“In the bathroom, one of the toilet tanks is running, but if I close my eyes, it could be a stream.
I breathe in old urine and cleaning chemicals. For the past two weeks I haven’t let myself think about it, the bear who got my food bag that also held my GPS, and left me wandering blind through the wilderness and in disbelief.
I knew that if this was actually happening there was no way I’d survive.
‘You’ve gone through more trauma than most people can imagine,’ the doctor said when they found me on day 47.
I nodded, and it felt true at the time, but after, when I was alone in that white little hospital room, I wasn’t so sure.
The sun punished me. Branches slashed at my skin and black flies landed in the wounds, and then on the sixth day, the stream.
There was a deep coolness to it and a steadiness like the world could end and it would still be there, with its blackberry bushes along the bank and trout swimming upstream.
Sweat had dried in a salty film on the back of my neck, and I stripped and plunged, the ache of cold and communion with the silent trees and birds’ black outlines against the impossible blue sky.
And then the deer. A mother and fawn, watching from the bank as I dunked myself. They were, still, and close enough that I could see their chests move as they breathed.
The mother deer and I looked at each other with this knowing between us, some sort of agreement in the chaos of nature.
I was still aware that something terrible was happening, that I would probably die and no one would find my body, but then I felt more than just the primal panic I had been plagued with for the past six days. I knew that hiking and hoping to find someone was burning too many calories, so there with the fawn and the mother deer, I decided to make camp.”
