Chapters One through Nine

Chapter 1

My name is David, and I used to think that life had no meaning. Each day was lived without a real purpose. I had mini-purposes that changed from day to day or month to month, but they lacked any real depth. It was sometimes a roller-coaster of emotion – I could go from despondency and self-loathing to pride to fear to pleasure to pain to thrill in the space of a pair of weeks. Most of the time I just felt like nothing would ever change, like I was in a rut.

Today, I woke up and everything changed.


Chapter 2

Let me tell you my story.

I grew up in a big city. Just another kid in the suburbs, you know. Nothing terribly remarkable about my life. I lived in a regular house with Mom and Dad and my older sister Carrie. I wasn’t especially gifted physically – I always felt kind of scrawny. I remember playing in the park down the block with the other kids in the neighborhood. You know how kids can be – I didn’t really fit in very well and the other kids, the boys especially, picked on me and didn’t include me. I remember elementary school…not the class material (I got good grades), but the social environment. It was an extension of my playground experience – and I didn’t fit in.

Mom and Dad married later in life than most people. They tried to get pregnant for several years before Carrie came along. Five years after that they had all but given up when I was born. They loved us – I remembered what a gentle manner Mom always had. Dad was a bit more stern and firm, but not violent at all.

But our house was – quiet. Mom and Dad didn’t converse much. In the evenings she would sit on the couch and read a book or knit – she was always making something to give away to somebody. Dad would watch a baseball game on TV or read the newspaper or one of his engineering journals. We never watched anything on TV except for sports games and the news.

I lived for trips to Grandpa’s house – he lived in a farmhouse in a small town about fifty miles outside of the city. You had to drive over the mountains to get there. It was a pretty little mountain valley – the mountains extended for a hundred miles or more on the far side of Grandpa’s town. The fields around his farmhouse had been long since sold to the neighbors – I guess he probably couldn’t take care of the place by himself. He would brighten right up when I came to visit. I don’t think Carrie really had the same experience with Grandpa, so a lot of times, especially during school vacations and summer break, we would drive over there and visit for the day and then they would leave me with Grandpa for a few days or even a whole week.

At Grandpa’s I could wander through the fields and the town for hours. It was so different than the city – so open. I didn’t meet many other people, just the farmers that lived closest to Grandpa. But I also spent countless hours with Grandpa, hearing stories of his younger years, life on the farm, family life with Grandma, what my Dad had been like as a kid, and on really rare occasions a story of his service to our country as a soldier in Europe. The stories seemed to come alive – this life of so much adventure. My imagination would run wild with images of riding horses or parachuting in behind enemy lines. I could tell he missed Grandma. I had no memory of her – she had died when I was three years old.

We went into the mountains behind his town many times during those years. Sometimes Dad would come along. Grandpa showed me lots of fascinating things in the mountains. We often fished in the abundant streams and lakes. We saw lots of wild animals. Dad and Grandpa had hunted years before, but now I was still too young to hunt and they had both grown old enough that it was a little too physical for them. But they taught me what they knew about the lives of the forest animals – especially the deer and elk and big predators like the bear and mountain lion.

From that young age I loved the mountains. I loved the smell of wildflowers wet with the dew, the beauty of the jagged ridgelines, the sound of the stream rushing down the canyon, the rough feel of the bark when I climbed a tree, and the taste of a fire-baked trout fillet. I was comfortable up there. I’m sure I would have spent a lot more time up there, but my trips to Grandpa’s weren’t frequent enough, and frankly, he was getting pretty old.

Grandpa died when I was almost eleven years old. He had a stroke one day, and went quickly downhill from there. I think it was less than a month between the stroke and the day he died. Dad had always been a quiet man, but I think he turned inward even more after the funeral. I remember seeing him weep there – the only time in my life that I saw Dad cry. I felt so alone. Grandpa had been the most important person in my life. I couldn’t imagine what the future would be like without him.

Middle school is arguably the cruelest place on the planet. Whoever had the idea to take a bunch of adolescents right around puberty and put a thousand of them into one place with relatively little supervision ought to have their head dunked into the toilet bowl and their pants pulled into a wedgie. I hated the experience. As I was still a pretty small kid, I was the object of a number of cruel treatments that I would rather block from my memory. The longer I was there, the more survival and avoidance tactics I learned, but the only way I really coped was by burying myself in academics. Of course, looking back, I realize that being a nerd that always got good grades made me an attractive target for bullies. I tried to talk to Dad and Mom about it a few times, but they just told me to avoid fighting and keep getting good grades. I really felt like nobody understood me, and I was believing more and more that there was something wrong with me.

Things improved a little in high school. I grew bigger muscles and facial hair at the same time that being a bully apparently became less cool, so I didn’t endure the same kind of treatment as middle school. But I was still pretty much a nerd, and socially I felt awkward and inferior to the other students. I discovered music – we didn’t listen to it at home very much – and built myself a little collection of my favorite artists. I loved to plug a CD in while I was working on my homework – I could just disappear for hours in the twin medications of music and homework.


Chapter 3

Those days seemed impossibly far away now. I lived in the mountains, and I had somehow managed to stay alive through an entire winter. I was skinnier than ever and very hungry. And so, here I was, hunting.

I sat very still and quiet with my back resting upright against the deadfall. It had now been three hours of waiting and was approaching dusk – I remembered how Dad and Grandpa always called it the “witching hour.” Patience like this was becoming a lot easier with time – I had been surviving on my own almost a full year.

I had picked this spot out last summer. It was at the edge of a clearing just 25 or 30 yards upslope from the stream. I had observed the deer come down the hill to this clearing sometimes twice each day, morning and night, to feed and water. I could sit back in this little copse with a great field of fire and it was difficult for anyone or anything to see me. And it was comfortable – while sitting here I often began to drift into a light sleep – but I would be back to full attention at the slightest noise.

