Haunting

I acquired a habit in my first year of university of going to the woods as a type of self-medication. Part of it was that my roommate was in the room more often than I was, so if I wanted to be alone I had to go somewhere else to find that. But the other half was I needed somewhere to worship. I had no church, no way to get into town even if I had one, and I have never felt close to god inside. So I started spending Sunday mornings on my knees by the river.

There was almost never anyone else in the woods. Sure, I would occasionally see boys playing disc golf in the warmer months, and once or twice I would see a dog walker or a botany student, but I learned pretty quickly what parts of the paths they would be on and how to avoid them. By my second year at college, I could reliably go into the woods every day and never see another soul. I felt safe there, in ways that other people didn’t tend to feel in the woods. Maybe that’s because of how I was raised, bare feet on the bark of a tree, or maybe it’s because the woods never asked me for anything. I have been told that something in the woods is hungry, so maybe I liked the way that spirit and I ache in the same way, our bellies empty for so long we forget what it is we even want to fill them with.

It was Halloween and a Sunday when I first began wondering what it was the woods wanted. I was stumbling more than walking along the paths, panic spilling out of my throat like water through a broken dam. It was one of those days where I wanted to grab God by the shoulders and beg him for an answer. When I found the deer I nearly tripped over it, lying pressed into the grass on the shore. I was startled, not so much by its presence or the fact of its death but the way that at first glance, it looked like it didn’t have a head. It was in perfect condition, recently dead except for its swollen, bloating belly and its broken neck. The head of the deer was folded under its body, as though it had fallen on top of it. I could find no wound to betray the cause of its death. It might have been shot or it might have died from the broken neck. Seeing as it was Halloween, I was shocked out of my panic into a sort of morbid curiosity.

The deer was not the first dead thing I had found in the woods but it was the first whole one. I developed a habit of going back to that section of the riverbank every so often to look at the deer. It was a surprisingly effective grounding technique: it is hard to feel disconnected from your body in the presence of decaying flesh. I began to feel a certain measure of attachment, affection to the deer and its decay. I was interested in the science of the thing, how the first thing to come was birds and other large scavengers, then beetles and grubs and the bacteria that rotted in its belly. When I came back from winter break, I figured I should go and see it again. It was a week before I found time to get out there, stumbling into the woods half-blind again from panic. But when I reached the patch of the river bank a few feet off the path where the corpse had been, all I could find was the jawbone, split in half and half-buried in the frozen dirt. Like I had been when I first found the corpse, the discovery sent me reeling. I combed the whole clearing and found, instead of the deer’s body, a broken mirror at the base of a tree just up the hill. It is one thing to know the woods are hungry. It is another thing to discover the woods are eating.

I still go into the woods. I have even been back through that clearing (I have to pass through it to get to another clearing, with a bench and a fallen tree that is more comforting). But I am cautious now. I do not believe in haunting, spirits, or ghosts. But I’m not sure the spirits know that. The woods are not hungry for me, they do not want anything I can offer, but I am smart enough not to get between the mouth of a beast and its prey.