

  The Canadian couple—we’d been seeing them in towns and on the trail, around their tent in the warm evenings—stopped, stood. Thin and twenty-two-ish and both tall, from rural Alberta, the pair looked as similar as boy-girl twins. Both lanky as branches, and in love. They were hiking south, the wrong way, slow. The girl—I couldn’t remember her name and had probably never asked it—carried in her twiggy arms a fawn. Tiny. With eyes like dark lights. Bones delicate.

  I couldn’t look away from its huge eyes; they were infant eyes, yet it was sick and dying. It was striking. It stretched its mouth open but made no sound. It looked like a creature from an old bleak fairy tale in which the knobbed trees are hollowed and full of goblins, and the night might last a half-day or a lifetime. This was September twelfth. This fawn was born months late.

  “’S mother left him,” the Canadian girl said. She was a marionette doll, her body long bones, untethered to the ground, her stick-arms pressing a fawn to her core, weighing her shoulder blades down. The girl’s pointy bones shifted and bulged under her skin at odd angles, a bone-dance, mourning, revealing her heaviness. But the fawn wasn’t dead. It quivered like wheat in wind. “We sat there, waiting and waiting just for her to come. He’s bleeding outta his hoof, got an infection.”

  She lifted his infected hoof. It was swollen twice as thick as the other three, puffy and pink and bleeding a pastel, pus-diluted blood. It was trembling. The couple had kneeled ten yards from the fawn for hours, waiting for its mother to return. She hadn’t. They’d waited longer, hopeful, then scooped him up.

  “You guys have powdered milk?” The veins in her eyes were red, and I could see she’d been crying.

  We didn’t, we were sorry. I was hollow. A mother had abandoned her new fawn. The fawn had been alone since noon or earlier, needing its mother’s milk, dehydrating. Now it shivered, emaciated, its eye-whites yellowed, looking nearer to the bird-picked, sun-bleached carcasses I’d seen in the Mojave than a baby, fat and coddled, learning to live. I couldn’t understand. Couldn’t the mother just nurse the fawn for a couple weeks until its young body beat the infection? Infections clear; broken bones heal. Evolution gifted us with this ability. Kindness exists in the strands of code spiraling in our genes. This fawn was not good as dead. Where was the mother?

  The mother needed to prepare herself for winter, yes, and she was bracing herself, sustaining herself, perhaps not equipped to save a wounded baby. Deer only have a life span of five to six years, less than a chicken’s, less than a human child’s before she spurts upward into a woman. And who—God, who—could be prepared for this? Not my mother. Not any mother; saving the hurt was not a mother’s job. Mothers are programmed to teach the fit. They are unequipped to listen to pleas, to alter their patterns. Mothers know how to nurse and nurture those who they have hope for—they coo over babies with infections they can help heal, they give advice for things they know, they protect from the dangers they know to fear. But once their baby becomes so hurt the mother doesn’t know how to heal her, she neglects because she doesn’t know better. The tricks she knows don’t work, she fears, and, eventually, when she is so lost she feels hopeless, she abandons.

  Whenever I was injured, my mother was excellent. She would bring me fresh cups of tea before I’d finished the old ones, chicken soup or kreplach soup or wonton soup; she’d buy the soft kind of tissues so my nose wouldn’t abrade. She’d sit up with me if I couldn’t sleep. She’d rub where it was sore. If I’d broken a bone, she’d always check when I’d last had the Children’s Motrin, so I didn’t take too much. The right amount, no more. If I had early period cramps, she’d set up the heating pad. She was a constant comfort.

  Dash and I held hands. We followed the good couple, back down and up, southbound. The exact wrong way. We walked in silence. The trail crossed a dirt road and we turned onto it, left, east. Toward, we hoped, houses and milk. The place where we could find the game warden. He’d be angry, we knew, would ask why we’d touched a fawn. Why we took him.

  We were breaking laws.

  The fawn screamed, a weak, infant’s scream. A cry like my newborn nephew, Tom, had cried when he wanted his mother. I imagined him—baby Thomas—alone in fog, in woods, wanting. Not knowing how scared he should really be. Needing love and a deep hug, an explanation for his abandonment, a second chance. He was not unsavable. He was not dead.

