The Silence

Sean contemplates the fifteen year old photo of his twelve man Special Forces squad with a longing he cannot name. Eleven men stare resolutely ahead. Sean gazes somewhere different, deep within. On his uniform is an insignia, "Never Lost. Squad Orienteering Leader."

It is early spring in the suburbs. The leaf blowers' roar rattle Sean's head. He breathes slow and deep to ward off a growing migraine. A second crew sets up next door. When a third duo of leaf blowers begins on the other side of his house, he walks into his living room where his wife, Cyndi, reads a magazine while talking on the phone to her best friend.

"I can't take much more of this."

Cyndi puts her phone on mute. "Jesus, Sean, toughen up."

Sean goes down to the basement to his sacred place where his pack and survival gear are stored. When Cindy leaves for her weekly grocery shopping, he makes a long simmering fantasy real. He stuffs his pack with his tent and the gear he will need to survive a week, a month, or a lifetime, in deep wild woods. He eyes his emergency beacon, hesitates a moment, then throws it in the pack. On the kitchen table, he leaves a note.

I'm gone. We'll both be better off.

He prints out detailed topographical maps of his destination, the vast boreal forest between Manitoba and Saskatchewan, Canada.

Sean drives for thirty hours, north over the Canadian border, then northwest and west. After awhile, the road is his alone. Visions of his wife and home barely register in his mind. They are as a dream once vivid that fades with consciousness. He enters the rural municipality of Lac du Bonnet, population 3,500 scattered over four hundred twenty-five square miles. Along the banks of the deep blue waters of the Winnepeg River, he rests in solitude and studies his topographical maps. Four hours west, sits a thin line that looks to be a dirt road that dead-ends two miles short of a small pond at the edge of the boreal forest. He heads west again.

The dirt road is exactly where he expected it to be. It has been long abandoned. Weeds and brush reclaim it. Sean inches down the road to the end where he spots a narrow hiking trail that must lead the two miles to the woodlands pond. He reconnoiters a quarter mile down the trail, around, over, and through, thorny brush. No one has used the trail, he gauges, for ten or twenty years. He gathers his pack and drives his car into the woods a quarter mile from the old trailhead, returns to the trailhead, forces his way a mile down the trail, then turns left into the woods.
He hikes through the woods for most of the day, twenty miles, he estimates, every step further from a tamed world. Amidst towering old trees are fire-scarred trunks, remnants of lightning strikes and forest fires. Fungus and insects have taken their toll. Dead trees, broken limbs, old and middle aged trees, saplings, and an impossible frenzy of undergrowth all share the forest. Sean had witnessed the chaos wrought by homo sapiens. Here, in the absence of humans, chaos is the natural order of things.

Clouds scud across the sun. In the dim light, Sean listens intently to the background noise of the forest. Hums and clicks of insects mingle with trills of songbirds, small creatures crunching through the underbrush, distant screeches he cannot identify. Sometimes the background music of the forest stops and all is still, as if waiting for a divine spark to resume. As to sounds of humanity, nothing, only silence.

Sean knows that grizzlies are the only lethal predators in these woods, yet cannot shake a sense of menace, an instinct he had learned not to ignore. He proceeds with all of his senses on high alert. As primal darkness closes in, Sean senses a change in the air, subtle and unmistakeable. He picks up his pace, and comes upon a spring fed ten acre pond, large enough to sustain salmon, trout, and whitefish, and to provide water for all of one man's needs. With his ax, he clears an area large enough to pitch his tent and make a fire ring. He'd packed a week's supply of food. After that, he will hunt and fish. Tomorrow, he will remove brush and cut down trees to create an opening in the woods where he will build a small log cabin with a fire hole through the roof. Bitter cold will not set in for a few months. If Sean remains once the first heavy snow arrives, he will be stuck for the winter even if he chooses one day to return to civilization.

For three months, Sean crosses days off his calendar, then throws it into the fire pit.

A deep chill wakes him from his first night in the cabin he built with logs and pine needles, and pitch. He had not lit a fire. Outside, the air holds a thin feel of coming winter. Last week had seen a brief cold snap that eased in two days. The brutal cold of winter at this latitude will be upon him soon enough.

"Good morning, Sean," he says to himself. "Hey, Sean, good morning."

The human voice jolts him, even though it is his own. He had not spoken a single word since he came to the forest. He has been mostly devoid of thoughts, other than the necessary tasks of hunting and fishing, curing meat for the winter, cutting down trees for firewood.

