We Went to the Woods

by Caite Dolan-Leach

  Back outside, I could still hear the sounds of people cavorting in the pond. A light mist had settled over the ground, as it often did on spring nights when the day had been warm but the earth was still cold from the long winter. The pond must be fucking frigid. I looked up at the sky, but the fog obscured most of the stars, and all but a faint shine of the moon. Unsure what to do with myself, I toddled towards the sauna, hoping to find Beau and Chloe. Or both.

  I continued to walk around the pond, treading carefully so that I wouldn’t make too much noise.

  I found Chloe blowing on the fire in the sauna, looking annoyed.

  “It won’t get hot,” she complained. “Jack must have brought us damp kindling or something.”

  I knew that Beau had been responsible for kindling the last week, and I was pretty sure she knew it too. But Beau somehow always managed to be blameless.

  “Here, I’ll blow,” I offered, and took her place by the stove, cupping my hands around my mouth in a makeshift, inadequate bellows.

  “You’re a good egg, Mack,” she said, and kissed my forehead. I looked in her eyes and tried to pretend that what I saw there was for me. Then Beau stood in the doorway, holding paper and some very small pieces of kindling.

  “Hullo, girls,” he said with a smile. “Can I help?”

  “Give me that,” Chloe said, reaching for his materials. “We’re not all going to fit in here, you know.”

  “We can snuggle up,” Beau suggested. My heart raced. This made my head throb and my belly swoop alarmingly.

  “I’m just going to poke my head outside,” I said, feeling nauseous. I ducked through the doorway just in time, racing into the field next to the sauna before my stomach emptied itself into the tall grass. The scorch of bad red wine burned my nostrils. I hoped desperately that I’d made it far enough into the grass to go unnoticed, and that no evidence would be visible in the morning. Queasy and full of shame, I crept slowly back to my cabin. When I saw Fennel heading towards the sauna, I briefly wished I could rally, but recognizing my weakness, I instead scuttled home, tail betwixt legs, to make the journey up into bed that Jack had failed to manage earlier.

  * * *

  Later that night, I awakened to the sound of shrieking. Ramrod straight in my narrow bed, I listened to the panicked screams. I knew I should fling off my covers and saunter into the night, full of derring-do, ready to rescue whoever was so clearly being eviscerated on my doorstep. But I lay immobile, stricken with an undeniable terror I hadn’t felt since childhood: that absolute certainty that there is something beneath your bed and that the instant you stretch your bare toes to the ground, it will seize you and drag you off to some darker place. I fought the temptation to pull the covers over my head.

  I listened to the screams for a lengthy thirty seconds, waiting for death, mine or the stranger’s. But the screams grew less and less human, until I realized I was listening to the sound of an animal, caught in mortal terror and signaling its anguish. I wondered how I could have mistaken those cries for human. The panicked keening continued, so high and so desperate. I almost grew used to it. Abruptly, it stopped, and I fell almost immediately back into unconsciousness.

  The next morning, I found two rabbits dead on my stoop.

  Chapter 11

  Chloe was out in the wildflower field with Jesse, learning how to start a hive. If she hadn’t been so far back, we might never have noticed what was going on near the property line, and Louisa might not have taken up her standard. And maybe then things wouldn’t have ended the way they did. But because Jesse recommended a quiet spot filled with pollen and far from any human disturbances, they walked through the woods to the flower field to install the hive. I think Chloe relished the idea of having her own project, of being able to creep all the way back there to do something useful by herself. I was mindful of what she had said the day we fell in the pond: that she disliked being perceived as helpless. Since then, I had watched her carve out space for herself, assert herself in dozens of small ways, even as she became lost in each of our worries and tasks.

  The field itself was exquisitely pretty, flanked by pine trees and old oaks. At one point it had been cleared and cultivated, but it had sat fallow long enough to return to tall grass and flowers. Over the next few months, it would be filled with goldenrod, asters, black-eyed Susans, and milkweed (this last useful more for the monarchs than the bees, though no doubt the bees would deign to sup on those gooey pods). Jesse said it was perfect.

