A Clearing in the Forest Read online

  Frances, for God’s sake, this is no laughing matter. The company has gone through due process and is within its legal rights in drilling on your property. As you well know. They are losing patience and a lot of money by the delay and think you are some kind of looney. The next step is unquestionably a warrant for your arrest.

  SINCERELY,

  Ralston

  Frances put the letter down. Jail. Who would feed the dog?

  15

  When Wilson’s alarm rang at five in the morning, its obstreperous jangling drove him under the covers. For several minutes nothing in the world seemed more important than the warmth of his bed. It was a snug boat pitching on the uncertain sea of a new day and he clung to it.

  Gradually he let himself become interested in why he was getting up so early. It was the first day of the hunting season. The November sky was black. Although the temperature must have fallen down into the twenties, there was no snow on the ground. Hunters would be tracking their deer over brittle leaves and dried bracken, and the deer would hear them come. He had another plan.

  Encouraged by the smell of coffee and bacon ascending the stairway, he began to pull on his clothes. If the house were burning, his mother would make them all eat a big breakfast before she let them escape to safety.

  His dad, hunched over a bowl of oatmeal, asked where he was hunting.

  Wilson hesitated over his father’s question, busying himself with the plate of buckwheat cakes gilded with butter and syrup that his mother placed in front of him. Everything felt so good this morning, the warmth and light of the kitchen, the food, the excitement of a day’s hunting ahead of him. He didn’t want to spoil it by telling them he was going to hunt on Frances Crawford’s property. But if he didn’t, his dad might notice where Wilson parked the truck or one of his dad’s friends might run into him.

  A week ago there had been a big fight. Because his parents were so opposed to his going to college, he had given Frances’s address instead of his own when he sent out his applications. When he had received an acceptance from Northern, where there was one of the best geological departments anywhere, he had brought his acceptance home so he could take it out and look at it whenever he wanted to. His mom had come across it cleaning his rooms and had showed it to his dad.

  They had been furious. “That’s a sneaky thing to do, Wilson,” his dad had said, “and there isn’t going to be any more of it. What does that old lady think she’s up to?”

  His mother had even blamed Frances for his working on the rig. “I remember how she came by that day you went to Oclair to apply for the job and picked you up in her truck right in front of our house, bold as brass.”

  “She’s been nothing but trouble for you, Wilson,” his dad had said, “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t have gotten all beat up by those motorcyclists if you hadn’t been over there. As long as you’re living in this house, I don’t want to hear of you going to her place again.”

  And for the last few days Wilson had stayed away from Frances’s. Should his parents kick him out, he would have to use his money for board and room and he’d never be able to save enough for school. If he could just hold on until next fall he’d be all right. But he had no intention of not seeing Frances, though he supposed he’d have to find a way of doing it without letting his folks know. But today was another matter.

  “Well, Mrs. Crawford said I could hunt on her property.” His father put down his coffee cup and his mother gave the potatoes a violent stir. He hurried on, “I know what you’re thinking, but just this once. It’s the best place in the county to hunt. She’s never let anyone hunt there before. I wouldn’t have to talk to her or anything.”

  He could see his dad struggle between meat on the table and his feelings about Frances. The meat won.

  Wilson moved quietly along the trail that led into the Crawford property, hoping he wouldn’t spook the buck before daybreak, when the hunting season officially opened. About twenty feet into the woods from the trail, he had built a blind of pine branches. He squeezed himself into the opening and settled down on the frozen ground, enjoying the rich scent of the pine and feeling snug in the seclusion of the blind. Before choosing the site, he had spent days tracking the big buck. A short distance from the site he had found a “scrape,” a shallow circular depression in the ground made by the buck pawing at the earth and urinating to mark it as his territory. It was a warning to other bucks to stay away. November was the mating season and the buck didn’t want any interference with his does.

  Wilson had felt a little guilty about going after the big buck. Not that he took Frances’s warning seriously, but because he thought she half believed it. He was not sure why she had allowed him to hunt on her property. Of course he had promised her meat, but he felt the real reason was that she had seen how he had grown to accept much of what she believed about the land—and this was his reward.

  It was a fair contest, Wilson told himself. The buck knew all the paths. His smell and hearing and eyesight were superior to Wilson’s. The buck could run thirty miles an hour and his color was a perfect camouflage. Often the only glimpse you had of him against the brown foliage was the inside of a leg or the flick of his white tail.

  Wilson settled down into the blind, feeling well provisioned. His down jacket, the same one he used on the rig, was warm and light. His boots and gloves had foam insulation. Hooked onto his belt was a sheath knife that had once belonged to Dr. Crawford; it had a rosewood handle with brass rivets and a sharp stainless steel blade. In a pocket were sandwiches. Next to him was the gun that had killed the fawn. He felt that if he could kill the buck in a fair contest, it would erase his unhappy associations with the gun.

  Gray light began to separate earth from sky. Maneuvering slowly, Wilson picked up the rifle and swung it from side to side to be sure it cleared the branches of the blind. Then he settled down to wait. In the distance he heard other hunters rushing loudly through the woods, trying to scare the deer and get them running toward their buddies who were waiting to get a shot.

