A Map Drawn with Teeth

I have worn this forest like a second skin longer than your bones. I alone remember their names.

Roots braid through my ribs. Moss pads the places the wind chews. Stones tilt when I step to listen. The water knows me too, iron-tongued and cold, sluicing through hollows that smell of rot and lightning. Here, the mountains crush the horizon into fists, and the trees stitch a sky so tight you forget the stars.

You call it wild and pass through in bright jackets and clean boots, breath steaming white. You say, West Virginia—almost heaven. You have not been here at midnight in November, when ridges bite and valleys pool with black, when the wind carves its initials on your teeth. Heaven? No. This is a mouth, and I am the throat.

The name you give me is not mine. Wendigo, you say, smuggling a northern word like moonshine and thinking it can cage me. I was here before the first axe shuddered, before clay met salt sweat, before ghost-white coal lifted from the hills’ bellies. There were others once, hungers tuned to frost. We learned to sing like streams through ribs of stone, to chew winter’s marrow, to swallow thunder. Winter taught us patience.

Tonight the wind runs thin, slicking the pines until every needle whispers yes. I leave no track unless I want one, no scent unless I slide my stink under your door like a cold letter for your lungs to read.

I am hungry. I am always hungry, but tonight the hollow of me pants like a dog. First snow lines up behind the ridge, blunt and white. I hear you before I see you.

You make sound into offerings, metallic clatter, quick laughter, the huff of a box that will make fire because you forgot the old kind. The creek tells me where you are: down in the broken bowl where hemlocks thicken, near the dead spruce still soft as a tongue. The water is small here, a thread stitching two deeper pools, its stones scrubbing the throat to a hum.

You cross on two ash logs slick as seals. One of you slips and swears. Birds go silent for three breaths. Then you step into my borrowed light: three shapes.

One is tall and serious. One wears a red pom-pom hat matted with burrs and keeps batting at it, irritated. One is a girl with a braid unravelled into a black rope. She speaks almost to herself, warding the dark with plans: we’ll make camp, we’ll boil water, we’ll put food in the bear box. She says them like spells to close doors behind you.

You do not taste like here. The serious one smells of careful pre-dawn coffee. The red-cap fidgeter smells of beer and cedar, wanting to be brave. The girl is salt and mint and miles. You have walked into my mouth.

You choose a flat near the creek where the ground is tired and damp. A stone bleeds old rain when you lift it. You raise your bright tent, talk about trout and ridge names and how stars will look once the clouds thin, the clouds will not thin, and argue about barred owls. The red-cap fidgeter makes the call—who-cooks-for-you, who-cooks-for-you-all—and the owl in the beech wrinkles its head as if he explained snow to a glacier.

I step closer. You smell me without knowing. Prey animals under jackets and talk. The serious one’s eyes cut to the black net of rhododendron. “Deer,” he says, wanting it to be a bear.

“Rhodys always sound like something creeping,” the girl says, trying to smile. Good.

I move where the frost will take a print and set down the foot I borrowed. You find it at the water. The girl crouches, breath opening in white gates. “Elk?” she asks, hopeful. I drag the claws long and clean. The serious one lifts his light. I slide sideways. The beam passes through where I was, and emptiness flashes like teeth.

You make fire. Fire speaks in tongues and gives everything away. I smell your meat and your fear in equal measure. Your hands are pink and thin, marked with your small histories: a rope burn on Pom-Pom’s left palm, a white thread scar across the serious one’s knuckle, the girl’s nails bitten to sore moons. She talks about maps, as if paper can be folded small enough to hold a land.

Your metal box is careful and smart. The bright food goes inside. You do not know metal is a song. You do not know I can sing back.

The girl goes to pee with a headlamp and becomes a lantern with a meat heart. Rhodys snags her jacket with fingers that do not want to let birds go, let sunlight go, let anything go. She laughs, nervous. Warmth hits cold leaves. My hunger leaps, slick and simple, and I pin it the way you pin a dog’s skull to pour medicine.

There is a rhythm older than trails.

She returns. You talk storm. It smells like teeth. The red-cap fidgeter confesses to the crosshatched black: a kiss he shouldn’t have taken; a stump he called bear. The serious one laughs and does not say that silence is the only thing he wants. The girl says nothing for a long while and then very softly: “We shouldn’t be here.” She does not mean the creek or the hemlocks. She means here, inside this century, inside skins stitched with rules and passwords that will not save you.

