The tracks led to a cut where some shift in the landscape was starting a new stream. It was dry now, but Tim could see that water had come rushing in a muddy torrent down the bank of the ravine, cutting and gouging among the rocks, uprooting one stunted juniper and carving a channel. Everything was knife edged in its newness. Obviously this waterfall had only seen one or two major rains. The deer’s tracks stood out clearly where it had gone up.

Tim gave a low whistle of admiration. Despite his injury, the deer still had stamina. And guts, for it had certainly fallen at least twice during the ascent. Tim tossed both spears over the lip of the bank above, then tossed up his unstrung bow the same way. Bracing his feet, he grasped his crutch-club by its tip and spun it up over the lip. The atlatl went into his quiver. It was a rough climb with only one good leg, but there were handholds.

A recent slide had dammed a small stream, shoving the waters sideways to spill over the bank of the ravine. Some water from the recent rain remained trapped there. The deer had apparently smelled it. Restraining his distaste, Tim drank from the muddy pool. The tracks led up slope away from the ravine.

Chapter 8

Tim squatted in the dimness and checked the tracks again. They continued toward the top of the hill, and Tim was sure that the deer was bedded down somewhere above him.

The deer had been browsing through this tiny, high valley. Tim could read this from his tracks, though he had not seen him. His father had taught him a lot about mule deer and their habits, and his grandfather had taught him Miwuk tales about them. Tim was sure that this deer would be up there somewhere watching the valley and trying the air for a foreign scent. In just a few minutes there would be no more light and Tim had to decide what to do. He could not make it back to his shelter now, even if he wanted to abandon the hunt. If he stayed where he was, he would be no better off in the morning than he was now. But if he could work to the ridge above under the cover of darkness, he would be in position when the muley came out from his cover tomorrow morning.

The wind decided matters for him. He simply could not stand the cold any longer.

He settled in against a cutbank, beneath a screen of firs and built a fire against a downed log. There were no aspens nearby to form a bark basket, so he skewered the squirrel he had shot that afternoon and roasted it whole. The dry, stringy meat was not nearly as satisfying as the squirrel and pine nut stew had been.

He drank from a trickle of water in the stream bed and wished for a bark basket and juniper berries to make tea. Even a pint of unflavored hot water in his stomach would have warmed him. He stretched out in the narrow space between the fire and the bank and thought of the down jacket tied to the back of his bike, hidden all too well at the campsite where he had started this hunt.

Tim did not sleep at once. He lay awake for a long time staring into the fire before the warmth finally began to soak into him, and thought about all the times he had sat beside his father or grandfather staring into other campfires. His father hunted only once a year to get a deer for the freezer, but they had spent many nights camping out for the pleasure of being outdoors. Sometimes he had gone with his father alone; other times his grandfather had come along. more tomorrow

Tim was pleased, especially when his second spear struck the same target. Gathering his weapons, he decided that his bow might not be very good, but at least the spear thrower felt natural in his hands.

He had no idea how far he had wandered, or in what direction, after his fall into the river. He could be sure that he had wandered away from civilization because he had seen no one, and had heard no deer hunter’s gunshots. It was not reasonable to believe that he could simply walk a few miles now and be out of danger.

He was considerably better off than he had been a few days ago, but he was weak and terribly hungry. He could not survive on pine nuts alone. Game was scarce, and soon it would snow. Normally, it was best to stay in one place if you were lost, but he had been in one place for days already.

The simple fact was that no one was coming to rescue him. He had put himself beyond help by not telling anyone where he was going.

While he thought it out, Tim had continued to hunt and an unexpectedly lucky shot had skewered a squirrel. As Tim bled it and tied it at his waist, he decided to check and disarm his deadfalls, and start walking out.

Then he saw the tracks of a mule deer – walking on three legs.

It gave him a strange feeling. It could not be coincidence, that this particular deer was here now.

His first shot, so many days ago, had seemed clear and true, but the deer had not fallen. When he continued the hunt, it had brought him to disaster. Had his fall into the river been clumsiness, or something more? The thought made his hair stand up along his neck as he thought of some of his grandfather’s tales. Last night the deer had haunted his dreams and now it was back with him once more.

Was it a spirit deer?

