Wolves and Men

He awoke groggy and sore.

What time is it?

What day is it?

His abdomen screamed as he tried to prop himself up. He decided to lay back down flat on his back. The floor of his shelter was soft and warm and after all it’s not like he had to go to work. He smiled at the thought and realized that even though he didn’t have work, per se, he still had to eat and survive. There wasn’t a Wall Mart down the street, and he didn’t have a refrigerator either. What he caught or hunted today is what he ate today.

Looking at the ceiling of his shelter he thought about just how much time he had spent in his forest. The forest that could kill him on any given day had been kind to him and through some trial and error he had learned to live with the forest and the forest seemed to have accepted him. The ceiling of his burrow arched over his head and was made with various logs that made a checkerboard pattern. The logs supported a thick layer of mud and clay that was meshed with other smaller branches and pine needles.

This little burrow had taken a long time to build. His mind reached back to those early days. He was so new to this world but he had a small idea of what had to be done. Oddly enough, he had found this giant redwood on the first day. It had a sad feeling surrounding it. The great tree had a chunk taken out of it by some fire or another. The scar remained though it had begun to heal itself. It would be many years, if ever, before the wound was fully healed. But the indention of the tree lent itself to be a perfect shelter and he had begun digging out his burrow floor, which he now rested upon. He had dug out maybe two feet or more that covered a ten feet area at the base of the scarred redwood.

He glanced around at his burrow and smiled. It was a good home, as good a one as one could ever need, and he had built it himself. Those first days had been filled with fears that some animal would come and tear his burrow down.

He was not as unprepared as some guy who just got up and walked into a forest one day. He had brought with him tools and some supplies. To get the ceiling beams for his burrow he went out with his woodsman axe and through a few days’ work he had gathered several logs and smaller branches to make the frame of his shelter. The frame was maybe the easiest part of the whole project. To get the shelter to be waterproof and also to mask his scent as well as the smell of food and other things that would attract the unwanted attention of the forest animals, he knew he would have to seal and waterproof his roof. This was a lot easier said than done. When one did not have mortar or cement, he had to make do with what was at hand and what was at hand was mud and clay from the nearby riverbed. The only problem was that his chosen burrow was a good mile or two from the riverbed.

He remembered taking handfuls of mud and clay from the river and climbing the hill side before dumping the clay on the roof frame and going back down for more. It didn’t occur to him until the second day that he could heap mud and clay on some tree branches and carry a lot more up the hillside per trip than with just his bare hands. Even with the new technique it had still taken him the better part of three days to finish his roof.

He inhaled the familiar scents of his home and his forest.

This place had sustained him for what? A year? Two? He really didn’t know and right now did it matter?

Despite the protests of his abdomen, he raised himself up off of his floor. He had to bend over to avoid touching his ceiling but that was ok. He didn’t spend much time here; he always had so much work to do. He looked behind him at his bed. It was a collection of logs and branches interlaced with pine needles with some deer skins covering the whole thing and a great bear skin blanket to sleep under. It was the most comfortable bed he had ever slept on and the last he felt he would ever need.

Next to his bed was a little dresser that he had also built himself. It wasn’t so much a dresser as a three-sided wooden frame where he kept what remained of his ‘normal world’ possessions, the least of which were his normal clothes. He frowned as he noticed that he only had one full set of normal clothes left. It didn’t really matter though he spent the majority of his time in his deer and bear skins. Through them he had been able to keep warm through last winter and been able to function out here away from any other human being.

This was life, not just some facsimile of a perceived life that had to be filled with the latest technology or gadgets. Life. Most people would say that he was running away from life to hide out in the woods like some estranged hermit. What did other people know? Have they survived out in the wilderness for any period of time?

Through survival he had found that many of his ‘civilized’ accoutrements could be shed, even names were expendable. His real name had meant very little to him out here. William Hadrian Setford. What did that name mean anymore? What use was that name to him out here? To say nothing about an even more useless set of numbers, like his social security number. The United States Government couldn’t or wouldn’t touch him out here, why would they? He had been gone over a winter and more than a year over that. He hadn’t been paid any money nor had he paid taxes. It probably didn’t occur to them that there was a young man out there that simply refused to live like everybody else.

He smiled and snorted out a laugh, a crazy person would, that’s who.