Clouds arrive like a closing fist. The owl zips over camp and is gone, taking easy stories with it. The sky bruises. Snow has not started, but the forest counts in snow and the count has begun. Last light slides under trees and lingers on the creek like someone loath to go home. “Early start tomorrow,” the serious one says, like a blessing. The red-cap fidgeter pees on the fire; shame rises with the steam.

In the tent, you lie like three pegs hammered at wrong angles into ground that only pretends to be soft. I stand forty paces away and listen to how sleep takes you. The serious one’s sleep has a schedule; you could set a clock by the drop of his jaw. The red hat fidgeter's sleep is a string of alarms he snoozes with snores. The girl does not sleep all at once. She falls, catches, falls again. Her braid loosens. The storm presses the tent walls, and the tent walls push back.

You built a second skin to wear inside my skin. It will not hold.

I have a voice.

A thing that eats stories learns to use its throat, to be a stream, a deer’s hock snapping in a snare, the way a mother says your name the first time after a long time. I do not mimic. I remember. Memory oils the gears.

When the world forgets itself, when even owls hold their breath to hear the snow queue behind the ridge, the girl shifts. Then I put her voice just outside the tent, small and tired and a little embarrassed: “I need to pee.”

She sits so fast her sleeping bag creaks. Even alone, she is polite. “Go,” whispers the serious one, sleep still riding his tongue. “Take the light,” the red-cap fidgeter mumbles and snores again.

She fights the zipper; the wind has taught it a trick. “Come on,” she coaxes, sweet as to a dog. She wins, slips into the corridor that the tent makes with the world. I give her the soft crunch of a deer where the headlamp cannot decide to look. The beam carves a white tunnel through rhodys. A tree leans into it like a bored drunk. “Hello?” she calls, because you believe speaking into the dark reduces it.

I give her another sound, farther back, the serious one’s voice asking if she’s okay, except not from the tent. From the creek.

She pauses. I respect that. She swivels the beam, carving circles in blank faces of leaves. “Did you—?” she begins, and I say her name the way her father does in a grocery aisle, trying not to let the search unravel into fear.

She steps toward the creek. I step backwards, and because we are both these animals, we dance.

At the stones slick with long patience, she squints. “That’s not funny,” she says. The wind makes a joke anyway. Her breath lifts a soft fog and loses it. I let her see me.

Not all. Not the places where skin and bark learned to mean the same thing; not the teeth that sculpt hunger into a cathedral; not the old slits where eyes used to be and the new slits that learned better angles. Just the shape inside the shape: a man assembled of winter and lightning and a thinking disease. The headlamp tries to make sense of me and fails.

Her mouth opens. She drops the sound she meant to make. For a heartbeat, it is only the creek saying its name to itself.

“Don’t,” I say—in her mother’s voice the last week before morphine softened the edges, when cheekbones ran like knives and hands learned that shaking was a way to say stay. I do not say what not to do. She knows. It is everything.

She runs.

It is not wrong. When deer explode from grass, when dogs find their feet, when storms unfurl their backs, running is faithful. Running heats the body and sweetens the lungs. The hammer of her heart makes the blood taste like a first cut. She slaps through rhodys. The headlamp catches my knee and knows it is not human. The tent unzips. The serious one threads her name into the dark as if he could haul her back. The red-cap fidgeter says, “What the—” and finds the knife.

I take the long way. The ground remembers the last flood that peeled it back. I know the old paths—the deer tunnel the coyote widened, the place where a man once crawled without his ankle and sobbed because he learned how long a night can be when you are the only meat. I cross the seam, up and around and down. Old spruce gives under my touch; moss gives, soft as a throat. I am above you when you think you have gone left. Your headlamps swing like small moons. “Sarah!” the serious one calls.

I step down.

Your knives are lovely. You bought them under warm lights and asked if they were sharp enough to cut rope. Yes, said the badge. You thought of rope, not bone. You did not imagine how a sternum resists and then yields with a sound that makes language pack a bag and leave. I am hunger shaped into a story.

The serious one stands between me and the girl because he is serious, and some part of him still believes we owe each other. He spreads his arms. The knife flares. His fear is a thin bright thing. The red-cap fidgeter stands left, mouth open, knife low—funny, if you are a mountain. The girl does not scream. She does not waste it. Three fast breaths cut her throat. “Run,” she says—bless her—and shares hunger with wind.

I could end it, a leap, a twist, a crack. I could spill blood that steams on stone and sing a keening that makes owls tilt and wonder what else is dying besides night. But I savour the not-yet. I'd like you to see me and understand that the world never belonged to you, that your maps are made of paper and paper burns.

