Stranded

by Matthew P. Mayo

  And speaking of feet, my left foot needed more pressure on it lest I topple. I did my best to shift weight to even out, but it did not work that way.

  When I eased that cursed foot down again something under it, a baby of a twig, snapped. I barely heard it, so small and muffled was it beneath my boot. But that bear heard it. He stopped, like the deer in the meadow, and swung that big head so he was looking straight at me. Oh Lord, but that jellied me inside.

  I stood frozen, but soon enough, cold drops of fear-sweat rolled down my face. I prayed for them to stop sliding down my nose, my eyes, out from under my woolen knitted cap, but they kept right on rolling. The gun was heavier with each second that passed. The sack I’d slung over my right shoulder felt as if it wanted to slide off and spill my poorly made snare parts right at my feet, like an invitation to the big bear to come on over for dinner.

  His big, staring face was wide, now that I saw it full-on. Wide and with hair all blooming out of it, like when you stare into the middle of a sunflower. Only this was no sunflower. That big black nose worked in all directions harder than ever, begging for a slip of a scent of whatever it was that made that noise.

  Its ears were bigger than I had seen before, but only because they were pricked up and cupped in my direction. The eyes, though, Papa, were like you said. He sort of squinted and tried to draw a sight on me, like it was unsure of what it saw. But that nose was working, and the ears twitched all the time.

  My sweat droplets kept rolling and the gun was a heavier thing with each passing second. The bear’s mouth parted slightly with shallow breaths. Its black lips sagged like played-out leather strapping, and I saw big yellow teeth that could do terrible things to my body. My left leg shook, and I prayed it didn’t jiggle enough to move my skirts. My hands gripped that shotgun tight but they were about to commence with the shakes, too.

  My heart sorted out what it was meant for, and began to thump something fierce, as if to make up for being scared to a stop. If the bear didn’t do something soon, I would shiver all over and give myself away.

  I forced my mind to remember how to work the gun. It would be my only chance. Papa, you said you can’t outrun a bear, and seeing that big beast, I knew you were right. Something about it was powerful and convincing. Seeing it staring at me, but not at me, if that makes sense, chilled me more than any dunk in a frozen river. It convinced me it was king of all these mountains, and I sincerely hoped I was another meal for another time.

  Even writing that now, three days after the fact, makes my hands shake. I have to stop for now. It is late and I have spent too much time today in my own mind, as Papa has often accused me of.

  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 1849

  * * *

  Remember how I mentioned I had three days that were frightening and overwhelming? I may not have used those exact words, but believe me, seeing the bear was only the beginning. I’d like to say it got better, but it didn’t. I stood that way, not moving, or trying not to, anyway. Much as I wanted to look like a tree or a rock, I am not one. I am a girl, and my legs shook and my hands shook and I kept right on sweating cold, stinging sweat in my eyes. Still, I stayed like that as long as I could.

  By the end, I was trembling so bad I looked like old Mimsy from the next farm over, before she died. She shook with what Papa called “her palsy.” I wanted to laugh at myself, even if that bear was still out there somewhere.

  Finally after what I am sure was much of an hour, I decided I had to move. With intention, that is. My body had already decided to move on its own sometime before that. I told myself all at once I was going to drop down to one knee and at the same time pull the stock of that big gun right up to my shoulder. I would thumb the hammers back, and be ready should that big bear still be there, out of sight, tr ying to decide if I was something to eat or something to ignore. That’s what I told myself, anyway. What really happened was that I fell over. More to the point, I collapsed.

  If that shotgun had been on cock, I would have blown myself apart, or blown a big ol’ hole in the ground right at my feet. But all I did was drop. I tried to scramble up to that kneeling position I could see in my mind, but my body wanted nothing to do with it.

  I finally managed to get my right foot planted firm, and shoved myself up to a sitting position. I yarned on that shotgun, but for the life of me I could not raise it more than a few inches from my lap. I let it sag back down, rubbed a hand across my soggy eyes and pushed my hat back off my forehead. I had sweated enough for two people. You would have thought I’d been chopping firewood for hours.

