The Weirdo Page 2
When winter returned to the swamp, he weighed seventy-two pounds, and it was back to a new den and more dozing until spring.
That April, able to survive without his mother, feeding himself on tender leaves, buds, and new spring grass, Henry responded to the mysterious ticking of his own life span clock, parting from his mother and sister, never to join them again.
Looking much as he'd look for the rest of his life—eyes small, ears rounded, coat glossy black, snout brown, claws sharp, and jaws powerful—Henry was a fine specimen. By the time he was six years old and fully grown, he'd reached his maximum weight of over three hundred pounds.
From the moment we met, the one thing I positively knew about Henry was that he couldn't have cared less about my face. Animals judge humans by smell and body language, not appearance.
Powhatan Swamp
English I
Charles Clewt
Ohio State University
***
UP IN her bedroom, Sam glanced at her .410-gauge shotgun. Her father had given it to her for her twelfth birthday, but she had yet to shoot it, much to his dismay. It gathered dust in a corner of the room, next to her frilly four-poster bed, another sore point. Modern furniture was what she wanted.
On second thought, the gun was a bad idea. If Buck happened to tree the bear, she'd need a rope to drag him away. The dog, not the bear. Bird shot and bears were a bad mix, anyway.
Taking stairs two at a time, she ran to the work shed by the barn, cut a piece of laundry line, then headed out, not thinking to leave a note in the kitchen to say where she'd gone.
Ever since she could remember, her mother had said, "Never go back in there alone, Samantha. Never!"
Up until Mr. Howell was murdered she'd occasionally entered the swamp with her father on hunting trips, never enjoying them. Once she'd seen him kill a deer, bad dreams resulting. Or she'd gone in a little way with Steve or her mother, on guard against snakes, to pick berries for canning. Mid-December for mistletoe was another time. But never far into it, never alone.
The last four years, since the Powhatan had become a National Wildlife Refuge, few people except biologists, geologists, and archaeologists had penetrated deep into it. Of course, poachers still hunted back in there, risking arrest.
Facing the porch at about fifty yards, a broad tangle of brush and low trees and licks of brown water, the swamp sometimes looked ghostly when thin mist arose. Summers, when the breeze blew off it, there was a damp smell of rotten leaves in the air. Breeze carried sounds, too. Birds and frogs and four-footed-animal noises. Some nights, as a little girl in the four-poster, she'd covered her ears at the cries and croaks, the yap-yapping of the foxes, the bloodcurdling shrieks of the bobcats.
Three times they'd lived in the farmhouse—when Bo'sun Sanders had duty in the Norfolk-Portsmouth area—and she'd seen the Powhatan in winter, spring, summer, and fall. It had a different mood for each season. None of them too inviting, so far as she was concerned.
Now, hearing Buck faintly in the distance, she waded across the ditch fronting the road and entered the refuge.
"Always try to stay on hard ground. Keep out of the water as much as possible." That was her papa—swamper, hunter, fisherman—talking to Steve long ago, warning him. It made sense. There was enough hard ground on which to maneuver most of the time. Except in the lake, random pools, man-made ditches, and creeklets, the water was seldom more than a foot deep, but hard ground was always safer.
There were nine trails along the banks of the ditches and sloughs, first used by lumber wagons two centuries ago, more recently used by lumber trucks. They were now barely passable in some places, overgrown with vines and weeds. Sam had been on only one of them, long ago.
Most worrisome were the peat pits. One type was the moss peat her papa used for litter and mulch. The other was fuel peat, with deposits as deep as thirty feet, used for heating in other countries.
Both kinds were found in the Powhatan. Sometimes underground fires hollowed the deposits, leaving a thin black crust to cover huge holes that were often filled with water. Her grandpa and papa had fallen into them before, as had deer and bear and all lands of other animals. The lucky ones, her papa and grandpa included, had crawled out.
Feet pounding on, Sam hoped she'd be lucky this late afternoon.
In addition to traces of the rough lumbering trails, there were remains of a narrow-gauge railroad, relic of timbering days. Four years of growth were beginning to return the swamp to a state of semi-wilderness. No hunting or fishing was allowed, a law that did not sit well with Sam's papa and many others.
