Be Not Far from Me(34)
“‘They divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment.’”
Between all the strips torn off my shirt I went ahead and did the dividing myself, and anybody is welcome to my jeans if they drive me to the hospital first.
“‘But you, LORD, be not far from me. You are my strength; come quickly to help me.’”
The sooner the better.
Day Nine
I put away what’s left of the possum in the morning, afraid it’ll go bad if I wait much longer. It goes down easy, my stomach understanding its purpose. I know this means I’ll be in that much more pain if I begin the process of starving again, but I can only hope that’s not in store for me.
I stick my empty Baggies in one pocket and the one with something left in it—one oxy—in the other. My bad foot is still swollen, but the wound looks as clean as I can expect it to. I put some plastic over it and pop it back in the sling, adjust my walking stick under my armpit and set out once more.
I keep thinking there’s got to be an end to this, that we’ve obliterated so much of our natural habitat that sooner or later I’m going to stumble across a road, an ATV trail, a natural-gas operation . . . something. People have never been decent about leaving nature alone, tearing into her with machines of metal teeth and money-hungry mouths. How many times did I have to pull to the side to let a gas truck pass me, the little road that led to my house too small for the both of us?
A lot, that’s how many. And I cussed them every time, getting to the point where I think the guys got a kick out of me giving them the finger and started using my road more often just to see me go off on them from behind the steering wheel. Dad always said if I didn’t give people such a reaction they’d stop giving me so much shit.
Still, I’d be all right with seeing a company truck right now. Like maybe I wouldn’t even cuss them. But I can’t find a walking trail, let alone a road, so I don’t see that anywhere in my immediate future.
I stop to fill my whiskey bottle when I hear the ripple of a creek, this one deep enough that it has a decent flow to it and a couple of slow pools near the rocks where I see some smallmouth bass passing the time, their mouths opening and closing in a rhythm that my own breathing picks up, slow and steady. I don’t know why I’m thinking so hard out here about all the things I’ve done wrong. Maybe because I’ve got nothing but time and I haven’t exactly done a whole lot of things right.
Once my bottle is full I climb back up the bank awkwardly, grabbing on to trees and pulling myself with my arms more than I am using my good leg. I lose my balance enough to knock against a little elm, scraping the raw edge of my foot against it and sending a blaze across my brain.
I dig out the oxy and break it in half with my fingernail, although a lot of the nail gets bent back before the pill gives away. I’m malnourished, all the little bits that used to make up me draining away, slowly. I get back up, hobbling into position and leaning a touch to the side where the whiskey bottle hangs heavy. I know it’s going to pull me as I go. I know I’m nowhere near to making a straight line as I hobble forward, walking stick, then good foot.
But at least I’m still moving.
The best way to spot a trail is to not look right at it.
Anybody that knows the woods gets that, but trying to teach someone how to see things without looking is a tall order. I knew the woods around our house well enough to be aware of the deer paths and raccoon stomping grounds, and Dad taught me how to gauge the size of a deer from its print, but it was Davey Beet that showed me how to find a trail where there were no tracks.
“Right there,” he told me, grabbing my wrist right before I went down to the edge of a ravine.
Embarrassed that I fell and even more because he’d caught me, I shook him off. “What’s right where?”
Davey nodded to the west, and I’d done what anybody would do, stared hard at the brush, trying to figure out what exactly it was that had his attention.
“Nope,” he said. “Don’t look at the ground. Look midway up the trees and rest your eyes. Then you’ll see it.”
And damn if he wasn’t right. It was like one of those pictures where a thousand different little things make up one big picture, and if you’re looking too close at the details you can’t see the overall view.
The deer trail that catches my eye now does so only because I haven’t given up scanning the trees for blazes on the off-chance that I’ll wander back across the trail. It’s not paint that I spot but a knot that either looks like a human face or I’ve been alone way too long. Whatever the case, I’m looking at that and not the ground when it all comes together, and there’s the deer path.
Humans aren’t the only creatures of habit. Deer use the same trails, moving from a bedding area to a feeding area to water every day. It’s not unusual to find the splayed-finger paws of raccoons and the scratch of a turkey right next to the cloven hoofprint of a deer. A wildlife trail is used often, and by many different types of animals. But that doesn’t mean it’s screaming for my attention either. Animals move soft and slow through the woods, and spotting a trail means looking for small blades of grass bent the same direction, like how I part my hair when combing it out after a shower.
The path is about as wide as that too and not heading west, but I’ve been making my own way long enough that it would be nice to follow for a while, so I decide to see what the deer know that I don’t. I find a few spots where they’ve bedded down recently and some scat that tells me they’re not far off. There’s no real reason why I should care. Like Kavita pointed out a lifetime ago it’s not as if I could run one down and kill it with my bare hands. And even if I could, I wouldn’t. I couldn’t eat a tenth of it and carry about the same before it went bad. It’s curiosity that leads me on, not need. So when I come across the fawns I’m not looking them up and down to assess where the good cuts are.