This was my third day sitting here without success. My biggest challenge was my weapon. I was carrying the AR-7 that I had bought several years earlier when I first started into my survival kick. Originally designed for paratroopers as a survival gun, the action and barrel could be removed and stored inside the stock. It was really lightweight and packed nicely into a bag or pack, but it wasn’t very accurate. Two days ago I had taken three shots at a doe about forty yards up the clearing from me, and had only found a light trace of blood on the grass and no blood trail to follow.

I had been irritated. I was probably just a bit jumpy since I was anxious for meat from larger game. Winter’s diet had consisted of rodents and an occasional rabbit, and I was still pretty hungry all the time. “One shot, one kill.” That’s what my buddies and I would say when we were fantasizing about our shooting expertise back in high school. But now I had a limited amount of .22 caliber ammunition, and I had wasted three shells. Furthermore, I really didn’t know how safe I was in this place, and the sound of three shots might attract unwanted attention. I wished I had actually spent the time back then to become a crack shot, but I was all talk and no action like many teenage boys. And an AR-7 with a peephole sight is not the most accurate weapon in the world.

The next night I had meditated longer before coming here, and I was breathing evenly and slowly. I had seen a pair of does but had refrained from the shot because they hadn’t approached any closer than the doe from the night before. I had reminded myself that if I waited long enough, one would venture close enough that accuracy wouldn’t matter.

A slight movement caught my eye. I had learned not to turn my head too quickly and not to stare directly at things. When I brought my head slowly around I could see several deer feeding fifty or sixty yards above me. They were naturally cautious animals, stopping to look around frequently between mouthfuls of grass. I knew it would be a while before they were close enough to chance a shot, so I relaxed.

It was early spring. There were small patches of snow in the shadier spots and lots of snow on the north facing slopes. I still had snow on either side of my sitting rock and underneath the deadfall that was my backrest, but the clearing had no snow remaining, and the wild grasses were pushing out in quantity. In a couple of months there would be blossoms covering the meadow. Last year it had been a menagerie of Indian paintbrush, wild daisies, fairy trumpets, primrose, fireweed, arnica, and a lot of other wildflowers that I could not identify. At the edges of the clearing, the leaves were coming back on the aspens, and further up the slope the evergreens were showing the fresh green shoots of the new year’s growth.

I only had another fifteen or twenty minutes before it would be too dark to take a shot, but one young doe was wandering my way. I continued to breathe deliberately and slowly raised my gun, resting it on the small branch of the deadfall that conveniently stuck out across my field of vision. She was less than twenty yards away and still coming my direction, so I waited.

Nature sometimes shocks you with its brutality. Unbeknownst to me, I wasn’t the only hunter watching this doe as it wandered a little far from its companions – from behind and to my right a flash of light brown fur sped in and took the doe by surprise. In seconds and almost without a struggle a mountain lion had broken the deer’s neck and severed an artery. It was chewing on the neck area and licking up the blood that continued to flow from the animal. The other deer had disappeared into the forest almost as quickly as the cougar had appeared.

It was almost pointless to try to regain my calmer state – the adrenalin was flowing through me and my mind was going a thousand miles an hour. But I hadn’t made it through this year by not keeping my wits about me, and my instincts told me that I should try to kill this cougar. Cats are very territorial, and this one was competing with me for food. Furthermore, I wasn’t a big man and a cat like this might even hunt me if it was hungry enough.

How had it not seen me or smelled me in the copse? I could only attribute it to the early season – the animal was likely extra hungry just like I was after a long winter. I had also arrived quite early that afternoon to sit on my rock, and I was getting a great deal more careful about the way I traveled around the area. Perhaps a year in the wild made my scent a little less unusual to the animals, too.

I quickly thought it through. The cat was somewhat engaged and I could get in one very careful shot. I would shoot it a little behind the ear – if that worked for the deer I had taken in the past, it might work for the lion. This little gun was semi-automatic, so I would be prepared for another quick shot or two if I had the chance. I had no doubt that this animal would be more difficult to kill than the deer, and since I had been up here in this mountain I had killed just four deer and had four more get away mostly unscathed.

I carefully lined up the peep sight on the back of the cat’s head and neck and squeezed off the shot. The cat made a weird flip in the air and landed facing the opposite direction. It was screaming. I squeezed off a second shot right behind its collarbone as it took off toward cover. Those were a pair of lucky shots, because the cat made it about fifty yards into the trees and died. I had very little time to work, so I quickly cut its throat to make sure it was indeed dead and then dragged it back down to where the dead doe lay.

First things first – I quickly gutted the deer and hung her from her rear legs in a nearby tree. Before I hoisted the carcass, I cut a large chunk of meat from inside one of her rear flanks and wrapped it in a cloth to eat back at camp. The winter had given me an opportunity to field dress a variety of smaller animals, but this cougar was just about as big as this small doe. Learning as I went, I dressed it out as quickly as I could and hung it near the doe. I grabbed the chunk of meat and headed up the hill to my little mountain home. Tomorrow I would come back to skin and butcher both animals. The carcasses would remain safe in the air tonight while the forest varmints and coyotes feasted on the entrails.

Fifteen minutes later I had venison roasting over the firepit, and I was reflecting on how many things had changed in the last year. Surprisingly, the adrenalin from the cougar attack had gone and it didn’t seem crazy or unusual that I had just killed it. Life in the city, with a job, a girlfriend, an apartment, my favorite music, a good book – it all seemed like a distant dream.


Chapter 4

When I came to the mountains to live, I felt like life had driven me here. It was always a favorite place since I had started coming here with Grandpa when I was a small boy, but the most time I had ever spent up here was four or five days in a row, and then I was always accompanied by friends or family.

I thought about my paternal grandfather – he had been the one to teach me about how fish lived in the streams and lakes. He taught me what they ate and where they could be found. He would look at the eddies and currents and could always see the fish before I could. He taught me how to float bait or lure into those places where they were most likely hanging out, how to set the hook when the fish hit the line, and how to keep the fish from getting the line tangled and getting away. My favorite – he taught me how to clean out the guts and prepare them for the frying pan. I missed him.

