AT thirty-three Lenor Stacy gave up her apartment, sold her furniture and most of her clothes, walked away from her job, and went looking for the Adorable Woods Woman.
But of course there was a great deal more to it than that. If she had lived fifty years earlier, Lenor’s friends would have said she had been disappointed by Love, and been half right. Today no one says such things—perhaps partly because women like Lenor no longer have friends; the old ties, the duty of the friends of one’s mother and sisters (Lenor had none) to be one’s own friends too, having broken down.
Lenor, then, had been disappointed by Love. She had (afterward) been disappointed by hate as well, and the experience had drained her for thirteen years, leaving her a woman—a tastefully, an inexpensively, a sometimes not very neatly dressed woman—happy to arrive at her desk early every weekday morning and more than content to remain half an hour late when any reason to do so could be contrived. They said, “She runs the place,” and she knew and enjoyed it and despised them because it was true; you know her. In the evening she watched TV or read, and only weekends, during the thirteen years, presented her with real difficulties.
She went to movies, exercised at a health spa (it had been a supermarket), drove, attended concerts and art exhibitions, and often spoke to no one at all from Friday afternoon to Monday morning. She was sometimes bored, but seldom unhappy. In a way she was tired. At no time did she show interest in hunting, fishing, hiking, camping, or any of the other woodsy pastimes that have sprung up like mushrooms on the dead roots of nature.
The Woods Woman was a black figure in a magazine, a black figurine set in a Kodachrome forest. The man who had taken her picture thought she was a female Abominable Snowman (yeti or metoh kangmi, the American Sasquatch, Big Foot, or “Stinking One”—and may Gitche-Manitou help you, paleface) and called her the Adorable Woods Woman in the hope that this appealing title would dissuade other lovers of the outdoors from shooting her. She was a fraud in a fur suit, an ape escaped, a bear, an animal, a last-surviving Gigantopithecus, a myth photographed, a troll woman. Imagine, if you will, a great strapping girl (Lenor was tall herself), a girl heavy-hipped, pendulously bosomed. Cover this girl with hair as thick and black as a spaniel’s; give her the head of a gorilla.
No (as Lenor said to herself), you did it wrong.
That thing in your mind is not a gorilla’s face. You think words, and the things behind the words change until they are no longer what they were. That stupid mask in your mind is fantasy, the bad, uncaring joke of some Hollywood prop man. She went to a zoo and watched a real gorilla, watched (she was standing behind children and drinking Coca-Cola through a straw) until the ugly prop-man goblin mask faded from her mind and she knew that wise, sad look.
There either was, or was not, a woman (girl?) in a forest in California who looked like that. If there were, she—and her parents, presumably, brothers, sisters, and incredible swain or swains—lived still as people had before those preposterous inventions fire and the stone-tipped spear, save that to all the other burdens of their lives were added deadly fear of that race of stunted, pallid elves who hemmed their world with magic. Lived by eating grubs and seeds. Shivering in rain and exulting in the sun; waiting for Eden to reopen.
And well why not?
And a week later, why not do something—just once?
She knew nothing about photography, but she bought a medium-priced Japanese camera and read the booklet that she found in the box. Then she took pictures in the park until she had learned to judge distance and light.
The camping equipment that the sporting goods stores offered repelled her. It seemed a crime to think of taking that costly, bright, durable, gimmicky stuff under trees; besides, it would be too heavy to carry, and she knew she would find nothing close to the road. In the end she bought a pair of tennis shoes because they reminded her of the ones she had worn to gym in high school, and took an old blanket to sleep in and a plastic drop cloth she had acquired when she repainted her apartment. The drop cloth would keep out the damp when she slept on the ground and, if it rained, could be made into some sort of shelter. She kept her underwear, some sweaters and blouses, three pairs of slacks, and an old car coat; she sold or gave away the rest of her clothes. I’ll buy all new, she thought, when I come back. I’ll have such fun. She did not look in the mirror (there was only one mirror now in her apartment, in the bathroom) as she said this, but then she seldom, now, looked into mirrors; lipstick was, now, her only cosmetic, and she had learned to apply it using the very small one in her compact, in which she saw her lips only.
