by Pamela Huber
Two girls and a wolf walk into a forest. The young girls don’t stray from the path, they don’t pick flowers, they stay the course, but still Wolf finds them and stalks them. He makes friendly talk, lies, silverfish sleeping between his teeth. Not sensing the danger yet, the girls offer an invitation to walk side by side with Wolf for a day, which Wolf extends to four.
In 2027, GRACE & GRAVITY will be edited and published by the Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Submissions for Volume 12: Grace in Justice are open through November 15th.
Wolf watches the girls sleep in, waits for them, trails them uninvited, hangs his food on their bear bag line, walks with them to get water, gives them hiking poles to replace their foraged sticks, makes them think they need him even as they try to sneak away. He curls around one of them at night, tucks her body into his, and she can feel his teeth there, waiting.
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This is no folktale. This was 2014 during the longest hike of my life, an exercise in tightrope walking. It was my first backpacking trip when, for four days in the Smokies, my friend and I were stalked by a man twice our age.
We wanted to be women but, at twenty, we were little more than girls.
Easy prey.
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The sun hid during the week Wolf stalked us.
The night before we entered Tennessee, the sky was clear above Hilton Lodge by Fontana Dam. In the morning, we would walk across the dam along
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the Appalachian Trail—the AT—where it entered the Smokies. I remembered my father telling me to take a picture of the dam for him, not because it was particularly beautiful, but because of the James Bond movie shot there. We approached the lodge just after nightfall, and thru-hikers were already bunkered down for bed in the Hilton—called that because of its roomy size for an Adirondack hut. A few others waved from the washhouse, a rare bit of luxury on the trail. I couldn’t believe my luck as I approached the lodge: just beyond the picnic tables, between the bare branches of the trees, the moon rose slowly over the lake, framed by two mountains. It climbed up the sky, silent and wise, and reflected down onto the water, throwing its light across all like melted silver. The stars flickered into view as the sky darkened. I stood, transfixed, until the moon rose fully above the mountains. Then I lay down on a log by the fire ring and looked up at the stars; I hadn’t seen so many since my last trip to Maine. After a quarter hour, a chorus of coyote howls rippled across the lake up at the moon, their voices turning the valley into an echo chamber. At the time I thought it a whole pack, but I’ve since learned how they can throw their voices, how one can resemble many. Then, though, I could feel myself grinning up at the sky. When I finally went to bed that night, I whispered quiet thanks to the lake, the trees, the moon, the coyotes that sounded like wolves in the distance.
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The first night proved inauspicious. Rain arrived the next day, cooling our red cheeks after five thousand feet of vertical gain in six short miles. It fell as we approached the Adirondack hut where we met and introduced ourselves to Wolf over hot tea. That was his trail name, Wolf, and he was all alone. He was an AT thru-hiker, which meant he could sleep at any hut in the Smokies without a reservation, because if the hut filled, he could pitch his tent. We, as lowly section hikers, could only sleep in specific huts we’d reserved months in advance. We offered to walk with Wolf the next morning when we learned we were all headed to the same next hut.
Once the rain began, it stayed. My thirty-five-pound pack took on water weight; my clothes clung to my body; my toes shriveled into tiny, perpetual prunes. We shivered at night in the huts. One night, coyotes came into camp at two a.m. crying loudly as they hid out from the rain. We could hear them on the other side of the thick plastic tarp that formed the fourth wall of the hut. We tried, in our animal fear of them, to sleep. Then lost weekend hikers crashed in at four a.m. fumbling for an emergency heat blanket to combat their shivering.
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They’d spent hours, like the coyotes, hiding out under a rock nearby before seeking out our shelter.
The third night, we told Wolf our next hut was not far down the trail, because we made our reservations late and grabbed what we could get: some days we’d hike three miles, while other days we’d need to hike fourteen. I need a rest day, Wolf said. I’ll go to the next hut with you. We hadn’t asked him to join us and thought it strange a thru-hiker would ruin his momentum taking two slow days back to back, but we didn’t know how to say no. And from then on, whether we walked fast or slow, whether we took long lunch breaks or slept in leading to late starts, no matter how much we urged him to go on without us, we could not shake him. He stuck to us, as persistent and dreary as the never-ending rain.
