The night before the last Wilderness Society Trip, the Wilderness Society Trip Leader found Ursula the Wasp at the get-acquainted meeting. It was exactly what a bachelor dreams of — a willing woman, before the trip even gets started. He didn't have the accumulated wisdom of the boatmen as a caution. Specifically, he didn't have Dr. Gibbs's longtime prohibition on hustling until the last night of the trip. By the time Snake, Lean Elk, and I met them at the launch the next day, the wstl was thoroughly taken, and had that smug look men get. Ursula looked energized. The wstl was a slender man, much of a backpacker, balding, perhaps thirty. Ursula the Wasp was a little older, thin, with small, high, hard breasts like the boss of a Cape Buffalo's horns, chitinous breasts. You knew she was one of those women of whom Lawrence said they had a kind of beak. There was a sharp, buzzing nasality to her voice.
About three days into the trip, the wstl had had it. Eyes hollow, temper sharp, pubis raw, life force drained. He wanted no more of Ursula the Wasp. Want or no want, he looked like there wasn't anything left to give. Tennyson was a romantic with his line about nature red in tooth and claw. Sometimes it's the explosive grace of the cheetah and the back-arching fleet gazelle in the dance of death. Sometimes it's the easy lope of the wolf running a moose up the line to the next wolf, and the noble last stand of the moose, harried near to exhaustion, battling the wolves with sharp hoof-darts. But more often it's the ovipositor boring through the exoskeleton, or the proboscis through the carapace. A numbness spreading through the abdomen; a grayness shuttering in from the edges of vision; all that was soft in you sucked out; and nothing left but a husk with dulling eyes.
Ursula the Wasp looked angry and taut. The trip was not over yet, not for days. The wstl would learn how fungible he was; he could be replaced; he would be. She adopted a technique common enough, though not perhaps very logical; if I snap at you and challenge you enough, you'll take me. This she directed at the boatmen, as the most obvious bachelors left.
It didn't work. After the fashion of boatmen then and now, we proved able to overlook the bluntest hints and plainest suggestions by reason of our hearty, bluff stupidity. The whining, buzzing quality of her conversation increased; after exchanges, you felt not stung, but like that moment when a meat bee incises you and starts to lift a tiny collop of your flesh away.
Not Time Yet

We are floating. Ursula looks with anticipation down on a breaking hole in one of the rapids. By my art I know it to be unsafe, and far upstream slip into a current that will drift us past it. In this case, buried in the roil of the hydraulic jump is one raft-ripper of a granodiorite fin. When she realizes we are not going to hit the wave, she turns to me and says, “There's a name for people who miss the good ride. It begins with ‘C'.”
I allow myself to be chafed. Very few incompetents direct me directing my boat. When we drift down beside the hole, I catch her eye and nod at the fin. She is silent. I don't expect an apology, but I do expect acknowledgment that I know my job. None is forthcoming.

