by Rich Foster
So he had escaped and ended up lost, shivering in the dark. Alan couldn’t help but think what a difference a day made. Yesterday morning he awoke with the certainty that he would find his way out. The sun had been warm and he had food to eat. He was back to the river even if he was uncertain how far downstream he had floated that first day. A glancing blow to the head had left him muddled for a bit, but how far could it be he asked himself? He had breakfasted on snake and miners lettuce and set off upstream with a bounce in his step.
Following the river quickly became difficult. The brush became denser and more entangled. With each step it seemed to be reaching out to snare him. The banks of the stream rose too steeply to safely climb, for he was fearful of spraining an ankle. At times he hiked in the shallows of the stream, but it was slow and tiring against the current. On land he used a broken branch as a machete to chop his way forward. Sometimes he pushed through the brush with his back and at others he was forced to crawl on his belly. Branches scratched at him and old scabs were ripped open. Soon his shirt was damp with sweat and patches of sticky blood. The day became a torturous forced march.
It was late afternoon when he rounded a bend and the land flattened out. He was soaked to the skin with sweat and tumbles into the water. He hurried forward to see where he was. The stream was in a wide flat valley ringed by low pine covered hills. Tall grass grew at the margins where a new meadow was beginning to form as the stream brought down silt from the hills above. He trudged out to the middle of a large pool that was extremely shallow. Looking in all directions he couldn’t see any of the peaks he expected to see. His excitement gave way to a small wave of panic. Until this moment there was an imagined map in his head, where he was, where he was going. Now it was gone. Alan looked down at the shallow water around his legs. It bubbled and splashed around the rocks, sunlight played on its surface. It certainly wasn’t deep enough for him to have been swept through. The realization came he was following the wrong stream.
Despair overcame him and he dropped where he was. Sitting in the shallows, with water streaming around him he began to cry. Like a lost child in a department store he sobbed, bewildered and looking for parents who no longer existed. He cried in frustration and fear; he cried for himself.
Slowly the tears subsided as his body cooled down from the rigors of hiking. A broad area of gravel beckoned so he splashed his way over. He picked a warm sunny area where the sun had beaten down for hours. The gravel was warm to his touch. He became aware of his sodden clothes. This made him notice that the sun was far across the sky. Night would soon be coming. Despite his exhaustion he forced himself to work. He removed his clothes and wrung them dry. By using two stout sticks he was able to twist them much harder than he could with just his hands. When he finished they were more damp than wet. Using nearby bushes he spread them out in the sun to dry.
He lay down naked on the gravel. The heat from the stones was soothing to his body and he dozed off for a few minutes. It was long enough for a dream to form, but when he woke up, despite the desire to hold onto it, the dream eluded him. Looking at the sky, Alan judged he had only an hour left before sunset. He pulled his cigarette lighter out, and putting a cigarette to his lips, he tried striking it. The flint only made small sparks. Looking through the acrylic body he could clearly see the gas was all gone.
He hiked up the hillside looking for a place to hunker down for the night. He wanted to be well above the stream for he had learned that the cold air moved down the canyon floors at night. He found a rocky recess behind some bushes where he later slept that night.
Overhead the sky was turning a hazy white. Alan felt the cool breath of the hills roll down into the meadow. The sunlight was fading as pale shafts of sunshine filtered through the tops of the trees.
His clothes were dry to the touch. Only the seams remained moist. He put them on and then began plucking up bunches of the tall grass, which he carried up hill to his nest. He worked steadily, but paced himself to avoid becoming sweaty. When he crawled in behind the bushes a gray fog was settling on the top of the trees. Before it was completely dark he had fallen asleep.
Hunger woke Alan. Fumbling in the dark, he pulled the liner of his shave kit out of the rucksack. He was using it as a plastic baggie for the bits of snake that remained. He had wrapped the meat with green leaves to keep it fresh. The miner’s lettuce and snake made a sort of sushi. Slowly he nibbled it.
I’d love a smoke he thought.
“Those will kill you, ya’know,” said Ralphie from the shadows.