  After they’d put in their panels and settled the new colony, they decided to walk to the property line at the end of the next clearing to look for more strawberries or see if they could spot a raspberry bramble, or even a place to harvest wild garlic or mushrooms.

  But when they broke through the tree line that separated this flower field from the next one, Chloe’s jaw dropped. The field was meant to be fallow—it was where we thought we might plant hay if we ever got a cow—but it had been plowed into neat furrows. Jesse dropped to his knees and buried his hands in the earth, even though it smelled of manure, and inspected the tiny seedlings that had just started to poke through the topsoil.

  “Corn,” he said. “Is this yours?” Chloe shook her head emphatically. We had a few rows of corn in the vegetable garden and were hoping to add a whole secondary plot of it in the next few weeks, so we could make cornmeal in the autumn. We definitely hadn’t planted an entire field of it on the property line. “Then it’s probably cow corn, not sweet. And you need to find out who your neighbors are. I’m betting this shit is not organic.”

  Chloe bore the news back to Louisa, who was immediately outraged.

  “Goddamn it, it’s the Larsons,” she explained. “They’re a big agribusiness and own half of this county. They lease the rest of it and cram every acre with GMO crops and pesticides.” She immediately trooped out to the field with Chloe, and came back even more enraged. “They’ve crossed the property line! They’re planting on my fucking property. This is illegal. We’re going to sue the hell out of them.” None of us could really object that she’d called it her land. It was, after all.

  After a quick phone call to Rudy, Louisa was a measure calmer, but still obviously inclined to crusade. She had found a cause, and I could tell that she had no intention of dropping it, or chalking it up to neighborly inconvenience. She was sure that the Larsons were on her land, and not only did they have no right, they were corrupting the water table that fed her farm. Jack finally convinced her to just let it be until Rudy got to the bottom of things, and she agreed, reluctantly. I could tell by the glances she kept giving Beau, though, that she wasn’t ready to let it slide.

  * * *

  We were making progress. The veggies looked promising, the chickens were all laying, the lilacs were starting to bloom. It was warm enough, finally, for us to remove our tattered sweaters when we tilled the garden or cleared another plot. We’d acquired three young apple trees from a local orchard, and though they wouldn’t fruit for years, just watching them leaf out made me happy. We got a goat! Beau and Chloe had returned home with him after a visit to a farmer in Trumansburg; he was a raucous, dark young male who kicked his legs and tried to get in the vegetable garden.

  “What will we do with him?” Louisa asked, looking at the goggle-eyed creature skeptically. She had lobbied ardently for a goat, but had evidently wanted a female. “We obviously can’t milk him.”

  “We’ll get a female soon. This guy was the only one old Rob was willing to part with,” Beau said, patting the goat on the head. The goat responded by giving him a vicious poke in the side.

  “I wonder why,” Louisa said drily. “What will we name him? Black Phillip?”

  “I already named him,” Chloe answered. “Ferdinand.”

  “Isn’t that a bull?” Jack asked. “From a children’s book?”

  “Really?” Chloe said with a frown. “I was sure he was a goat.”
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br />   “A pacifist bull,” Jack answered, shaking his head. “But maybe his name can be…aspirational.” We watched as Ferdinand bucked off, kicking up his haunches and prancing through our yard, bent on destruction.

  “He looks like Black Phillip,” Beau mused. “I think that’s what I’ll call him.”

  “Please don’t,” Chloe said.

  “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” Beau asked.

  While I was happy to expand our menagerie, Argos was the animal that meant something to me. We’d begun to hunt together.

