Such a scenario seemed likely to me at the time, and even likelier the more I learned about weapons and how to handle them. But the police were not interested in my interpretation of events, and my sister even less so, and it was about this subject that we argued on the day of their burial. Now, crashing through the underbrush, I pictured my sister’s flushed young face, rubbery with drink; I imagined punching her over and over, as I might have done — but restrained myself from doing — on that day, and her nose running with blood. The face changed to that of the ruined woman she had become today, laughing at me in my own home, a cigarette dangling from a corner of her mouth. How dare you impugn my father? I said to her in my mind, and soon I was saying it aloud, shouting it as I leaped the deadfall and splashed through the mud: “How dare you! How dare you!”
It was as I was screaming this that the ground gave way beneath me and I tumbled headlong into darkness.
I landed on my side, and my head soon followed, thudding against a smooth stone lodged in the mud. I was not knocked unconscious, but the wind was driven from me, and it was at least a minute before I had gathered myself enough to determine where I was and what had happened to me.
I was lying at the bottom of a pit approximately ten feet deep and six feet in diameter. It was very quiet here, and cold, with snow and ice still covering the ground, and the walls near my head hoary with frost. The pit gave the impression of having been dug with hand tools, not by a machine, and the walls had been scraped smooth and any protruding rocks or roots removed. Slowly, carefully, I tried to get to my feet. My head throbbed, my neck ached, and my muscles, bruised by the fall, protested. But I was able to stand; and, bracing myself with my hand against the earthen wall, I gently probed the painful spots to determine if I had broken any bones.
To my relief, the answer seemed to be no. There were many tender areas around my midsection, and it was possible I had fractured a rib, but no debilitating breaks were apparent. I was, I knew, lucky. I had allowed my emotions to overwhelm my good sense and had made a tactical error. In less benign circumstances, a mistake like this might have resulted in more serious injury, even death. I took a minute to catch my breath, and to stifle my feelings of embarrassment and inadequacy. Then I turned my attention once again to my surroundings.
Scattered about the floor of the pit were the remains of the false ground cover I had fallen through: a few broken twigs, some pine boughs and stones, and a lot of leaves. More startling, however, was what poked out of the ice and snow underfoot: thick branches, carefully whittled sharp, and positioned to do grievous harm to anyone or anything that should land on them. Most of these branches had slumped over and lay on their sides, but some stood straight, and it seemed a minor miracle that I hadn’t landed on one. I might have been killed.
The sharpened sticks had provided me with another piece of luck, I could see now: they could be driven into the dirt walls of the pit, and used to help me climb out. Having noticed this, I wasted no time. I tugged several out of the snow, along with a palm-sized flat stone that had fallen down with me, and began to pound them into the earth. Ten minutes later, I heaved myself up and out of the pit and lay panting on the damp forest floor.
The relative warmth of the surface was a great comfort, and I tipped my head back onto a mossy log and took a moment to think. Two things were clear to me. One was that this was a trap intended for men, not animals. There were easier ways to kill a deer, for instance; and even if a prospective hunter wished to use a pit, he would not have to dig it nearly so deep. This begged the question of who, then, had dug the pit, and why — but I had more important things to do at this point than to indulge in idle speculation.
The second obvious thing was that this trap was not carefully maintained, and might even have been entirely forgotten. The circle of false floor I had crashed through had developed its own layer of natural humus; it had been very well built, and had lasted a long time, perhaps a decade or more.
Surely, no one had come this way in years. Nevertheless, I suddenly felt paranoid. I jumped to my feet, body crying out in protest, and looked around me. I saw nothing and no one, save for the trees. The sun was lower in the sky, and a faint fog appeared to be rising up from the ground, but that was all. No one appeared to be watching.
I realized that the going would be rougher now, that the bruises and scrapes I had just endured would grow more painful as the hours passed. I briefly considered returning to the house. It seemed so inviting to me: the roaring furnace, a hot bath, a comfortable bed. But I have never been one to indulge in creature comforts; the only real comfort was success. I straightened my pack on my shoulders, consulted my compass (mercifully unbroken), and continued on my way, stepping more carefully now, with my eyes locked on the treacherous ground.
I made it another hour or so before I stopped. The sun had sunk further, and its slanting rays no longer found their way through the canopy above. In addition, the fog had thickened, and it had become difficult to see clearly more than a few feet in front of me. And finally, my fall was beginning to take its toll, with exhaustion and pain overwhelming my conscious thoughts. It was time to make camp for the night.
I found a lightly wooded area and began to clear it of debris. This proved more difficult than I had anticipated, as my rib cage ached, and the years of deadfall had become intertwined and grown through with vines. I made heavy use of my small hatchet, hacking away at everything that could not be pulled apart, and half an hour later I had managed to create a large circle of bare ground. The earth was very wet, of course, but I had packed a thin tarpaulin, and I laid this out carefully where I wanted my tent to go. The tent, a water-resistant one-person pod with inflatable headrest, came together without difficulty. By now it was nearly dark. I made a quick circuit of the area around my camp, gathered up as many dry or semi-dry branches as I could find, and built a small fire. When at last I had it blazing, I unpacked my food and sat down to a meal of trail mix, dried meat, and water.
Where, I wondered, did the time go? It seemed to me that it had only been a few hours since I’d left my house, yet somehow the entire day had managed to pass me by. Furthermore, I was puzzled once again by the apparent disconnect between the amount of time I’d spent walking and the amount of ground I ought to have covered. It took only an hour to circumambulate the entire wood on paved roads. Even allowing for the thick underbrush and mud, I ought to have been able to traverse the area twice over by now. Perhaps I had been walking in a circle — but the compass suggested the contrary, and I couldn’t remember encountering the same piece of terrain more than once.
These thoughts led nowhere, and my mind entered into the same state of confusion it had suffered earlier in the day. I looked up and found that the fog was impenetrable now: it reflected the light of my fire back at me, as if I were sitting in an igloo. The silence of the forest, already unnerving, had deepened, and a shudder ran through my weary body. The only thing to do was sleep, and hope that the fog lifted in the morning.
I removed my boots, crawled into my tent, unpacked my sleep sack, and slid deep into it, shivering and aching. A tightness in my throat suggested that, as if my misfortune were not already great enough, I might have contracted a cold. With a deep sigh, I closed my eyes and tried to plot out the morning’s progress. But the fog that blanketed the woods crept quickly into my conscious mind as well, and I was soon fast asleep.