A Walk in the Woods Read Free Page B

first-aid kit, sewing kit, anti-snake-bite kit, $12 emergency whistle, and small orange plastic shovel for burying one’s poop, on the grounds that these were unnecessary, too expensive, or invited ridicule. The orange spade in particular seemed to shout: “Greenhorn! Sissy! Make way for Mr. Buttercup!”
    Then, just to get it all over and done with at once, I went next door to the Dartmouth Bookstore and bought books—
The Thru-Hiker’s Handbook, Walking the Appalachian Trail
, several books on wildlife and the natural sciences, a geological history of the Appalachian Trail by the exquisitely named V. Collins Chew, and the complete, aforementioned set of official
Appalachian Trail Guides
, consisting of eleven small paperback books and fifty-nine maps in different sizes, styles, and scales covering the whole trail from Springer Mountain to Mount Katahdin and ambitiously priced at $233.45 the set. On the way out I noticed a volume called
Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance
, opened it up at random, found the sentence “This is a clear example of the general type of incident in which a black bear sees a person and decides to try to kill and eat him,” and tossed that into the shopping basket, too.
    I took all this home and carried it down to the basement in several trips. There was such a lot, nearly all of it technologicallyunfamiliar to me, which made it both exciting and daunting, but mostly daunting. I put the hands-free flashlight on my head, for the heck of it, and pulled the tent from its plastic packaging and erected it on the floor. I unfurled the self-inflating sleeping pad and pushed it inside and followed that with my fluffy new sleeping bag. Then I crawled in and lay there for quite a long time trying out for size the expensive, confined, strangely new-smelling, entirely novel space that was soon to be my home away from home. I tried to imagine myself lying not in a basement beside the reassuring, cozily domesticated roar of the furnace, but rather outside, in a high mountain pass, listening to wind and tree noise, the lonely howl of doglike creatures, the hoarse whisper of a Georgia mountain accent saying: “Hey, Virgil, there’s one over here. Y’all remember the
rope
?” But I couldn’t really.
    I hadn’t been in a space like this since I stopped making dens with blankets and card tables at about the age of nine. It was really quite snug and, once you got used to the smell, which I naively presumed would dissipate with time, and the fact that the fabric gave everything inside a sickly greenish pallor, like the glow off a radar screen, it was not so bad. A little claustrophobic perhaps, a little odd smelling, but cozy and sturdy even so.
    This wouldn’t be so bad, I told myself. But secretly I knew that I was quite wrong.

chapter 2
    O n the afternoon of July 5, 1983, three adult supervisors and a group of youngsters set up camp at a popular spot beside Lake Canimina in the fragrant pine forests of western Quebec, about eighty miles north of Ottawa, in a park called La Verendrye Provincial Reserve. They cooked dinner and, afterwards, in the correct fashion, secured their food in a bag and carried it a hundred or so feet into the woods, where they suspended it above the ground between two trees, out of the reach of bears.
    About midnight, a black bear came prowling around the margins of the camp, spied the bag, and brought it down by climbing one of the trees and breaking a branch. He plundered the food and departed, but an hour later he was back, this time entering the camp itself, drawn by the lingering smell of cooked meat in the campers’ clothes and hair, in their sleeping bags and tent fabric. It was to be a long night for the Canimina party. Three times between midnight and 3:30 A.M . the bear came to the camp.
    Imagine, if you will, lying in the dark alone in a little tent, nothing but a few microns of trembling nylon between you and thechill night air, listening to a 400-pound bear