A Clearing in the forest (7 page)

“We're drilling through salt right now,” Wilson told Frances. “My wrists and ankles are raw from the brine they're bringing up.” This tangible evidence of ancient seas had been a revelation to him. Suddenly he remembered something, and with a pleased look dug a small fossil from a pocket. It looked like a pair of wings turned to stone by an evil spell.

“Microspirifer,”
Frances told him. “You don't usually find them around here. I don't think I have one myself.”

He held the fossil out to her. “Do you want it for your collection?”

“No.” She looked at him hard. “I thought you were going to do some fishing.” She began piling up books. It was too much to become attached to someone new. She wouldn't have it. Hers was a time of life when you ought to begin to pull away from people. And until Wilson had come along, she had done just that. In India people her age slipped off into the countryside to live a solitary life. Those left behind had the wisdom and delicacy to let them go.

Wilson, not understanding why Frances seemed angry all of a sudden, was grateful to tug on Dr. Crawford's waders and head for the stream. But before he could climb into the river, she was coming toward him with a cottage-cheese carton full of worms.

“I found them in the compost pile,” she said proudly.

Wilson couldn't help laughing at her. With her small tan face cocked to one side and her short white hair standing up like feathers, she looked as if she could have pulled the worms out of the ground herself.

He knew she meant the worms as a peace offering. She wanted to let him know she didn't mind his fishing for the trout with bait instead of artificial flies. When he had first started fishing there, she had told him how Dr. Crawford couldn't stand bait fishermen in the river; “plunkers” he called men who fished with worms. Anytime he saw one wading the stream, he would put on an old khaki army shirt and a tin badge from the dime store, get into his waders, and stomp into the river carrying a folding rule and a pad of paper. He'd give the man a big smile and introduce himself as someone from the conservation department who was assigned to measure the depth of the river.

Keeping a few feet in front of the infuriated fisherman, he'd plunge his yardstick here and there, giving special attention to the holes where there might be a big fish and generally muddying up the river and scaring away the trout for miles around.

Eventually the conservation department had designated a stretch of the stream for “artificial flies only.” But evidently the men in the department had never fully appreciated the doctor's impersonation of them; when the signs had gone up, the Crawfords had discovered the “flies only” stretch had ended at the beginning of their property.

Wilson left the worms on the bank and eased himself into the water. The current tugged at his legs as he made his way slowly over the slippery rocks. He picked out a fly cleverly fashioned from feathers and horsehair into a small green grasshopper. He dressed the fly with grease, as Frances had taught him to do, so it would float in a natural way on top of the water. Finally he stripped off some line from his reel and snapped the line upstream. He knew Frances was watching approvingly from the bank.

The fly bobbed along a riffle and disappeared in a little whirlpool. He retrieved it, false cast a few times to dry off the fly, and sent it down the same waterslide. Even in midsummer he could feel the icy water through his waders.

He rounded a bend in the river and was out of sight of the cabin. The bank on either side was lined with tag alders and willow, and behind the shrubs were tall pines. Wilson felt he was wading through a green tunnel. A mink swam by to have a look at him, his sleek brown body making parabolas. Mink were fearless; this one circled around Wilson, staring him straight in the eye.

He was so fascinated with the mink he nearly forgot his line until he saw his fly sink beneath the water. He set his hook gently. In a minute a trout rose about fifteen feet from where he was standing. Wilson gave him a little line, watching him swim one way and then another trying to shake off the hook. Little by little he reeled in his line until the trout was close enough to scoop up with the landing net. The trout was good-sized, fifteen or sixteen inches, his side dappled with speckles of pinkish gold and purple.

By suppertime he was back with four trout. He cleaned the fish, and together he and Frances examined the contents of the trouts' stomachs to see what they were feeding on: grasshoppers mostly, and one had a partially devoured crayfish in his craw.

After a dinner of trout grilled with bacon strips over an outdoor fire, Wilson and Frances started off into the woods for a walk, leaving by the back door of the cabin since a rather testy colony of yellow jackets had taken over the front entrance and resented anyone coming near their home. Wilson had offered to remove the papery gray nest that hung down like a pendulous balloon from the eaves, but Frances wanted to see how large it would get.

