The Followed Man (20 page)

He went to the rear of the
station wagon and pulled out John­ny's nylon pack bag, which
contained in its various zippered pock­ets all of Johnny's Camp
Ontowah gear, each piece lovingly cleaned and polished at the end of
last summer in anticipation of the next year's canoe trip on the
Allagash (where Johnny would have been right now, on June's high
water). He looked through the pack, found a small bottle of insect
repellent and used it be­fore he did anything else. From the
cardboard box of canned goods and staples he'd taken from the kitchen
cupboards he chose a can of baked beans, a package of Swedish
hardtack, a bottle of instant coffee and a can of red salmon, and put
them in Johnny's pack. He thought for a moment before he put the
half-f bottle of bourbon in there too, saying out loud, "We
shall see."

From the old toolbox he took a
hatchet, and that seemed to be enough. Even though he'd be only a
quarter of a mile from the car he didn't want to have to come back to
it until tomorrow. He changed quickly into dungarees and boots,
though not quickly enough to avoid one or two mosquitoes. Johnny's
pack would con­tain everything else he needed. He lengthened its
straps, put it on and descended through the overhanging brush of the
old road to­ward the brook and the lower pasture. The valley's
coolness came up over him like ghost water as he went down into its
darkening green. The sigh of the brook grew louder until he could
identify individual rapids along its curve through the small valley.

At the brook he filled the quart
polyethylene water bottles from the side pockets of the pack, crossed
on stones and then crossed the pasture around juniper and between
aspen until he came to the cairn of stones and the still-open grass.
Here it was far enough irom the brook so that the rush of water would
not cover the sounds of wind and the night flutters and calls of
animals.

By full dark, the cool air
passing and folding over him from the west where the great wooded
mountain was a world-heavy pres­ence, he had strung a nylon tarp
over saplings to keep out the dew, spread a nylon groundcloth and the
thin foam pad beneath Johnny's light summer sleeping bag, and had a
small fire of dead-wood going in the cairn between two stones that
supported an alu­minum billy full of water. He sat Indian fashion
on the tarp, on the soft sod of the meadow, in a small island of
orange light that flickered and pulsed in the light wind. The can of
beans, punc­tured a few times in the top by the clip blade point
of Shem's knife, half floated in the water in the billy, warming fast
enough while he sipped bourbon and cold brook water from Johnny's
mess kit cup and smoked a cigarette. He felt good, now, a moun­tain
himself because he was so alone, so far from any other of his kind in
this pre-moon darkness. Miles of woods and nearly a thou­sand
feet of altitude were between him and any other person.

He knew that later, in the damp
of night, after sleep's sponging away of force and confidence, he
would awake half-blind, his fire out, to a more vulnerable mood, more
near nakedness and an­cient terror. He would wake in the midst of
that fear, he knew, but now the small fire crackled and gave light,
and the valley, though wild and dark all around him, seemed at peace
with his presence here. A great horned owl in the woods to the south
gave his brea­thy hoots in series, to the rhythm of
hip-hip,
hip-hip, hooray,
a sad-sounding but not really mournful cheer
from that predatory night world.

The animals, except for those
small fliers who wanted only a pinhead's worth of his blood, whose
high voltaic whines he could ignore, would know very well that he was
here and would not challenge him because they were sane, their
business being surviv­al; men were dangerous. But another part of
his education told him he was vulnerable in the open, before a fire
that not only made him visible but by its small cracklings made him
unable to hear sounds within a certain range of decibels. The lessons
of bi­vouac and infiltration (where was his pistol?) did not
apply here except in his imagination. No mortar rounds, grenades or
snipers' bullets would come from these woods. No Chinese bugles would
signal a charge that would turn into tracers and burnt cordite.

But who was the Avenger? First,
being carefully logical about it, if the Avenger was that strange
sexless voice on the telephone, he was (or she was) cleverer than his
notes would indicate, and in fact the word "sites "
applying to the sights on a rifle, might have been deliberately
misleading. If so, and if the Avenger had somehow followed him, his
head might be in those sights right now.