At least, I thought, I have Clingman’s Dome—the highest point on the trail, the pinnacle of the southern portion of the AT—to look forward to. And when the wet, slippery, still-icy ascents up mountain after mountain finally culminated in the Dome, it was completely shrouded in fog. Mountains supposedly stretched out in every direction for fifty, a hundred miles—and I couldn’t see fifty feet ahead through the mist. I looked at the signs detailing each peak I should see off in the distance and it all felt like some sick joke. I debated giving up. I was too exhausted, too wet, too disappointed by the nothing view and our inability to shake Wolf. Still, I figured I’d feel better once I got to a hut that night.
Ice covered the trail on the south side of Clingman’s where the mountain’s shadow prevented it from melting. My Yaktrax failed me and wouldn’t grip the ice like a proper crampon would; I slipped again and again, rubbing my knees bloody and raw against the rocks as I descended. We planned to hike fourteen miles that day but made it only seven before giving up and veering off toward the nearest shelter, sans reservation. A ranger there, the first we’d seen since the night we met Wolf, told us that eight section hikers had booked the hut full up for the night; we could stay for now, but if they showed up, we’d have to move on in the dark. We and other waterlogged thru-hikers unrolling our sleeping pads held a collective breath of anxiety at the thought of being forced out of the warm shelter to make camp in the rain. An arriving thru-hiker came to our rescue when he informed the ranger that he’d met eight boys hiking in jeans who said they were done with the rain and headed home. We claimed victory as the ranger let us unpack our provisions and make use of the fireplace. We laughed over dinner and cards at how ill-prepared the boys were. Secretly, though, we felt lucky and hoped they’d made it off the trail safely; we could mock lack of preparation, but hypothermia was no joke.
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The men in the shelter were good company. They admired women hikers; we were definitely in the minority, and they wanted to see us succeed. They would offer small bits of advice, but never so much as to be condescending. Most understood that we were motivated to do this all on our own.
Wolf was the exception.
It had been four days in which he had not left our side, and he avoided leaving us alone with the female ranger long enough to tell her he had overstayed his invitation, that he was stalking us.
In the morning, as we filtered water from the nearby spring, we finally got a moment alone. Wolf climbed the hill back up to the Adirondack hut ahead of us—presumably to get to the ranger before we could. This is when my friend told me Wolf had curled around her spine in the night as she slept beside me. This is when she told me how she’d gone stiff, as frozen with fear as I’d been hearing the coyotes on the other side of the tarp wall. This is when we decided to hitch a ride off the trail at Newfound Gap.
We were thirty miles short of our goal to finish the complete Smokies portion of the AT, and we were done.
As we made our escape plan, three male thru-hikers our age climbed down the hill to the spring. We told them our plight and our plan to hitchhike out at the Gap, the only portion of the Smokies where road intersects trail. The boys agreed to walk slow that morning, to let us pull ahead of them, to form a barrier between Wolf and us.
What I remember most is that last hour on the trail, triumphant with our escape, when the rain slowed to mist and we were able to enjoy the final stretch of our hike in solitude, not performing, alone with ourselves.
We had pushed our knees past their limits, slipping and smacking them against sharp ice on the shadowed sides of mountains. We had spent five days wet, our socks never drying, our toes blistered and shriveled. We had evaded the teeth of a wolf.
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It would take me years to trust myself hiking or camping alone again. To learn to dodge the unasked-for offers, to learn how to say no.
Eventually, when I lived on the road, in a campervan, I learned to lie with my own silverfish slipping between my teeth.
No, I’m not staying here tonight.
My father is ahead at the campsite.
My boyfriend is waiting for me.
Of course I have a dog in here. A gun.
I had cut my teeth with the ultimate trickster, the coyote in wolf’s clothing, who throws his voice and makes himself appear larger and scarier than he is, who makes himself seem a pack when he is just a man, in the woods, alone, and I, a woman, still have the power to leave.
Pamela Huber is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Montana who was raised on the waters of the mid-Atlantic. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals including Atlanta Review, Furious Gravity, and Mid-Atlantic Review, and has received awards from Glimmer Train and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She lives online at pamelahuberwrites.com.
