Wilderness Read Free Page B

and out of sight. Having taken a maze rat’s route from the limestone formation to this ridge, I was reasonably sure that in an attempt to follow me, he would make more than one wrong choice of trails.
    I needed only to catch my breath and then make my way toward home by such indirection that I didn’t risk crossing his path as he wandered in search of me. Or so I believed. The rabid ferocity of his reaction had confirmed Mother’s warnings, but I didn’t yet comprehend the depth of the revulsion that I inspired or how relentless he would be in his determination to kill me.
    As I sat gazing down into the serried ranks of trees in their celebratory dress, I realized that if the hunter ascended through them, I might not register his movement until he was close. In that festival of color, the numerous red-leafed maples redefined his red hunting jacket as a kind of camouflage.
    Chips of bullet-fractured rimrock sprayed over me simultaneously with the crack of the rifle. I rolled away across the narrow ridgetop, down the next slope, onto all fours, onto my feet, and plunged through lashing feather grass, no deer trail apparent. I made it to the tree line, into shade and ferns, blundering through undergrowth. The hunter obviously had expert tracking skills, and I was leaving in my wake a path of disturbed and broken foliage that any amateur could have followed.

4
    Out of the undergrowth, onto a deer path once more, I quickened down through a forest dressed in a million Joseph’s coats, skidding where the fallen leaves underfoot were damp, no longer trusting that switching to intersecting trails would thwart my pursuer, seeking the most direct route to the floor of the next hollow.
    In previous outings, I had never gone farther than this, but I knew that at the bottom a stream wound through the hollow and might offer me a way to delay the hunter or foil him altogether. I thrashed through a sudden richness of painted ferns with purple-tinged, gray-green fronds and came to shallow water flowing lazily.
    On her trips to the nearest town, my mother bought my clothes and always furnished me with the best waterproof hiking boots each time that I outgrew the former pair. Although I’d never tested their reliability this boldly, I waded into the water, which was three or four inches deep, and proceeded upstream. After splashing twenty yards or so, I looked back. Through the clear and sparkling currents, I saw my footprints in the compacted silt of the streambed. The water flowed so slowly that it might need an hour to erase the tracks I’d left, but my stalker was only a few minutes behind me.
    Shaken, I hurried forward and soon came to a section of the stream paved with water-smoothed pebbles, on which I left no marks that I could see. Here and there were points along the bank where I might exit onto stone, leaving no footprints or disturbed vegetation. I took the third of those and hurried into the trees and once more uphill.
    I proceeded now into new territory, not sure what I might find, and I was very afraid. As I climbed the slope, I told myself that I wasn’t just eight years old, that I was going on nine, that I might be a boy, yes, but not an ordinary boy, that I was strong and quick beyond my years, that already I could read at the level of a sixteen-year-old, which wouldn’t save me in this situation, but which nevertheless suggested that my chances of outwitting the hunter were much better than those of other boys my age.
    And maybe my appearance could be turned to my advantage. The hunter had expressed his loathing—
“Abomination!”
—but I had also seen terror in the blue eye when first he’d met my stare through the limestone flute. At some point his fear might get the better of him, and he might turn back.
    As I ascended the wooded slope, the autumn trees lost some of their radiant color, and the scattering of sunshine faded from the forest floor. I peered up through the lacework of branches and saw that gray