A Walk in the Woods

requirements. I was just plunging into it when Katz broke a long silence by saying, with a
strange kind of nervousness, "You know what I keep doing? I keep looking up to see if
Mary Ellen's coming through the door."
I paused, a forkful of shimmering goo halfway to my mouth, and noticed with passing
disbelief that his dessert plate was already empty. "You're not going to tell me you miss
her, Stephen?" I said dryly and pushed the food home.
"No," he responded tartly, not taking this as a joke at all. He took on a frustrated look
from trying to find words to express his complex emotions. "We did kind of ditch her, you
know," he finally blurted.
I considered the charge. "Actually, we didn't kind of ditch her. We ditched her." I
wasn't with him at all on this. "So?"
"Well, I just, I just feel kind of bad--just kind of bad--that we left her out in the woods
on her own." Then he crossed his arms as if to say: "There. I've said it."
I put my fork down and considered the point. "She came into the woods on her own," I
said. "We're not actually responsible for her, you know. I mean, it's not as if we signed a
contract to look after her."
Even as I said these things, I realized with a kind of horrible, seeping awareness that
he was right. We had ditched her, left her to the bears and wolves and chortling mountain
men. I had been so completely preoccupied with my own savage lust for food and a real
bed that I had not paused to consider what our abrupt departure would mean for her--a
night alone among the whispering trees, swaddled in darkness, listening with involuntary
keenness for the telltale crack of branch or stick under a heavy foot or paw. It wasn't
something I would wish on anyone. My gaze fell on my pie, and I realized I didn't want it
any longer. "Maybe she'll have found somebody else to camp with," I suggested lamely,
and pushed the pie away.
"Did you see anybody today?"
He was right. We had seen hardly a soul.
"She's probably still walking right now," Katz said with a hint of sudden heat.
"Wondering where the hell we got to. Scared out of her chubby little wits."
"Oh, don't," I half pleaded, and distractedly pushed the pie a half inch farther away.
He nodded an emphatic, busy, righteous little nod, and looked at me with a strange,
glowing, accusatory expression that said, "And if she dies, let it be on your conscience."
And he was right; I was the ringleader here. This was my fault.
Then he leaned closer and said in a completely different tone of voice, "If you're not
going to eat that pie, can I have it?"
In the morning we breakfasted at a Hardees across the street and paid for a taxi to
take us back to the trail. We didn't speak about Mary Ellen or much of anything else.
Returning to the trail after a night's comforts in a town always left us disinclined to talk.
We were greeted with an immediate steep climb and walked slowly, almost gingerly. I
always felt terrible on the trail the first day after a break. Katz, on the other hand, just
always felt terrible. Whatever restorative effects a town visit offered always vanished with
astounding swiftness on the trail. Within two minutes it was as if we had never been
away--actually worse, because on a normal day I would not be laboring up a steep hill
with a greasy, leaden Hardees breakfast threatening at every moment to come up for air.