Carrie and I were never close. I guess the age difference was the biggest contributor, but we also valued completely different things in life. Her husband Mitch was a successful trial lawyer who had made his name on a couple of big class action lawsuits, and now he had his own big law firm in Sacramento. They were in another universe. Big house, expensive cars, two children enrolled in private schools, and very few visits back home to Mom and Dad and little brother. I don’t think I ever felt animosity toward her – I simply didn’t relate.

The summer after my senior year in high school Mom got sick. The doctors told her she had cancer in all her lymph nodes and that it was too late for treatment. We made her as comfortable as we could, and she died as gracefully as she could five months later. Dad never recovered from the grief. He went to the mountains a couple of times with me the next year, but he stopped taking care of himself and soon had his own health problems. Two years after Mom died he had a heart attack while I was at work and didn’t make it to the phone. I found him lying in the hall. He had been gone for several hours already. I felt a hole open up inside me and I laid down beside his body and cried for an hour before I could pull myself together and call the authorities.

My parents hadn’t been rich, but they had stayed out of financial obligation. Carrie had no interest in the house or need of money, so I ended up stepping through the probate process myself and came away with the house free and clear in addition to a tidy sum to keep in the bank for a rainy day. The house just made me feel hollow, so I sold it and moved into an apartment closer to my job.

The next year was difficult, to say the least. I felt a deep loneliness and I didn’t know how to fill it. Dad and Grandpa had instilled a good work ethic in me, so I worked hard and that helped me through the worst of it. I was a systems analyst in the corporate office of a retail store, and there was always some issue that needed solved.

After work I would play my music and open up a book. It was just over a year after Dad died when I met Camille. I had stopped in to the music store where she worked to browse a couple of CD’s and she came over to see if I needed some help. We ended up talking for at least two hours in the store. It turned out we liked a lot of the same music. I had dated a few girls in high school for short periods of time, but it had always seemed like a popularity contest and I didn’t have the patience for it. I think the girls lost interest in me pretty quickly as well – I was pretty much a nerd and social misfit. This was the first time I had spent this much time with a girl my age in my whole life. When I realized what time it was the conversation got a little awkward because I lacked the social experience to know what to say and do next. But we managed to exchange enough personal information to ensure that we would get together again – Camille took the initiative on that.

At first she seemed to fill the void that I felt. She was attractive and witty. She was genuinely interested in the books I had read and the music I liked. We spent obscene amounts of time together – Camille again took the initiative on that, but I was easily persuaded. However we were both pretty naïve about the emotional ups and downs of a deeper relationship, so in a few months we had begun to experience the more challenging aspects of couple-hood and found ourselves mad at each other fairly frequently. Things would be going along alright for a while and then it would all fall apart over some issue that may or may not have mattered. This continued on until we had known each other for a year and a half.

I had become interested in survival in high school. When I met Camille I had collected as many books and field guides on the topic as I could find. I had a small collection of firearms, and a variety of other survival gear that I had either made or purchased. It wasn’t fear of a crisis that drew me to the subject – I simply found it fascinating.

I read a lot of books, but my favorite was the classic western or the spy adventure where a quick mind and performance under pressure were the keys to the hero’s success. When I was in the mountains, I would often reflect on these stories. Sometimes I would also think about something I had read in a survival book or field guide. But I had never really tried the ideas, tactics, and techniques I was reading about.

As it turned out, this particular passion for survival drove Camille crazy. She had an orderly and predictable family life, and her parents and siblings seemed to put a lot of stock in what other people thought about them. Maybe we didn’t have enough in common in the first place to form the basis for a relationship. Finally one night she just blew up at me and stormed out of the apartment. On my way home from the office I had stopped in at the military surplus store to look at a few things I had been thinking about purchasing. They had a well-built ghillie suit marked down to half the regular price – I had seen it hanging on the rack before and I just couldn’t resist. When Camille came over for dinner later, she asked what it was – it was just sitting there on the couch. I should have known better and put it away in the closet before she arrived. She just couldn’t imagine why a person would need to hide himself in the bushes or trees and spy or ambush or snipe or whatever you do in a ghillie suit. I said something lame about how you never know what might happen tomorrow and she said that she wasn’t sticking around to find out.

She was true to her word. She never came back. After about a week I tried calling her but her mother wouldn’t put her on the phone. Later that week I received a note from her asking me not to contact her anymore – it was over. So I didn’t. But the hole in my soul was back bigger than before.

The day after Camille’s letter I walked into my boss’s office and quit my job. I went home and started putting together a list of the essentials I thought I would need to survive alone in the mountains. I decided that I wanted to take the experiment very seriously as possible, so it would be important to make sure nobody knew where I was going. The last thing I wanted was a search party interrupting a perfectly good excuse to be a hermit.

I loaded my gear into my pickup truck and drove to the trailhead where my favorite haunts were located. It took me two days to take the gear in about five miles. I had broken it into several loads, and I hauled it up far enough that nobody was likely to stumble across my cache. When I was finished, I drove my truck back to my apartment and slept.

The next morning I told my landlord that I was going to be out of the country until fall but I wanted to keep my apartment. I paid him seven months rent and he agreed to check on the apartment weekly, get my mail, and take care of anything else that might arise while I was gone. I didn’t bother to check with Carrie – she wouldn’t even miss me and if she really wanted to find me she would eventually talk to my landlord. I threw my little knapsack over my shoulders and headed out the door. It took the rest of that day to hitchhike back to the mountains and I didn’t arrive at my cache until after dark. That was mid-spring of last year. It seemed like a lot longer.


Chapter 5

There had been times up here when I had no food for many days in a row, so I didn’t waste any part of the deer or the cougar. I arrived early and spent an hour skinning them and hauled their hides back to camp. Then I went to work cutting meat off the bones. I was careful to keep everything as clean as possible – it would be ironic if I died of a bacterial infection or food poisoning after making it this long out here. As soon as I had a full sack of meat, I stopped carving and hauled it up to my camp. I repeated this process until all of the bigger chunks of meat were removed – by now it was mid-day. Next I began to disassemble the bones for easy transport up the hill, also carrying them to camp when I had a full load. It was early evening when I arrived with my last load. It was still cool enough that I didn’t need to worry about spoilage, but I had rigged each load to hang up off the ground so that the small critters wouldn’t get into it. For safety reasons, I had chosen a spot just outside of camp for food storage. I looked around at the hanging red meat and white bone – it was sort of macabre but it was satisfying.

