Wilderness

2

This weather-sculpted stone was also a familiar warren, because I had explored its limited interior architecture as far as it would accommodate me. The tunnel was low and tight and curved to the right, and I crawled through the blinding dark, frightened not just of the hunter but of what might currently be in residence in the chamber at the end of that passageway. In the past, when I’d gone exploring there, I had done so with a flashlight, but I didn’t have one this time.

The warren offered a home for various species if they wanted it, including rattlesnakes. In the cool of early October, snakes would be lethargic, perhaps not too dangerous, but although Nature’s creatures had spared me all these years, a weasel or a badger or some other formidable animal would be frightened and would feel cornered when I came rushing in upon it. Leading with my face, I was vulnerable, and I shut my eyes tight to protect them from a sudden swipe of claws.

The passageway brought me around a corner and into the cave, roughly six feet in diameter and between four and five feet high. Nothing attacked, and I opened my eyes. A silver dollar of sunlight lay in one corner of the room, having fallen through one of the flutes, and a larger and more irregular pattern of light, about the size of my hand, formed under another flute. The day lacked wind, and quiet pooled in that subterranean lair—and there proved to be no tenant other than me.

I intended to remain there until I felt certain that the hunter had hiked far away. The air smelled vaguely of lime and moldering leaves that had blown in through the larger hole in the ceiling. If I had suffered from claustrophobia, I could not have tolerated such confinement.

At that moment, I couldn’t have predicted that before much longer I would have no choice but to find my way out of the mountains or that by night and by arduous travel, surviving multiple attempts on my life, I would journey to a great city, or that I would live secretly for many years deep beneath its teeming streets, in storm drains and subway tunnels and in all the strange byways that exist below a metropolis, or that one winter, while visiting the vast central library after midnight, when it should have been deserted, I would meet a girl in lamplight near Charles Dickens and my world would change, and her world, and yours.

After a few minutes, as I crouched there in the dark between the narrow shafts of light, I heard noises. I thought the badger of my imagination might have become flesh and might be approaching now through the passageway that I had followed. The long claws of a badger’s forefeet make it a dangerous adversary. But then I realized that the sounds came from above, carried to me with the sunshine. Boots on stone, a clank of something, a rattle. A man coughed and cleared his throat and sounded very near.

If he hadn’t merely glimpsed me, if he had seen me in some detail, either he would have been searching for me aggressively or he would have decided to depart from a forest so queer that it could harbor something like me. Instead he seemed to have settled down for a brief rest, suggesting that he had not gotten a clear look at me.

What I might be, how I could be brought into the world through the agency of a man and woman, I didn’t know and thought that I would never know. Much of the world is beautiful, and much more is at least fair to the eye, and what might be ugly is nevertheless of the same texture as everything else and clearly belongs in the tapestry. In fact, on the closest consideration, an ugly spider is in its way an intricate work of art worthy of respect or even admiration, and the vulture has its glossy black feathers, and the poisonous snake its sequined scales.

One thing seemed to suggest that I might have some wisp of beauty to offer the world: the nature of my heart, which remained free of bitterness and anger. I feared, but I did not hate. I knew dread, but I did not judge. I loved and wished to be loved in return. And though my life had been circumscribed, though my experience had been limited by the threats I faced, I was usually happy. In this world, where woe and misery were common, where sometimes darkness seemed about to drown civilization, perhaps a capacity for happiness and hope was beauty of a kind, a small welcome light in the flood.

Waiting in the dark warren, I wondered about the hunter, who was separated from me by a few feet of stone. His life was unimaginable to me, more mysterious than that of a lion on the veld or a polar bear on the arctic ice. The little mountain meadow in which our house stood was so far from the nearest neighbor, so remote, that hunters had not before ventured that far. It seemed unlikely that this man meant to kill a deer and then carry or drag it miles to his vehicle. A disturbing possibility occurred to me. Perhaps he hunted for the thrill of the kill and had no need of venison. If he shot a buck, he might take only the rack of antlers, and if he shot a doe, only the ears and tail. Or maybe he would kill and take nothing away except the memory of killing, in which case, it seemed to me that for the first time in my life, I might be in the presence of true evil.

I recognized the smell of his cigarette because my mother was addicted to her Marlboros. A moment later, the draft brought ribbons of smoke down the larger of the flute holes, suggesting that the hunter must be sitting near it. The pale fumes curled and quested as if they were spirits of the dead seeking a way back into the world of the living. He whistled a tune I didn’t recognize, pausing now and then to take another drag on his cigarette.

Other than my mother, he was the first human being that I’d seen. I sat fascinated in the gloom, fearful but intrigued, no less than would have been an astronaut on an alien world encountering for the first time life born around another star. His interrupted whistle, his occasional throat clearing, a few muttered words, the sounds of him shifting position—all of it made me impatient for a closer look at the man, for even the smallest detail of a hand or of the red coat he wore, because, though he was but human, he was magical to me. Gradually I convinced myself that he must be sitting so close to the flute that something of him would be visible, if only a shoe.

Silently I eased to the larger hole and leaned into the light and peered up and was rewarded by the sight of his hand less than three feet overhead. It rested on the stone next to the shaft, the cigarette held between two fingers. The hand was large and work-worn, and suggested that he might be strong, and red-blond hairs like fine copper wire glowed on the back of it.

The draft-drawn smoke willowed down through the hole and across my face, but I didn’t worry about coughing or sneezing. I had long experience of my mother smoking, when we would sit reading in the living room, she with her book and I with mine. From the age of six, I had read at a level far beyond my years, and books were a passion we shared. Her back remained nearly always turned to me, so that she could spare herself from the sight of my face, which might cast her into despair and give her a bad case of the mean reds, which were immeasurably worse than the blues, but somehow the graceful tendrils of smoke found my face and fingered it as if to question the reality of my features.

On the rock above, the hunter adjusted his position. His hand disappeared, but as he now sat, as he leaned, humming a tune rather than whistling, I could see part of his face at such a severe angle that it seemed to be of Mount Rushmore proportions: a heavy jaw, the corner of his mouth, the tip of his nose. A portion of the cigarette appeared but not the hand that held it, and he inhaled and blew smoke out in a ring that amazed me. The bluish circle quivered dreamlike, hung for a moment as though it would remain there in perpetuity, but then the moving air distorted it and drew it down into the hole and unraveled it into my upturned face.

He blew another ring. Doing such a thing twice proved intent, which made the second more delightful than the first. Although this trick ensorcelled me, I am all but certain that I made no sound.

Yet suddenly he turned his head and looked down, and because he didn’t block the sun, he saw my eye, one of my singular eyes, three feet below, regarding him from within the stone. His eyes were blue, and the one of them aimed at me registered shock and then such pure ferocity, such hatred and horror, that I knew—if ever I had doubted—that my mother’s story of the midwife must be true.

Trembling, frightened as I had never been before, I retreated from the light, scooted into the dark, and pressed my back against a wall, grateful that the passageway into my den was much too small to accommodate him.

The crash of the rifle thundered down the hole and echoed around the chamber so unexpectedly that I cried out in surprise and terror. I heard the slug ricocheting wall to wall—peen peen, peen—and knew that I would die there, but it spent its energy without finding me. The hunter thrust the rifle farther into the shaft and fired again, and my ears rang with thunderclap and stricken stone and bullet whine.