  As the morning dragged on, he heard rifle fire two or three times. He became impatient. The cold dampness of the ground began to leech through his clothes. His arms and legs were cramped from the long hours of sitting. By noon the woods were perfectly still and Wilson knew most of the hunters would have returned to their camps, some with their bucks, but most with stories of the big one that got away.

  Wilson was ready to leave, for you seldom saw deer this time of day. Deer browse for their feed in early morning, swallowing ten to fifteen pounds of twigs and leaves; their work done for the day, they find a sunny, well-protected spot and for the next several hours lay quietly chewing their cuds.

  As Wilson prepared to leave, there was movement on the trail. He froze. Two does stepped along. Ten yards behind them came the buck, his magnificent rack of antlers silhouetted against the sky. Wilson sighted a spot just in back of the buck’s shoulder, hesitated for a second, then pressed the trigger. After his rifle went off he heard a dull thunking sound that told him the bullet had hit home. The buck swung his head in Wilson’s direction, then turned into the woods.

  Wilson raced after him. He remembered the legend of the Indian hunters. But the buck did not lead him deep into the woods. A hundred yards or so from the trail, Wilson found him, legs crumbled under his body. He was dead.

  Wilson stood over him. There were pink splotches of blood on his chest; probably he had died from a lung shot. The antlers had ten points. Though Wilson had run only a short distance, he was breathing hard and his hands were trembling. Taking out his knife, he began to gut the buck. It was a job he hated and got through only because there was a certain satisfaction in doing it correctly. Once the buck was eviscerated, heart, lungs and stomach all removed, it seemed to Wilson the buck’s spirit had passed away and no longer could run off into the woods and life.

  16

  Frances heard the first shot only minutes after sunrise. On chilly mornings like this she woke to find
her hands drawn into rigid claws; each finger had to be painfully stretched out and wiggled into usefulness. The room was cold, and getting out of bed required cajolery and petty bribes—promises to herself of second cups of coffee and the further postponement of any housecleaning. She pulled on warm wool slacks and an old sweater. Because Wilson had said that if he got his deer he would stop by, she tied on a bright parsley-green scarf.

  The dog, in a fit of excessive morning enthusiasm, rushed to the door ahead of Frances, nearly knocking her over. While she searched through the closet for his red coat, put away at the end of last year’s hunting season, he whined impatiently to be let out. He was just the size and color of a small deer and she didn’t take chances. Each year dogs, cows and people were mistaken for deer and shot. In the afternoon she would walk down to the mailbox, wearing a red cap and ringing a cowbell, enjoying the expression on the faces of any hunters she met.

  Settled in front of the kitchen window with a large mug of coffee, she stared gloomily out at the colorless river merging with the colorless sky; even the feathers of the few goldfinches that came to the feeder had molted from bright yellow to an olive drab. The winter hunger for color was upon her.

  It was not only the drab winter landscape that distressed her. Upstream from the cabin, the oak, jackpine and birch had been cut down. In their place a derrick of red steel, with supports like giant cross stitches, rose into the air. Beside the derrick the one remaining tree, a pine that once had seemed a giant, now appeared insignificant.

  A week ago she had walked over to talk to the men who were beginning to clear the site for the oil rig. She had been furious with them for being on her land, doubly furious because she didn’t have the right to throw them off. But she wanted something, and to get it she knew she would have to control her anger.

  As soon as they saw her, bulldozer, chain saws, trucks, everything, had come to a halt. Just like the mural on the post office wall, she had thought, with its frieze of muscular lumbermen interrupted in the middle of cutting down a painted forest. Why were the men staring at her? Did they expect her to twine herself fanatically about a tree trunk and dare them to cut it down. She had called out, “Which one of you is the boss?”

  No one had moved. Fright or egalitarianism?

  “Somebody is surely in charge here.”

  One of the men had stepped forward. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and had the slightly near-sighted look of someone who checked blueprints or corrected papers. Except for the fact that he was splotched from head to foot with mud, he could have been a draftsman or an English teacher. “What can we do for you, Ma’am?”

  “I want to know exactly which trees of mine you plan to cut down.”

  “We’re only going to clear a space big enough for the rig, about three acres, couple thousand trees or so. All the poplars, most of the jackpine, those oak trees over there, and the big Norway. Oh, and the birch.” He looked at the other men for support, but they were looking at her.

  No one reached the age of eighty without plenty of experience in the art of relinquishment, but the Norway rose into the air like the spar of a windjammer. In the evening its dense shape was weightier than the darkness. She shoved a book under the man’s nose. “This is a history of Pine County. I hope you recognize the pine tree in the photograph on the cover. You start to fool around with that tree and I’ll get the County Board of Supervisors up here.” The pine on the cover was one that grew three miles away, but the man wouldn’t know that.

  He studied the picture. “Well …” Turning to the operator of the bulldozer, he asked, “What about if we leave that corner there where the pine is and they can squeeze the tanks over in this direction?”

  The operator shrugged.

  The man turned back to her. “But the other trees got to go. We’re already keeping the space more tight than we should. It’s for your own protection, ma’am. If a fire gets going, you dont’ want any trees close by.”