Since Wilson was due at the rig in an hour, they headed for Deland, only a short distance from the cabin. On their way they passed hundreds of rotting stumps nearly hidden in the second growth of maple and oak. At the turn of the century Deland had been a lumber town, complete with churches, hotels, taverns and even a sawmill. Trains arrived night and day to carry out logs which had been floated down the river from the lumber camps. One by one the huge white pine trees had been timbered. Some had reached up a hundred and fifty feet into the air. “Higher than a derrick,” Frances told Wilson, pleased that nature had outdone man.

Now there was nothing where the town had been but a few old foundations grown over with brambles, and a lilac bush that still bloomed every spring. The site of the old town fascinated Wilson. He felt as though he could close his eyes and hear wagons rolling down the dirt streets and the rasp of the sawmill.

“It will be that way when the oil goes the way of the timber, Wilson,” Frances said. “The men will pull out, taking their trailers with them, and not even a foundation will be left to mark where they lived. Chances are, down in oil city, some woman has already planted a lilac bush that will outlast us all.”

By the time they walked back to the cabin, little puffs of ground fog like balls of cotton had begun to roll over the water. On the opposite bank, fireflies signaled one another. The only sound was the deep overhead note of nighthawks plunging toward earth. Wilson watched as the birds stopped abruptly in mid-flight and then soared upward again as though some invisible barrier they could not penetrate lay between heaven and earth.

“Chordeiles,”
Frances said. “Greek for evening lyres.” Wilson made no comment. Frances expected none. The better they knew each other, the oftener they lapsed into these silences. Once Wilson had confided to her that sometimes when he was with people he had nothing to say, but they still expected him to go on talking. If you didn't they thought you didn't like them or wished you were someplace else.

“I've felt that way, too, Wilson,” she replied. “I didn't even know those voices existed until I married Dr. Crawford and moved up here from the city. For years he was the only doctor for miles around, and he was often gone all day and part of the evenings. Living here in the woods, I was lonely and then I began listening to everything around me. To what the woods had to say and to my own thoughts as well. I found out that everything in nature has something to say, Wilson, even if it doesn't make a sound. Never be afraid of silence.”

But tonight the silence was broken. Just behind them they heard a loud noise, something between a snort and a hiss, followed by a rustling noise and the sound of hooves thudding away. “What was that?” Coming as it did out of the stillness of the woods, Wilson thought he had never heard anything as frightening.

“There's a big buck in there, Wilson. He's been around for years. Thinks he owns the woods—and maybe he does.”

“I'd like to see him when the hunting season comes,” Wilson said, excited now at the possibility of hunting the buck down.

Frances looked at him thoughtfully. “I don't know that I'd want to go after him, Wilson.” She thought of an old Indian legend of an enormous buck that would appear to the tribe's most accomplished hunters, leading them so deep into the woods they were never seen again. But she didn't want to spoil Wilson's excitement. She kept the story to herself.

11

After being shut up in the cabin by a gloomy week of August thunderstorms with nothing to do but watch the bread go moldy and the milk sour, Frances Crawford was elated to be outside.

The rain had stopped, but everything was drenched; it was like walking under water. Ferns and grasses and trees swam by. The wild asters and goldenrod were awash. A crop of early-fall mushrooms had popped up through the moist earth. Yesterday's paper reported the death of two people who had eaten poisonous mushrooms, probably the very species whose orange and yellow lollipop colors she was admiring—amanita, the destroying angel.

Tracks on the rain-washed sand told her she was not the first to travel the road that morning. A row of evenly spaced tiny paw prints followed by a slender rippling line suggested a meadow vole had been out hunting seeds. She had seen a hawk circling nearby and was surprised the vole had risked the danger of venturing out of its runways in the grass. A rose-breasted grosbeak sang from a branch high in a maple tree, the sun illuminating its red throat and breast.

