The Woods
A kindly widow and a shy friend
The Woods
When I was 37 my husband and I moved from Georgia to the Olympic Peninsula near Seattle. It was a big change in a year of changes. Our son, our only child, had died only months before, and staying in the same house full of memories was just too much for me. I guess too much for Jim as well. One day he came home from work early and just plain as day said, ‘We’re moving”. I didn’t even ask where. I was ready to be gone.
He had gotten a job working for the state park service, similar to what he had done in the logging business in Georgia, so we went from one rural area to another, but this place was nothing like what we had known our whole lives. It was beautiful, and lush, and the weather was fine for me after a lifetime of that humidity and heat.
We found a small place on the edge of the national forest, just between Crescent Lake and a town called Forks. It was quaint and small, famous for some movie called Twilight about vampires and werewolves or some such silliness. I had never seen the movie but we did go see the townsfolk put on a play about it. The kids had more eagerness than talent, but I enjoyed it, and we grew to like the town and the people there. It was mostly white folks, but no one paid us any mind or made us feel unwanted. My husband made friends at the VFW (he was a Marine during the hell that was Fallujah and Mosul), and I made friends with the wives of his friends, playing bingo and cards, and drinking the occasional watered down beer. It was nice.
But mostly I kept to myself at home, doing a bit of gardening and hiking on the trails behind our house pretty much every day. I enjoyed the solitude of it. Just a few steps away from the house you would think you were in a different world. The trees were majestic. It was real old growth forest, not that flimsy excuse most people have in their suburban parks, but gigantic old pines, cedars, alders, and all the attendant undergrowth. In the Spring and Summer the bushes got so thick and tall you couldn’t see over them or through them too far. It was like being lost to civilization.
At first it was daunting. I got lost a bit, but before long I was going farther and farther from the house, and I knew every turn and every trail. My husband said to be careful because there were bears around, but I had seen a few, they stayed out of my way and I stayed out of theirs. I thought there was nothing out there that could scare me, but one day I found out I was wrong about that.
It was a beautiful day, mostly cloudy but warm and dry. I was going down a trail I had passed by a few times before but never tried because it was a bit overgrown and tight with high bushes all around it. It turned and meandered, and led down into a bit of a hollow I’d never known was there. It wasn’t quite spooky but it was quieter than the forest usually is. I didn’t think much about that at the time.
I took out my phone to see if I could check where I was on the GPS, but I couldn’t seem to get a signal, and while I wasn’t looking where I was going I walked right into something solid. So solid that I just bounced off and ended up on my butt in the middle of the trail. I looked up and saw nothing but black fur. I thought, ‘oh great, won’t Jim be mad that I didn’t listen about the bears’, but the more I looked at it, it didn’t seem like a bear. All I saw was a long leg, and above that a long arm, and looking up further I had the funniest feeling. I remembered being a little girl and going to the zoo with my dad. It was the first time the zoo in Atlanta had a gorilla exhibit, and I remember being mesmerized looking at the big male gorilla, and him looking at me. That was all I could think of. There was a gorilla right here in the woods.
And it looked back down at me. Its eyes were large and black. It bent its head and torso down just a bit, opened its mouth and made a kind of huffing sound. That sort of brought me back to reality. I had heard stories of things in the woods out here, called Bigfoot or Sasquatch, and I just thought that was more made up nonsense like the booger man or the Loch Ness monster. But this thing was sure real. And I got scared. Did they eat people? I didn’t know, but I remembered something about not looking gorillas in the eye because it made them want to fight. I looked down at my foot but it just kept standing there. I had an apple in my pocket, I always brought a snack or something along, so not knowing what else to do I reached in and grabbed it and just held it up over my head. It made another sound, louder, more threatening this time. I just shut my eyes and prayed. When I opened them, the apple was gone, and I was alone.
I ran back to the house, looking back over my shoulder the whole way, thinking that thing was going to come back, maybe change its mind about eating me. I ran up the porch and locked the door, something I had never done before that. I looked out from behind the curtain on the back window, breathing hard. But there was nothing there, and little by little I calmed down. When Jim got home I told him the whole story. He just shook his head, muttering something like “told you about them bears” as he made his way out to the shed behind the garage. I asked him what he was doing and he said he was gonna take care of it. He came out a few minutes later with a large spring trap. He said if that bear was nearby he’d bait it and trap it, and he had a tranquilizer gun for work that would put it to sleep so it could be moved out somewhere away from people. I tried telling him again that it wasn’t a bear, but he just shrugged that off, saying, “well we’ll see now won’t we”, and walked off into the woods.
Jim went to work the next day as usual, and I just stayed in the house. It wasn’t like me, on a nice day when I could’ve been pulling weeds or watering. I didn’t even think about going into the woods, but just stared at the trees, thinking any minute that thing was going to come running out. But nothing happened. At least not that day or the next. I was starting to think that maybe Jim was right, maybe I did just run into a bear, such a stupid touristy thing to do. I decided I would at least get out and water my now sad looking tomatoes. I had just got the hose turned on when I heard it. It was like a low yowling sound. It wasn’t like anything I had ever heard, not back in Georgia and not out here. I froze. It had to be that gorilla thing. I didn’t want to see it, but at the same time I couldn’t help myself. It sounded so mournful and sad, like a hurt dog. I got the tranquilizer rifle from the safe and went down the path and into the woods.