  After Argos’s arrival, Beau had been the one to suggest I try hunting. He hunted deer and turkey in the autumn, but in spring, our carnivorous intake had been limited to what we could barter for. He sized up Argos one morning as the dog was assiduously stalking squirrels and chipmunks near the tree line. Argos would hunker down and creep, cheetah-like, until he was between the unsuspecting rodent and the safety of a tree before launching himself into a powerful spring. Most of the time he struck out, but eventually he returned, proud, with a squirrel dangling from his mouth. Beau and I were sitting in the clearing, taking turns with a butter churn—and, so far, having limited success; Natasha had shown us how to do it, but we lacked either skill or sufficient patience.

  “Well, aren’t you a clever pup,” Beau said when Argos pranced towards us with the unappetizing scrap of drool-soaked gray fur poking from his jaws. “You’re clearly a self-reliant guy.”

  “He brought me two rabbits the other night,” I said. “I thought someone was being murdered.”

  “Rabbits, hmm?” Beau mused. “Have you thought about hunting them?”

  “I’ve never been hunting in my life,” I said.

  “He’ll do most of the work. You’ll just have to train him to bring you his prey. Looks like he already does it instinctively. But maybe you can nail some of them yourself. If you clip something in the leg, he’ll definitely be able to do the rest for you.”

  “Clip them with what?”

  Beau looked at me like I was simple.

  “A gun, silly.” He stood up. “Bring that churn with you.” He led me over to one of the storage sheds that we’d repaired in our first weeks. It had a log propped in front of the door to keep larger critters from getting in. Inside were mostly hand-me-down rakes and a couple of rusty shovels, but Beau maneuvered towards the corner.

  “We’ve got a couple of options here. For small-game hunting, you’re going to want the rifle, this little twenty-two here. It won’t do much, but if you learn to aim, you should be able to help out the professional over there.” He handed me the length of metal, and I held it by its smooth wood stock. It was light and easy to handle. “You’ll want to do target practice, see if you’re any good with that,” he said.

  “What about that one?” I asked, pointing to another gun visible in the corner.

  “That’s a shotgun. There wouldn’t be much rabbit left for you if you went out with that.”

  “Why do we have it?”

  “So far, only to put down a rabid raccoon. I found it staggering around in the daytime a few months back and we couldn’t risk letting it go. Had to shoot the poor little guy.” I shivered. I was glad I hadn’t been present for that execution.

  “This one’s for hunting deer,” Beau said, handing me a heavier rifle. “Belonged to my father, of all things. Pretty decent once you get used to the kick. Louisa refuses to touch it, ever since it bonked her in the shoulder. She had a bruise for two weeks.” He chuckled. “She’s a warrior, but she’s no good with guns.” He hung both the rifle and the shotgun back on the wall. “Ammunition is on the shelf right there,” he said, pointing to a row of boxes directly above the weapons. Looking at the ammo, I saw the butt of a handgun. Knowing nothing about guns, I couldn’t identify it, but it didn’t seem like something you would go hunting with. Beau saw my eyes linger on the pistol.

  “You don’t have to worry about that one. You won’t ever need to touch it,” he said.

  “We sure have a lot of firepower out here,” I said, trying to conceal the uneasiness I suddenly felt. Guns made me nervous; I hadn’t grown up with them, and in my mind they would forever be linked to news bulletins about mass shootings.

  “Ha. You should see what Jesse has stashed at the Collective. Preppers have a whole other idea of what’s a reasonable amount of armament. We’ve just got the country basics here.”

  “Land of the free,” I said, smiling. He grinned back.

  “C’mon. I’ll show you how to shoot that thing so you can bring me home some dinner.”

  Since that day, Argos and I had only tried for rabbits. I wasn’t sure he was particularly suited to catch anything else—big as he was, I doubted he could bring down a deer, even though the thought of venison for the winter was deeply tempting. Still, he was excellent at snagging the little bunnies as they raced obliviously through the underbrush, and I again wondered where he had come from and who had trained him. I loved our afternoons out in the woods, me crouching low to listen for him as he hunted ahead of me. We soon learned where the skittish cottontails lurked and we’d finally gotten the barbecue shipshape and were experimenting with smoked rabbit. We were careful with the bunnies, inspecting them for parasites and cooking them until we were sure they were safe—after some research, Louisa had decided they were about as safe to eat as anything else, and though I had my doubts, I liked hunting too much to question her. I ate sparingly of the meat, anyway.