Still, he was hungry, and that deer might mean life or death for him. He had no desire to chase him further, but it was an opportunity he could not pass up.

“I’m sorry, Deer,” he whispered aloud. “I don’t want to kill you any more, but now I have to.” 

He knelt to examine the spoor. The ridge of dirt between the halves of the hooves had collapsed and the edges of the track didn’t seem fresh. He worked along the ground, closely examining a whole series of tracks. The deer was favoring his right foreleg, carrying it mostly, but stepping gingerly on it from time to time. Where the right foreleg made prints, they hardly bruised the dry ground, while the left foreleg’s prints were deep. The left forehoof was fraying under the strain. Its tracks were a bit less smooth in outline than the rear leg tracks. The good foreleg would be tender from doing more than its share.

The tracks were several hours old. They came out of the maze of brush that extended from his camp to the edge of the ravine. The deer had apparently used that cover to sneak through the ravine without coming in sight of the camp.

The tracks went straight down the ravine and into the brush. Tim followed them slowly, not wanting to overtake the deer too soon. It might be a long stalk, and he would have to be cautious and study the deer’s habits in order to get close enough for a kill.

The tracks led to a cut where some shift in the landscape was starting a new stream. more next week

Chapter 7

Tim made quite a sight.

A quiver of aspen bark sewn with strips of willow bark hung from his belt. It held eight arrows, all feathered with aspen bark and tipped with obsidian arrowheads attached with pine pitch. Opposite the quiver hung his knife, the canvas case containing his firestone, and his canteen, now filled with dried tinder. His shirt sleeves were hacked off just below the elbow. His pant leg was split from waist to cuff and laced with strips cut from a dirty handkerchief. His boots were scuffed and battered; one of them was heavily splinted and both were laced with willow bark. His hair was still matted with dirt and dried blood.

He leaned on a crude crutch. He had replaced the original crosspiece with a stone from the creek bed set in pitch and lashed with squirrel hide so that it could double as a club. In his left hand he carried a bow strung with bootlaces and two slim spears tipped with deadly obsidian points. Through his belt, he had thrust an atlatl.

His Miwuk ancestors would have recognized all of his weapons as crude versions of their own, except for the atlatl. That was a spear throwing stick that Tim had read about. Because of his interest in his own ancestors, he had done a lot of reading about primitive men, and now he was about to put that reading to use.

It was his seventh day on the mountain and he had had nothing but pine nuts and one squirrel to eat. If he came upon any game, from squirrel to deer, he intended kill it – if he could.

On the opposite side of the creek, squirrels and Stellar jays had congregated in a lodgepole pine. They disappeared when Tim approached, so he seated himself on a fallen log and waited until they returned. He nocked an arrow and shot at a squirrel. It was a bad miss and every animal disappeared. Soon they returned. This time he aimed at a jay, and missed again. Tim had to wait nearly twenty minutes before they returned, and then they managed to keep to the far side of the tree. Finally, one cocky jay set himself up as a perfect target. Tim’s arrow clipped his tailfeathers, but did no harm.

After another half hour, Tim decided that he wouldn’t be getting any more shots, so he retrieved his arrows. One had lost its bark fletching, but that could be repaired.

Stopping in a clearing, he let his crutch fall and fired his seven good arrows at various targets while balancing on his good foot and letting his injured foot take some of his weight. There was no doubt that his ankle was getting better, and no doubt that his archery was lousy.

Pulling out his atlatl, he nocked the butt of a spear into its hook and raised them together until the spear came to a horizontal position above his shoulder. Holding the handle of the atlatl, he hooked his forefinger around the middle of the spear. The obsidian point glinted thirty inches in front of his face while the atlatl and the rest of the spear stuck out behind him. He cast the spear with an easy overhand motion, releasing his forefinger and keeping his grip on the atlatl. The light spear was fetched with bark like his arrows, and it described a flat arc ending in the bush he had chosen as his target.

Tim was pleased, especially when his second spear struck the same target. more tomorrow

The old man had seen the blot of darkness moving against the lesser darkness of the forest. He shifted the rifle carefully up as the bear came into the light, and fired.

A fiery lance of pain shot through the bear’s leg.  He squalled and charged back toward the forest.