I made my own smoker last fall out of several scavenged pieces of sheet metal and that was my primary method to preserve my meat. All of my smoking was done at night. It would take me several nights, maybe a whole week, to smoke all of this meat. The bones would provide my short term food – I could roast ribs and make soups for at least two weeks. Although my hunger became quite acute at times, especially this winter, I had never gone without food long enough to overcome my aversion to eating eyeballs and brains and other parts of the animals that would have been culturally disgusting to eat in my former life. I made an exception for tongue, heart, and liver. I knew these were important for their nutritional content.

Tanning the hides was a challenge. Ideally, I would have seasoned them with salt. I was still improvising and trying to make the leather smell better and last longer. My method of preparation could be better described as drying. I had a good sturdy pair of boots, but I only wore them when I had a heavy load to carry. Most of the time I wore leather moccasins of my own make. I had refrained from cutting two of last year’s hides and added them to my wool blankets for warmth during the nights this winter. With the hair still on, they were surprisingly warm.

I had collected a fair amount of sinew from the deer I had killed – it made good stitching for my moccasins and other various projects. I remembered a random conversation I had on a bus one day with a lady who was an expert on native cultures – she had explained how the natives used almost every part of each animal they killed. I reflected that the native Americans were probably always keenly aware of the need to survive and it was a way of life for them. I didn’t know if I would ever become as in tune with nature as I thought an Indian might have been, but this year in the wild had certainly changed the way I viewed things and the way I made choices. One inappropriate choice could make a dramatic negative impact on my life up here.

It was good to have a full belly. A few days of preparation like this would help me focus on what I needed to do next. Although I might be able to go on living here for a long time, I knew that was not really living in the long run. People need other people. The loneliness was the most challenging part of my isolation. At first it had been almost unbearable. I went through a lot of different emotions – fear, anger, worry – but I had learned to push through it and also enjoyed periods of satisfaction, happiness, and general comfort.

At the end of about a week I was ready to begin some reconnaissance of my situation. Last time I had ventured out of the canyon wasn’t a pleasant experience.


Chapter 6

I had originally only intended to stay up here for the warmer part of the year. I figured I could fill the hole in my heart with this curiosity for survival. I think there is an instinct to push away when everything fails you. Survival during spring, summer, and fall didn’t worry me. The risks were minimal. I planned to return in the fall and figured I would be able to look at the world with a new and better perspective. I would just be a two-season hermit – no great harm in that.

The first thing I had to do was establish a shelter. I had a cheap bivvy style tent, but I intended to build something more sturdy and permanent. I had a few tools – a bow saw, a drawknife, some chisels, a brace, an axe, a hatchet, and a selection of rude hardware. Following ideas from some of my books, I intended to build a relatively weather and animal resistant cabin that would serve as a place to keep me warm and dry as well as store my provisions.

I spent several days looking for the right location. I knew I needed good building material and water. I also considered secrecy to be important if my experiment was to be effective. I found a nice secluded cove about a half mile above the canyon bottom. A small spring ran nearby, and the lodgepole pines were plentiful. The only reminders I had of the world I had left behind were the con trails of the jet airplanes high above me.

It took me a full month to build the main structure of the cabin. I built a foundation and floor with rock. A tidy little fireplace against the back wall was also built with stacked rock. I had an improvised roof and door for most of the summer. Shingles were a bit of a challenge – ideally I would have had juniper or cedar, but I had to make do with what I had on hand. It was a very slow process to carve them with a drawknife, and I spent some time every night on it. The door was not so important as long as it was fairly warm. But when I had finished shingling the roof, I finally built a stout door. The mechanism of hinging and fastening was rather crude, but down the road I could refine that.

In the meantime I also had to eat – I had been lucky and killed a deer early on. I also fished a little, but it required a lot of time for a small amount of food. I knew that I would not be healthy with just protein, so I combed the forest for plants that were edible. The berries did not ripen until later in the summer, but there were numerous roots and leaves that were edible – again I relied pretty heavily on the reference books that I had with me. It was a very different diet than I was accustomed to, but it was satisfying to be able to fend for myself in this fashion.

By the end of the summer I had quite a nice little camp. I had managed to eat fairly well. In the back of my mind, I knew that if this were a real survival scenario, I would have to provision for winter, so I engaged in those activities frequently to make the experience feel more real. My activities were not overly strenuous, so my food consumption was not excessive. I brought in more food than I was consuming, so I was able to store a good amount. I had to build some sturdy wooden boxes to keep the rodents out of my food. By first frost I figured I had six to eight weeks of supplies stored, and this could be stretched out for a longer period of time in a real survival situation.

That was when everything changed. I didn’t understand it at the time. Actually, it changed twice. I’ll tell you about the second time later. This first time, I was feeling pretty self-sufficient with my supplies laid up in store, and feeling rather vindicated in life. The loneliness was sort of replaced with a self-confidence, like I could get on with life and didn’t have to trust folks or depend on anybody else to get by. I built a nice fire and curled up in my bed and slept deeply.

When I awoke, something felt wrong. I think two days passed before I figured out what it was – there were no more airplanes flying in the sky. I couldn’t think of any good reason why this would happen – it made me very nervous. I thought very hard about my options and decided that I would carefully venture down the canyon and see if I could find out what was going on. I packed a couple of days’ food and supplies in a daypack and trecked out. I didn’t see a soul on the trail. There were cabins with road access a few miles from the trailhead, so I headed in that direction.