  My heart came back to itself, too, and my body told me I should rest. So I did, sat right there and did nothing for a few minutes. But I kept a watchful eye. That bear had made hardly any sound at all. That was the most frightening part. I could have walked right up to him without even knowing it.

  Then a thought came to me. Papa said that bears go to sleep all winter. They den up and don’t come out until the snow melts and finds its way down to the rivers and the grasses poke their heads up, looking for sunlight.

  So why wasn’t this bear asleep? Maybe Papa was wrong, though I don’t think so. Likely this bear was late in heading to his den, looking to curl up and sleep away the long winter.

  That’s about what I wanted to do, too. And my thoughts turned to the camp. If that big grizzly kept walking in the direction I saw him head, he’d tromp smack-dab into my nest. That’s when I realized no matter how solid I make my nest, now that I’d seen a grizzly bear up close, there was no way on the good earth it could hold up to a bear looking for food or a place to sleep the winter through.

  I made tracks for camp. I was careful to swing wide to the north, so as to spy on it from across the meadow. All I could think as I made my cautious way out of the woods was my meat cache. If that bear got into it, I would be in sorry shape.

  It hadn’t much occurred to me I will need to safeguard the camp while I am gone. How do I go about that? I will have to figure it out right quick if bears are roving during the daytime while I am off cutting wood or trying to snare rabbits.

  A rock of fear in my belly burned hotter with each step closer to camp. Then I made it out from the edge of the woods and into the little meadow. It is now mostly a rumpled quilt of white with rocks and knobs of brown, dried grasses stitching the place together in odd patterns. The camp was off to my right, hard by the river. I kept walking as I looked that way, expecting to see a big brown-black beast standing up on its rear legs, swatting my little nest apart.

  I slowed, stopped, my breath gasping out of me. It’s harder to breathe in the mountains, and I tire sooner than I ought. I held a hand over my eyes and squinted. The sun was behind me. I turned, angling my sight line once more toward the camp, and saw nothing I did not want to see.

  That was good. I admit I feel the nervous flutters whenever I return to camp. It is that time before I know for cer tain nothing’s changed, when it’s a possibility I still might see Papa. He’ll have a hand over his eyes looking right back at me, my brothers to either side of him. And he’ll see me at the same time I see him. Oh, writing that makes me so happy, and then, as quick, I am alone once more.

  I have to stay strong, take care of myself and the camp, so they might see the smoke or smell it. That will be the happiest day of my life, and I am looking forward to it.

  But about the bear. Even though I did not see the bear anywhere near camp doesn’t mean it wasn’t hidden, sniffing and pawing my goods. I cut a wide circle around the camp, so as to see around the river side of the nest. It took me longer than I expected.

  I stopped, eyed the camp. I threw caution to the breeze and made for it. Didn’t take me long to reach the wagon. I was sure there was no bear near it because I saw through the ribs and under it. Unless that ol’ bear was lying down in the wagon, stretched out and snoozing like Thomas of an afternoon back home under the crab apple tree.

  The nest is beyond that, positioned between the wagon and the river, along the berm
I used to help make the wall. I rested a hand on the wagon, solid and comforting. I made my way around the end, stepping slow, hoping there wasn’t anything on the ground under the thin snowpack that might give me away.

  With each step closer to the nest my heart bumped and thumped louder in my chest, so loud at times I swear if a bear was about he would have heard it, too. Soon enough I was at a spot where I saw most of the way around my little winter shelter. It all looked as I’d left it.

  I let out my breath in a long, nervous sort of way and lowered the gun for what I hoped was the last time that day. I was tuckered. I held it loose in my left hand, and made my way down the dug-in steps I’d cut into the hillside. They lead at an angle to a wide space before my front door. I have tried to make it homey, but it is a low sort of spot. I still mean to gather needled boughs to lay there so I won’t have to stomp through mud each time I go out or in.