“Please,” the girl breathes. There is no god here that is not teeth and frost, yet you still name spaces the way you name stars after you're dead. Please. I am not indifferent. I remember, please.

I step so close that the serious one’s breath touches the edge of me. He tries to step back, but the red-cap fidgeter is behind him, and bodies do not always want to be in order. The knife jerks up. I smell the store’s oil, the cardboard box the blade slept in before waking here.

“What are you?” the red-cap fidgeter asks. Sweet boy. He thinks I can be reduced to one name. I open my mouth.

I give him his mother, the night she found him on the porch at three, after he wrecked his father’s truck and the red-blue lights spun the dog into a seizure. “Oh, baby,” I say, and the knife drops half an inch because the body turns toward the first mouth it learned.

For the serious one, I give, “Hey, bud,” the way his father said it before the night coughs turned bad. His face cracks like pond ice under a heel.

I leave the girl alone. She paid me a service by being quiet. She earns mine—for now.

I take the serious one’s wrist. Trapping is older than me, but some truths do not wear out. The wrist bends. It makes a small noise. The knife falls. The red-cap fidgeter lunges. His blade slides along the part of me that remembers ribs and finds no purchase. He swears and tries again. He is not a coward. I will keep that in my black heart as long as I keep one. The girl slips sideways toward the creek’s left-hand pool, where rocks stack like steps. Good.

Run.

I do the work.

After, the owls start again. The storm comes down to taste stones with its white tongue. The girl is gone, not far, but gone—the forest has swallowed her, and I am proud of it. The red-cap fidgeter lies crooked and quiet, his knife in the leaves where some mole will find it in spring and wonder at metal. The serious one stares at the place the sky would be if the rhodys hadn’t decided centuries ago that no one needed it. His chest rises where it can. He wants a last word—about a trout he caught when he was nine. His lips shape it without sound, then stop.

You think this ends with me licking your story from my fingers and crawling into a hole to sleep. You like cycles with tidy bows—fat summer streams of hikers, thin winter bones of starving. You like to believe the right kit or whistle, or grip could keep you from prey. Sweet. Not wrong. Care is armour. It makes you last longer. But the mountains carry older blood, and the cold taught me a hunger that stays even when blackberries give their sugar for free.

The girl will tell it differently: a shadow she could not argue into bear; a voice that learned hers and threw it back full of pins; small knives, a large mouth; a cold that was a person that did not love anyone. She will say West Virginia has places where trees lean their heads together to whisper secrets learned from bones.

She will find a word—Wendigo—and people will argue geography and respect and whether such a story should be told. Some will nod. Some will scoff. A few will never come to these hills again. A few will come at night with cameras and salt and prayers they learned from television. I will watch them from places where their lights cannot point. I will take what I need. The storm will make the creek’s voice bigger for a while and then smaller.

There will be mornings. Someone will find a red pom-pom snagged high in a rhody and say, “Huh.” A spring flood will rearrange the stones; the metal box will ride among logs like a child until a fisherman with river-stone hands hooks it out and tells a story true and not true. Owls will live long enough to watch boys become men and then hush.

And I will be here, hunger walking upright, second skin over first, winter buttoned down my spine.

If you come with your bright tent and jacket and knife and your bright friend whose laughter makes the owl tilt its head and think mouse?, you will not see me. You will feel me like a storm three ridges away. Your teeth will ache the way they did when you were six. You will smell iron and say trout to make yourself brave. You will call into Laurel, and Laurel will keep your call. You will hold your friend’s name like a candle, and the wind will take it. You will try to fold the forest into a story you know how to survive.

You will reach for the word—Wendigo—as talisman, apology, dare. It will not matter. Names are lines on water.

This place is all water under stone.

Listen: the creek is learning your name. It will say it for a long time. I am here. My ribs are beech and oak. My teeth are frost and stone. My voice is your mother’s, sharpened into a key. The wind runs its fingers through me and counts. I count with it. One. Two. Three campers who thought the woods were only a place to prove you could be cold.

I am a lesson you do not want to learn, but the mountain teaches it anyway. It tastes like iron and wintergreen and last words. It is almost snowing.

I will take what you bring and wear it in the dark. I will wait, and waiting will be a kind of eating, and when you cross the ash logs—slip, swear, laugh—the creek will tell me. I will come down with patience like a knife and hunger like a map. You will hear your name the way you have never heard it and understand that heaven was a word you used to keep the night small.

Almost heaven, almost a promise. Almost.

The mountains open their mouth. I open mine.