The first three cabins I came to were empty. A jeep was parked nearby but had been burned badly. Two of the cabins had the windows knocked out and showed signs of a struggle, so I became more cautious. Another cabin sat quite a bit further off the road and off into the trees. As I came closer, I could see that it was occupied. The circumstances of the first three cabins made me very nervous, so I found a tall old evergreen and hid myself near the base of the tree within earshot and sight of the front door.

Several hours later a man came out the side door with a rifle slung over his shoulder. He moved deliberately and swiftly to a shed behind the cabin, opened the door, and roughly pulled another man out of the shed. The second man was gagged and tied up, and didn’t offer any resistance as the first man prodded him into the cabin. It was evening, so I stayed in my hiding place until it was dark.

The moon was not up yet, so it was very dark. A dim light came through one of the windows, and I crept slowly to the wall. I could hear muffled voices, but I couldn’t hear what was being said. A small tree near the window offered some cover, so I moved behind the tree and looked through the branches into the window. I could see the bound man – he had his gag removed – sitting dejectedly on the floor against the far wall. Two other men, including the one I had seen earlier, were having an animated discussion about whether or not they should stay here or move to another location. It sounded like this position was “compromised” and “too close to the road.” One of the men walked over by the bound man and said, “You’d better make yourself useful with information pretty quick or you’re not going to last much longer.” The more I listened, the more I could tell that these were two unfriendly and dangerous people.

I moved back to my original spot under the old tree. I satisfied myself that it was well hidden and curled up to sleep.

I awoke in the early dawn to a roaring noise and a lot of heat. The cabin was on fire by the side door. I looked quickly around and saw the two men moving away down a two-track road around the other side of the cabin. I ran to the front door and opened it – across the way the bound man, again gagged, was squirming and moving around the floor in an attempt to get out. I got him to his feet and supported him out the door – I guided him to my little hiding place and took off his gag.

After confirming that there no other prisoners inside the cabin, I began to carefully question the man. He said he was the owner of one of the other cabins I had seen, but only occupied it part-time. Three days ago he had been at his house on the outside of town about twenty miles away when the power grid and telephone had cut out without warning. He had loaded into his jeep and headed to the cabin. Within a few hours, his neighbors had also arrived and they exchanged stories. They didn’t know why the grid was gone, but everybody in town was gearing up, so they loaded some foodstuffs into the car and came here.

Yesterday morning at dawn two men forced their way into his cabin and tied him up at gunpoint. They were clumsy and noisy, so the neighbors had a chance to jump into their vehicle and leave. The two men fired several shots, and somehow managed to blow up his jeep in the process. Then they rummaged through the supplies in all of the cabins and smashed several windows. They had asked him to identify where other neighbors lived and what supplies they might have.

He didn’t share any information with them, so they dragged him to the shed that I had seen, gagged him, and locked him inside. When they pulled him back into the house, they had questioned him again. After a while, he had fallen asleep from fatigue and awoke with the house on fire.

His name was Eric. He seemed sincere and honest, so I cut his bonds and we began to plan how to safely get to town together and find out what was going on.


Chapter 7

With no vehicle available to us, our only option was to walk to town – it took 3 hours. I never overcame the extremely edgy feeling. We constantly surveyed our surroundings. We only saw one vehicle – we heard it with enough time to run into the undergrowth on the side of the road to hide. From there, we could see that it was a truck, and there were two people in the back with guns at the ready. I only had my AR-7, and it was packed away in my pack. Eric had no weapon.

As we topped the last little rise before town, we could see that there was a barricade made mostly of vehicles blocking the way into town ahead. It was difficult to find cover – we left the road and headed across fields, sometimes finding a little bit of visual protection in the irrigation ditches and fence lines. We could hear an occasional burst of gunfire, but mostly we heard an eerie silence.

Eric’s place was all the way across town, but our goal was to find out what the situation was, so we headed toward the home of one of his friend Jimmy nearby. As we approached, it was clear that all was not well. The back door had been kicked in, and several of the windows were shattered. A body was lying on the ground just to the side of the door. From our vantage point behind a hedge Eric thought it was Jimmy. The landscaping of the yard allowed us to get close to the door if we stayed low. When we got inside it looked pretty bad – every cupboard, shelf, and closet had been emptied out into the rooms. Jimmy’s wife was lying dead in the upstairs hall, and there were a few shell casings nearby. I could see that Eric was extremely shaken.

We left as cautiously as we had come. We encountered similar sad and grisly sights at the homes of other acquaintances. The gunfire had all but ceased, and dusk was rapidly approaching. Rather than run the risk of accidentally stumbling into a bad situation in the dark, we chose to overnight in an outbuilding behind the last house we had visited. We also needed more information – we had no idea what was happening and who was responsible for this destruction. There was no food to be found in any of the houses, but I shared the little I had left in my backpack with Eric and we fell asleep.

The next morning we were up before dawn. Nothing seemed to be stirring. Thus far our route had taken a sort of semi-circle around the center of town. We carefully made our way toward Main Street in the same fashion that we had moved the day prior. We were taking our time – the sun came up before we got too close. As we drew near we could hear voices and the noise of a vehicle engine. It was risky, but we crept through an alleyway and slipped behind several pallets of big bags by the farm store.

The courthouse was a block away, and we could see a small tank and two troop transports out front. At least a dozen people were milling about. I counted eight of them in matching military fatigues carrying assault rifles. From the looks of it, they were well-trained. I was guessing that these guys had been working together a long time – maybe in the same guard unit. It seemed crazy that an actual military unit would be responsible for the wanton destruction that we were witnessing, but nothing else was coming to mind. What we had seen was pretty systematic and would have required coordination – after all, in small town western America there were lots of freedom-loving folks that wouldn’t just lay down and die without a fight. Nothing was making sense.

Several pickup trucks came and went while we watched. Most of the men in the trucks were just dressed in civilian clothes – a few were wearing hunting camouflage – but the eight guys with the assault rifles seemed to be at the center of the activity. The trucks were bringing deliveries – we could see them offloading boxes into the back of the troop transports. I was sure that it was collected plunder from the town. It made me sick to think about people preying upon other people – innocent people – and right here in my own country.