  I was about to step up onto the rock I’d worried into place. It helps me get height to climb into the door I made, which is four or more feet up off the ground, and I reckon that helps keep me a little safer.

  I looked down to see where to set the butt of the gun when my eye caught something below me. Pressed into the snowy mud, right beside where I’d stepped, was a huge paw print. I stopped breathing again. I hope that isn’t about to become a habit.

  I stared at the print, water still pooling and oozing in the cratered center. There were puckers where the claws had set, then pushed off again, smearing the mud and creaming it into the snow. There was another track, and another.

  Soon I saw at least two dozen bear prints, right where I was standing. Judging from the direction the prints pointed, it had been sniffing at my nest walls, at the mud and weed-packed sides. I wanted to jump through the door and hide myself inside. But then I got the silly notion into my head that the bear had somehow figured out how to get into my house. I finally mustered enough bravery to peek in, but it was too dark in there to do much more than squint and wonder what shape was what.

  Eventually I grew too tired to let my mind play its tricks on me, so I climbed on into the nest. Before I closed the door, I looked out around the campsite, certain I would see the bear peeking at me from the other side of the shelter. But no. At least not that night.

  WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 1849

  * * *

  I woke in the nest in the dark of the cold, still night. I was stiff. Something, a sound outside, had awakened me. I did not move. It was footsteps, and my heart sounded like far-off cannon fire in my chest. In that moment, I knew it was Papa, that he’d finally made his way back to me. And there were other sounds, too. The boys!

  I was set to call out when my happiness was taken from me. Outside the nest wall of canvas and earth, I heard something sniffing. Whatever was nosing around out there could not have been any more fearsome than the creature I conjured in my cursed mind.

  I pictured it taller than the nest, and with matted fur and crusted sores, the cause of which I know not. And its great, black, wet nose worked almost as if it were a beast all its own, twitching this way and that, before finally settling on my scent. Then its mouth dropped open beneath the snout and a scarred pink tongue slopped and dangled and drooled over too many rows of meat-choked fangs, curved and snapped and as raw and jagged as the mountains all about my little valley.

  But this was not what was out there, could not be. It did not grunt how I imagined a bear might. It snuffled like a pig. No, it was more like a . . . dog. And that’s when I knew it had to be a coyote or a wolf. It sounded like Belle, our old hound, when she was on the scent of something and didn’t want to let up, her snout making a sort of coughing-chuckling sound. It snuffled closer and I heard my heart pounding like what I imagine an Indian war drum sounded like. I felt the pounding in my neck, all the way up my throat, even in my nose.

  How was I to live through this? Where was the gun? I had leaned it too far from me in the dark. I swear, sometimes I don’t have the sense of a goose. At least I had the big knife with me. It lay close by my hand and I groped for it with my fingers. The cold bone handle, the bent steel hilt, the stiff leather sheath all felt reassuring.

  I pulled at it with my fingertips and the knife slid on the quilt, the slightest of sounds ever made, but the snuffling, two beasts at it now, and not but a few feet from me, stopped. Dead still.

  I didn’t dare breathe. I fancy the unmistakable stink of wet dog reached my nose as I sat huddled in blankets. There was the rank tang of hair and sweat and something else I had never smelled. Somehow I knew what it was—it was wildness. It was far from the way people live. And it made me not want to take another breath. Made me want to become smaller and smaller until I could fit between clumps of frozen mud and worm my way deep in the earth.

  With no warning one of the beasts howled a long, loud cry, ragged at the edges as if it had been howling all day long and had grown hoarse. The cry dragged out of it as if pulled against its will, tapering to a quavering, trembling sound. Wolves.

  I jerked in my blankets, which I had wrapped beneath my boot heels. The beasts did not hear me. I jammed a wad of Mama’s quilt in my mouth, tasted the spongy cotton and smelled the smoke of a hundred and more campfires that gets into everything. I bit down hard, stifling the scream that wanted to climb out of my throat.