* * *

It had been six days since Tim had eaten anything but a handful of pine nuts, and now the squirrel stew was playing havoc with his stomach. He squirmed uncomfortably through the night in his pine needle bed. And he dreamed.

It was morning in his dream – a clear, Sierra morning with the great pines standing bold against the blue of the sky. Once again he had his rifle in his hands. He and his companion were crossing a meadow with the sun at their backs. The grass was wet with dew and the morning sun fell slantwise, casting their shadows before them.

From time to time he would glance at his companion. Sometimes it would be his father in jeans and cowboy boots, striding along with his quick eyes darting about. Then it would be his grandfather, whose brown eyes were nearly buried in a mass of wrinkles. Since it was a dream, Tim did not think it was strange that his companion could change from one to the other.

Across the meadow, a deer emerged from the forest. Tim raised his rifle and his companion – he wasn’t sure which one – whispered, “Steady!” Tim let the rifle settle into place for the fraction of a second it took for the barrel to become still. The deer was pinned on the rifle sight. He squeezed the trigger gently and the rifle leaped in his hands.

The deer stumbled, fell, and rose again to run. But he did not run toward safety. He ran straight toward Tim. Tim reached for the lever to jack up another cartridge, but his hands felt numb and useless. The deer’s forequarters were soaked with bright, red blood. The deer’s eyes were bright with anger; his antlers looked sharp and deadly. The skin of the deer’s chest shivered from the interplay of muscles beneath and each drop of blood stood clear and individual, carried like bright jewels on the tips of the deer’s coarse hair.

The deer’s great brown eyes held no human intelligence, yet Tim felt as if it were shouting a reproach at him for his clumsy shot. A watery weakness swept through him and he had to turn away from that calm, accusing face. And as he did, the weakness settled in his stomach and became genuine pain. He woke, chilled and sweating in his shelter.

* * *

Tim lay awake for an hour. Then he slept, and dreamed again.

This time he was in his parent’s house, and once again his father was there. It was a brief dream, almost a simple touch of memory. His father and mother sat reading and talking while Tim played on the floor. Tim slid from sleep into wakefulness and lay awake again, staring at the rough underside of his shelter roof and missing his home. more tomorrow

Tim hobbled to the aspen and cut a palm sized square of bark. With this to protect his hand from the tiny chips of volcanic glass, he pressure flaked the blades into shape using the point of his knife, working slowly and removing hundreds of tiny chips. The finished product had a smooth concavity down the length of one side where a previous flake had been removed and a rough concavity down the other side. It was crude, but it would serve.

The squirrel had been simmering all this time. The smell made it hard for Tim to concentrate on his work. Now he removed the carcass from the water. He tore at the meat with his fingers, removing most of the bones and setting them aside. Then he added pine nut flour and stirred. The broth thickened, the smell thickened, and when he could wait no longer, he ate, shoveling the stew into his mouth with a large splinter from his whittling.

When it was entirely gone, he refilled his bark basket with water, dropped in the other half of the carcass, and set it beside the fire to boil again.

Tim took time to slash the bark of a pine sapling in a dozen places so pitch would ooze out. The pitch would not come as readily in October as it would have in summer, but he hoped to get enough to set his spear and arrow points. Then he returned to the fire and worked steadily into the night.

Chapter 6

Hunger stalked the black bear, fueling his rage. He had eaten the leaves of willows, the inner bark from several pines, and had torn several rotting logs apart for the grubs within, but this alone could not supply his body’s needs. His sense of smell was almost entirely gone, and without it he could not find the food he needed.

Hunger and pain-fueled rage drove him back to the lower hills three nights later. He approached the scene of his downfall with care. He raised his head and instinctively tested the air, but it did him no good. His eyes saw only the usual dim shapes and his ears were spread wide. Somewhere ahead a pig squealed. It was a high pitched, momentary sound. The bear paced nervously. Hunger drove him on, while caution and the strangeness of the scentless night held him back.

Now he could catch some scent. Even his torn nose could register the smell of a pig pen at close range, and he could sense the ripe carrion smell of rotting flesh. Pushing forward to the point where he had broken through the pig pen fence before, he found it repaired. He pressed his muzzle through a square of wire and sniffed uselessly.