  I spoke: “They’ll send you pictures, I bet. After he’s better and running around in their yard. He’ll get better, and they’ll send you pictures of him as he grows.”

  He peed, dark and yellow-brown and so much. Down my new friend’s leg.

  Her boyfriend pulled a bright bandana out of his drab pants like a magic trick—poof! okay!—and dried his shaking girlfriend. Up and down, patting. Right by her crotch.

  “’S better,” the boyfriend said. He wanted to help. “It’s good—means he’s still enough hydrated.” His cheeks were flushed. He turned to Dash and me. “Second time he’s peed.”

  Second time. My new friend was so good.

  The smell remained, musky and terrible. “It is good,” I said. If I were alone, I would never be here. I wouldn’t want to—I wouldn’t want to know.

  We walked again, faster. I tried not to see the fawn’s large eyes closing. His constant quiver faded to shivers, less and less frequent, weaker. Every tiny muscle in his infant body tensed—I felt hope!—we were all holding breath—and the baby collapsed in her arms, limp. Limp. But its eyes were now fully open, huge black globes, the only echo of its spent youngness, and it remained cute, yet it was dead. It deserved to live, to live a full deer-life. I wondered if it had ever even had a chance to walk.

  My friend kneeled, laid him down in the center of the wet, hard dirt road. No mud.

  I kneeled, too.

  “He’s not dead,” Dash said. He stood up straight, straight, paced. He was going to fix this. “He’s not dead.”

  I believed him. It was easy to believe Dash, I wanted to believe him. Now Dash crouched down, kneeled low, this man, my man above this infant deer. He was searching—his fingers darted too young to understand, frantic, sure they’d find a pulse. Watching his hand’s desperate sprint, his trembling pinkie outreached, pleading for a heartbeat, for a happy ending to this walk’s story, I fell in love with his vast and noble hope.

  “He’s not dead,” he declared again, the only words he’d spoken. Dash’s face was just two inches from the fawn’s. The fawn’s eyes were vacant.

  Dash didn’t say anything more. He unfolded himself upright, walked maybe fifteen feet, off the road and into the wet forest. We all followed behind him. The ground here was ancient leaves, wet and so-long-dead, the color of Thomas’s wet hair fresh from the tub. Dash shook a boulder back and forth and back, large as an infant’s crib and cold. He uprooted it, shoved and rolled it five feet to the side. It exposed a foot-deep hole.

  He dug with cupped fingers.

  I felt in my warm chest a cavity of
loss. My mother, my body, my blood and life: gone. My mother’s eyes: vacant. She had gone deaf. She had wanted me to hold rape inside my body like a dark pearl, keep it in there, as it grew, as I grew cramped, as it overtook me as hidden things do. Secrets become lies. I’d carried in every step I took this lie, the shame of it. My mother’s mute eyes. They couldn’t even cry for me, my loss. Her ability to love me in the way I needed was as gone as my childhood. I’d been her girl, Doll Girl, bleeding, needing her, but now I didn’t. Now I had Dash. To nurse me back to health. To love me hugely.

  The rain was flowing again—I didn’t know when it had gotten this hard—and Dash scooped up the fawn and lay it down in the dirt-hole grave. He pivoted from grave to soil-mound to stone to grave to stone, filling the hole, burying the fawn; he rolled the biggest rocks he could find onto the grave, instinctually following the ceremony of our ancestors, keeping the body sacred.

  We three could only watch.

  Dusk’s shadow swallowed trees, lumped evergreens and sky together in black blotches shaped like house-less roofs, like a giant stooping woman in silhouette. This day was ending. This hike was ending, too, I knew, I felt.

  In one week snow would drift down in wide twirls; the ground would freeze, all white, too hard for coyotes or grizzlies to dig into. The fawn would lie dead in peace, well-buried, protected from indignity by Dash.

  Dusk had faded into nighttime in the woods. Dash was walking, now, down the road, back west, north on the faithful trail. We followed. The boyfriend kissed the girl. The rain drizzled out again, and I thought I saw a little black sky through the fog. I was still crying, I realized, late that night, Dash asleep, hugging me in his sleep in our taut tent as he had for hours and hours.

  Late in night in darkness, still awake, I asked Dash, “Why are you doing this walk?” I finally needed to know his story too.