***
Indian summer, ripening time, is the time for serious eating in the Powhatan—named after Chief Powhatan, father of Pocahontas—time for bears like Henry to store up fat to last through the winter, which is usually comparatively mild, nothing like the frigid weeks in northern forests.
Yet I remember days when ice edged the ditches and ponds, the surface of Lake Nansemond; when snow softly mantled the swamp. So the animals and birds, responding to the season, ate from dawn to dark.
Food is plentiful in autumn. Pawpaw and blackgum and pokeberries, and the luscious wild grapes. Tupelo berries are choice, and acorns are thick under the oaks.
Twenty-two species of animal life walk and crawl and slither around the swamp. Shrews and moles thrive, as well as mice and muskrats. In addition to the bears, bobcats, river otters, mink, gray and red foxes, raccoons, weasels, and white-tailed deer all live there. The gray wolf once stalked the Powhatan but has not been seen since Indian days.
There are the usual noisy flocks of red-winged blackbirds and grackles and cowbirds and common crows; hundreds of thousands of robins, gray catbirds, and Carolina wrens singing gaily. I could hear the hweet of the towhee and tock-tock-tock of the working woodpecker, see pine siskins feeding on juniper cones. Overhead, night and day, fly tundra swans and Canadian geese, en route to wintering grounds in the south. Loons, going that way, too, wail mournfully. Great ospreys occasionally let their passage he known with a harsh kreekkreekkreekkreek. The soaring turkey vultures stay home. They love the Powhatan.
Though it sounds strange, sometimes I talked to the swamp, and sometimes it talked back in its own, unique way.
I know that many people say "ugh" at the mere mention of swamp, the reputation being more of beast than beauty. Yet it is probably the most misunderstood landscape of all. And those who do enter it and stand still for a while to listen and watch, can often find a melancholy beauty, especially in autumn and early winter. I found that beauty through the eyes of Tom Telford, who was conducting the bear study in the Powhatan.
With its rush-lined waterways and ponds encircled by the brown heads of cattails, its strips of forested high ground and acres of soggy marsh, the Powhatan is fortunately not for everyone. That is just fine for the kings of it—the black bears, white-tailed deer, and bobcats.
Humans are incidental.
Powhatan Swamp
English I
Charles Clewt
Ohio State University
***
PUSHING through bramble, thorns tore at her jeans and leather jacket. Thankful a pair of gloves had been in the pockets, Sam could just hear Buck. She guessed he was still on the chase, the bear not treed as yet. They are headed for the lake, she thought. Most of the bears lived on the south side of it, according to her papa. Every few hundred yards she stopped to listen.
The first hard frost had brought shades of brown. The deeper she pushed, the more she was encased in tangles of cinnamon and cocoa and bronze. Some reached out for her.
There were specific bear paths throughout the swamp. Her grandpa had described them: narrow tunnels about three feet high through the thick brush—not big enough for deer or man, but a bear could easily scramble through them. So could a dog like Buck.
But it wasn't a wise route. The bear could decide to make a stand in the tunnels. Good-bye, Buck.
Rarely were the bears seen by
human eyes. She'd seen no more than a half-dozen. Yet when the corn was roasting size and ripened, or at apple time, such as now, they ventured out for banquets. They also raided peanut fields and beehives, Sam knew. On she ran. Sliding. Stumbling.
Mixed in with the tough and grasping briar shrubs, some patches so thick she couldn't see daylight on the other side, were trees. Bald cypress and junipers, the local name for cedars. Tupelo gum, red maple, and sweet bay, in glorious fall colors. In other parts of the swamp were loblolly pine and white oak, occasionally draped with Spanish moss. Plenty of trunks for any bear to climb.
Hundreds of thousands of trees had been cut down when the lumber company owned the swamp, but thousands more had burned in lightning fires that sent brown-black coils of smoke out over the Atlantic, forty miles away. Sometimes the peat deposits burned and smoldered for months.
