The Stranger in the Forest
Part 1
It was a cold November night, and I wished I had worn heavier gloves because my fingers were numb. The oaks and other hardwoods had weeks ago shed their leaves, and the forest floor was carpeted with a thick lawyer of dried leaves. The tree branches were naked and exposed, like the bones of a skeleton after the flesh had rotted away. In the faint moonlight, everything was either some shade of gray or black.
I could see my breath in the lantern’s light, and the cold sent shivers down my spine. There was very little wind, so the temperature must have been around freezing. To make matters worse, my hounds had travelled much further than normal, and I didn’t know where they had gone. I was hunting raccoons, and bitter November nights are the best time to hunt them, but this night, I simply wanted to go home. I was cold.
Raccoon hunting or simply “coon hunting” is an unusual sport, even for most hunters. Understanding the theory of coon hunting is easy: the hunter uses a hound or hounds to trail a raccoon until the raccoon climbs up a tree. The hunter then uses a light to find the racoon in the tree and then dispatches it, usually with a .22 caliber rifle. Since raccoons are nocturnal, coon hunting takes place at night.
In practice, the sport is far more difficult than it sounds. The hounds will run around the forest trying to find the scent of a raccoon. If they discover a raccoon’s scent, the hounds will sound off, using a bark that sounds more like a long bawl than the short yaps of most dogs. Each hound has its own that its own particular voice, and the hunter will recognize the individual voices of each of his hounds. Listening to the hounds and trying to anticipate their direction of travel is the longest and most enjoyable phase of the hunt. A raccoon will sometimes run for miles, and the chase can last for hour.
The hunt’s goal is to “tree” the raccoon, meaning the hounds will eventually get close enough to the raccoon to force it to climb a tree. When the raccoon is treed, the hounds voice will change to a shorter, sharper bark. More often than not, however, the hounds will lose the raccoon, and the hunter will return empty-handed. Raccoons are intelligence, cunning and resourceful. Sometimes, they will head to streams or rivers and use the water to wash away their scent. Another of their tricks is to climb up one tree, climb out one if its branches, jump to another tree and then climb down to the ground and keep running. Sometimes they will fight with the hounds. Pound for pound, raccoons are fearsome animals with sharp teeth that can inflict savage bites on a hound. Other times, they will go into a fox or ground hog hole ending the hunting. More often than not, the raccoon escapes as the hound loses its trail.
For most coon hunters, the sport is a social affair. Groups of six or eight hunters will gather with a similar number of hounds and spend the night talking as they listen to the hounds hunt. It is different for me. I enjoyed the quiet solitude of the forest. Strange as it may seem, I enjoyed the small feeling of being alone in the dark not knowing what might lurk just beyond the light of my lantern. I enjoyed contemplating what life might have been like in the primordial forest millennia ago when man was more likely to be prey than predator. Some nights, like this night, the cold, still air is so clear that you can see all of the stars in the heavens.
But I was cold, and I only wanted to go home. Before I could go home, I had to find the two stupid coonhounds that had run off. They were oblivious to the cold and possessed a one-tract mind: find a raccoon. So off I went in the direction where I had last heard the them, carrying a lantern to provide some light and a .22 caliber rifle. The only sound I heard was the crunching if the dry leaves with each step I took. I feared it would be a long night.
I climbed up one mountain and down another and then up yet another. I thought I knew these woods like the back of my hand, but everything seemed strange. The further I went, the less I recognized and the more disoriented I felt. As I approached the last location where I thought I had heard the hounds, I found myself at the top of deep hollow. Strange. The mountains in Central Pennsylvania are mostly like hills and although hollows can have steep sides, the sides of this particular hollow were almost cliff like. It also seemed far deeper than it should have been in view of the modest size of Pennsylvania’s mountains.
With my lantern in one hand, I tried to descend the mountain, holding onto trees and saplings and the occasional rock outcropping as I descended. It became noticeably warmer as I crept down into the hollow. Hollows often offer shelter from the wind, but that wasn’t it. There had been no wind at the tops of the mountains. A loss in elevation can also lead to an increase in temperature, but the change I experienced was much greater than would normally be expected. The feeling had returned to my fingers, and I could feel perspiration on my back.
As I descended into the hollow, the air became heavier, and the stars and the moon disappeared. A shroud of fog engulfed me, and the fog became thicker the further I went. The only directions I could tell for certain where up and down. I continued down. My descent slowed. I tried to be cautious on the steep slope, but as I let go of one branch and grabbed for the next, in the dark, I apparently grabbed ahold of a dead spar of branch on a rotten tree. It broke under my weight, and I went tumbling down the remainder of the hill onto the flat bottom in the depths of the hollow. During my fall, I had lost my rifle, and I broke my lantern. I remember falling, but I do not remember landing.
I don’t know how long I laid there, but eventually my head started to clear. In the distance, through the trees and the tree branches, I thought I saw a flicker of light. I started moving through the woods and through the fog toward the light. The hardwood forest at the top of the hollow had given way to pine trees and hemlocks. The pine trees were huge, maybe six or seven feet across the stump. At one time, Pennsylvania had been famous for its limitless pine forests, but trees like the ones I was seeing hadn’t existed in this part of Pennsylvania for a hundred years or more before. The noisy brittle leaves of the deciduous forest were replaced by a blanket of soft pine needles, and my footsteps no longer made any noise. The faint light grew stronger as I walked closer.
After about a quarter of a mile, I found myself at the edge of a clearing. The light I had been following came from inside a small cabin. The cabin sat a little above the forest floor. Three steps led to a small porch that, in turn, led to a front door. It was still dark, and what little light that escaped from the cabin was insufficient to allow me to see much detail, but my hounds stood at the bottom of the steps. They appeared to be eating something though I didn’t know what.
My first thought was to grab the hounds and get moving as soon as possible. People usually don’t like large hunting dogs around their home. As I approached the cabin, however, a women walked out the front door with a bucket of water, apparently intended for the hounds. The woman who carried the bucket was extraordinarily beautiful. She seemed perfect in every way, from the curves of her body to her long brown hair and deep brown eyes. She wore a thin silk robe that seemed just a little to small. It clung to her body leaving little to the imagination. It should have struck me as odd that she was wearing a silk robe and did not wear a coat or shoes or slippers on her feet, but it didn’t. She was mesmerizing.
She walked effortlessly down the steps, poured the water into a bowl for the hounds and petted one of them. Both hounds responded as those they had known her their entire lives.
Suddenly, she turned and looked directly into my eyes.
“Oh,” she said, “are you hurt?”
“No,” I replied.
“You look like you’ve taken a fall. You should come in and rest for a little.”
I told her I couldn’t and that I had to go, but I really wanted to follow her into the house. But I longed to go into her cabin, to sit by her fire and to delight in her company. She turned to walk into her home, and I feared she had taken me at my word. Just as she was about to enter the cabin, however, she turned and gestured for me to follow. I was powerless to resist.