The longer we stayed in our spot the greater chance there was of being discovered, so we determined that it was time to go. This time we would head toward Eric’s house to evaluate the situation there. We found our way back down the alleyway and slipped as quickly as possible out of the center of town. His house was on the edge of town. Our method of evading notice seemed to be working – or maybe we were just getting lucky.

Eric’s place was in nearly the same condition as the other houses we had seen. We were just about finished looking around when we heard the sound of crunching glass. We wheeled around and ducked around the corner. A whispered voice called out, “Eric, it’s just me, your neighbor Tucker. I saw you come in. I’ve been hiding out at my place.” A few minutes later we were all huddled together at Tucker’s house exchanging stories.

Tucker had been in the city where I had lived and worked when the power went out. He also had no idea what had caused it, but the “vultures” had descended almost immediately. The blackout could not possibly have been a coincidence – men with military fatigues, weapons, troop transports, and tanks seemed to be at the center of all of the disorder. This had to have been a coordinated attack. Blockades went up quickly and tactical teams began to make coordinated sweeps in grids of the city. They had central command and seemed to be in close communication with each other.

He had watched people get mowed down by automatic gunfire in parking lots and stores. His wife had been in town too, visiting friends. The chaos had been too great – he made it back to where she was, but nobody was there. All he could do was make the long and dangerous hike back here to their small town. He had no word from her and all he could do was hope for the best. But we were all starting to expect the worst.

During this conversation I learned that the problems hadn’t been as immediate as it seemed to me – not long after I had disappeared to the mountains there had been a fairly rapid breakdown of the economy – at first it was like any other recession and people had talked of recovery, but the price of fuel was skyrocketing with each passing month and the hole was getting deeper and deeper. Unemployment went through the roof and so did crime, especially in the city. There were sporadic problems with the infrastructure – brownouts and blackouts – but the lights always came back on after a while. There were occasional riots and insurrections, but most people kept hoping for a return to normal. Fuel became very difficult to obtain, and then everything stopped moving – that’s probably when I had noticed the silent sky. Then came the total blackout and the renegade army.

I remembered that my grandfather had once told me that the fabric of society is a delicate and fragile weave, and all it takes is a little bit of unraveling to make the entire fabric come apart. Apparently it was true. It had taken several months for the chaos to build, but in just a few quick days the whole thing had come apart at the seams. It seemed impossible. I had been completely oblivious to the whole thing.

Two days later I lost Eric and Tucker. We were all extremely hungry, and had systematically been searching for anything edible in the surrounding houses. We had found a small cache of cans in the crawlspace of a home and I had been passing them up through the hole in the floor. I had a few more things to bring up, but Tucker and Eric had gathered what they could reasonably carry and headed back toward Tucker’s place a couple of blocks away. As I lifted the last of the cans out of the crawlspace, I heard shouting and the staccato of gunfire. I pulled myself up and carefully looked out the windows – I could see a truck in the field behind the house and four men with rifles pointing at the ground – Eric was down and not moving. Tucker was still trying to get away, but obviously hurt. Two of the men ran and grabbed him and brought him back to the truck. I heard a lot of shouting. Tucker was down on his knees with his hands behind his head. My heart was pounding – nothing prepares a man for this kind of moment. What could I do? I guessed they were trying to find out where he had come from and who else he might be with, but his answers must not have satisfied them, because I heard several more shots and then his body went limp and slumped to the ground. I vomited on the floor. My body just shook with convulsions for several minutes. Then – nothing. The hole in my heart was deeper than ever. I regained my senses, gathered the cans up, and hid myself behind an old couch and overturned shelf against the wall of the room. I waited until after dark, packed up the cans, and walked slowly to Tucker’s place. I paused to pay respect to Eric and Tucker on the way. The killers had failed to find all of the things they were carrying – I picked up several more cans in a nearby ditch.

At Tucker’s, I gathered everything useful together into my backpack, opened up a can of corn and ate it, and descended into a hollow sleep. I awoke very early, just before light, and started back across town in roughly the same semicircle that Eric and I had arrived. I moved carefully yet quickly, and had made it out of town and well up the canyon before full light. It took almost all day to get back to my camp. I had no idea what to do, but I knew what to expect up here. In my emptiness, it was the closest thing to home that I had.


Chapter 8

Thinking back on that awful experience from last fall, I decided that I might be best served with several short trips down to different groups of cabins. Each trip would take anywhere from one to five days, depending on how far I had to travel and how much reconnaissance I had to do. I figured I could carefully watch for any sign of activity for a period of time, and then when I knew it was safe, venture inside and see if I could gather any useful provisions. If I did see anyone, I could watch for a longer period of time and make a judgment on whether or not they were “good guys” or “bad guys.” If they seemed like good people, I would try to find a safe way to introduce myself. With the events that I had witnessed last summer, people were unlikely to trust anybody. If they were the type that I had seen manhandling Eric and Tucker and all the other innocent people that had died in the town, I guess I could just sit back and observe – perhaps learn by observation and maybe conduct a raid on their provisions if it wasn’t too risky.

My first trip was to the first group of cabins I had visited, where I had met Eric. The charred cabin and the burnt jeep frame were still there. I saw no sign of people, so I entered each cabin and spent anywhere from thirty minutes to two hours going through with a fine-tooth comb. I found a few packages and cans, as well as a few other useful items for living at camp. I also found a pair of boots that was an acceptable fit, and a number of other articles of clothing that hadn’t been destroyed by rodents or the elements. Most importantly, I found an old wooden outfitter packframe – the kind with the tall frame and folding shelf in back. A worn army dufflebag from the loft of one of the cabins would strap nicely to this frame and allow me to move a lot more supplies up or down the mountain comfortably and safely. I packed my smaller backpack inside the duffle along with the other supplies I had scrounged and trecked back up the canyon to my camp.

