There was a darkness on my inland side when I opened my eyes; I thought I had been lying there a long time. But then something filled the space again. It was Drew with his guitar. I sat up, and the water, though it still swarmed weightlessly with the cave-images of fire, now seemed on the point of swirling them down.
Drew tuned softly, then raked out a soft chord that flowed and floated away.
“I’ve always wanted to do this,” he said. “Only I didn’t know it.”
He moved up the neck, drawing out chord after chord. These built and shimmered on each other in the darkness, in lonely harmony. Then he began to pick individual notes, and put the bass under them.
“It’s woods music,” he said. “Don’t you think so?”
“Sure do.”
I loved the powerful nasal country clang, the steely humming and the strings hit like hammers on rails. Drew played deep and clean, and neither of us could have been happier. He played “Expert Town” and “Lord Bateman”; he played “He Was a Friend of Mine” and “Shaggy Dad” and Leadbelly’s “Easy, Mr. Tom.”
“I really ought to have a twelve-string for this one,” he explained, but it sounded good anyway.
Lewis brought over the cooked steaks while Drew played, and then we ate, two little steaks apiece and big wedges of cake that Lewis’ wife had made. We all had another drink. The fire was leaving us; in the river it had already died.
“You know,” Lewis said, “we don’t have too many more years for this kind of thing.”
“I guess not,” I said. “But I can tell you, I’m glad we came. I’m glad to be here. I wouldn’t be anywhere else, the way I feel.”
“It’s true, Lewis,” Bobby said. “It’s all true, what you said. It’s great. And I think we did real good on the river. I mean, for amateurs.”
“Yeah, good enough, I reckon,” Lewis said. “But I’m sure glad you and I didn’t get that damned sluggish wood canoe turned around backward just before we hit some white water. That might have been bad.”
“We didn’t though,” Bobby said. “And I don’t think it’ll happen again, do you?”
“I hope not,” Lewis said.
“Well, to the sleeping bags, men,” I said, stretching.
“Had my first wet dream in a sleeping bag,” Lewis said. “I surely did.”
“How was it?” Bobby asked.
“Great. There’s no repeating it.”
I stood up, finally, and creaked and stooped into the tent. I was massively tired, and hated the laces of my tennis shoes which had hardened in the water until I couldn’t untie them. I pulled the shoes off by main strength, shucked off everything else as well and got into the bag and zipped it up. Drew was still playing, out on the bank; I could hear him trying out some high minor, far away. I lay back in the soft down, crinkling into the elastic resistance of the air mattress. I snapped out the flashlight and closed my eyes.
I was out and in. I was stone dead and also, for a while, lying there listening, not knowing what I was listening for. It might have been a human voice with fire in it, an unearthly drunken man-howl; it might have been old Tom McCaskill screaming into the night from his fire.
Then there was nothing. I turned and saw Drew now beside me with his hand down along the seam of the bag.
I could hear the river running at my feet, and behind my head the woods were unimaginably dense and dark; there was nothing in them that knew me. There were creatures with one forepaw lifted, not wanting yet to put the other down on a dry leaf, for fear of the sound. There were the eyes made for seeing in this blackness; I opened my eyes and saw the dark in all its original color. In it I saw Martha’s back heaving and working and dissolving into the studio, where we had finally decided that the photographs we had taken were no good and had asked the model back. We had also gone ahead with the Kitts’ sales manager’s idea to make the ad like the Coppertone scene of the little girl and the dog. There was Wilma holding the cat and forcing its claws out of its pads and fastening them into the back of the girl’s panties. There was Thad; there was I. The panties stretched, the cat pulled, trying to get its claws out of the artificial silk, and then all at once leapt and clawed the girl’s buttocks. She screamed, the room erupted with panic, she slung the cat round and round, a little orange concretion of pure horror, still hanging by one paw from the girl’s panties, pulling them down, clawing and spitting in the middle of the air, raking the girl’s buttocks and her leg-backs. I was paralyzed. Nobody moved to do anything. The girl screamed and cavorted, reaching behind her.
Something hit the top of the tent. I thought it was part of what I had been thinking, for the studio was no dream. I put out a hand. The material was humming like a sail. Something seemed to have hold of the top of the tent; the cloth was trembling in a huge grasp. The sickening memory of where I was took hold of me from the inside of the heart. I groped down for the cold shank of the flashlight between the air sacks and snapped it on, running the weak glow up from the door of the tent. I kept seeing nothing but graygreen stitches until I got right above my head. The canvas was punctured there, and through it came one knuckle of a deformed fist, a long curving of claws that turned on themselves. Those are called talons, I said out loud.
I lay with the sweat ready to break, looking up through almost-closed lids, full now of a dread that was at least partly humorous. There was nothing, after all, so dangerous about an owl. Its other foot punctured the tent slowly and deliberately, and it shifted its weight until I could feel it come even. The claws did not relax, but the tent quivered less. Still, it shuddered lightly, as though we were about to be carried away in it. I dozed for a minute and tried to see what the tent must look like from the outside, with the big night bird—surely it was very big, from the size of the nails and feet—sitting in its own silence and equilibrium, holding us fast inside what it took to be our sleep.
The nails tightened a very little, the canvas tore slightly and then beat in a huge tent-beat; it seemed strange that we were still on the ground. I fell back, realizing that I had heard the first downstroke of the owl’s wings, urgent and practically soundless; the stroke that hung it in the air as it set out.
Sometime later, from some deep place, I heard the woods beating. In the middle of this sound the tent shook; the owl had hold of it in the same place. I knew this before I cut the light on—it was still in my hand, exactly as warm as I was—and saw the feet, with the heel talons now also coming in. I pulled one hand out of the sleeping bag and saw it wander frailly up through the thin light until a finger touched the cold reptilian nail of one talon below the leg-scales. I had no idea of whether the owl felt me; I thought perhaps it would fly, but it didn’t. Instead, it shifted its weight again, and the claws on the foot I was touching loosened for a second. I slipped my forefinger between the claw and the tent, and half around the stony toe. The claw tightened; the strength had something nervous and tentative about it. it tightened more, very strongly but not painfully. I pulled back until the hand came away, and this time the owl took off.
All night the owl kept coming back to hunt from the top of the tent. I not only saw his feet when he came to us; I imagined what he was doing while he was gone, floating through the trees, seeing everything. I hunted with him as well as I could, there in my weightlessness. The woods burned in my head. Toward morning I could reach up and touch the claw without turning on the light.
September 15th
Kept waking, and waking again, but when I was alive for good, the screen wire of the tentfront was gray and steady. Drew was deep in his sack, his head away from me. I lay with the flashlight still in one band, and tried to shape the day. The river ran through it, but before we got back into the current other things were possible. What I thought about mainly was that I was in a place where none—or almost none—of my daily ways of living my life would work; there was no habit I could call on. Is this freedom? I wondered.