  I tasted blood. I had bit the inside of my mouth, and I did not care. That wash of fear was the beginning of a long night. I knew I had to keep awake. Within minutes of the wolf’s howl, I heard the soft thumping of others drawing closer, racing toward the nest.

  I breathed hard through my nose, not daring to let my mouth have the chance to scream, to reveal to the wolves there was someone, some thing inside. Could they make it into the nest? Yes, my mind told me. They will dig down to you and fill this sad little hovel and you will have nowhere to go.

  It kept up like that for an hour, perhaps longer. Then, as quickly as they had come, my tormenters vanished, one by one, trotting off to some other distraction. But I have no doubt they will return. They know I am here. They smelled me.

  THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 1849

  * * *

  It is my birthday, or near enough—I curse myself each day for neglecting diligence with the calendar. My diary entries well could be off by several days, or perhaps a week, though I hope they are at least consistent with each other. Since today is bright and promising with blue skies and a warm breeze, I choose to believe my birthday is this fine day. I allowed myself a cry. Tomorrow I shall not.

  I indulged in something special and cooked an extra half portion of beefsteak and johnnycake. I long for milk and eggs, but made do with water in the cornmeal. I even managed to coax a sprinkling of pepper from Papa’s grinder, which I thought had been emptied sometime before.

  It is days such as this I wish I had taken up a musical instrument. Mama was the musical one in the family. The rest of us can carry a tune well enough, but she played her spinet for church meetings and often at night. It was a lovely sound and now that I write this I find myself longing for another good cry.

  I am sorry, Mama. I should have not been so stubborn, should not have been the girl who wanted to be out in the fields with Papa instead of in the house with you. I should have said, “Yes, ma’am, a thousand times yes, I will learn to play the spinet, but only if you will teach me.”

  I say this to you now, but other than the brief sunshine and a raven sawtoothing away from here—oh luckiest of birds!—I am alone. No one hears me when I cry or sing.

  Since my birthday is in late November, the twenty-second, to be precise, that means many months of winter ahead. I pour hot water in the last of Mama’s teacups and look at the pretty blue flowers until it is too dark to see them. Happy Birthday, Janette.

  DECEMBER (EARLY?), 1849

  * * *

  My visitor has come. Likely the worst of all.

  Cramping woke me, deep in my gut, like a tiny fist covered in apple thorns, twisting and twisting without cease. I thought at fi
rst it might be the beef.

  A moment of dread filled me, for I suspected that if I had salted it wrongly, then surely I was doomed. I have no other food, nor a practical firearm to “make meat,” as Papa calls it, save the shotgun. And precious little education regarding that brute of a weapon. Why should Papa have taught me to use a shotgun? Why should he not have? Because I am a girl? That notion sets my jaw tight, as always.

  But all worry of food came to naught, shadowed instead by the bigger worry of my visitor. I have experienced unseen visitors before, many times, in fact, since I built this little snowcovered hovel. But always they are toothy and hairy and snarling and hungry and secretive. But none so devious and unseen as this.

  I long for you, Mama. For your cool touch on my forehead. Your hands, I recall, were not soft, but hardworking with red knuckles and calluses. But I miss them all the same. You should be here now, for me. I need your help.

  I am using one of Thomas’s shirts, it being in the worst condition, despite my many mendings. It is stitched by me in a dozen places, tiny precise lines like the tracks of a railway. The blue thread runs up and down the sleeves, the back, one side—each repair marking a time on the trail when he had gotten himself stuck on something and in anger pulled himself free, making work for me.

  And now that shirt has come to this, a stopper for this unseen, unwanted visitor that hurts me from the inside out. I believe I know enough about it to deal with it, nothing more.

  I am not so ignorant of the way a woman’s body functions, yet my first thought on waking and finding myself sticky with blood was that I had been attacked in the night by some animal still hiding in a dark corner of this nest. The truth came quickly to me, yet my waking thought did haunt me for long minutes even as I took stock and figured a way to meet this new task.