Clouds blew in above and the shadows under the trees grew together. Suddenly all was darker. I had a pain in my stomach. I had not yet passed the jelly and toast I had eaten at the Big Sky Motel the morning of our fateful flight. And I was mighty hungry. I sat for a spell holding my stomach as what was left of the sun crowned the mountains. The place had the look of evil and I was scared. True dark would come soon and I had no airplane to shelter in.
I decided that I would build a fire. I set about gathering twigs and sticks and pine cones and I piled them in the flattest place I could find. I drug a rotted log to the pile and sat there. I took out the matchbook from Terry’s coat pocket. Once more I studied the muscled dancing skunk on the cover and then I struck a match. The flame did not want to take to the log and it burned my fingers and went out. Three more matches were left.
Mr. Waldrip and I used to visit the Panhandle Plains Museum in Canyon, Texas, where there are life-sized plaster figures of cavemen and cavewomen, hairy and mean, squatting at the limits of a campfire with paper flames. One of the cavewomen was meant to have set it. My thought was, if she had been able to set a fire back then in that hard way of living, surely I could too.
I tore up some pages from the Time magazine about President Reagan’s colon surgery and stuffed them under the wood. Then I lit another match and dropped it in the makings. It burned some and went out. I tried again with the penultimate match and had not a thing on my mind save that cavewoman. The flame took and slowly wound its way up the tinder. I had never before given much thought to what Darwin called his Origin of Species, but I did then. I can see how it might have come about. The people that could not get a fire going would have perished in the cold. And I suspect it was womankind that spared Man from extinction.
The fire caught into a fine blaze and I watched it there for a little while. I was feeling mighty pleased with myself, so much so that I risked a little cheer out loud. It is true a fire is a great comfort even in the most dire of circumstances, but it does make the dark it cannot reach a great deal darker. I endeavored to keep my eyes from the dark and watch the glow in the rotted log instead. Little bugs trapped there hissed and exploded like popped corn. A poor daddylongleg was scurrying from the heat but its fine appendages singed away and the fire overtook it.
By then my stomach pained me something terrible and my bowels began to move. I hurried to the other side of my fire and looked around at the dark. I do not take any pleasure to include this here, but bless you, I will not shy from relating this story in its entirety. It is important that you believe I am relating the whole and pitiful truth of the strange events yet to come in this narrative. As a tree kept my balance, I undid my skirt and rolled down my stockings and I relieved myself right there in the firelight before all creation.
I have always considered myself a well-bred Texan woman, but I suppose even the best of us have bowel movements. My generation is mighty ashamed of them and precisely why that is I do not know. But I was sure sorry for myself and I teared up a little and swatted away the little black flies and mosquitoes that pestered me. I was a pitiful sight to behold. After I had finished, I kicked some pine needles over it and went back to where I had been sitting before and cleaned my ankles with grass. The notion crossed me that I was more unlike myself than I had ever been before.
I watched the fire take more of the log and exhausted I fell asleep.
I woke to thunder. It was dark yet and wind and rain clashed in the trees. The fire had gone out and the burnt-black wood hissed like a nest of smoking snakes. I backed up to the spruce close as I could, but rain still fell on me. It had created a sump and I was sat right in it. The rain washed out my permanent. I am sure I looked like a sopping wet mouse. I have always disliked the way I look when my hair is wet. I got out the umbrella I had found in the airplane and went to open it but it had a big tear in it and was about as useful as a ceiling fan in an igloo. I chucked it aside and set Mr. Waldrip’s boot out to fill up. I wrapped up tight in Terry’s coat. The rain was not as cold as it could have been, I imagine, but I shivered out of my bones nevertheless. How I did not perish right then and there I do not know.
I was glad that it was not long before the rain turned to scarcely a drizzle. For the better part of an hour the lightning crawled in the night above the trees. The sky seemed to me then like a cracked mirror turning and glinting and giving back all the awful true nature of the earth below, which was a hilly and scorched landscape of soot, a very unlucky and inhospitable place indeed.
One strike was not far away and it lit up a mighty strange presence ahead between the boles of two big pines. The light had come and gone so quickly that I was not too certain what I had seen. My first thought was that it had been the face of a young man, hidden in the dark of a hood. When the light was gone I was stone blind. I screamed out before the crack of the lightning reached me in the dark. I was considerably frightened.
It is a funny thing how I trembled at the notion that another person was out there with me, when another person was just what I had hoped to find. There is just something about strangers. And my thought was: what manner of lunatic would stand quietly in the dark and the rain to watch an old woman suffer? Or was it Terry’s disembodied face regurgitated by that white-eyed raccoon, come to haunt me for what I had taken off his person? Perhaps there are spirits over which God has lost dominion, though I have never given much credence to phantoms.
I kept my eyes on the place in the dark, but when the next bout of lightning lit up the trees, whatever it was had gone. The woods flashed on and off for a spell, and I watched for the face to come back, but it did not. There was only that grand timber, which to me then were like great bars to a cell imprisoning me for convictions I feigned not to understand. I tucked my head to my chest and waited for morning.
Mr. Waldrip’s boot filled up past the ankle overnight, but I only got a little sip that morning before I stumbled and spilt it and would spend the rest of the day as thirsty as a catfish in a catamaran. The morning was overcast but the trees all about were bright and grayly bejeweled with rainwater. The good thing about everything being wet and cool was that the mosquitoes had taken the morning off to do whatever it is they do when they are not out terrorizing us higher creatures.
I did not move for some time. I considered not moving ever again and letting myself perish right there. It might have been the first time that I had entertained the notion of resigning to what many would have said was an inevitability in the case of a seventy-two-year-old woman becoming lost in the wilderness. It most certainly would not be the last. I imagined myself looking something like poor Terry, rigid and squirreled up against that spruce, my jaw off its hinges and flies making a mansion of my skull. I wondered how long my hair would stay in and if I would be found in this most unlovely condition, or never again be beheld by human eyes. I could not decide which fate I most preferred.
I took out the tore-up map and worked to make sense of it, but it could not be done. It might as well have been a swatch of the Chinese wallpaper that insufferable Catherine Drewer had used in her sitting room. I decided to voyage away from the clearing and farther down the mountain, although not before I stepped right in my own mess and had to clean my shoe in the wet grass! I do not mean to offend, and this is again a detail I could have left out, but I believe it contributes to the absurdity of my plight and proves that I am not being false nor grand.
After about an hour I came to a rocky place where I could see out from the trees and down into a valley. My heart jumped! I spotted in the distance the asphalt of a highway, tracing a path back to civilization. I was likely as good as rescued if I could make it down there. With renewed energy and hope I made my way down to the valley. All the while I heard strange noises behind me. I had the notion I was being followed.
I reached the place after a couple of hours and stumbled out of the woods. The highway was not a highway at all but a creek. Gracious, I was disappointed. Although by that time I was mighty thirsty too, so it was hard work to be too disappointed in finding water. I wobbled on like a newborn calf, my stockings tore up pretty good now, and I collapsed at the bank of that creek. I cupped my hands in the water and drank. It was very cold and clear. I had drunk two handfuls when I looked up and spotted in the shallows the hairy corpse of a huge animal! I spat