At last she turned the Walkman off, rewrapped the headphone wire, gave the black plastic case a perfectly unselfconscious smooch, and tucked it lovingly back into its pocket. She eyed the mashed-up lunchbag and decided she couldn't bring herself to look inside and see what shape the tuna sandwich and the remaining Twinkie might be in. Too depressing. A good thing she'd eaten her egg before it could turn into egg salad. That thought probably deserved a giggle, but there were apparently no giggles in her; the old giggle-well, which her mother believed inexhaustible, seemed to have temporarily gone dry.
Trisha sat on the bank of the little stream, which was less than three feet across here, and disconsolately ate potato chips, first out of the burst chip-bag and then plucking them off her lunch-sack and finally dredging the smallest fragments out of the bottom of her pack. A big bug droned past her nose and she cringed from it, crying out and raising a hand to protect her face, but it was only a horsefly.
At last, moving as wearily as a woman of sixty after a hard day's work (she felt like a woman of sixty after a hard day's work), Trisha replaced everything in her pack-even the shattered Gameboy went back in-and stood up. Before rebuckling the flap, she took off her poncho and held it up in front of her. The flimsy thing hadn't been any protection in her slide down the slope, and now it was torn and flapping in a way she would have considered comic under other circumstances-it looked almost like a blue plastic hula skirt-but she supposed she'd better keep it. If nothing else, it might protect her from the bugs, which had reformed their cloud around her hapless head. The mosquitoes were thicker than ever, no doubt drawn by the blood on her arms. They probably smelled it.
'Yug,' Trisha said, wrinkling her nose and waving her cap at the cloud of bugs, 'how gross is that?' She tried to tell herself she ought to be grateful she hadn't broken her arm or fractured her skull, also grateful that she wasn't allergic to stings like Mrs. Thomas's friend Frank, but it was hard to be grateful when you were scared, scratched, swollen, and generally banged up.
She was putting the rags of her poncho back on-the pack would come next-when she looked at the stream and noticed how muddy the banks were just above the water. She dropped to one knee, wincing as the waist of her jeans chafed against the wasp-stings above her hip, and took up a fingerful of pasty brown-gray gluck. Try it or not?
'Well, what can it hurt?' she asked with a little sigh, and dabbed the mud on the swelling above her hip. It was blessedly cool, and the itchy pain diminished almost at once. Working carefully, she dabbed mud on as many of the stings as she could reach, including the one which had puffed up beside her eye. Then she wiped her hands on her jeans (both hands and jeans considerably more battered now than they had been six hours ago), donned her torn poncho, then shrugged into her pack. Luckily, it lay without rubbing against any of the places where she'd been stung. Trisha began walking beside the stream again, and five minutes later she re-entered the woods.
She followed the stream for the next four hours or so, hearing nothing but twitting birds and the ceaseless drone of bugs. It drizzled for most of that time, and once it showered hard enough to wet her through again even though she took shelter under the biggest tree she could find. At least there was no thunder and lightning with the second downpour.
Trisha had never felt as much like a town girl as she did while that miserable, terrifying day was winding down toward dark. The woods came in clenches, it seemed to her. For awhile she would walk through great old stands of pine, and there the forest seemed almost all right, like the woods in a Disney cartoon. Then one of those clenches would come and she would find herself struggling through snarly clumps of scrubby trees and thick bushes (all too many of the latter the kind with thorns), fighting past interlaced branches that clawed for her arms and eyes. Their only purpose seemed to be obstruction, and as mere tiredness slipped toward exhaustion, Trisha began to impute them with actual intelligence, a sly and hurtful awareness of the outsider in the ragged blue poncho. It began to seem to her that their desire to scratch her-to perhaps even get lucky and poke out one of her eyes-was actually secondary; what the bushes really wanted was to shunt her away from the brook, her path to other people, her ticket out.
Trisha was willing to leave sight of the brook if the clenches of trees and tangles of bushes near it got too thick, but she refused to leave the sound of it. If the brook's low babble got too thin, she'd drop to her hands and knees and crawl under the worst of the branches rather than sliding along them and looking for a hole. Crawling over the squelchy ground was the worst part (in the pine groves the ground was dry and nicely carpeted with needles; in the clenchy tangles it always seemed wet). Her pack dragged through the lacings of branches and bushes, sometimes actually getting stuck ... and all the time, no matter how thick the going, the cloud of minges and noseeums hung and danced in front of her face.
She understood what made all of this so bad, so dispiriting, but could not articulate it. It had something to do with all the things she couldn't name. Some stuff she knew because her mother had told her: the birches, the beeches, the alders, the spruces and pines; the hollow hammering of a woodpecker and the harsh cawing cry of the crows; the creaky-door sound of the crickets as the day began to darken ... but what was everything else? If her mother had told her, Trisha no longer remembered, but she didn't think her mother had told her in the first place. She thought her mother was really just a town girl from Massachusetts who had lived in Maine for awhile, liked to walk in the woods, and had read a few nature guides. What, for instance, were the thick bushes with the shiny green leaves (please God,, not poison oak)? Or the small, trashy-looking trees with the dusty-gray trunks? Or the ones with the narrow hanging leaves? The woods around Sanford, the woods her mother knew and walked - sometimes with Trisha and sometimes alone-were toy woods. These were not toy woods.
Trisha tried to imagine hundreds of searchers flooding toward her. Her imagination was good, and at first she was able to do this quite easily. She saw big yellow schoolbuses with the words CHARTER SEARCH PARTY in the destination windows pulling into parking areas all along the western Maine part of the Appalachian Trail. The doors opened and out spilled men in brown uniforms, some with dogs on chains, all with walkie-talkies clipped to their belts, a special few with those battery-powered loudhailers; these would be what she heard first, big amplified God-voices calling 'PATRICIA McFARLAND, WHERE ARE YOU? IF YOU HEAR, COME TO THE SOUND OF MY VOICE!'
But as the shadows in the woods thickened and joined hands, there was only the sound of the stream-no wider and no smaller than when she had tumbled down the slope beside it-and the sound of her own breathing. Her mental pictures of the men in the brown uniforms weakened, little by little.
I can't stay out here all night, she thought, no one can expect me to stay out here all night
She felt panic trying to grab her again-it was speeding her heartbeat, drying out her mouth, making her eyes throb in their sockets. She was lost in the woods, hemmed in by trees for which she had no name, alone in a place where her town-girl vocabulary had little use, and she was consequently left with just a narrow range of recognition and reaction, all of it primitive. From town girl to cave girl in one easy step.
She was afraid of the dark even when she was at home in her room, with the glow from the streetlight on the corner failing in through the window. She thought that if she had to spend the night out here, she would die of terror.
Part of her wanted to run. Never mind how flowing water was bound to take her to people eventually, all that was likely just a crock of Little House on the Prairie shit. She had been following this stream for miles now, and all it had brought her to was more bugs. She wanted to run away from it, run in whatever direction the going was easiest. Run and find people before it got dark. That the idea was totally nutso didn't help much. It certainly didn't
