A couple of weeks ago, as I was taking my normal walk through the woods (BLM-managed public land) and up the mountain, I saw a tent in the woods with a man tying tarps around it. He was gray-haired, and his campsite was neat, with a carefully constructed wide entranceway, lined with logs, so I decided he wasn’t dangerous and approached closer, loudly crunching sticks underfoot. When he didn’t look up, I called out, “Hello.”
Two little dogs leapt from the tent, barking hard. The man, startled to see me, grabbed the dogs and put them in the tent, then turned to greet me. He told me that friends of his ex-wife had suggested he could camp there and that he had a job waiting for him in Gold Beach, as soon as got his truck fixed. His truck was at the other end of the trail, on the old logging road. Down the path he had a kitchen site, with another tent, a firepit (carefully lined with metal), some coolers and storage bins, and a pole-constructed table with some Christian magazines. Small logs tied horizontally in the trees designated the space as a room. He had taken a lot of trouble with this temporary home.
I pass his campsite, of course, whenever I take my walk. He’s sometimes there and sometimes not. One time I saw trash strewn around the kitchen site. Food cartons, well licked, lay open on the trail. The compost bucket and coolers were ripped open and strewn about. I surmised a bear.
Last week I was again taking my usual walk, passing, of course, the campsite again. The first tent looked battened down, and I wondered if maybe the man were gone again, but then I saw smoke curling from the campfire as I got closer to the second tent. Everything was quiet. Then I saw that the man was sitting next to the fire, reading, so I said, as I had before, “Hello.”
Too late alerted to danger, the two dogs charged from the tent and onto the path. They ran at me, baring their teeth, barking their shrill barks, making feints of attack. If the dogs were doing what they instinctively do in defense, so did I. I screamed at them to STOP! QUIT IT! GO AWAY! GET AWAY!. The more I screamed, the more they thought they needed to protect their territory from this terrifying monster. The more they barked and charged, the louder I screamed, backing away, kicking at the dogs. I think I certainly could have sent a dog flying except that I didn’t really want to kick a dog, so my kicks were bluster. The man came running up the trail, snatching at dogs, saying, “You got them all excited,” as though I weren’t supposed to be defending myself, but doing what instead? I also noticed that he wasn’t saying, “Don’t worry. They won’t bite.” As soon as he caught one dog and grabbed for another, the first one jumped from his arms and charged me again. One dog was in front of me, the other behind me, both barking and snarling and showing their sharp little teeth. The man was zig-zagging around. I was backing up, screaming and kicking and flailing, and then I tripped backwards. As I fell, I was remembering the time my sister was bitten by a husky dog because she also tripped as she was running backwards, and it’s the nature of the husky, the owner told us later, to jump on what’s down. I was fervently hoping the same was not true of yappy little dogs, but I was expecting one to jump on me at any moment, so I sprang to my feet with more alacrity than any 73-year-old woman could possibly muster. The man finally got the dogs in his arms and put them on a leash at the tent. I was breathing harder than I ever do while climbing a steep mountain trail, and I had a hard time calming myself, not because I was still frightened but because by now I was pretty mad.
The man asked me if I was all right, and I said yes, but I was still trembling. “How am I going to walk through the woods?” I asked.
“You got them excited,” he said again, as though the whole episode were my fault. But I had calmed down, so we chatted in a friendly way for a bit. He told me about the bear that had gotten into his food supply while he was away for a night. I said I had noticed and that he had done a good job cleaning everything up. I asked what he was going to do with a set of good-sized logs lying next to his kitchen. He said he was building a barrier for keeping his food from animals.
His camp in the woods is looking more and more permanent.
No comments:
Post a Comment