He heard a sharp metallic click. He paused cautiously, but the sound was not repeated and he had no way of knowing that it was the sound of a Winchester being brought to full cock.

The pig that he had killed lay rotting in the yard. Flies swarmed about it. The light from an electric light bulb mounted at the barn eaves fell across the body of the pig.

The black bear was wary and cunning, but he was not human. He could not know that no farmer would leave a rotting carcass in his yard, nor did he know that the electric light had only been placed there two days before.

The old farmer was waiting. He had sat through last night, and he had already sat several hours in silence tonight. He had left his shotgun inside, and sat in the shadow of his porch with a rifle across his knees. more tomorrow

Tim peered out of the underbrush at his deadfalls. They were still in place, and the pine nut bait had not been touched, even though the mud at the edge of the water was a mass of tracks. He did not approach them. If he left them alone long enough, he hoped the man-smell might leave them.

Working backwards on hands and knees, he emerged out of sight of the pool. There he recovered his crutch and started upstream in search of another pine he could harvest. As he went, he searched the floor of the dry creek until he found a rock about twice the size of his fist. It glistened black in the dim morning light. It was obsidian, washed down from some volcanic deposit higher in the mountains, and more precious than gold to Tim.

He found a small sugar pine a hundred feet back from the stream growing up beside a broken boulder. Climbing the boulder, he harvested the cones. The were huge, but most of the nuts were gone from them. He piled them by the creek bank and continued his explorations.

Now that he felt stronger, he was hungrier than ever.

At the edge of the bank he found a willow that had died when its roots were exposed. From this he cut a slightly curved branch about six feet long and as thick as his wrist, along with thinner, straight branches of about the same length and a bundle of shorter branches. It took several trips to return all his finds to the campsite.

Tim spent an hour shucking the remaining pine nuts from the sugar pine cones. As he worked, he tried to remember all that his grandfather had taught him. Tim’s grandfather had always taken him along when he had harvested Digger Pine cones in the spring, and again when he harvested acorns in the autumn. Nowadays, Tim’s grandfather ground his acorns in a commercial flour mill and leached them in the kitchen sink, but he still knew the old Miwuk ways and had taught them to Tim.

Unfortunately, the Miwuks had lived at lower elevations. Where Tim was now there were neither Digger pines nor oaks.

Tim fed his fire and set to work. He checked over the curved willow shaft he had chosen for a bow, then cut it back to about five feet. That was the maximum his two boot laces, knotted together, would string. He whittled away the the lower part of the limb until it matched the upper in size and shape. When it was roughly bow shaped, he hung it on a tripod of saplings near the fire to dry further.

The daylight was fading, so Tim laid his work aside and went off to check his deadfalls. Three of them were untouched, but the fourth held the body of a Douglas squirrel.

Back at camp, Tim skinned and gutted it carefully. He saved the intestines for cord, split the carcass, and dropped half of it into one of his bark cooking basket to boil.

Tim took the obsidian he had found and studied it like a diamond cutter. His Miwuk ancestors had traded with other tribes to get their obsidian. They had treated it with respect because it had been so hard to get. Tim was in exactly the same position.

He decided to make his spear points first. He knocked the head off the obsidian with a glancing blow from another stone, then struck off several long flakes from it’s length. These were irregular, but once he had the obsidian trimmed he was able to strike off two decent flakes before the remaining stone snapped in two crossways. more next week

In the evening of the fifth day, Tim sat in the mouth of his shelter, grinding more of the pine nuts for another meal. He had set the deadfall, but he didn’t have any real faith in it. He felt stronger now, and his ankle hurt less than it had. He had reworked his crutch, padding the crosspiece with lichen and wrapping it with willow bark.

He was trying to think through his situation. Unless someone found his bicycle at the campground – and he had hidden it with great care so that it would not be stolen – no one would know that he was lost in the forest. There would be no rescue parties.

He could try to walk out, but he did not know which way to go. He did not know where he was because of the time he had wandered after hitting his head in the stream. He did not know east from west. Heavy clouds had covered the sun for days, and it is a myth that moss only grows on the north side of trees.

