CAMP

A hunter shoots. The sound is still in my head even after I swollow. He's half a mile away. I double check to make sure that the white of the paper is facing the road. Even the road is a lot of trees and thorn before I can make out the tar . I am the buck in the briar lost to the swamp. I listen. I know my pulse for it is in my ear. Any movement is a thought before an action. The hunter is drawn to anything that moves. When a breeze stirs the leaves I read adjust if I must.
Twenty feet away is a good tree. My food bundle rests beside me, leaning to one hip just like my dog back home. I put my hand on it and allow my heart to pretend it is combing fur--or remember. The dark is coming down slowly. I wait. It is easy to set camp in the trees in this dusk as long as there is no wind or rain. Food bundles tied up in the limbs of trees is another creature with its own set of rules, and teeth. There is nothing natural about throwing a rope over a limb, securing line to a sack, and then hoisting the limp animal up fifteen feet into the air. It is then that I tie the line to a sister tree, and begin to look excusable. Every other part of the act shouts trespass, and someone should be contacted. In the coming of dark I watch a chipmunk run to my feet for cover before he braves up to cross another thirty feet to the bottom of the tree he calls home. I move just enough to tell him I am alive. No, I move to see him freak. He freaks. From my feet he throws out everything he has gathered in the opening of his mouth, cursing and screaming all the way to his pre-planned destination. I laugh softly, and consider that it is the first time I laughed all day. Sorry friend.
The window is a small one. Moving to the tree I coil the rope aroung a half a foot of a down branch. The coil and branch are tossed. Success. In a few minutes the window would be closed. Even in this weak light the targer branch is a melting form in shadow. In a minute it will be...It's gone already. Tonight I will not sleep with bear bait. Walking back to the tent my eyes find branches I forgot to be careful around. I cut them to save myself more painful stabs. From the damp earth I pick up a handful of dirt to rud into the bright white eyes that remain from where the cut branches were. They disappear like candle flames blown out, and all the trees take me in to their shadow.