This was ridiculous; his sudden,
involuntary ducking of his head was ridiculous, a boggle. No one knew
he was here, unless someone in Cascom happened to recognize his car.
But the whole thing was boggling. If there were an authority to
appeal to he would shout in an outraged voice, "What's happening
here? I'm a man who's lost his family!"

That was not logical, just
reasonable. If he could stop being out­raged long enough to
think, he might try to figure it out. Recent­ly, on the radio,
he'd heard this reasonable story: a man, driving his car out onto the
street from his driveway, swerved to avoid a gray squirrel. His door,
not properly closed, swung open and his left foot slid out of the
car. Another car, also trying to avoid the squirrel, hit his open
door, which closed, cleanly severing his left foot above the ankle.
On the man's rear bumper was a sticker say­ing, "I Brake for
Animals." No, that wasn't part of the news item, that fatuous,
sanctimonious bumper sticker; you can find, or cre­ate, meaning
in the misfortune of another, so do it in your own case, or in
Marjorie Rutherford's case.

The water in the billy boiled
with a hiss. It didn't really matter if the beans were warm or not,
just so the pot backened on the fire and he was alone. In Johnny's
pack he found a two-cell flashlight with weak but functioning
batteries, and a GI thumb-style can opener. He also found a folding
tin and mica candle lantern and a supply of short steroid candles, so
he set the lantern up on its own rock, undid the spoon, fork and
knife set, opened the beans and ate them with the spoon.

He was alone here; no needful or
hurtful person had followed him. That was why he was here. This dark
valley had its own pow­er, this benevolent night being only a
small respite in its seasons. The small chill between his shoulders
was a reminder of crisp, pure, deadly cold to come.

Beans, hardtack, bourbon and the
cold water of Zach Brook—there was a proper meal. The Civil
War had been fought on such a diet, among the other wars, shoot-outs,
rapes and fiascos that had occupied his ancestors. Add a little beef.
Now he was the last of his line, though there were plenty of people
named Carr, and he wasn't sure how such things were reckoned. His
grandfather was born on this land, and now it was his—though
not quite so much at night. There were things he would not think
about be­cause he didn't have to think about them here; they
didn't exist here. He took off his boots, blew out the candle lantern
and got into the thin sleeping bag. The fire was quietly embering
now. The cool earth was close beneath him, a bed miles wide.

He awoke knowing from his swept
mind and odd fragments of dreams that he had slept for several hours.
His coverings seemed frail though he was not cold. The world had two
colors, pale silver and blue, and every blade of grass, stone,
coverlet and line was as wet as if immersed in water. He had to get
out of his dry bed and urinate, a function that could be put off, but
not forever and at the price of no more sleep. He could read his
watch by the three-quarter moon: two thirty-five.

The wet grass was cold, old
stalks from the year before like little spikes against his tender
feet. A mosquito got him on the ankle be­fore he finished, a tiny
imperative his other foot had to rub, the wet like cool oil against
the feverish little itch. Back in the sleeping bag his feet would dry
and the chills would leave his back, but as he ducked beneath the
suspended tarp a rivulet of moon-cold wa-there were hazards he would
have to learn again.

Back in the dry warmth of the
bag he removed his shirt and pushed it down toward his feet. Anything
in the outside air would be soaked by morning. He found his
cigarettes and matches down there in one of his boots, lit a
cigarette and lay propped on his el­bow watching the silver smoke
drift out and away. The woods and field were drenched and silent, the
brook a whisper from the east where the dark blue woods rose up the
hill toward the ruined buildings of the farm. Even though those
buildings were fallen and rotted, their people all dead, in that
direction was a far civili­zation where people at least lived at
one time. Down here was the beginning of wilderness, where the bear
marked their trees and dug up anthills and rotten stumps for grubs.
It had been that way even when he was a child and the farm was still
a farm. So he felt now like a child who had through a dare made in
daylight agreed to sleep out and away from the warmth of light and
company, in the night world that was so different from the world in
sunlight.