If he had been uninjured and well fed, he could simply have followed the dry wash to a creek, and that creek to a river, and that river to a road. But he did not know how many twisting miles that might take. He might walk to a road within an hour, or it might take more days than his weakened condition would allow.

He couldn’t take his shelter with him, and another night of exposure in the rain might kill him. It seemed best to stay with his shelter and live on pine nuts until his ankle had another day or two to get better.

It was a sensible plan, but events were taking place in another part of the forest that would change everything.

* * *

Wherever Man moves in, the wild creatures move back. In California, the grizzly bear, the state animal, has been extinct for nearly a century. The foothill towns rarely see even a relatively mild mannered black bear.

Nevertheless, three days after Tim went hunting, a black bear came down from the forest. It was an old male, shaggy with years, and hungry. He wandered around the outskirts of town, remembering vaguely that he had found plentiful food here in his youth. He could not know that that food source had been a garbage dump, nor could he know that garbage was now stored in bear-proof steel containers.

In his wanderings at the edge of the town, the bear found the sweet smell of rotting grain and followed it to a pig pen. Perhaps he would have eaten the mash, or perhaps the pigs. Or both, for he was very hungry. Instead, the farmer heard the squealing of his pigs when the bear attacked and came running out of the house with a shotgun in his hands. He fired at the bear and hit him in the face, then fired the other barrel at the bear as he ran toward the forest and safety.

The buckshot lodged in the black bear’s face and right hind leg. One shot split his muzzle and traveled four inches under the hide to lodge beneath his right eye. The most serious damage was done by a single pellet which ripped away a section of the bear’s fleshy nose, and cost him most of his sense of smell.

Sight is not very important to a black bear; a pellet in the eye would have done less damage. This old male had been finding it increasingly hard to catch his prey. Without his sense of smell, he was truly crippled.

He ran for several miles before going to earth. He growled and rolled and ripped down saplings in his fury, but the pain persisted. more tomorrow

Once in the crotch of the tree, he rested for a while, then climbed about the lower limbs, pulling off cones and dropping them to the ground. After half an hour he had taken all that he could reach. Then he looped his belt over the lowest limb and swung down to hang at arm’s length. The ground seemed a long way down, but there was no avoiding it. He drew up his injured ankle and let go.

It was surprisingly easy. He managed to roll toward his good side and his ankle was only jarred. Painfully jarred, yes; but not with the searing pain Tim had expected.

Tim made a sack of his shirt and filled it with cones. When he returned to this shelter, he was tempted to shuck them immediately. Instead, he forced himself to make four more trips back to the tree until he had gathered in every cone. He did not want to share a single one with the squirrels.

He used a rock to break up the cones and sifted through the dust and scales to get the nuts. It was mid-afternoon when he finished, and he had only enough to fill one of his bark baskets. He ground a handful of flour, mixed it to a thick gruel in one of the baskets, then heated it by dropping in hot rocks from his fire.

As he ate, Tim remembered all the times he had started projects that had seemed too big for him to finish. His father had always listened to his complaints, and had always given him advice, or shown him a different way of working, or given him some tool he did not know existed. No matter how impossible they had seemed at the time, Tim had always finished those projects somehow.

Looking back, Tim could not remember a single time when his father had actually helped him. But he had always seen to it that Tim got what he needed to finish without help. He had taught Tim that he could do anything he really wanted to.

Halfway up that tree and exhausted, Tim had felt his father at his side, urging him on.

Now, with his first meal in many days calming his growling stomach, Tim felt new strength flowing through his limbs. He returned to making his deadfall trap.

Chapter 5

On October twelfth Tim had set out from home on his bicycle to spend the day with his grandfather. His mother didn’t get home until past midnight. The house was empty, so she assumed that Tim’s grandfather had kept him because she had to work late. She went to bed without calling.

Tim’s grandfather had not known that Tim was coming, so it was late Sunday morning before either of them knew that Tim was gone. They drove over the roads Tim might have taken between their two houses without finding any sign of him. Then they searched around the house, and found his bicycle gone. No one noticed that his rifle was also gone.

When the police were called, they treated it as if Tim were a runaway, or had been kidnapped. The police in three counties looked for him, but no one looked in the great forest that bordered the foothill town where Tim lived, for no one had any reason to think Tim had gone that direction. more tomorrow