Trail

the view depends on where you stand

image [edited by author] courtesy of SectionHiker.com, used by permission

fiction by Kelvin Martin

in spite of the pseudonym, this is Len Bassham’s entry in the new Questionality contest announced June 12th

They were hiking along, minding their own business, when suddenly there she was in front of them. The girl. Well, not a girl. A young woman. Either an older teen or somebody who had turned twenty about a week ago. Matt couldn’t tell.

He saw her first and stopped walking. Mark turned to see why he had stopped and almost backed into her.

“Oh,” Mark said, when he realized what had nearly happened.

“Hello,” she said. “Two young boys alone in the woods. Let me guess. Your parents let you out at Bulls Bridge, and have driven on ahead to pick you up at, what, where the trail crosses highway 341?

“What a guesser!” Mark said. “Got it in one go.”

Matt thought, ‘Shut up, Mark. It’s none of her business.’ But he didn’t say it out loud. He almost never did, though he thought similar things often enough. Mark always talked too much. Always.

What he did say out loud was, “Not much of a guess, Mark. Where else would we have started and where else would be going in one day. We don’t have overnight stuff on us.” He gestured with his empty hands to get the point across. Including to her.

“Let me guess again. You’re, what, fourteen and sixteen?” She looked, first, at Mark, then at Matt, as she said the ages

“Thirteen and fifteen,” said Mark, inevitably.

“You’re tall for thirteen,” she said to him.

“Thanks.”

“I’m not sure it’s something you should be thanking her for,” Matt couldn’t help saying. “It’s not like you got tall on purpose.” He decided to take charge. He said to the girl, “His name is Mark. I’m Matt.”

“I’m Shelly,” she said. Nobody offered to shake hands. She had backed up a few steps when Mark almost ran into her and hadn’t moved since. “Are there a John and a Luke too? Or are the two of you it?”

“Huh?” said Mark.

“She’s making a joke,” Matt said. “The four gospels, right? Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?”

“Oh,” Mark said. He wasn’t so talkative any more. Probably falling in love already. He did that a lot. Talking too much and falling too fast for a pretty face, which this one was, though she was much too old for him. She was tall. A few inches taller than either one of them. Almost as tall as Mark’s dad, who was six feet. A lot taller than Mark’s mom, who was about five feet. She had a small blue pack on her back, with a dark green tent-roll strapped to it.

Long straight blonde hair, probably natural, no dark roots showing. White T-shirt with an unbuttoned man’s blue plaid long-sleeved shirt over it. Light brown jeans. White tennis shoes, not heavy brown boots like theirs.

“You hike the trail often?”

“First time ever. We’re from Arizona.” Mark sounded apologetic about it, as though the southwest was a place to be ashamed of.

“What brings you to Connecticutt?”

“Relatives.”

‘Shut up, shut up,’ Matt thought. ‘She doesn’t need to know this.’

“You guys brothers?” Her gaze shifted back and forth between them, wih a skeptical look

“Not even coursins. Our parents are sort of a foursome and we just come along for the ride.”

“So why the trail? And why this part of it?”

“We noticed on a map that the trail goes into New York for a bit and then back out again. We thought it would be cool to hike through three states in one day.”

“Not really three. Two. Connecticut and New York.”

“True, but when you say, ‘Connecticut, and then New York, and then Connecticut again, it sounds like three.”

She shot him a scornful look.

“Almost,” he finished lamely.

But she bailed him out. “You said something about relatives. Here. In the state?”

“The relatives live in Sharon.”

“Sharon, really?” Her voice was loud with surprise. “That’s where I started from! Yesterday.”

She and Mark were quite a pair, weren’t they! They both thought nothing of saying anything that popped into their heads. Including stuff that nobody needed to know.

“That’s a long way,” Matt said. “You must have got an early start, if you left there just yesterday.

“Yep. Fourteen miles yesterday. Plan on another fifteen today.” She looked at a large silver or chrome wristwatch, probably a man’s.

You from there?” Mark asked. “Sharon? Maybe you know my cousins?”