Two deer had walked along the road. One pair of heart-shaped tracks were large, the other small: a doe and a fawn. When the tracks reached a large puddle, the doe fastidiously avoided it while the tracks of the fawn sloshed right through. At a clump of Juneberry bushes the tracks made a circle. Several tall branches had been tugged or knocked to the ground so the deer could get to the berries at the top of the bushes.

The dog sniffed; his nostrils quivered. She saw two brown shapes spring up. The large shape took off in one direction, the smaller shape in the other. Although the deer moved quickly, the effect was one of slow motion because of the way their bodies rose up in the air and seemed suspended there for a moment. They rose and fell in graceful arcs. The dog started after the doe, then changed his mind and was after the fawn.

Frances screamed a command at the dog, threatening him with terrible things. At first her voice was harsh, authoritative, with only a thin edge of disbelief. Then it became shrill, hoarse, until she could hardly get words out. She ran after the dog, but her ankle had not healed completely and slowed her down. Ahead of her she saw the fawn's tail like a white flag; close behind it and straight up in the air was the dog's feathery tan brush. Finally there was no breath left for screaming at the dog.

A raw pain of exhaustion built in her throat. The tall grass was wet and her clothes were soaked. Her shoes were like wet cardboard. She tripped over a log and fell onto the drenched ground. As she tried to push herself up, her hand sank into a sodden patch of dead leaves. By holding on to a tree, she got back on her feet. There was nothing to see. The fawn and the dog were gone.

Stopping to rest every few minutes, she headed for the road. Her hair clung to her forehead in wet points that dripped down her nose and cheeks and mingled with her tears. On winter nights when the dog lay in front of the fireplace asleep, his legs moving as though he were running, little yelping sounds coming from his throat, what had he been dreaming?

When she reached the cabin, she sensed something behind her and turned. The dog was there, his breast a bright red, like some exotic four-footed bird. At first she thought the blood was his, that in protecting the fawn, the doe had kicked the dog, slashing his chest with her sharp hoof. Frances started to run toward him. But, no, he was padding along briskly, his feet barely touching the ground, panting from the run, mouth open into a wide smile, tongue lolling out and dripping saliva. He stood before her, his tail wagging. It was not his blood.

She grabbed him roughly by the collar, tied him to a tree, and washed off the blood by pouring buckets of water over him. His outraged yelps pleased her. She took longer than necessary. Little puddles of reddish water lay on the ground. Just as she finished, Wilson, driving his father's truck, rounded the curve in the trail. The truck rose and plummeted in the deep ruts like a small boat on a stormy sea.

Wilson climbed out of the truck. From a distance it looked as if she were giving the dog a bath. Then he saw Frances's dirt- and tear-streaked face and the pools of red-tinted water around the dog's feet.

“The dog ran a deer. A fawn I think. We'll have to track it down, Wilson.” Before they started off after the fawn, Frances went to the closet where Tom's hunting and fishing equipment were kept. Lately she had been thinking of giving it all to Wilson. He was becoming a competent fly fisherman and the gun he used for hunting was not as good as Tom's. She found the rifle, loaded it, and handed it to Wilson, avoiding his eye. They walked past the dog, who was straining at his rope in a frantic effort to go with them. Neither looked at him.

They followed his tracks in the sandy road to the point where he had left the woods. In the forest the trail was harder to find. There was often nothing more than a leaf tinged with red or a bracken stem broken in half. Sometimes they lost the trail, turning off the wrong way, and had to double back. Then Wilson saw a streak of blood like a scarlet ribbon along the ground and knew the fawn couldn't be far away. They found it lying on its side, blood oozing out of its torn throat. It's fearful eyes followed their movements.

Wilson had thought if the fawn were badly injured he would have no trouble killing it. It would not be the first deer he had shot. But in hunting he had fired in the excitement of the chase. The deer was just lying there, the whites of its eyes turned up, its belly heaving.

Frances saw Wilson's face and reached for the gun, but Wilson shook his head and fired. It took two shots to kill the fawn. With the first shot the deer made some little scrabbling motions with its legs as though it were trying to get up. The second bullet went into its head and the fawn twitched for a moment and then went limp. Wilson handed the gun to Frances.