  She remembered the red glow in the sky last spring and nodded.

  Then the frieze of men came to life. Bulldozers rumbled back and forth for three days, shouldering down the trees; only the largest were accorded the dignity of being individually felled. They were cut down on the second day. She had sat in the cabin listening to the whine of the chain saws. By five o’clock she could see a pile of logs heaped up high as a house, all cut into two-foot lengths. A half hour later when she looked again, they were gone.

  She was out of the house and into her pickup. It took her nearly ten minutes to catch up with the big truck, but once she saw it, she gained on it steadily. It was big and cumbersome and the heavy load of logs slowed it down. Steal her trees, would they! She passed it on the crest of a hill, edging an oncoming car and its terrified driver off onto the shoulder. Once in front of the truck, she screeched to a halt, blocking its path.

  She jumped out and stamped over to the two men in the cab, who looked down at her and listened to what she had to say with stupified expressions. For many years they had worked with tough men, doing rough work. They had struggled with frozen equipment in below zero weather and once they had spent the better part of a day pulling a capsized trailer out of a mud bank in the rain, but even in their extremity they had not had recourse to so rich a vocabulary. The summary of Frances’s various suggestions and remarks was that they should turn their truck around forthwith and deliver the logs to her cabin door.

  When they arrived, they found her plans for them included stacking the wood. Otherwise, she told them, the sheriff would be called in. (“My good friend, the sheriff” was how she had put it.) There were eight cords of wood, and they finished stacking it by moonlight. When they were through, she gave them each a glass of cider and told them they had done a nice job.

  After that, the crew was never out of her sight. Each morning she measured the distance to the river with a ball of string to be sure they had not edged closer.

  In the daytime, when the bulldozing crew was there in front of her and she could confront the enemy, it was tolerable; in the evening, when they were gone and she stood looking across the three acres that had once been forest and were now nothing more than a flat stretch of naked sand, she was desolate and could think of nothing to say to the river.

  Then the derrick took over the empty space. For days trucks rolled in and out, dragging long trailers loaded with lengths of steel. What had once been a footpath through the woods became a roadway thirty feet wide. An enormous ditch stood ready to hold the brine and drilling compound. Another ditch was excavated for innumerable black plastic bags of cans and paper that seemed to accumulate endlessly. At one end of the clearing two house trailers had been set up.

  The dog was delighted with all the activity. Each morning he was anxious to be out on his rounds of the location and had long since made friends with the drillers. He begged scraps shamelessly from their lunch each noon, and in the evening when Wilson arrived for the night shift, he bounded over to greet him.

  Finally, two days ago, at four in the morning, the engines had been switched on and the drilling began. Sometimes the sound of the engines was like a surf rolling in; at other times there was an urgent bleating noise, accompanied by black puffs of smoke. More irritating than the noise was the suspense. If they found oil, the site would be enlarged and a moonscape of holding tanks, pumps and heaters would go up. Day and night, machinery would run and oil tankers would lumber in and out.

  Because he knew how anxious Frances was, Wilson had managed to be assigned to the rig so that he could report to her. He did it with a high sense of drama, calling in from obscure phone booths and lowering his voice as though someone might be following him. The men who worked on the rig weren’t supposed to give out any information which might alert other oil companies with property nearby. He had told her that if his calls were discovered, he could lose his job. What he hadn’t told her was that much of his secrecy was to keep his parents from knowing that he was still in touch with her.

  Early in
the afternoon Frances heard a truck pull into her road. Since the dog wasn’t barking, she guessed it was Wilson. He climbed out of the front seat, grinning. From the doorway she watched him heave the carcass of a deer out of the back of the pickup.

  She saw from the size of its antlers that it was the old buck. She told herself there was no point in mourning his passing. The herd was large this year. They were predicting a bad winter with the kind of snow that immobilized deer. Certainly a shot was better than slow starvation. She consoled herself with Wilson’s triumphant look and the thought of how good a haunch of venison would taste. But with the buck dead, she wondered who would help her watch over the land.

  17

  When she looked out of the window and saw the snow whipping into migrating drifts, Wilson’s mother begged him to stay home. “Call them and tell them you’re not feeling well,” she said.

  But Wilson could imagine what T. K.’s response would be to that. “First little bit of weather we get and the boy cops out,” he’d say. “When you goin’ to hire on some real men, Pete?” If the weather was bad tonight, it would be a lot worse before the winter was over. Once they started drilling a well, they didn’t stop until they finished. The rig cost thousands of dollars a day; to let it stand idle would have been wasteful. It ran twenty-four hours a day, twelve months a year.

  When Wilson reached the site, the earlier shift was leaving. “Don’t envy you,” one of the men called out to him. “That pipe’s colder than a well-digger’s bottom.” Wilson’s heart sank when he saw they hadn’t finished sending the pipe down and his shift would have to complete the job, struggling with the cold metal in the snow and high winds.

  Pete sent Wilson up to the platform. “You can start off up there,” he told him. “If it gets too bad, holler, and I’ll send Barch up to trade off with you.”