Temple Grove by Scott Elliott

Author:Scott Elliott
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780295804712
Publisher: University of Washington Press

14

Paul lay awake in his tent thinking he should have talked his way out of the situation on the ridge, had a better story ready, or been more careful in his spying—anything instead of resorting to the gun so soon. Anything but getting caught.

Sleeping was often a difficult prospect when you were alone in the woods. In the confines of his tent it was easy to imagine that the sounds he heard outside were cougars or bears snooping around. On certain sleepless nights his imagination conjured a host of cougars and bears circling the tent, waiting for their moment. On several occasions, he'd thrown open the tent flap, certain he would see and need to confront a tooth-and-claw predator and been amazed to see nothing but his own empty boots stuffed with his socks, a benign breeze working the leaves and grass.

It was another thing entirely to have good reason to believe that two (or more) burly loggers were looking for you because you'd threatened to kill them.

He had moved his camp from the bunchgrass meadow to a soft knoll in front of a crook in a redcedar about fifty feet into the forest, thinking it would make him more difficult to find, but the new site didn't set him completely at ease. He'd already put the loggers on alert. The next time they met, all hell was likely to break loose, especially considering the loud retreat of the kid about his age and the size of the man with the mane of black hair and the grey-flecked beard who looked so much like himself.

The biggest problem, he decided, was the gun. If newfangled gear presented a problem in the wilderness experience, then a weapon like a gun presented a problem in the basic human experience. Though he couldn't see the pistol, it throbbed with a certainty of its own significance in the pocket of his day pack, which rested on the ground at the mouth of the tent. It was hard to take your mind off of a gun. Its power was too certain, its iconic potential for deadliness too emphatic. He'd imagined several times the scenario in which he heard voices approaching from the distance. The ever-mischievous forest had provided him with several of these anxious moments. Three or four times in the early dusk he was certain he heard the approach of a mob bent on revenge.

In spite of what he wanted to believe, the first step of action he took in every imagined fight scenario was to grab the pistol and ready it to bluff or blast his way out. He saw them coming to the tent door and saw himself unzipping it just enough to fire at them. He saw himself getting out of the tent before they arrived and hiding behind a tree opposite it and surprising them from behind with a volley of bullets when they stood before the tent to demand he come out.

How wrong was it to envision this extreme defense?

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