Voracious - Alice Henderson [88]
Screwing up her courage, she stepped off the porch, heading for the store.
Around her she heard the typical sounds of summer in the forest, the chirping and trilling of Douglas squirrels, the chee-dee-dee of mountain chickadees, the occasional police whistle-like call of a varied thrush. And always the scent of sun-warmed pine. It was a comforting smell, one that reminded her of endless happy hours spent hiking in the wilderness. She found herself smiling in spite of the dire situation. Sometimes nature reminded her of bigger things than her own problems. It whispered of ancient forests, the advancing and retreating of glaciers, the everyday foraging of birds and squirrels in the underbrush. Here these animals were, carrying on with their lives day after day. They foraged and gathered and stored, slept through winters and explored the springs. Trees weathered countless snowstorms, fierce winds, and mild summers, with the chattering of squirrels in their branches. They did this, year in and year out. The constancy of nature.
It always calmed her mind, the chaos of her problems seeming smaller, the panic subsiding. Time was she had worried about how to hide her gift, about not having any friends, about her parents’ aversion to her gift.
Today she worried about her own death. But still, even that seemed smaller, just one organism in the cycle of life, born one day and returning to the earth the next, her body food for coming generations of flowers and worms and trees.
This thought didn’t make her sad; it liberated her. The best she could do was make the most of the time she had left, whether that was seventy years or a day. She would live every moment to its fullest, and she would fight until the very end.
Madeline padded along the paved road until she reached the camp store area. A pack of kids rushed by her, screaming and running this way and that, attacking each other with robot action figures. A woman in a St. Louis Cardinals sweatshirt yelled after them, “You all better be back for lunch! I ain’t gonna say it twice!” She piled into a monstrous RV and slammed the door.
Ah, camping, thought Madeline, feeling a little better, her spirits brighter than they’d been in days.
She strode up the four wooden steps to the camping store, only to find the place overflowing with tourists buying suntan lotion, cedar boxes sporting coyotes, and walking sticks decorated with bear bells. It was one of those stores that sold both souvenirs and groceries and was perpetually packed from June through September.
This day was no exception. The line for the register ran the length of the store, and everyone in it looked sweaty and impatient. She did notice one couple, though, happily kissing in the middle of the line, somehow miraculously able to tune out the droning masses, the wheezing of vacationers who’ve spent their last recreational dollar on postcards and gimmicky T-shirts, the whines and pleas of kids who want just one more gobstobber to stick in their sibling’s hair.
A family at the end of the line was buying bear bells for each of its five members. The three kids whined and complained about who got which bell until they got distracted by a bin of rubber spiders and scorpions and began dumping them on each other. She cast an annoyed look at the parents, who were jangling the bells, as if giving them a test run. Many times she’d encountered bell wearers on what she had hoped to be peaceful, rewarding hikes.
The clanging of the bells now rankled her memory.
Jangle jangle jangle up the trail.
Jangle jangle jangle down the trail.
And the real crime of it was that there was no solid evidence bear bells even worked; some specialists believed they were nowhere near as effective as the human voice. As predators, bears exercised a certain degree of curiosity, and sometimes were even attracted by the bells, wanting to know what they were. One Canadian boat captain Madeline had met called bear bells “dinner bells.”
She squeezed down the aisle between a cluster of people eying glass tankards with grizzly