The Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, Montana August 28, 2002

For six days and nights she had roamed, feverish and disoriented, drinking little and eating next to nothing. A few fibrous tree mushrooms, some ants and cutworms she had slashed from rotting logs, a wilting patch of skunk cabbage, the already scavenged corpse of a baby elk she had stumbled across. But where were the berries she depended on, the sweet, juicy, nutrition-rich blackberries and huckleberries that would sustain her through her long winter sleep? Always before there had been berries. She would gorge on them for weeks on end through the long, warm, sunny fall afternoons. This year, what few there were were shriveled and hard.

And the trails and the markers, what had happened to them? Where were the trees whose bark she had clawed to mark her territory? Where were the worn, well-known paths she had trodden her whole life, back to the time when she and her brothers had wrestled and play-growled on them at their mother’s side? They had been there forever, and then one day she had awakened from a nap and everything had changed. Smells, sights, sounds, places-all new and frightening. Nothing was familiar. How could that be?

These were not thoughts and questions in her mind, for her mind could not form thoughts or questions, but in some dim recess of her brain she was aware that things were not as they were supposed to be, as they had always been. She knew too, if “knew” was the right word, that she was in pain, but she had forgotten the fall down the cliffside that had splintered her humerus and driven its jagged ends into her flesh, and she understood nothing of the fever and the raging infection that had spread through her bloodstream from it.

What she knew-all she knew-was: hunger; thirst; pain; confusion.