“Go to hell, Ralphie! I don’t need you reading my mind,” said Alan.
Ralphie gave him a wounded look.
Alan had accepted Ralphie at the periphery of his thoughts, but as he trudged along the imaginary friend had accompanied him more openly. He welcomed the illusionary companion. But as the stress built, the fantasy had taken on a life of it’s own and Alan permitted himself to talk to him.
“Look, Ralphie, I’m lost in the woods. No one knows where I am. I’m eating snake and freezing my ass off. The mosquitoes sucked me dry and I’m supposed to worry that smoking may cause cancer?”
Ralphie waved a hand at an imaginary mosquito by his face.
“Oh yeah, well you don’t want to be like the old guy who said, if I knew I was going to last this long I would have taken better care of myself.”
Alan pulled another piece of snake from the sack.
“Beside, you little smart ass, it doesn’t matter; my lighter ran out of propane. Why do you think I don’t have a fire? I’ll probably freeze to death and then where will you be?”
Ralphie just shrugged his shoulders and hugged himself as he shivered. He looked forlorn and lonesome.
In Ralphie’s eyes Alan saw himself. His thoughts drifted off, carried on the tide of fatigue. He had been just as small and helpless, unable to stop what happened.
“You’re thinking about your brother again, aren’t you?” It wasn’t actually a question but a statement of fact.
“Yes. I’ve been thinking about him everyday now for quite awhile.”
“You mean ever since that fat slob dropped dead at the office?”
Alan jerked as if he’d been poked with a stick. “I don’t want to think about that incident!” his voice filled with whelming anxiety. He clamped his head in his hands.
“The incident” had happened three months previous while Alan was in the break room getting his coffee, black, no sugar. Suddenly Frank, a company salesman, greeted him with a slap on the back. Frank was overweight, ruddy complexioned, given to high blood pressure, high blood sugars and a "hail fellow well met" mien.
“How’s it going good buddy?” Frank asked as he used his free hand to push the last of a cinnamon roll into his mouth. Then he grabbed his 42-ounce Coke and washed it all down. Alan thought, “We aren’t buddies.” In fact they were little more than casual acquaintances, Alan didn’t even know his last name. He was just another cog in the machine. But Frank was a back-slapper. Alan replied with a grunt that Frank was free to interpret as he chose. Frank could supply a running dialogue for two people using a vocabulary that was mostly vulgar and profane.
Frank charged on with exuberance. “Hell I’d like to tell that old bastard Voss to take this job and shove it where the sun don’t shine. Little piss ant! Who needs the damn headaches every day? Hell! If I crossed the street I bet I could easily pull down another ten grand a year. The sons-of-bitches in management don’t fucking appreciate us. And they sure as hell don’t give a shit what happens to our ass.”
It was Frank’s last chance to talk like this, three seconds later he was dead. One moment he was jawing away and the next his eyes bugged out, his face contorted while his left arm snapped up to his chest. His legs buckled and folded under him. On the way down he slammed his head against the edge of the table splitting the scalp open. When his face hit the floor it made a thump like a rotten pumpkin hitting the ground. The coroner’s report said it was a massive coronary/st
roke combination. They couldn’t tell which caused which but Frank died fast.
As Frank bounced off of him, Alan dropped his coffee, breaking his favorite cup. He called for help but the door was closed and nobody paid too much attention to strange noises from the break room. People were always fooling around in there. Alan rolled Frank over on his back and began doing CPR. He could smell the stale cigarettes on Frank’s breath and the cheap cologne, which failed to mask Frank’s pervasive body odor
Alan worked frantically. Five compressions and two breaths... five compressions and two breaths… Alan had no idea how long he performed CPR on a corpse, for at some point it was no longer Frank’s but his brothers bloodied body on which he worked. He could see Eric’s face and mangled body. He saw his brother’s vacant eyes staring at him from an ashen face. Alan sobbed hysterically as he worked, five compressions, two breaths…five compressions, two breaths.
When the paramedics came they had to pull Alan off of the body. Alan was babbling nonsense about an explosion and how it wasn’t his fault. The medics shot him up with injectable Valium and then body bagged Frank and strapped him to a gurney. In the hospital, when the Valium wore off, Alan’s anxiety attacks began.