“Nope. I’m from the city. The big one.”

“Hartford?” They had come through Hartford on their way up, and it had seemed fairly big to both of them. They were from Sedona, which had fewer than ten thousand people.

She laughed. “Hartford’s tiny. I mean the big one. The tall one.” She gestured ‘tall.’

“New York?” Mark said it as though he thought it was on the moon.

“Where else? That’s why I hike the trail alone. Rub shoulders with thousands of people all week. The only cure is to be alone for a day or two.”

“You’re not afraid?”

“Do I look afraid?

Mark had to think about it. Then said, “No, you don’t.”

“Well, there’s your answer then.” She said it as though she meant it to be the end of the discussion, but Mark didn’t take the hint.

“Who picks you up at the other end?” he asked

“Nobody. Nobody drops me off and nobody picks me up. And I haven’t decided yet where the other end is going to be, this trip. So even if there was somebody to drop me off and pick me up, I wouldn’t know where to have them do it. ‘Spontaneity’ is my middle name. I have three days off this weekend, so I can go quite a ways.” She looked at the watch again. “If I get going, that is.” But she made no move to go.

“So how do you get around?”

“I hitch.”

Mark looked as though he wanted to ask her if she wasn’t afraid of riding with strangers, and then visibly thought better of it.

“You’re probably wondering how safe it is for somebody my age and gender to be hitching alone these days,” she said, as though reading Mark’s mind. “Well, let me tell you, it isn’t. If there were five of me, instead of only one, it wouldn’t be. There are a lot of creeps out there. But the thing about creeps is . . . they don’t know how they’re being played when it’s happening. They buy into themselves, very willingly, so they don’t see that nobody else does. Or why.”

“I don’t get it,” said Mark.

“I play it like I’m interested. When they stop to see if I’ll get in the car, I don’t hesitate. I do it. And I smile, like they want me to. So they think they’ve got it made. Like they’ve got me made. Later, when they find out it doesn’t work that way, it’s too late. They’ve already given me the ride to the place I wanted to go. And if they try to make a move and I knee them in the balls, they’re too surprised to do anything about it.”

“You don’t carry a gun?” Matt said.

“I don’t need to,” she said. “I’ve got powerful knees.” She pulled up a pantsleg and showed him.

She was telling the truth.

“I need to head on south,” she said now. “You should probably go with me.”

“Huh? Why?”

“There’s trouble up ahead. Some bad people. You don’t want to meet them.” She nodded back up the trail, toward the direction she had been coming from when they first met her. “Up there about a mile. Four of them. Four guys. Hunter types, with camouflage jackets and everything. About twenty minutes away.” She glanced down at their boots. “Maybe thirty for you. They’re beyond creeps. They’re bad.” She said this last word as though it were about a mile long.

Mark, as Matt knew he would, tried to make a joke of it. “I’ll bet you killed some people and just don’t want us to see the bodies. That’s why you want us to go with you.”

She just snorted, which was more than it deserved.

“We can’t go with you,” Matt explained. “His folks are up there expecting us, and if we don’t show up they’ll worry. We’ll be careful.”

“How did you get past the hunters if they’re so dangerous?” Mark wanted to know.

She ignored what Matt had said and answered Mark. “They didn’t see me. I heard them and avoided them. I know how to be surreptitious. I know how to be silent. My knees aren’t my only weapons.”

“We know how to be silent, too.”

This time it was Matt’s turn to snort. Shelly echoed it.

“You’ll walk right in on them. You’ll be surrounded before you even know they’re there.”

And she was right. When they got there, they had stumbled into the middle of the four guys before they saw even the first one.

The hunters had a dead bear tied upside down, hanging between two trees. A huge black bear, and they were skinning it. Two of them were. One of the other ones was watching the process, and the fourth one was watching Matt and Mark. Especially Matt. He could feel it before he saw it.