The brief, savage summer storms hit the Powhatan every so often. Lightning turned it calcium white. Thunder rumbled across it as if a giant was waving huge sheets of tin. The deafening thunder and lightning attacks scared the wits out of animal and man alike, but Sam loved the noisy storms.
She stopped again, listened, and shook her head in dismay. How had she gotten into this?
Uncle Jack and Aunt Peaches had often bragged about how smart Buck was. Well, he sure didn't use his dog brains this day.
Sam plunged on.
Lake Nansemond was in the center of the swamp. It provided water, down the Feeder Ditch, for the George Washington Canal, which formed the lake's eastern border. Nansemond was about five and a half miles from home, and Sam hoped both the bear and Buck would stop long before they came to the lake. She didn't care to run all the way out there.
It wasn't too big, maybe three thousand acres—two miles—across at the widest, but, like the rest of the swamp, a little spooky, with water the color of oxblood from tree-root acids. When she was a little girl, her father brought her up the Feeder Ditch to fish for bream and crappie. She didn't enjoy those trips, either, but she never told him that.
Sam pulled up, listening again.
Buck still yapped, maybe a mile ahead, maybe more. Sound carried a long way in the eerie stillness, a quiet broken only now and then by bird cries. She looked up at the slate-colored sky, then down at her watch. Four-thirty. A half hour or less till complete darkness. She should have brought a flashlight.
Her feet had begun to blister, she knew. She'd quickly put on sweat socks before changing into the waders, but rubber boots weren't built for running. She'd soon have to stop.
After the government took over the Powhatan, someone on the refuge staff had posted a map of the swamp. Sam had seen it several times. With twilight approaching, she thought she paralleled Trail Number Six. The trails were numbered westward from the canal.
And somewhere off Six, perhaps not far ahead, was the Sand Suck, as old-timers called it, a big patch of quicksand, a landmark. She'd heard of it all her life from her grandpa, her papa, and others, but she had never seen it.
After the Powhatan became government property, the Fish and Wildlife Service ringed its five acres with barbed wire, posting big red-and-white signs that said Danger—Do Not Enter.
So far as Sam was concerned, the Sand Suck had always been a creepy place, but now she hoped she'd see those warning signs so she could get her bearings.
***
The Sand Suck was there when George Washington surveyed the canal, there when the Civil War was fought. It might have been there two thousand years ago, before Christ was born. Geologists haven't been able to do more than guess at its true age. I saw it a half-dozen times or more.
Deep within its slippery, sandy depths are bones of all sorts of mammals unfortunate enough to step on its tricky surface or doomed by being tossed into it. Probably Indians and slaves and deserting Confederate soldiers, bootleggers and unlucky hunters. Certainly, there are bones of wild cattle and wild hogs and bears and dogs and deer—almost every creature that ever inhabited the Powhatan. Without doubt, there are gray wolf and panther remains down there. Perhaps deeper down, where ice once slid, are skeletons of ancient giant reptiles.
In addition to bones, there are the remains of modern civilization—pots and pans and stoves, maybe even whiskey stills tossed in by revenue agents. Perhaps an old car or two, trash of all kinds. I once threw a tire in. It disappeared with a gurgle.
Powhatan Swamp
English I
Charles Clewt
Ohio State University
***
TWILIGHT: Two distinct shots split the somber stillness, the reverberations finally dying in the dense cushion of brush and trees. Sam heard them, but the immediate noise of several turkey vultures taking to the air ahead of her almost drowned out the faint echoes.
Paying little attention to the shots, Sam looked again at her watch. Quarter to five. Roughly fifteen minutes until night would lock her in. Fifteen minutes to find Buck and tie that length of laundry line around his idiot neck.
Then what?
By now she thought she'd covered about two and a half miles, almost half the distance to the lake.
Sam began to realize the predicament she was in: It was impossible to move safely in the Powhatan after dark without a light. Even if she did find the weimaraner, they'd have to spend the night.