I realized that I did not want to leave a trail to my front door, so I was learning different ways in and out of the canyon. Game trails led along the bottom of every draw, and connected food and water locations down low to the bedding locations up on the higher slopes in the thicker cover. I found that I could follow a game trail for a while until it veered in a different direction than I wanted to go, then I could cut cross-country until I found another game trail.

I also knew that I could travel less conspicuously just by careful placement of my feet – if I didn’t knock small rocks loose or scuff the ground too much. There were probably a million things I didn’t know about being inconspicuous and stealthy like the natives that lived here long ago or even the mountain men that came later to hunt and trap, but just by paying attention to things around me and by using common sense, I felt like I was blending in pretty well.

On this trip I was taking note of the side canyons and draws along my main canyon, and the ridgelines high above on either side. There would be natural migration routes for the wild game going up these natural features and across the saddles of the ridgeline. The vegetation thinned up higher, and it might be more difficult to remain concealed, but if I ever needed an alternate route out of the canyon, I could trust the old migration routes that had probably been used for centuries.

For the sake of unpredictably, I chose to rough camp along the way back to my cabin, even though it was less than an hour away. When I found a suitable well-sheltered location along my route, I quickly dropped my bag and doubled back along my route in a wide loop just in case I had been followed. Fifty yards back in the trees, I rested in the shade and waited for forty-five minutes until I was comfortable that I was alone – only then did I return to my pack and make a minimalist camp. I enjoyed a chunk of jerky and some spring water from my canteen.

I could hear coyotes yipping in the distance, and then the hoot of an owl. The forest noises didn’t bother me – I couldn’t remember a time when they had. Grandpa and Dad had both told me what the noises were from the time I was old enough to ask. Really, it was the things that didn’t make much noise that might actually hurt me, but even those larger more dangerous predators like bears and mountain lions would likely see me as an anomaly and stay distant. And I knew from my recent encounter with the cougar that I must be less obvious to these animals than I ever would have believed. So I slept well that night in my simple brown wool bedroll beneath the boughs of an old Douglas fir tree.

The next morning I awoke before light and broke camp in less than ten minutes – I had no reason to believe I had been followed but it was programmed into my way of living to be over-cautious. It occurred to me that a very astute tracker could have been willing to wait out the night and follow me in the morning to find my camp. Part of my return trip was along the rocks by the streambed in the canyon bottom. This kind of behavior would have seemed insane to Camille, but the events of the past year proved that I was closer to correct in my perspectives than she had been. It was melancholy to think that way about her, but it was accurate.

I arrived at my little cabin and set to work repairing my current pair of moccasins and making a new pair. If I was going to spend this much time coming and going, I would be wearing out footwear rapidly.

I made a pair of similar trips over the next week and collected a number of additional useful articles for my camp, as well as a few more cans and boxes of food. Apparently the raiding was not quite as thorough way up here. I knew I had more cabins at greater distances, but I decided to put off my supply collecting trips for a few days while I did a different type of reconnaissance from the peaks and ridgelines.

Accordingly, I donned my least conspicuous clothing and packed up food, bedroll, and gun for a few days journey, and the next morning early I headed uphill. I also pulled out a pair of binoculars that my Dad had given me in high school. I hadn’t used them much up here – last summer I had watched for deer at a distance across the canyon, but didn’t feel like it improved my chances of getting an animal very much, so I packed them away.

I doubted I would see anybody up above me, but moving with caution was becoming natural to me. Around mid-day I stopped near a small lake and snacked. I had probably traveled four miles and climbed 600-800 vertical feet moving fairly slowly. Near the shore I found an old fire ring made of rocks – it was several years old. I felt a little exposed near the shore of the lake, but I stood there long enough to observe some salamander-like amphibians about the length of my hand swimming in the shallow water. I couldn’t see any fish, but they were probably out a bit further. The lake was only about 100 yards across.

I continued uphill, passing other lakes and streams. The trees and other vegetation became thinner as I went, so I stopped frequently under cover of trees to observe around me. I made a last quick push to a saddle in the ridgeline and took cover in a small stand of trees. From there I took the time to look all around. The ridge dropped sharply in front of me toward another lake basin and canyon. If I remembered correctly, there was no ready access to this area, so I did not expect to see any sign of anything over there. It was a beautiful view – lakes, trees, peaks and ridges for a hundred miles or more.

Back the way I came, I could see my canyon. The higher area was also covered in small lakes. Off to the north, across the canyon from my cabin, I could see an area that had been burned in recent years – most likely a lightning fire. The canyon was bounded by two major ridgelines, and probably averaged less than two or three miles across as the crow flies. I knew that some of the area I had visited last week on my trips was beyond the northern ridgeline. I was standing on the southern ridgeline, near the point where the two ridgelines met. I decided to travel down this ridgeline out to the end of my canyon. Of course I would actually stay just below the horizon so as not to draw attention to myself.

I made a three day trip out of it – I did not see anything unusual along the ridgeline. I did learn a great deal more about the area that I called home. When I reached the point where the ridge began to descend to the road, I spent a lot of time, hours and hours, looking through my binoculars. I saw one truck, but it was too far away to see any details. It drove slowly down the road and disappeared behind the mountain. That night I returned to camp.

The next day I ascended the northern slope. It was drier, and I found no lakes. I had not seen any from my earlier vantage point on the opposite ridge. I saw a great deal more animal sign over here. I even jumped out a few deer that had bedded down for the day. About halfway through the day I achieved the ridgeline. From here I could see the very wide river valley that my road came through to the northwest. Cabins dotted the river valley. To the northeast I could see a large lake that also had a road and a number of cabins around it. I decided that I would spend a night or two up here and observe the area below me.

I saw a fair amount of activity in both locations. I saw one truck driving around the lake. It stopped behind a cabin and didn’t move again during the time that I was there. I saw smoke rising from the chimney of the cabin a while later. Although most of the cabins still looked quiet, I noticed smoke coming from several other cabins down both sides of my lofty perch. I also saw some people moving around near cabins from time to time – it looked like quick walks out to the woodshed or spring to stoke their fire or slake their thirst.