Alan’s memory of Frank ended and he found himself rocking back and forth like an autistic child. He rocked steadily, arms wrapped tightly around his body. Slowly he became aware that dawn was coming. Overhead it was now gray not black and he could make out the silhouette of objects around him. He could see Ralphie rocking in the shadows.
“I must be crazy.” Alan said aloud.
“Are you?”
Alan gazed glassy eyed at Ralph. After a long time he said, “I don’t know. Maybe I am. I can’t stop thinking about death. It was the same when Eric died. It was a scab I could not stop picking at. Then I started thinking about being and not being. Finally my brain just sorta shorted out”.
“That’s when you created me!”
Alan began to cry, “I just needed a friend to talk to. God I was scared! My mother would just cry and cry.” His words came out in broken spurts as he wept. “Day after day she would sit on the porch and rock. Some days she never spoke a word. I could see in her eyes, she was far away, somewhere neither my Dad nor I could go. She wanted to be with Eric. Then she took that bottle of sleeping pills and got there. After that Dad stopped talking to me. Maybe he blamed me. Or maybe he was just angry and scared, too.
Dawn spread out and Alan shook the unwanted thoughts of night from his mind. He crawled out from the bushes, stood up and stretched. His limbs were stiff and he felt weary beyond words. He wanted to get moving and get warm, so he put on his pack. As he trudged down the hill he thought motion was the best way to quiet the dialogue in his head. But it didn’t work. He heard a small internal voice, quoting Hamlet.
“To sleep, perchance to dream, ay, there’s the rub. For in that sleep of death what dreams may come…that undiscovered bourn from which no traveler returns?"
The sky was lighter when he emerged into the clearing by the water. He judged that within an hour the clouds would probably burn off. Alan scooped up some drinking water with his thermos. Cold water and the last piece of cold snake were his breakfast.
He needed to make a new plan. The fact that he was truly lost gave urgency to finding more food. It might be best to stay in one place for a few days and gather food. A mountain man he was not, but he hadn’t done so poorly. After all he thought I found the snake and miners lettuce. I also gathered pine nuts. Fish might be a possibility, too. Yesterday he had seen a few small ones dart past in the water. If he took his time perhaps he could trap some.
Staying put and resting seemed attractive. He wasn’t sure how far down stream he would have to hike to meet the other branch of the river. And he knew how hard the trip up had been. The other choice was to go overland and try to cut the distance to the river. Ennui finally won. He decided he would stay and try to gain strength and food. If he was to do that he thought, he had to find a way to make fire.
The woods were no longer shrouded in fog. They were losing their strange and haunted appearance. Overhead the gray was melting away to wispy white trails of haze, and then to an azure blue. The tops of the trees danced in the welcome sunlight. Alan looked to see where he thought the sunlight would first reach the meadow. He walked that direction following the edge of the water. A dark shadow stirred in the water. Sure enough, he thought, there were fish drifting along below the bank. He counted at least a dozen small to medium trout. On the far side of the shallow pond he saw what looked like the tops of oak trees. Later he would look for acorns. He could crush the nuts and make a mash out of them. His spirits improved.
Alan sat down on a rock, which promised to be one of the first spots to get direct sunlight. While he waited he tried to start a fire with the spark from his lighter. First he collected very fine kindling and a clump of dry moss. He broke these up and built a little mound on a flat piece of bark. He spun the wheel on the lighter again and again, until the side of his thumb was sore. In the movies they made starting a fire from a spark look like child’s play but despite his best efforts it would not catch.
He laid back and closed his eyes to rest. Soon he drifted off to sleep. When he awoke the rock was cold beneath his back however his face was warm in the sunlight. Squinting into the bright light, he saw the sun had finally reached him. It was wonderfully warm and he luxuriated in it. Eventually he sat up and opened his backpack hoping to find a small bit of overlooked food. He spread the contents out on the rock but the only edible items were a couple bits of dark wilted miner’s lettuce and the toothpaste. The mint flavor was like candy when he brushed his teeth.