He immediately felt the danger. He didn’t see any guns, but he saw several large knives, and not just the two the skinners were using. And the way the guy was looking at him got to his nerves. It wasn’t an unfriendly look, nor yet a friendly one. It was just a look. Hard and slow and deep. The guy was tall, taller than Mark’s dad. He had very dark eyes, and big dark eyebrows that shot out over his eyes, putting them in shadow.

The guy saw him looking at the knives and said, “We don’t use guns. They’re too loud.”

“I thought hunting bears was illegal in Connecticut,” said Mark, and Matt could have killed him. It was too late to think ‘shut up,’ but he thought it anyway.

Mark kept going, oblivious. “Back home we were studying how hunting laws changed from state to state. The old Conn is one of fourteen where bear-hunting is illegal.”

The other guy, the skinny one who was watching the skinners, cut in. “We didn’t get it in Connecticut. We got it in New York. You know, back there where the trail loops back into New York for a few thousand yards. We got it there.”

“And carried it a mile into Connecticut to hang it up and skin it.” Mark loved to give adult men the lip. Especially teachers. And he was doing it now. But these were a long way from being teachers.

“Yep,” said the skinny guy. “This was the first place we could find where we could hang it up and let it drip.”

There was something about the way he said ‘drip’ that gave Matt the creeps, again. He remained silent.

Mark? Anything but.

“Plus which, you’re on the east side of the trail. The side away from New York.” The skinny guy was looking at Mark as he said this.

But the tall guy wasn’t. He was still looking at Matt.

Who was thinking. It might be legal to shoot bears in New York, but only in season. Which was in the Fall. This wan’t the Fall. It was late summer, but the leaves were still green. Even the fields they had passed through and by were still green. This section of the Appalachian trail was not wilderness, as some parts were. There were farms, and meadows. Right here was thick woods, yes, and would get thicker before they thinned down again, just before where Mark’s parents were waiting.

On the other hand, the trail was for feet only. Not wide enough for a jeep or even an ATV. Besides, a jeep or an TV would make noise, and these guys wouldn’t want to make noise, with gun shots or with anything else.

How had they done it? A trap or a snare. Certainly not with the knives. They would never get close enough. He didn’t see any bows or arrows around. More likely a snare, then. It would have to be a sturdy one, to catch a bear this size, but it could be done. He looked around, didn’t see one. They probably just left it behind. They were that type.

The guy noticed him looking around. There was menace in the air, and not just for the bear.

The men had hiked a long way to get their prey, and they would have to hike a long way back, once they had freed the skin they wanted. They would leave the bear hanging, for anything and anyone to find. These were not the kind of guys who cleaned up after themselves. They let stuff drip.

Mark gave up and turned to start hiking north again, as they had been.

“Where do you think you’re going?” The tall man said. It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t threatening. It was just flat. It sounded like an honest question, but Matt knew better. He had heard those kinds of voices before, and they were never innocent.

Mark was startled. “We have to get going,” he said. “We’ve got people waiting for us.” As though speaking to a slow child.

The man didn’t react.

He took a step away from the tree he had been leaning against and looked back and forth between the boys.

“Let them wait,” he said.

“But . . .” That was as far as Mark got. The guy shot him a look, and he did, at last, shut up.

‘Thank you,’ Matt thought, toward the guy. And the guy glanced at Matt and almost smiled, as though to say, ‘You’re welcome.’

“You’ll be leaving when we do,” he said out loud, to Mark. “One way or another.”

The words ‘alive or dead’ weren’t spoken, but Matt heard them clearly.

He thought, ‘No we won’t.’

Last summer, late, even later than now, he and Mark had attended a two-week ‘Zen Camp,’ in the foothills above their town. Very California, even though it was in Arizona. In the sixties, the teachers would have called themselves ‘Hippies,’ though that word wasn’t used anymore. Not by anybody, and certainly not by anybody who filled the slot.

One of the teachers, an Alden Prescott (‘not named for the town,’ he liked to joke) was a lover of Koans. Neither one of the boys had ever heard of a Koan before, so he had explained the concept to them. “They’re short pithy sayings or questions that make you think,” he said. “They’re almost self-contradictory, but not quite. The most famous one is ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’ but there are many more good ones. Some even better than that.”

