Wilderness Read Free

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 sawmy 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.

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