My husband had chained the trap to a sturdy old alder tree just on the edge of a clearing where we had a few apple and plum trees. He had hidden it in a small hole dug out and covered with leaves just under a barrel of apples hanging from one of the branches. The thing had stepped right on it, and it was rolling around on the ground tugging at the chain. Getting a better look at it, I wasn’t as scared as I thought before. It was barely as big as me, not even six feet tall. Weren’t they supposed to be huge? Maybe it was just a kid. It made me think of my own son, all the suffering and pain he went through, lying in that hospital bed, moaning just like this child was now. My fear vanished and I could only feel pity for him. I put the rifle down in the grass and moved forward slowly.
“Shhh” I said. He hadn’t noticed me until then (and yes, it was a ‘him’, I know that much about anatomy), but when he did he snarled and made that huffing sound again, only much louder. He bared his teeth at me, all the while pulling at the trap but the chain held fast. “It’s ok” I said in a calm tone, and I reached up in the pail and got an apple, and kneeling I held it out to him with my eyes down. Somehow that calmed him down. Maybe he remembered me from the forest. Maybe my skin made him feel I was more like him, that I wasn’t a threat. I don’t know. But when I took the trap off his leg he let me do it. It made me glad I had spent all those years as a little girl hunting and trapping in the woods with my dad and brothers, otherwise he might have laid there until Jim got home, and who knows what would’ve happened then.
He got up slowly, I could see some blood on his ankle from the trap, but he could walk well enough. When he got to the edge of the forest, just before he moved off into the bushes, he looked back and his eyes met mine. This time I didn’t look down.
I put the gun back in the safe, and the trap back in the shed. Jim must have seen the blood on it, but he didn’t ask me about it and I didn’t offer. We went on about our lives, and before too long I was out walking in the woods again. Somehow, I didn’t feel afraid anymore, but I steered clear of that hollow. That was his place and I let him have it.
The years went on and I thought about the creature in the woods less often, but I never forgot him. I would put out apples and the like in the hollow space of an old tree trunk, too far up for the deer or bears to get at them. Sometimes they would be there for a while, sometimes a long while, but usually they were gone the next day when I came by, and I had a feeling who had taken them. Jim and I both got a little grayer, a little slower, but we kept going. He retired at 55, after a life of hard work in the outdoors, and we looked forward to settling down and really spending some time together, maybe traveling a bit, but he passed from a heart attack less than a year after stopping work. Ain’t that just like life, to throw you another curve ball, right when you put in all your dues.
It was probably for the best in a way. Things started changing, crime and drugs came in just like the big cities. I still saw my friends, but less and less. I didn’t like what the people in town were turning into. Meth heads they called them. Jim would’ve just called them white trash, and he’d have been right. I thought I would be safe being out in the woods, that nobody knew about me, but I guess I was wrong about that too. One night I was sitting alone watching television, and I heard something strange outside. I was just getting up to open the safe, just in case, when someone kicked at the front door, hard. I fumbled with the combination but I didn’t have time. The door came flying in, followed by a scruffy looking man with one of those covid masks on his face and a hammer in his hand. The mask didn’t matter, I knew who he was, just another dead beat who hung around downtown, and he knew that I knew, so he wasn’t looking to leave me with a few bruises. He was here to kill me.
“Where’s the money at bitch!” Two more of the same sort of trash pushed in after him. I lit out the back door, trying to slam it closed, but I could hear them crashing through the house. If I could just get to the woods, I thought, I knew those trails well enough to run them in the dark. Maybe that would be enough. I almost made it.
Just as I was getting through the fruit trees my stupid slipper came off and tripped me up. I didn’t sit around the house in my jogging shoes, but this was one time I wished I had. I tried to get up but the one with the hammer cut me off, standing between me and woods. The other two stood in a circle around me. I just looked at him. “I know who you are, you best get out of here or..”
“Or what you nigger cunt”, his mask had slipped down over his face, but he was beyond that pretense, “your nearest neighbor is half a mile down the road, and just as old a fuck as you. Now you get back in that house and open that safe or I’m gonna have some fun with this”. He held up the hammer, like I hadn’t seen it already. I didn’t know what to do, I thought I was through for sure. One of the others reached for my arm to pull me up, when the third one cried out, pointing to the woods. “Holy shit!” and he was off running. I looked up just in time to see a giant hand come down over Mr. Hammer Time’s head and pick him straight up in the air. He tried to scream but it didn’t make much of a sound. He got one swing in with the hammer before the fist closed and he went limp all over. I could hear the bones of his skull collapse, and the hammer drop with a thud to the grass.
There he was, after all these years, my son. Not the one I had given birth to and raised, but the one I had saved, and who had somehow adopted me. He had grown some, that was sure, but I could still make out the bald patch on his ankle where the trap had bit him. It was him alright. He just held the body of the ruffian up off the ground, his arm straight out, blood rushing between his fingers. He looked down at me, and our eyes met once more. Then he turned and walked back into the woods, the man’s body slung over his shoulder like a sack. I could hear a car engine revving and gravel flying, likely the other two since they were nowhere to be seen. When I looked back he was gone, just like that.
The sheriff stopped by the next day while I was having the front door replaced. He asked me what had happened, and I told some of the truth, a sort of truth. I said my dog had scared them off. The Sheriff gave me a funny look. “Dog? I didn’t know you had a dog. Where’s it at?” I said he was off playing in the woods, but he would be around if I needed him. And I think he will be. I think he will be.