Dean Koontz: Wilderness

I sat on the rimrock to catch my breath, and the forest below blazed with fire that didn’t consume it, each autumn tree a torch of red or orange or yellow, like a vast canvas by an impressionist painter inspired and exhilarated by the quantum nature of all things.

By now I understood that he hadn’t shot me in the back on the first uphill leg of the trail because he must have been out of ammunition and needed to reload, which had given me a minute to get ahead of him and out of sight. Having taken a maze rat’s route from the limestone formation to this ridge, I was reasonably sure that in an attempt to follow me, he would make more than one wrong choice of trails.

I needed only to catch my breath and then make my way toward home by such indirection that I didn’t risk crossing his path as he wandered in search of me. Or so I believed. The rabid ferocity of his reaction had confirmed Mother’s warnings, but I didn’t yet comprehend the depth of the revulsion that I inspired or how relentless he would be in his determination to kill me.

As I sat gazing down into the serried ranks of trees in their celebratory dress, I realized that if the hunter ascended through them, I might not register his movement until he was close. In that festival of color, the numerous red-leafed maples redefined his red hunting jacket as a kind of camouflage.

Chips of bullet-fractured rimrock sprayed over me simultaneously with the crack of the rifle. I rolled away across the narrow ridgetop, down the next slope, onto all fours, onto my feet, and plunged through lashing feather grass, no deer trail apparent. I made it to the tree line, into shade and ferns, blundering through undergrowth. The hunter obviously had expert tracking skills, and I was leaving in my wake a path of disturbed and broken foliage that any amateur could have followed.

Out of the undergrowth, onto a deer path once more, I quickened down through a forest dressed in a million Joseph’s coats, skidding where the fallen leaves underfoot were damp, no longer trusting that switching to intersecting trails would thwart my pursuer, seeking the most direct route to the floor of the next hollow.

In previous outings, I had never gone farther than this, but I knew that at the bottom a stream wound through the hollow and might offer me a way to delay the hunter or foil him altogether. I thrashed through a sudden richness of painted ferns with purple-tinged, gray-green fronds and came to shallow water flowing lazily.

On her trips to the nearest town, my mother bought my clothes and always furnished me with the best waterproof hiking boots each time that I outgrew the former pair. Although I’d never tested their reliability this boldly, I waded into the water, which was three or four inches deep, and proceeded upstream. After splashing twenty yards or so, I looked back. Through the clear and sparkling currents, I saw my footprints in the compacted silt of the streambed. The water flowed so slowly that it might need an hour to erase the tracks I’d left, but my stalker was only a few minutes behind me.

Shaken, I hurried forward and soon came to a section of the stream paved with water-smoothed pebbles, on which I left no marks that I could see. Here and there were points along the bank where I might exit onto stone, leaving no footprints or disturbed vegetation. I took the third of those and hurried into the trees and once more uphill.

I proceeded now into new territory, not sure what I might find, and I was very afraid. As I climbed the slope, I told myself that I wasn’t just eight years old, that I was going on nine, that I might be a boy, yes, but not an ordinary boy, that I was strong and quick beyond my years, that already I could read at the level of a sixteen-year-old, which wouldn’t save me in this situation, but which nevertheless suggested that my chances of outwitting the hunter were much better than those of other boys my age.

And maybe my appearance could be turned to my advantage. The hunter had expressed his loathing— “Abomination!” —but I had also seen terror in the blue eye when first he’d met my stare through the limestone flute. At some point his fear might get the better of him, and he might turn back.

As I ascended the wooded slope, the autumn trees lost some of their radiant color, and the scattering of sunshine faded from the forest floor. I peered up through the lacework of branches and saw that gray clouds had come in from the east and swallowed the morning sun. Cloud cover, too, might be to my advantage, for surely the hunter would find it more difficult to read my tracks in a forest that had fallen into shadow.

The woods ended just past the crest of the slope, and beyond lay a broad meadow, at the far end of which stood a couple of ramshackle buildings: an old single-story house long shorn of paint and with no window glass intact, and what might have been a stable, where now the roof sagged like the tortured spine of a swaybacked horse. A few canted sections of split-rail pasture fencing still stood, but most had years earlier collapsed into the knee-high wheat-gold grass, which swayed ever so slightly, as if it were seaweed moved by deep ocean currents. My passage through the grass would be as obvious as if I had marked my way with a can of Day-Glo spray paint.

Staying within the forest, I circled the meadow, weaving among trees as fast as I could, acutely aware that the hunter might arrive at any moment. My initial intention was to navigate a semicircle to the woods beyond the house. When I arrived behind the structure, however, I discovered that the tall grass gave way to a short, dead, matted sedge of some kind that suggested this side of the meadow had once been much wetter but had dried out. The dense surface resembled a Japanese tatami and seemed unlikely to show tracks of any kind. Nearing the end of my resources and not certain how much longer I could continue fleeing through the forest, on impulse I crossed to the house.

The cupped boards of the porch steps protested, and half a dozen barn swallows exploded from their mud-cup nests under the eaves and arced up to roost for the moment on the rusted tin roof. There was no back door anymore. I entered the dark interior in hope of finding a good hiding place.

Even when new and painted and home to someone, the structure had been humble. Long abandoned, it groaned and creaked with my passage, and though it wouldn’t collapse on me, it would announce my presence to the hunter if I so much as shifted my weight slightly from one foot to the other.

In the front room, the gray light of the clouding day came ash-pale through the glassless windows and through another opening where the front door should have been, and I narrowly avoided stepping into a hole where a floor plank had gone missing. The house had been built off the ground, on a series of piers, perhaps because the meadow had once flooded in heavy rains, and underfoot lay an enclosed crawlspace about two feet deep.

The house offered fewer places of concealment than I had hoped, and I was about to retreat when, through a window, I saw the hunter moving just within the shadowed woods, following the very route by which I had circled the meadow. I had no choice now but to hide, no option but the crawlspace.

Because they were loose, some of the twelve-inch-wide planks rattled underfoot more than others. The nails that once secured them had rusted away. At the east end of the room, near the wall, I lifted aside one plank and then another and squeezed down between the floor joists into a realm of spiders and centipedes and their kin. I pulled the first plank into place with little effort. I had some difficulty manipulating the remaining one through the twelve-inch gap, but then it settled where it belonged, and I lay on my back in darkness with the sudden thought that I had just constructed my coffin.