The Klamath Forest of northern California is seldom named on maps, though it covers more than 2500 square miles. Mapmakers, it seems, do not like to give the names of forests because it is so difficult to show their bounds; they have no hard edges. Lenor, despite them, driving along State Route 96 between the little town of Happy Camp (where are you, Bret Harte?) and the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation, knew that the Klamath lay south and east of her. And that the likely spots—the places where the crowding trees could be penetrated with little trouble, where the ground was for walking instead of climbing, or where some timbering operation had built a road—would be no good. She stopped her car at a place that looked very bad instead, got out and forced her way in. As simple as that.
The Klamath Forest grows on the Klamath Range, geologically one of the oldest mountain massifs in North America. The Klamaths have seen glaciers come and go, and remember dire wolves as big as ponies beneath their trees; they are no longer tall and proud like the young Rockies, but they are very, very rough.
All up and down like an Irish wind; water courses that go nowhere, sinking into dead pools. Others dropping a hundred feet in half a mile, roaring over rocks. There are dry folds in the Klamaths too, and deep, silent crevasses which it is better not to clamber down into.
Lenor made her way into this country for two days. A man would have told her it was no place for a woman, and in half a day he would have decided it was no place for a man either, and gone back. A man would have tried to carry enough food for three large meals a day. Lenor took tea and matches and some hard baking chocolate, a box of dried figs, sugar, and a small pan. She expected to lose weight, had fasted before (though she called it dieting), and suffered no neurotic doubts about her strength of today as compared to her strength of yesterday. At the end of the second day she found a spot more open than most (though no spot in the Klamath Forest is very open) and so nearly level that after what she had been scrambling across for the last thirty-six hours it seemed actually flat. (Though no land in the Klamaths is really flat.) A faint game trail led to a stream, and she built a screen of brush there to hide behind, something she did not call a blind because she did not think in such terms. When it was finished, she settled down with her camera to wait; not smoking, moving no more than necessary, listening to the birds and the wind.
After three days she had seen several rabbits, three grey foxes, a raccoon, and a doe—whose picture she had snapped in order to have something to remember the experience by. She called herself a fool and decided it was time to go home.
She “went home” for three more days without striking the road on which she had left her car, and at the end of the third day she was in an area she was certain she had never seen before. The figs and the chocolate were gone, and the sugar almost gone. She ate a handful of insipid berries and some crayfish that she cleaned with a nail file and boiled. She knew, or thought she knew, the direction in which the road lay; but the country would not allow her to go that way, forcing her off at right angles time after time.
On the fourth day (the seventh since she had left her car) it rained. She made a lean-to of her drop cloth and spent the day sleeping and brewing tea over a tiny fire kindled of wood that she had managed to get under cover before it was wet down too badly. When she wrapped herself in her blanket that evening, it was still raining.
The fever came in the night and woke her. There was nothing to hear but the patter of the rain, but she felt the hot flush creeping from her face and ears all down her body. She thought: I’m going to be very sick. Then she dropped back to sleep.
She was sick the next day with fever and a deep, rattling cough. It was still raining, but it might rain for a week, and she could not wait a week. She put the blanket and the drop cloth over her head like outsized shawls and went as far as she could before stopping to rest under an outcrop. Then it was morning again, without any night that she could recall between the sun and birds and the dripping afternoon of the preceding day. She tried to stand and found that she had to pull herself erect, holding on to the rocks—while somewhere a stone slid on a stone.
She froze, then let herself sink down again, perversely glad at the recess of effort. Feet shuffled. A bear, she thought. A bear. And flattened herself against the rocks. Whatever it was, it was just out of sight, only just hidden by the angle of the rocky wall. She drew her shawls around her and heard it come nearer. Then, as she watched, a hand reached forth to pinch up a scuttling insect two yards from where she crouched. The fingers were matted with hair, the nails filthy and broken, but it was a human hand. They are people after all, she thought, and stepped out, slowly (so as not to frighten the creature, but then she could only move, now, slowly), until she could see the girl’s frightened, deep eyes. Perhaps they’ll help me, she thought; and then discovered she did not know what to say.