Chapter 3

I started out pretty briskly, as I always did on these excursions; the first few hundred feet were my own yard, which I saw every day—well, every day I was home—and nothing to linger over.

As usual I picked a direction more or less at random. It had to be generally east and uphill; anywhere else and I'd run into one neighbor or another's property, which didn't appeal to me. But that still left a quarter of the compass, and there were lots of options. There wasn't anything much resembling a trail, but I was at enough altitude that undergrowth was relatively sparse and it was comparatively simple to pick my way through the trees.

Within minutes I was out of sight of both my cabin and all of civilization, completely immersed in my natural setting. The first time I'd done this, not long after I moved in, I'd incautiously proceeded on for about fifteen minutes before it occurred to me that maybe going very far wasn't a good idea. I'd turned around immediately to retrace my steps, as I thought, and another fifteen minutes later realized that I was completely lost. I stumbled and bumbled around for nearly three hours before, mainly by sheer chance, I came across the dirt road that was the only vehicular access to my cabin. The only thing was, I was nearly three miles down that road, and it took me another hour to hike home.

The next day I'd visited a small electronics shop downtown and picked up an assortment of this and that. Using the skills I'd learned in school I put together a rough schematic and then built myself a little radio beacon. I installed the transmitter in my cabin's attic and connected it to an old TV antenna that had never been removed from the roof. It plugged into a light socket, and for safety I rigged a long-life rechargeable battery. The receiver was so tiny that I played merry hell cobbling it together, but I finally got it done and attached it to my keyring. The system had a range of about fifteen miles; so long as I stayed within that distance, and I couldn't imagine straying further, I could always find my way.

After testing it a couple of times I no longer worried about getting lost again. It was simply a matter of pulling out my keys and going the way the little LCD arrow told me. The transmission was wide-beam; at anything short of extreme range I could even pick up the signal from gullies and ditches. I'd been so pleased with myself that I'd even thought about getting a patent but found that, as with so many useful things, the idea wasn't a new one, it's just that there wasn't much call for such a gadget so it wasn't commonly on the market.

Another good reason that I wasn't in electronics professionally.

My spirits were already up. For a little while I started singing an old German folk song, "Mein Vater war ein Wandersman." Literally the name (and the first line) translates to "my daddy was a wandering man," but it gets rendered in English as "I am a happy wanderer." I sang it in German; it's the original, and I don't much care for sloppy paraphrased translations. But I soon quit; my voice, I realized, however (I hoped) alluring to human audiences, was scaring off all the wildlife within hearing distance, and that was no fun. I also stopped tromping along quite so noisily, for the same reason.

And I was soon rewarded. The squirrels, no longer intimidated, were as usual the first to venture back out. For a while I could only hear them as they leaped back and forth among the tree branches above me, but soon they were back to foraging on the ground where I could catch glimpses of their furry tails before they noticed me and scampered off. One little fellow sat at the base of a tree trunk shifting his eyes between me and an acorn that lay at his feet; when I continued to approach he bent down, carefully retrieved the nut and then whipped two or three feet up the tree and around to the other side of it. If I persisted I knew he'd climb further out of my reach, but for the moment he was content with the tree between us. I passed on without disturb­ing him further.

I saw no deer, but it was mid-morning by now, they were likely laying up for the day. No mountain cats, but probably the same, and they weren't abundant here. Likewise the coons and foxes, though they both were pretty thick on the ground; if I saw one I'd give it plenty of space, they could be rabid. You also got the occasional black bear, but they weren't stealthy, you could hear them a ways off. If I did I'd steer clear, bears weren't usually aggressive but it wasn't smart to provoke them.

We humans, we're so sure we own the world, but put us one-on-one with just about any wild animal bigger than a mid-size dog away from the trappings of our so-called civilization and we're at a distinct disadvantage. You keep to yourself in the woods, and mostly the other inhabitants follow the same idea and everybody coexists in harmony.