Though he knew he was not in any
real danger, an ancient, bone-deep, deeper than bone, a marrow of the
bone terror was still there, waiting, not to be quite thought away
because it was primal, racial, before thought. How flickering and
puny was his warmth here below the moon's distant and indifferent
light. It was animal loneliness, not a desire for any named person—as
if he were not just the last of his line, but the last of his race.
He could put on his boots and get out of here, go back across the
field and brook and up the dark hill to his car, that familiar room
with its engine noise and lights. There was that cowardly choice to
make.

He put out his cigarette in the
dew and after its last hiss listened to the night. The owl had
stopped its hooting or moved over a ridge. The woods dripped with
dew. It would begin to turn to­ward dawn in an hour and a half or
so, he thought, though he was out of touch with dawns. He would not
go back to his car and to that world. He would tremble if he must,
and listen with the fear­ful intensity of the hunted if he must.
In the morning he would rise, wash and eat, then make plans for his
permanent shelter here. As he imagined that shelter, it would be of
stone and wood, built against this enlivening terror as well as
against water, wind and cold. By winter he would be snug, solitary,
cousin of the black bear and the yarded deer.

That thought had the power of a
resolution. Made in spite of night fear, it seemed as binding as
whatever resolution had caused Shem Carr to live out his life alone
on this land. Why should he need other people with their wants he
could never quite antici­pate, like their wanting him to love
them, or even their wanting to kill him?

It was the vision of a room,
part log cabin, part massive stone, that he saw now, with its warmth
and soft yellow light. He might be near that room or even within the
yards of space it would sur­round. In the morning he would look
and see, thinking of its orientation and elevations, drainage,
footings and joinings. His rough construction skills would return in
the service of that shel­ter. He could see the clean stone and
wood surrounding a spare, sinewy man who would age and cure in his
labors, hurting no one, surviving no one.

He slept again for a while, this
time waking cold, with a cold light growing behind the wooded eastern
hill. Chickadees and bluejays began their morning business, and a red
squirrel sang in the dark spruce. Soon the granite of the mountain in
the west turned a warm rose, the spruce on its slopes a paler green
than they would be in full daylight. He watched as the shadowy
dim­ness washed out from the valley and changed its nature; just
to be able to see into its interior spaces changed it, and as the
darkness passed, his loneliness passed. When the sun itself came
above the trees its warmth slowly reversed his chill. Heat then came
from outside his covers, toward him rather than from the energy of
his own body, so that nature supported his comfort.

When the dew burned off his
little pile of dead branches he re­kindled the fire and boiled
water for coffee, opened the can of red salmon and ate its cold
delicate chunks and bones with hardtack and the coffee.

The new sun grew warm and then
hot. Soon his clothes, tarps and pack were dry, as was the meadow hay
and the trunks and leaves of the saplings. He packed up, leaving only
the drowned ashes of his fire to show he'd been here. The pressed
grass would rise back within a few days, like the beds of the deer.

If the cabin were here, if he
had spent a night alone within its future walls, he would have meadow
to the south, deep spruce to the north, and the brook down across the
meadow to the east. The dense spruce would protect him from the north
and northwest winds, and from the south would come the radiant heat
of the low winter sun. The cabin would be the perfect shelter; he
must study this. He had read many things about heat and cold and
thermal efficiency in the last few years, as had everyone, he
supposed, and he had some theories of his own. In his mind the cabin
grew, changed, widened. Logs fit upon logs; stone (a bad insulator—think about that) fit into near-eternal mosaics, storing heat and
letting it go. There were inflexible laws he must know and use,
be­cause he would be solitary in a February blizzard followed by
weeks of below zero weather. He'd been in the woods when the sun
seemed to have no heat in it at all, just cold light. In those times
the deer didn't move because they would lose more energy finding food
than they could get from the food. The bear drowsed in their dens,
living off their own bodies, and the par­tridge flew deep into
the snow, away from the killing air, and wait­ed. The deer could
starve then, and the partridge might be caught by a quick melt and a
freeze, imprisoned beneath the crust until they died. That was the
dangerous season, life at its most precarious balance, and he yearned
for his own readiness then. He would be here, alone in a clean and
deadly world, knowing his comfort.