  I was saving all the skins, salted and stretched on my porch, planning to make a rug for my cabin when I had enough. Jack and Chloe had each taken tiny bites of carnivorous temptation when Louisa had barbecued two rabbits one evening when we were out of stew supplies. Our diets were still so limited that being a vegetarian didn’t make enormous sense, though Chloe in particular seemed to feel guilty and disgusted. Still, as Jack had acknowledged, we were hardly supporting the factory farming industry or endangering ourselves by consuming undisclosed antibiotics. He would not last as a vegetarian much longer. I knew that we would eventually kill a chicken, though, and I felt sure Chloe wouldn’t be able to partake. Even I would have misgivings. Maybe it would be better to barter a chicken from someone else.

  Louisa saved the rabbit skulls and lined them up on the windowsill in the kitchen, near the bear trap. She boiled their bones for broth.

  * * *

  Though it was satisfying as fuck to see our crops succeed, and to watch the fruiting and spurting of life, I began to feel restless, devoid of something essential that had made me me. Without the anchor of my PhD program and my research, I felt unmoored, as though the days somehow lacked real heft because they didn’t serve a larger function. Of course they did, really, I would reason with myself: What more purpose could there be than self-sufficiency, a radical remaking of the world? But I couldn’t distance myself from the niggling impression that it mattered less because I was not documenting it adequately.

  Because I’d so badly bungled my last case study, I was obviously reluctant to embark on a similar process here; after the failure of The Millennial Experiment and my subsequent abandonment of my dissertation, I was not in a hurry to reboot my academic aspirations. Formal anthropology held nothing for me any longer (I was certain), but I found I still cared about the social concerns that had preoccupied me as a grad student and still felt compelled to chronicle what happened around me. I took to jotting down impressionistic sketches and bugging Jack and Louisa for more detailed descriptions of their recipes and alchemical experiments. I mused, lengthily, on the importance of our work, and waited for some more profound inspiration to arise, something that would allow me to spin all of this into the perfect text, the oeuvre that would redeem me. This translated into a lot of rambling through the fields and forests, mumbling arcanely to myself and pausing to document, in a small notebook or with my phone, the bustle of grubs under a rock or the persistent natter of an
errant woodpecker.

  One afternoon in high spring, I returned home from a fruitless romp through the woods to find two unfamiliar vehicles parked in the still-drying mud near the cabins. Argos barked gruffly a few times, though not with any particular agenda; while a surprisingly efficient hunter, he was a lousy guard dog, always willing to poke his sweet wet snout into the armpit of any visitors. He careened off towards Louisa’s cabin and stopped in front of the open door.

  The lilacs were in full bloom, and I was nearly as giddy as the bees with the sunlight and incipient warmth. The morning glories were already retreating from the onslaught of daylight, and I had stared rapturously at the peonies’ violent waxing, composing goofy rhymes like some feckless Romantic infatuated with nature. Spring had turned my head, and I was in the mood for picnics and hikes. Not Louisa’s machinations.

  I poked my head inside her cabin door to see her, Rudy, and a stranger, all peering intently at a sheaf of papers.

  “The property line is clearly marked here, on the far side of the field in question,” Rudy was saying, stabbing emphatically at the documents before him. “That’s a fairly simple matter to establish legally, given that we hold the records.”

  “You’re absolutely sure that’s where your property ends?” the stranger asked, brow furrowed.

  “You can see it right here on the map!”

  “Even if that weren’t the case,” Louisa interjected, “could we argue that their use of pesticides is, I don’t know, somehow affecting our adjoining fields?”

  “That would be tricky,” Rudy explained. “I can see why no one would want to establish a legal precedent for something like that. It would make it impossible for any non-organic farmer to grow next to an organic farm.”