When I was finished with my recon mission, I packed up and headed back toward my camp. I made dinner and thought about what I had seen. I couldn’t decide if I was seeing a return to normalcy or if this was just more bad guys that I didn’t want to run into. Either way, I would have to proceed with caution if I was going to visit the occupied cabins. I curled up in my bed, went to sleep, and dreamed I was listening to my music.


Chapter 9

I think I spent at least the first three days stalling at camp, frightened about what would await me if I visited those cabins. I went back and forth. I could hear a loud voice inside my head telling me that I had survived this long up here and I could survive a lot longer – I didn’t need to take the risk of visiting unknown people in such dangerous times. I had gathered a fair amount of supplies from my several trips out in the surrounding area – I could survive almost indefinitely if I supplemented my hunting and fishing with these canned and dry goods.

The first day I did an inventory. I figured I had more than twice as many food supplies as I had when I first started my two-season hermit quest. And if I added in the venison and cougar, I had at least four months of food on a normal diet. If I rationed myself, I might survive all the way through spring, summer, fall, and winter without adding a whole lot more to my storage. Of course, I would continue to add to it anyway.

The second day I took a look at my clothing. I had some pretty sturdy wool military surplus pants and shirts, and they were holding up pretty well. I had successfully made several pairs of moccasins, and although they didn’t hold up very long, they were easy to make and I had plenty of deer hide. And I still had my pair of sturdy boots that I didn’t wear very often. My socks and underwear were getting fairly worn, but who was I trying to impress? I could make them work for a long time yet. Additional layers were not a problem – I had several more layers that I could put on top when it got cold or peel off when it got warm.

The third day I gathered a bunch of firewood – I used the bowsaw to cut it into lengths short enough for my fireplace and a maul to split it. I gathered enough to last me conservatively through the next winter. I had several woodstacks near my cabin, partially sheltered underneath the long lower limbs of older evergreen trees.

On the fourth day my stall tactics took a new variation – I took the rifle and went hunting. I went a bit further up the hill from my favorite hunting spot. About half a mile up into the trees I sat on a rock outcrop with a nice field of view and waited. Just before dusk I was surprised to see a small herd of elk moving across the little side canyon where I was sitting. They came close enough that I took the chance – I raised the gun and fired a shot at a young cow that had moved within fifteen yards of me. It was a good clean head shot, and she dropped right where she stood.

If I was looking for excuses not to venture out of my canyon, this elk was perfect. From the evening that I shot her until I finally had all of the meat preserved was a full two weeks. Her carcass provided me more food than all of the deer I had shot combined. Her hide was also perfect since I had shot her in the head – I would never be cold in my bed again.

I began to feel justified, like the elk had been some sort of sign that I should go on living here alone and not visit these other people I had seen from a distance. So far, the other people that I had engaged had only stuck around long enough for me to start feeling companionship before they were killed. And it seemed like they were outnumbered a hundred to one by violent, brutal people. Why should I risk either being killed or being disappointed again? I now had food, supplies, and wood to last me through another winter easily.

I lolled about camp for a few more days pretending to stay busy with odds and ends, but I couldn’t chase away the nagging feeling in my gut that things might have changed in the world out there, and that I would never know if I didn’t at least get close and “spy” on these cabin-dwellers for a while.

I finally relented. I packed a lot of gear into my pack – I figured it might take me quite some time to gather information. I even brought my AR-7 – it would at least buy me a little more time if I got into a sticky situation.

Early the next day, I repeated my ascent of the north side of the canyon. When I reached the ridgeline, I descended toward the cabin area with caution because there was little to no cover up this high. I figured the ridgeline was around 10,000 feet above sea level. The cabins were down around 8,000 feet. I was moving slowly enough that it took me a couple of hours to lose the elevation. It was early afternoon, so I didn’t approach the nearest cabin. Instead, I found a rock formation that provided a bit of cover and sequestered myself for a few hours.

When dusk approached, I took advantage of the lower light to move into a semi-sheltered dry drainage on the hillside above the cabin. I was about 50 yards away from the building. It didn’t look like it was a well-traveled part of the yard, so I stashed my gear, hunkered down and waited.

It proved to be an uneventful night – there was dim light in the cabin for an hour or so and then the occupants must have put out the lights and gone to bed. I elected not to get any closer to the cabin in the dark – I needed more information first. So I spread my bedroll underneath the bushes and went to sleep.

The smells of home cooking wafting from the cabin woke me up in the morning – I guess my sense of smell had become more acute. It had also been a long time since I had smelled food like this. It was still early, so I prepared my little area for a day of observation. I made sure my pack was well-concealed, and that I had my binoculars and food with me.

Sometime mid-morning a young man came cautiously out of the side door and gathered an armful of wood from a nearby woodpile. I noticed the curtains in one of the windows rustle while he was outside – apparently there was at least one other person inside the cabin, probably covering him while he grabbed the firewood. I hadn’t paid attention before, but now I noticed the curtains rustle from time to time. Apparently the occupants were frequently keeping an eye on the world outside their cabin.

In the late afternoon a truck rolled down the two-track road that led to the cabin. It stopped out front and an older man got out. As he walked toward the house, I noticed a hunting rifle over his shoulder. He gently knocked and walked right into the house. I was too far away to hear the conversation inside. About an hour later, he came out of the house with a covered basket and drove away. From the smell, it must have been bread in the basket.

At dusk some deer wandered into the trees at the far side of the cabin. They seemed undisturbed by human presence. I watched them feed through the meadow-like area around the cabin before disappearing in the blackness of night. I repeated the prior night’s routine and slept concealed beneath the branches and stars.

The next day was not much different, except that it was a young lady that came out for the firewood. Nothing sinister going on here…

At dusk I picked up my things and moved a half mile over to another cabin. The truck I had observed at the first house was parked out back. It was dark now, but I had enough starlight and moonlight to find a good hiding spot under the branches of an old fir tree. The lights went out in the house and I went to sleep.