Sean contemplates the truth that if he becomes seriously ill, crushed by a falling tree, attacked by a grizzly, he will die. He is at peace and there is no going back. He will live out his life alone in these woods. Hunger fills him with a growing unease. The hunting has been more difficult than he imagined. Unless he downs a moose or large buck, he will have to ration his calories over the winter, an unappealing prospect, maybe fatal if winter is especially severe. He straps on his rifle and ventures out in search of game. He treads softly, hypervigilant, and stops often to listen for larger creatures, for predators as much as for food. Grizzlies on the verge of hyperphagia, their preparation for hibernation when they eat nonstop, will sense winter not far off, and he would be a fine morsel.

A loud crashing in the woods to his right, startles Sean. He dives to the ground and in the same motion chambers his rifle, points it ahead of him, ready to swivel in the direction of a charging beast. For five long minutes he stays motionless on the ground. Through the trees, a giant bull moose, antlers nearly six feet wide, eyes him warily. The creature has lived in these woods for a long time, neither victim nor king, a survivor. Before Sean can get off a shot, it bolts away and disappears. After six more hours, Sean returns to his cabin with two snowshoe hares.

***

The woman cannot not believe her good fortune. She had set out to clear her mind by searching for ghost roads on the edge of the wilderness. At the end of the abandoned dirt road where she had carefully maneuvered her car, she finds the old barely visible trail. She straps on her waist pack, puts a snack bar inside, shoves a water bottle into the side pocket, and heads down the trail. She checks her watch. One hour in, no more, then she will head back. It is slow going. She puzzles at the signs that someone had recently cleared away some of the brush. No vistas, only trees surround the trail. At forty minutes, she decides she's had enough, and turns around.

"Oh, my god," she says.

She has been so focused on moving forward that she has no idea when she lost the trail or in which direction she strayed. She fights against the fear and trembling that overtakes her, and recalls the lessons preached by her hiking club. Above all, stay calm. Orient yourself. Look for subtle cues from your surroundings that may lead you back to the trail you were on. If you see a stream, follow it downward until you reach a road. She surveys the woods around her. There. Ten feet beyond are some trees that look familiar. She strikes out in the direction she believes will lead her back to the old trail.

On her third day of wandering lost, she becomes light headed from the lack of food and shelter, and the chill nights. She trudges on, trips over roots, gashes her arms and legs, gets up and stumbles mindlessly on again. She cries quietly nonstop. On the morning of her fourth day lost, she comes upon a glade under a canopy of red alder and quaking aspen. For a moment, only a moment, she thinks that the small meadow might presage a thinning of the forest, and lead her out. Beyond the glade are only multitudinous trees.

***

The sound shimmers and undulates. It is beautiful, like nothing Sean has heard in the forest. A migratory bird, perhaps, late for its journey south. He sits down, stills his breathing, and waits. The sound comes again, still faint. From the timbre of the sound, he knows it comes from the small glade he had passed through, a half mile away from his spot. A third time, still from the glade. A dread rises within him. The sound is no bird. It is the voice of a young woman.

"Help me. Help me."

Silence, then barely audible over the distance, desperate sobbing. She must have found the abandoned hiking trail, Sean thinks, and decided to go on a solitary adventure that would last two or three hours. It would have been easy to lose that trail and become hopelessly disoriented. Sean had forged his way twenty miles from the trail through the deep woods. The woman would not have come in a straight line. She has to have been wandering for days. Water sources are plentiful, but without the right tools and skills, she'd not have eaten. Nights were cold and would get colder. Sean knows that without warmth and food, she will soon die, and no one will ever find her. What is it to him? He'd seen death, taken life. An incalculable number of people in the world will have died since he awoke that morning.

Her voice again, this time a high-pitched scream of pure terror. Tears roll down Sean's face. He jams warm clothes, food, water, headlamps and his emergency beacon into his pack, and hoists it onto his shoulders. His eyes hurt with migraine pressure. He looks to the sky, screams to the heavens.

"Why, damn you. Why did you come here?"

He tries to remember the world he chose to leave months ago. He peers behind toward the endless forest, and the silence. With tears still in his eyes he heads toward the glade, and the woman.

BIO: Kenneth N. Margolin is a retired attorney, and lives with his wife, Judith, in Newton, Massachusetts. During his legal career, Ken made it a sacred mission to avoid legalese in his professional writing, believing that persuasive legal writing should tell a good story. Ken's stories and creative nonfiction have been published in print and online in Short Edition, Sport Literate Magazine, Dash Literary Magazine, The Blotter, CommuterLit, Evening Street Review, Corner Bar Magazine, Twenty-Two Twenty-Eight, The Literary Hatchet, among others; poetry in Shot Glass Journal.

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