There are mosquitoes, too—not as many, but another maddening irritation at night. Several always get into the tent, whining around invisible in the dim light and biting me when my guard is down. I splat them when they land, and thwack their little flat corpses off my skin with one finger. Hundreds more hover and press frantically at the tent’s window screens with a high urgent screamy whine. The sound creates an uneasiness at a primal level, awakens an instinctive aversion to biting insects that’s built into the human genome. Impossible to ignore. Makes me feel under siege, eases off when I blow out the candles.
There are bugs I’d never heard of and didn’t believe existed until they bit me: no-see-ums. No-see-ums are semitransparent flies about as big as a comma, and they bite painfully. You’re going about your business and are startled by a sharp pain, like a splinter. When you look for the source of the pain, you can’t find it at first. Then you spot the tiny bastard and smear him into nothing. How can such a minute thing cause such pain in a creature as big as, relatively, a mountain? Fortunately, the bite doesn’t itch afterward. And they can’t get at me inside the tent. I was lucky I bought superfine-mesh tent screens, or they’d drive me out of here.
Then there’s fear. Sometimes, when the weather is just right and the bugs are momentarily absent and the woods do look like serene glades in the sun and the birds are singing all around, there’s no nag of fear at all; it’s sweet and good. But at times, even during the day, I get spooked when I head up to the spring and into the deeper woods. I always feel I’m being covertly watched, and I probably am—animals live here. I realize I am a stranger here. It’s like walking in an unfamiliar neighborhood and some local gives you more attention than you’d like. The woods are a community, and I don’t know its residents.
At night, I’m always afraid. The dark is mysterious; I am blind; my little outpost of candlelight seems very isolated. Earnest swears that Vermont’s black bears are harmless, but I am deathly afraid of them at night—I nearly threw up after watching Grizzly Man last year. I strain my ears to hear the night noises beyond the mosquitoes’ shrilling. And there are always things moving out there. A crackle in this direction, a leafy scraping there. The stealthy progress of some creature moving over last year’s leaf litter. Shiftings. A stick breaking. Once, a series of hellish shrieks in the distance that literally brought up the hair on my arms.
A couple of times, I swear I’ve been stalked by a human. Regular, two-legged-sounding quiet footfalls from uphill coming closer, a zipping sound like fabric scraping past a twig. Then silence charged with horrible imminence, expectancy. Maybe one of the Goslant “trash” up the hill, who heard about this woman camping out where no one could hear her scream. I haven’t seen one of the Goslants yet, but picture them as a tribe of leering, gap-toothed, twitchy-eyed sinewy men with evil intentions about everything.
I may have a death wish, but if I’m going to shuffle off this mortal coil I’m going to do it my way, not subject myself to some other creature’s or human’s perverse preferences. So I go to sleep with a set of defensive weapons carefully arranged where my hand can find them in the dark: flashlight, sheath knife out of its sheath, hammer, shovel. Anything and anyone could come through the thin nylon with ease. Wake up in the night but am too afraid to go out to the outhouse hole I dug, about a hundred feet away among the trees, so I wait until my bladder’s about to explode, and then I scuttle out and pee right next to the tent.
Like so much else I feel up here, this fear transcends conscious or rational control. My body must remember being a timid little hominid in a big predatory world. It knows the harsh laws that govern nighttime in the deep woods. Sometimes I lie with suspended breath so I can hear noises better.
And, I hate to write this down—an admission I’ll feel stupid about later, when I’ve escaped this situation: I fear supernatural dangers. It’s as if I sense movements in mental space, unnamed creatures of the air or earth, sentient but inhuman beings that all outdoor-living peoples acknowledge and fear. If I could say where they came from, it would be the boulder tumble uphill, out of the crevasses. I don’t even know that they’re malevolent, only that being around them could destroy me, or that our kinds have always been enemies.
Each dawn I chide myself for these imaginings. I rationalize them as stemming from the same species proclivities that led people to invent gods, demons, ghosts. I almost laugh at myself. And as night falls I become aware of the gargantuan stupidity, the hubris, of such skepticism. Of such profound ignorance of the world’s real ways. The source of the fear is vast, ancient, deeper