Slowing to a walk, she remembered that Grandpa Sanders told her about a few nights he'd stayed in the swamp as a boy, muskrat trapping. He said to find a fire-hollowed stump, make sure there weren't any snakes or bats in it, scoop out any ants and bugs if it was summer, then curl up inside.
Even though she could still hear the distant echoes of barks ahead, in the remaining light, Sam began to search for shelter. Finally she saw a charred gum, about six feet of it above the surface, big bell-like trunk standing in the still water, likely hit by lightning years ago.
Reaching down inside it, digging out handfuls of rotten wood and char, she climbed in. Darkness enclosed the Powhatan a few minutes later.
After a while the barking ceased, and Sam wondered if Buck had tired of the chase or if the bear had killed him.
Compressed in the stump, long legs folded, Sam knew she'd be painfully stiff and sore long before dawn, but it was better than sliding and stumbling blindly in marsh water.
Night noises had risen around her. They weren't exactly a soothing symphony. Squeaks and clicks and sawing and flapping, night birds called and cawed and coughed. The barred owl hooted. Had it been summer, the hollow rasp of bullfrogs would be deafening.
Thank the Lord it wasn't summer when the snakes were out and about. Sam had been terrified of them—ever since her brother put a corn snake in her bed, the only time she'd ever hit him. Right in the mouth.
Inside her narrow haven, which smelled of ancient fire, she could see the evening bats that swooped and twirled around the gray treetops. Though a farm girl, Sam had never laid claim to bravery.
Grandpa Sanders, who'd died three years ago, had told Sam and Steve about the people who'd lived there: the prehistorics and the Powhatan Indians; the juniper-shingle cutters who had come before the Revolutionary War; the whole community of runaway slaves—men, women, and children—who had hid back there; the hunters and trappers who had disappeared in the brush and muck. Between tobacco spits, he told them about hundreds, maybe thousands, who had died in the Powhatan.
The stories reminded Sam of shot-in-the-chest Alvin Howell. He still came back in dreams now and then, bringing midnight screams with him.
Sam's blistered feet had begun to send darting pain up her legs. She was tempted to take the waders off but decided to wait till morning. Any protection from the cold was essential.
If they lived in Portsmouth or Norfolk, where there were people and lights and malls, none of this would have happened. Whenever her father was transferred to duty away from the farm, she rejoiced. In another year, when she finished high school, she'd transfer herself out of Albemarle County, N.C. Good-bye cornfields, swamp, and old farmhouse, four-post
er bed. She hated where she lived. Hated that creaky house! A hundred and twenty years old! She wanted a new one.
Stranded was what she felt, with only the bicycle to take her anywhere—unless her mother or father were home; then she could borrow the pickup or the Bronco to go on baby-sitting jobs. During school months she worked Saturdays and Sundays at the Dairy Queen in Currituck, filling soft ice-cream cones and not making enough to buy her own car—barely enough to pay her phone bill. At least she had her own phone. The phone was her lifeline to the outside world.
"Trouble with you, Samantha, is you're always feelin' sorry for yourself," her mother had said more than once.
Sam had silently agreed. Am sorry, was sorry, will remain sorry, for good reason. She didn't resent her mother saying that. It was the honest truth.
Listening to all the cackling and jabbering, flapping and croaking, Sam wondered again what had happened to Buck. She knew her mother and father would be worried about both of them. She finally slept awhile, then awakened, colder than before. Just before midnight she got out of the stump and squatted to pee, then moved around to stretch her legs and arms, careful not to go too far from the hollow tree.
Back inside she dozed fitfully until dawn. In one of the awake periods, she decided not to try to retrace her steps home, but to continue on south toward Lake Nansemond. The spillwayman, John Clewt, who controlled the water flow into the canal through the Feeder Ditch, lived in a house by the dam with his son. They had a phone, she was certain. She could call home, have someone send a boat up the ditch and bring her back to the highway that went by the canal. Hunger had begun to speak. Loud. Even dry toast would taste like cake.
She awakened again predawn, stiff and aching all over. She'd slept with her hands tucked under her armpits, trying to keep her fingers warm. They stung from the cold, even with her thom-slashed gloves still on.