And then he had told them his favorite. “How do you go East at the South Pole” he had said. And, after they had struggled with it for about an hour, he had given them his favorite answer. Which would be applicable now, Matt thought.

The other thing that Prescott had been famous for was his one-word command to ‘Apply.’ When they were studying Zen teachings, he would say that word when they had understood the concept he was working on. This was not about Koans, now. You weren’t supposed to be wondering. You were supposed to be absorbing, and when you got to the point where you had absorbed, Presott woud say, “Apply.” Which was his way of saying, “Put the teaching into practice, in your own life.” But his way was quicker, and more memorable. At least Matt hoped it was more memorable.

He didn’t want to have to spell it out, with four hostiles watching and listening.

So when at last the guys finished removing the fur from the bear, in one long careful piece, so that they could have a bearskin rug made of it, Matt felt sure, they began to pick up their stuff and prepare to leave.

It was time.

“Remember Alden Prescott?” he said rather loudly to Mark.

Mark frowned at him, as though to say, ‘Why bring that up at a time like this?’ Mark had finally gotten the message that they were in some potential danger, and was visibly worried about it.

“Yeah?” he said, almost whining.

“Remember his favorite Koan?”

“Yeah?”

“Remember his favorite answer to the Koan?”

This time, Mark didn’t bother to vocalize his question. He just looked it at Matt. “I don’t remember any particular Koan,” he said. “He had lots of Koans.”

“The one about the South Pole.”

Mark just looked at him.

“’How do you go East at the South Pole?’” Matt said.

“Oh, yeah, that one.”

“Do you remember his favorite answer to that Koan? Don’t say it. Just nod or shake your head.”

Mark nodded, tentatively. He obviously didn’t get where this was going. Yet.

“Apply,” said Matt.

It took a few seconds for Mark’s brain to kick into gear, but then he visibly ‘got’ it.

“Oh,” was all he said. But he turned to face the guys, and when they said it was time to go, he shook his head ‘no,’ as did Matt, at the same time.

“We’re not going,” they both said simultaneously.

The skinny guy almost shouted. “Of course you’re going! What do you mean you’re not going?”

“We’re staying here,” Matt said.

By now all four guys were staring at him.

“For how long?” one of the skinners wanted to know.

“Long enough for you to get back to your vehicle,” Matt said. “So you won’t have to worry about us reporting you. By the time we get anywhere where we could report you, you’ll be long gone.” He said it in as even a tone as he could. He wanted to make sure it was taken as the opposite of a threat.

“What the . . .?” the skinny guy started to say, and then reached for one of the knives.

But the tall guy shot him a look. “Not necessary,” he said. “The kid is right. They won’t see our truck. Won’t know the license number. Won’t know what state we’re from, even. It’s the best possible solution. We don’t have to make things any worse than they already are, and we get away clean.”

The skinny guy laid the knife back down.

The tall guy turned to Matt. “You didn’t hear any names,” he said.

Matt snorted. He was getting good at snorting. “Of course we didn’t hear any names. You didn’t say any names.”

“Glad you noticed,” the man said, and the four of them, two carrying the soon-to-be rug, started north on the trail, in the direction that Matt and Mark would go in a half hour or so.

As soon as they were out of sight, Shelly stepped out from behind a nearby tree. As Matt had expected she would. She was that kind of person. Other people mattered to her, as long they came in twos or three rather than millions.

“OK, explain,” she demanded. “How do you go East from the South Pole? And what the hell does that have to do with this?” She gestured all around, and ended up pointing toward what was left of the bear, which was now pink rather than black.

“Not from,” he said. “At. At the South Pole. How do you go East at the South Pole? You can’t go East from the South Pole because every direction is North.”

Shelly just looked at him, waiting for him to explain.

“You stand perfectly still,” said Matt. “You don’t move a muscle. The earth is spinning beneath your feet, right? It’s turning from west to east. You’re very slowly turning east. You’re going East at the South Pole. Without moving.”

“I never thought of that,” she said.