The sky trembles. My first thought is that it’s a camera drone, crashing, and this is something I want to see. I look up, raising an arm to block out the sun. Instead of a drone come undone, I see an airplane plowing through the high blue to leave a wispy white trail. It takes me a moment to process the sight, the sound, the sensation of having my small human presence overwhelmed so completely. This is the first time I’ve noticed a plane since taping began. I don’t know if this is because I wasn’t paying attention or because they weren’t around to notice.
Either way, this is important—it means they can’t control every aspect of my surroundings. A small assurance, but it inhabits me like a revelation. I feel my insularity retreating. For the first time in too long, I am not the but a. Just one person among many. I think of the men and women above me. The plane is huge; there must be hundreds of passengers seated up there beneath nubby air vents, napping, reading, watching movies on their iPads. One or two crying, perhaps, frightened by the enormity of the journey they’re embarking on.
I stand still, neck craned, until the airplane is out of sight, its contrail dispersing. I hope someone up there is going home. That there is at least one person in that plane who knows unselfish love and is returning to it.
The next few hours are easier than what came before, except that I’m wretched with hunger. I reach a brook a few hours before sunset and decide to make camp early to try to catch some protein. The pieces of the figure-four deadfall I carved during group camp are in my pack, and now that I have something other than pinecones to use as bait it might actually work.
I take the trio of sticks and set them under a tall tree. It takes me a minute to figure out which stick goes where, then I align the notches, balancing and steadying. Once I can keep the trap in its distinctive angular pattern by pinching the top nexus, I smear the end of the bait stick with peanut butter and lean a heavy log over the top to take the place of my hand. It’s a precarious piece of work, but it’s meant to be, and it holds.
I boil water in batches and build my shelter, glancing regularly toward the trap. The bait lies in the log’s shadow, untouched. The woods grow dim and I’m sitting at the fire, waiting, trying not to think the thoughts that come most readily. I hate it. I need to keep busy, so I decide to carve a second trap. I salvage appropriate-sized sticks—each about a half inch thick and a foot long—and start carving. It’s only four notches and two sharpened points, but they have to be aligned perfectly. Carving takes me longer than I’d like—the knife I was issued is so dull at this point I wouldn’t trust it to slice cold butter. By the time I’m done, my hands are aching, my fingers blistered. I drop the sticks at the base of a tree and head to the brook to collect a long flat stone to use as the trap’s weight.
I take off my boots and socks and wade in. Pebbles massage my feet, a small pain. As I pry up the rock, I think that I could never do all this if it wasn’t part of the show. This adventure I asked for, it’s not what I was expecting, not what I wanted. I thought I would feel empowered, but I’m only exhausted.
I heave the stone upright. It’s too heavy to lift, so I drag it out of the water and to the tree. The stone leaves a six-inch-wide trail through my camp. I remember a driveway much wider twisting through the woods, leading from a mailbox choked by blue balloons to a cabin with more balloons by the door. The cabin itself was blue too, maybe, I’m not sure. Maybe it just had blue trim. And there were so many balloons; every time I remember I remember more. The balloons weren’t all: a bottle in the sink, a handful of wrapped packages on the table. All blue. Even the bedroom light felt blue when I found him—found it.
I didn’t quit then. I didn’t quit when I got sick afterward, days of shivering and feeding the fire, boiling water constantly because I was losing fluids and I didn’t boil the tap water in the cabin and that must be what made me sick. Vomit and diarrhea, feeling so cold, endlessly cold.
I drop the stone by the tree.
Nothing can be worse than what they’ve already put me through. I’d never choose this, not again. But I’m here and I’m a woman of my word and I promised myself I wouldn’t quit.
I put my boots back on, then kneel to assemble the second trap. As I’m testing the fulcrum stick, there’s a soft thud behind me. I turn; the first trap’s been triggered. I think I see movement, but by the time I get there the squirrel is dead, its front half compressed into the dirt beneath the log. The thinnest sliver of black is exposed between its fuzzy eyelids. I’ve never been fond of squirrels; I prefer chipmunks with their racing stripes. When I was six or seven I spent an entire summer prone among the maples and birches behind my parents’ house, hoping a chipmunk would mistake me for a log. I wanted so badly to know the feel of his little feet on my skin. That never happened, but once one did scamper close, until we were eye-to-eye. And then he sneezed in my face and disappeared. Like a magic trick, I told my husband on our first date. Poof. A story I’ve told so many times I no longer know if it’s true.
Gray squirrels, though—I associate them with cities, with overcrowding and litter. Even so, I feel bad as I pick up the squirrel by its tail. Killing mammals is tough, even when it’s a squirrel, even when it’s to eat. “Sorry, little guy,” I say.
Cooper could field-dress a squirrel in less than a minute. We timed him once using Mississippi seconds. I was usually tending the fire. I’ve cooked squirrel, but I’ve never skinned one.
It didn’t look too hard.
I lay the squirrel belly-down atop a log. Cooper started with a slit under the tail, so that’s what I do, forcing my dull knife through the skin. I saw across the base of the tail. And then—this part astonished me every time I saw it, how easy it was—I cover the tail with my foot, stepping hard, and yank the squirrel’s back legs up.
Red spritzes through the air as the squirrel rips in half and I stumble backward. Unexpected motion makes my head float; I feel like I’m on a raft, rocking in a ship’s wake. Clutching the chunk of the squirrel that came with me, I take a knee and force three slow, deep breaths.
I don’t know what I did wrong. When Cooper pulled, the skin of his squirrel always slid right off, like a banana peel.
It doesn’t matter what I did wrong, I need to salvage what I can. I look at the carcass dangling from my right hand. A happy surprise—it didn’t rip in half. I’m holding everything but the tail. This is correctable, with patience.
I walk back to the log and see the detached tail sitting there, a fluffy gray-and-white lump. Memory brings me an image: Randy, his sweaty red hair puffing up anime-style, his bile-green bandana tight across his brow, a squirrel tail dangling over each ear. I see him dancing wildly around the fire, his tail-ears flapping as he howls a howl that is supposed to sound like a wolf but is purely a showman’s call.
I sit on the log and flick the disembodied tail onto the ground, trying to focus. Randy doesn’t matter. All that matters right now is skinning this squirrel. Maybe my cut was too deep or I pulled too fast, I don’t know, but I think I know what to do next. I creep my fingers along the muscle, separating the skin in tiny increments. It takes forever. I’m probably doing it wrong. But eventually the hide is pulled up to the squirrel’s front legs. I place the blade of my knife flat against the midpoint of a front leg, and then I lean over it, pushing. The bone snaps, and the knife digs through into the log; I have to jerk it free. I use less force for the next three legs and the neck. My hands are slick and aching, but I’m almost done. I just have to gut it now. I flip the carcass so it’s belly-up, then turn the knife so the blade faces me.
Don’t puncture the organs. I know that much, at least.