J. Lennon - Castle

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.

I woke with a start in the night, as if from a frightening dream — though I remembered nothing of it — and cried out, in part from fright, in part from pain: my bruises and lacerations ached in earnest now, and my tent was eerily illuminated by the campfire’s remains. I paused a moment, caught my breath, calmed my racing heart. The pain was sharpest just below my left kidney: I probed the area, certain now that I had cracked at least one rib. I was just about to lie back down, to ease myself back into sleep, when I heard a noise outside my tent.

I froze. There was another sound, a rustle of brush. And then the light changed: it flickered and dimmed, and slowly a shadow appeared, elongated, on the tent wall. An animal.

For a moment, I was terrified. And then the animal moved, and I could see that the distorted shadow was that of a deer. I let out breath, and the shadow raised its head, and it bounded away. I heard its footsteps on the wet ground, and the cracking of twigs, and then silence returned. Reassured, I closed my eyes.

When I opened them again — mere moments later, it seemed — the tent was flooded with daylight. Effortfully, I unzipped the tent door, crawled outside, and stood.

The fog had lifted. The air was clear. Directly in front of me, about fifty feet ahead, visible between the trunks of trees, stood a solid wall of stone, reaching up beyond the canopy and out of sight.

I resisted my instinct, which was to run to the rock without hesitation. Instead, I broke down my tent, rolled it into my pack, and removed my climbing shoes, gloves, and helmet. Faintly trembling, I scattered the remains of the previous night’s fire and covered them over with dirt; then I sat down and scraped the mud off the soles of my mostly dry boots with a twig. At last I shouldered my pack and strode calmly to the rock, taking care not to trip and fall.

The work of breaking camp had loosened my stiff muscles, but the scrapes and bruises from my accident had ripened, and I winced with every step I took. My blood, however, was flooded with adrenalin, and my fingers and toes were warm. Above the forest canopy, the sun shone brightly. I imagined myself basking in its light when I attained the summit, and a shudder ran through me, a quiver of excitement that I did not fully understand, nor wish to. My mouth went dry, my palms were moist, and my skin prickled with anticipation.