Wilderness

3

Spared again, I knew that I wouldn’t be spared forever. On hands and knees, I crawled through the dark, found the way out. The passage seemed to have grown much narrower since I’d entered through it, the stone pressing relentlessly against me as though I would be flattened between strata and fossilized to mystify archaeologists thousands of years hence.

Half deafened by the two reports, I nevertheless heard the panicked hunter shouting outside. His voice came to me by the flute holes through which the wind might pipe on another day. He sounded both enraged and terrified.

The rifle fired again, but the boom was more muffled and seemed to come from a different direction than before. Vibrations translated through the hugging stone as I squirmed along. Another shot and yet another.

I realized what he was doing. He had come off the formation of limestone and had begun to circle it, seeking those holes at its base that might lead to the chamber where I had been when we came eye to eye. There were only five that would accommodate a boy my size, and only three of them bored inward to any extent, and only this one led to a pocket cavern large enough to serve as a refuge. If he fired blindly into some of those openings, he was at risk of being wounded by his own ricocheting rounds, but intuition told me that luck of that kind would not save me from him.

On hands and knees, I hastened through the darkness and followed the curve and saw precious daylight ahead. I almost hesitated, but my sole hope was to get out before he appeared and opened fire. I exited the passageway, expecting a boot in the face, a bullet in the head, but when he fired again, the report came from farther around the limestone outcropping.

I rose to a crouch, considering my options. I was on the west side of the formation and could see the place where the wolf had vanished into the undergrowth. But our house lay in that direction, and it would be dangerous to draw the hunter toward home. To the north, a deer path offered a narrow but clear route into the rising woods, and if I could get to it and disappear along it before he rounded the limestone, I might be safe.

As I sprinted toward that best chance of escape, I heard him shout like a biblical avenger offended by some outrage committed against all that was good and decent—“Abomination!”—and knew that he’d seen me. The rifle cracked, and a bullet tore a chunk out of a tree trunk inches from my head. Shaken by the power of my own hard-hammering heart, gasping for breath, I ran as I had never run before, along a trail scattered with coins of sunshine and with a greater currency of shadows.

I knew this portion of the wilderness better than he did. If only I could avoid being shot in the back during the next minute, I believed that I might be able to lose him. This was the next thing to primeval forest, and though he had longer legs than I did and all the firepower, anyone lacking my peculiar intuitive sense of direction might become lost here forever.

When I reached the first turn of the trail without hearing another shot, I assumed that he must be racing after me. I didn’t look back but made an even greater effort.

Deer traveled by the way of least resistance, and because their sense of time measured life in four seasons rather than in minutes and hours, they lived without urgency. The hoof-beaten trails were therefore circuitous, and from time to time they branched. I took the first branch, and when that one eventually divided, I followed the new path again, hoping that at one intersection or another, the hunter would go the way I hadn’t. By this strategy I reached a crest and descended and crossed a shallow vale and climbed a longer slope to a ridge, where I stopped and turned and looked back and saw no one.

I sat on the rimrock to catch my breath, and the forest below blazed with fire that didn’t consume it, each autumn tree a torch of red or orange or yellow, like a vast canvas by an impressionist painter inspired and exhilarated by the quantum nature of all things.

By now I understood that he hadn’t shot me in the back on the first uphill leg of the trail because he must have been out of ammunition and needed to reload, which had given me a minute to get ahead of him and out of sight. Having taken a maze rat’s route from the limestone formation to this ridge, I was reasonably sure that in an attempt to follow me, he would make more than one wrong choice of trails.

I needed only to catch my breath and then make my way toward home by such indirection that I didn’t risk crossing his path as he wandered in search of me. Or so I believed. The rabid ferocity of his reaction had confirmed Mother’s warnings, but I didn’t yet comprehend the depth of the revulsion that I inspired or how relentless he would be in his determination to kill me.

As I sat gazing down into the serried ranks of trees in their celebratory dress, I realized that if the hunter ascended through them, I might not register his movement until he was close. In that festival of color, the numerous red-leafed maples redefined his red hunting jacket as a kind of camouflage.

Chips of bullet-fractured rimrock sprayed over me simultaneously with the crack of the rifle. I rolled away across the narrow ridgetop, down the next slope, onto all fours, onto my feet, and plunged through lashing feather grass, no deer trail apparent. I made it to the tree line, into shade and ferns, blundering through undergrowth. The hunter obviously had expert tracking skills, and I was leaving in my wake a path of disturbed and broken foliage that any amateur could have followed.