Wilderness Read Online Free PDF Page A

to confront me without plenty of ammunition. He fled the ruined house, his footfalls thundering off the planks, the wood cracking under his plunging weight. Maybe he stumbled, and I’m sure he fell against a wall, judging by the way the place shook, and he cried out like a terrified child. Cursing once more, he righted himself and found the door and left.
    In the stillness, I lowered my hand to the earthen floor of the crawlspace, and after somefascination with my thumb, the spider grew bored with me and went elsewhere in the darkness.

6
    Because I am not one to take chances, I remained on my back in the crawlspace, listening, waiting, thinking.
    That long-ago day, when I was only eight, I didn’t arrive at this realization, but in time I came to see that of the many kinds of wilderness, the human heart can be the bleakest and the most hostile. Many hearts contain great beauty and the smallest measure of darkness. In many other hearts, beauty brightens only remote corners where otherwise darkness rules. There are those in whom no darkness lies, though they are few. And others have purged from their inner selves all light and have welcomed into themselves the void; their kind are to be found everywhere, though they are often difficult to recognize, for they are cunning.
    In the years following my escape from the hunter, I encountered the best and worst of humanity, in days of much peril but also days of triumph, through years salted with much grief but also sweetened with joy. My life would be constrained by the horror and fierce rage that my appearance inspired, but I would know peace as well as fear, tenderness as well as brutality, and even love in a time of cruelty. I will not say that my life would prove to be the strangest in a world replete with strangeness; but I would never have reason to complain that my life was ordinary.
    At last, convinced that the hunter had gone away, I slid aside the two loose planks and rose from the crawlspace. I brushed off my clothes and wiped my face as if to gather the spider silk with which my imagination had festooned my features.
    I saw the body lying just inside the front door, the pooled blood more black than red in the dim light. Although I wanted to exit by the back door and avoid the dead man, I knew that it was incumbent upon me to look into his face and bear witness.
    Apparently he had been a hiker, one who loved nature and the mountains. He dressed the part, and he carried a large backpack. He might have been in his late twenties, a curly-haired man with a well-trimmed beard. His eyes were open wide, but as grotesque as I might be, even I couldn’t frighten the dead.
    I had seen just two living people in all my eight years, and this was the first that I had seen dead. He hadn’t willingly offered his life for mine, but fate had spared me by taking him. Perhaps he’d heard the hunter’s voice but not his words, or if he had heard nothing, then he might have come into the old house for no reason but curiosity. Each life is a spool of thread that unravels through the years, and it is by a thread that we are so perilously suspended.
    I thanked him and closed his eyes and could do nothing more for him than leave him there to the attention of Nature, that she might take him unto herself and be one with him again, which is the way of all flesh.
    If the hunter had lingered, he would have by then attacked me. Nevertheless, I didn’t walk boldly through open grass, but returned to the woods and circled the meadow with caution. Clouds masked the entire sky, and in the dismal light, the trees no longer blazed with color but seemed to have faded a bit more to brown than they had been when I’d set out that morning. The sycamores, quicker than some other species to drop their foliage, were nearly stripped, black-limbed and stark against the sky.
    By a somewhat different route, I hiked toward home, wondering if the hunter would indeed return and take the forest from me, so that I