As he repacked his meager possessions he bumped the can of shaving cream. It rolled across the rock. The cans polished, concave bottom glinted in the sun. An idea germinated in his brain. He opened his pack of cigarettes, and put one in his mouth. Holding the can upside down he aimed the bottom toward the sun. Then with the cigarette between his lips, he leaned forward and put the tip into the focal point of sunlight. Sure enough, the end of the cigarette was in an oval glare of focused sunlight. By moving the can he achieved the tightest concentration of light possible on the very edge of the cigarette paper. Nothing happened. He waited for two minutes. Just as he was about to give up because his hands were becoming shaky, he saw a tiny puff of smoke rise from the paper. He gently inhaled and the paper began to smolder; soon the tobacco was burning. He inhaled deeply on what was to be the best cigarette of his entire life.
Excited, he quickly gathered small twigs and sticks from the duff under nearby trees. Then he built a miniature tepee of the smallest twigs over the moss he had been trying to light and put the cigarette against it. One gentle inhale made the cigarette glow hot and a gentle puff out fanned the kindling. A small flame sprang up and soon Alan was hustling to get enough fuel to keep the fire going. He fed the flames steadily for half an hour until there was a solid bed of coals. The fire wasn’t where he would want to camp but he planned to keep it going all day and then carry some hot coals to wherever he camped using a rock or his thermos shell.
Having a fire helped Alan’s sense of well-being. It made it easier to decide to stay put for a couple days. He could use it as a base camp and try to locate where he was.
Fishing was the most promising source of food. Down by the pool he waded in and began piling rocks into a modest size circle. Working steadily for an hour, he felt like a boy again playing in the woods. The water in the pool was not as cold as the first river. Alan guessed there must be less snowmelt and more shallow areas where the stream could warm in the sun. Just the same, his feet were stiff with cold when he got out of the water to stoke the fire. He felt lightheaded and weak as he bent over to gather more wood. The bed of coals was sufficiently large that he was able to pull larger branches over and push one end into the flames and keep the fire going “Indian style”. After a short rest he returned to constructing his fish trap. Using a stout branch as a
lever he rolled a large log into the water and maneuvered one end up to the opening in his rock corral. He then brought other tree limbs down and built a second wall. The two walls formed a “v”. The water was about a foot deep but grew shallower in the circle. His hope was that the logs would funnel the fish into the small opening. Some would escape but others would not find their way back out. He wasn’t sure if it would work but he had seen pictures of such traps in museums about Indians.
Alan left Nature to do the work and went looking for food. Acorns covered the ground beneath the oaks, but birds or bugs had already eaten many. Many were mealy inside. But with a modest effort he found enough and soon his shave kit collection basket was full. Sitting near his fire he pounded the acorns out on a flat rock, using a cylindrical stone as a pestle. By mid-afternoon he had a mound of acorn flour. But acorns are full of tannin and extremely bitter so the flour needed to be washed. He laundered his socks in the water and then filled them with the flour. He left it soak in fast flowing water, weighted down by a rock.
His fish trap had not yet produced any dinner. Perhaps the fish might be more active at twilight. If he trapped a fish he knew it would be difficult to scoop it out of the pen, so he set about making a spear. By using his razorblade knife he was able to sharpen five straight sticks into sharp points. These he lashed with long field grass to a thicker branch about five feet long. Each sharpened point was tied to poke out from the pole, giving him more chance of hitting his target.
Alan waded into the deeper water by the bank. Standing still, he soon saw several fish swim past his legs. He jabbed at them with his spear but refraction made him miss. However the fish darted away and swam into the trap. One turned away at the last moment but two swam into the pen. Water flew as he tried to dash over to the opening. Picking up a large rock he closed off the exit. Instead of shooting ducks in the water this was like spearing fish in a pot. After several misses he learned to lead the fish by a few inches and soon had both lying on the bank. One was a decent size trout; the second would have earned him a citation if a game warden came by. Rather than trying to gut them with his small blade he speared them with a green stick and propped them over his fire.
