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I stop to fill my whiskey bottle when I hear the ripple of a creek, this one deep enough that it has a decent flow to it and a couple of slow pools near the rocks where I see some smallmouth bass passing the time, their mouths opening and closing in a rhythm that my own breathing picks up, slow and steady. I don’t know why I’m thinking so hard out here about all the things I’ve done wrong. Maybe because I’ve got nothing but time and I haven’t exactly done a whole lot of things right.

Once my bottle is full I climb back up the bank awkwardly, grabbing on to trees and pulling myself with my arms more than I am using my good leg. I lose my balance enough to knock against a little elm, scraping the raw edge of my foot against it and sending a blaze across my brain.

I dig out the oxy and break it in half with my fingernail, although a lot of the nail gets bent back before the pill gives away. I’m malnourished, all the little bits that used to make up me draining away, slowly. I get back up, hobbling into position and leaning a touch to the side where the whiskey bottle hangs heavy. I know it’s going to pull me as I go. I know I’m nowhere near to making a straight line as I hobble forward, walking stick, then good foot.

But at least I’m still moving.

The best way to spot a trail is to not look right at it.

Anybody that knows the woods gets that, but trying to teach someone how to see things without looking is a tall order. I knew the woods around our house well enough to be aware of the deer paths and raccoon stomping grounds, and Dad taught me how to gauge the size of a deer from its print, but it was Davey Beet that showed me how to find a trail where there were no tracks.

“Right there,” he told me, grabbing my wrist right before I went down to the edge of a ravine.

Embarrassed that I fell and even more because he’d caught me, I shook him off. “What’s right where?”

Davey nodded to the west, and I’d done what anybody would do, stared hard at the brush, trying to figure out what exactly it was that had his attention.

“Nope,” he said. “Don’t look at the ground. Look midway up the trees and rest your eyes. Then you’ll see it.”

And damn if he wasn’t right. It was like one of those pictures where a thousand different little things make up one big picture, and if you’re looking too close at the details you can’t see the overall view.

The deer trail that catches my eye now does so only because I haven’t given up scanning the trees for blazes on the off-chance that I’ll wander back across the trail. It’s not paint that I spot but a knot that either looks like a human face or I’ve been alone way too long. Whatever the case, I’m looking at that and not the ground when it all comes together, and there’s the deer path.

Humans aren’t the only creatures of habit. Deer use the same trails, moving from a bedding area to a feeding area to water every day. It’s not unusual to find the splayed-finger paws of raccoons and the scratch of a turkey right next to the cloven hoofprint of a deer. A wildlife trail is used often, and by many different types of animals. But that doesn’t mean it’s screaming for my attention either. Animals move soft and slow through the woods, and spotting a trail means looking for small blades of grass bent the same direction, like how I part my hair when combing it out after a shower.

The path is about as wide as that too and not heading west, but I’ve been making my own way long enough that it would be nice to follow for a while, so I decide to see what the deer know that I don’t. I find a few spots where they’ve bedded down recently and some scat that tells me they’re not far off. There’s no real reason why I should care. Like Kavita pointed out a lifetime ago it’s not as if I could run one down and kill it with my bare hands. And even if I could, I wouldn’t. I couldn’t eat a tenth of it and carry about the same before it went bad. It’s curiosity that leads me on, not need. So when I come across the fawns I’m not looking them up and down to assess where the good cuts are.

I just enjoy them.

They’re grazing in a small clearing, little nubs of teeth pulling up the new grass. They’ve still got their spots, dazzling white in the sun, contented tails flicking back and forth as they eat. Their mom lifts her head and spots me, falling still and silent. I do the same, waiting for her to snort and let her little ones know that there’s a predator nearby and it’s time to run.

She doesn’t.

That’s how I know I’m well and truly fucked.

Day Ten

My Baggies are empty and so is my stomach.

I didn’t bother with a shelter. Instead I crawled in under the low branches of a pine and slept with my fist punched up into my belly like somehow I could trick it into thinking it was full. It didn’t work, and I wake up with needles stuck into my skin at odd angles and a grumble in my gut that nothing but food is gonna fix.

It doesn’t hurt yet. I’ve probably got at least two days before I’ll be in pain again, so that’s something. I pull up some greens and chew on them, rolling them in my mouth same as the deer did the day before, thinking. I still haven’t moved out from under the pine when it starts to rain, low-hanging branches keeping me reasonably dry.

I wrap up in my blanket and watch it fall, changing from big, lonely drops into a decent downpour, then becoming a sheet of water. There’s nothing I can do but sit, and while I’ve been telling myself all along to keep moving, like it was a plan that would make everything okay in the end, that motivation is gone.

I try to tell myself that I’m just taking advantage of the little break, that there’s no point in wandering around and getting soaked to the skin and sliding down wet ridges and maybe even getting struck by lightning. But the truth is I’m tired. I’m tired of walking and not getting anywhere, tired of everything I’ve got hurting, right down to my insides. And I’m tired in the sleepy sense too, even though I know I lay down last night before it was fully dark and the sun had already put in half a day’s work when I woke.

None of this is good, and I know it.

My body is worn out, and my mind is ready to follow that path. Little things have been happening that I haven’t given my full attention to, and now that I’m stuck here I can’t quite ignore them anymore. I talked to a tree yesterday, though I don’t recall what I said. I know it didn’t answer, which is a point in my favor, but the fact that I was disappointed by that is not.

That, and I’ve been thinking about cheese a lot. I probably put in four miles yesterday and I thought about big orange blocks of Colby the whole time. I can’t explain it, but I could see cheese in my mind, right down to the uneven breaks when you pull off a chunk that you want and the way it crumbles in your hand. I even sat down hard at one point, right on my bad foot because it was still up in the sling, and I didn’t really think about the pain too much. I was still caught up in cheese.

The color. The smell. The taste. The texture. I even thought about the way the refrigerator gives off a nice poof of cold air when you first open it, a prelude to cheese.

“A prelude to cheese,” I say to myself aloud. “You’re a fucking idiot.”

That might be true, but it doesn’t mean I can’t sit here in the rain, chewing on grass and thinking about cheese. I guess it’s because it’s something I absolutely can’t have. When I was a kid I wanted all kinds of things that I’d never get: a pony, a dog, a mom. So I’d sit around and think about those things, the fun we’d have, how close we’d be, the places we’d go together.