Still Not Time

We are standing around the campfire. As usual, Lean Elk is somewhere frantic in his mind; more than any other boatman, his spirit holds converse with the unseen. When Lean Elk gets going like this, you have no idea where and when he is. God's mind is said to be parachronic, viewing the reach of time from the promontory of eternity; so for Elk past and fact and fiction and present are equidistant.
“So I come up to her tent and scratch on it,” says Lean Elk in his gruff singsong, and suddenly emits a noise remarkably like a fingernail scratching on the wall of a nylon tent, “and I says, ‘Listen up, baby. How old are you?' and she giggles. Just like a book, man, she giggles.” There is a noise very like the giggle of a Teenage Republican from Orange County, in fact, indistinguishable. Actually it is not very like a book, being far more real. Some of the passengers startle and look around for the girl, as surprised as if they had heard the harsh cry of a crested and bluely brilliant Steller's jay burst from the gray round mildness of a mockingbird. But there is no Teenage Republican, only Elk, and where he is, no man knows.
“Listen up, baby, if you ain't eighteen, I ain't comin' in that tent, an' I ain't doin' you, an' that's flat.”
“I'll never tell,” says the voice of the tar in Elk's mouth, piping another alluring giggle. It is somewhat uncanny. But Snake and I do not care and do not follow, because we have tried to follow these aural montages before: Lean Elk is mtv before it was invented. Some of the passengers, though, are much interested. It is a variant on a classic plot, after all: girl chases boy. Will the tar lure the cautious Elk into her nylon bower? Or perhaps a more classic plot still: virgin and unicorn. Will the Elk lay his head in her lap?
“So look,” says Elk, glancing jerkily around the fire, “What would Toohoolhoolzote have done? Huh?” Behind the round lenses Elk's eyes roll wildly. Suddenly he shouts, “What the HELL would Toohoolhoolzote have done?”
“God!” continues Elk abruptly, but suddenly the tar irrupts. There is a high giggle which attempts to descend to the lower registers of throaty sexiness; it peals and ripples from the lips of this strapping boatman.
“Why don't you come in here and find out how old I really am, Elk?”
“Yeah, well,” says Lean Elk pointedly, and throws a dramatic and forceful glance at each of us around the campfire, in turn, “What about Toohoolhoolzote?”
He glares indignantly at us. “You think maybe Joseph would have put up with this? Joseph?” he inquires with angry sarcasm, “Put up with this?”
“Well, you think wrong. Hell NO!” He is full of a fierce contempt. Elk wanders off into the night. From the darkness where he disappears there is the sound of one fingernail scratching nylon.
“But what happened with the girl? What about Toohoolhoolzote? Who is Toohoolhoolzote? Earl, I thought you were Joseph. Isn't your name Joseph?”1 asks one of the passengers.
Snake and I shrug. “Was there a girl?” says Snake, “I'd let it go, if I were you. I do let it go, every time. You're not ever going to know, and neither will we.”
With happy pomposity, I say, “Elk is not here, in the same way you and I are here.”
“Not here, eh?” says Riva. “Sometimes you guys get a little hard to take.” A day or two previously, Riva had evinced an interest in Snake which caused her husband considerable discomfort, but which Snake in his cloddishness had failed to discern.
Ursula looks at Snake and me. “Well,” she says conversationally to some of the passengers, “I'm not surprised. I'm sure Elk never went in that tent. Why should he? He wouldn't have had any idea what to do if he had.”
Ursula looks around the fire, collecting everyone's attention. “These boatman really look like something,” she observes. She looks at Riva and says rhetorically, “Really, Riva, aren't they gorgeous? You don't see anything like this back in Paramus, do you?”
She pokes at Snake's slab-like deltoid, and her finger rebounds from the skin. Riva grins. “Shoulders out to here, all that muscle knotting in their backs when they row. And look at those arms.” She gives an arm a squeeze with both hands, and rubs her breast across the back of it. Impassively Snake withdraws the arm. Until her grip breaks, Ursula is drawn right along with it.
“Or those thighs — like young trees,” Ursula continues. She glances ostentatiously at Snake's thighs. A pause. She has gathered many listeners.
“It's all show.”
Some of the passengers look uncomfortable. Riva smiles. Some others besides Riva are getting amusement from this. I concede: Ursula is doing it very well.
She turns to Snake and me. The voice is raised slightly for her public; a buzz. A whine. “Saving yourselves, for yourselves, eh, boys?”
Riva says, “O Ursula, I know all about these big, blue-eyed, corn-fed Idaho types. I've read The Boys of Boise.”2 Riva smiles. Ursula smiles.
Snake and I exchange glances. A shadowed hollow appears for an instant in his cheek as his masseter tightens.

Time

We are standing around the campfire, after a pork chop dinner. I am talking to some of the other passengers about hunting. Ursula interrupts, leaning in over the shoulders, banderilleros high, planting one: “I bet you get a real Thrill out of killing something, eh, Earl?” Her tone leaves no doubt of the nature of the “Thrill.” I have encountered this before: mental chyle, comprising some partly digested and uncomprehended chunks of Freud that someone else had read for her, and a lot of acid.
I can never tell when it will happen. There is not usually much point in conversing with people who have their opinions adsorb onto them, so generally I don't. But sometimes it happens. Yes, it does happen. Rather to my own surprise, something about Ursula bores through the shell of my denial. On the sudden I determine to out myself and my fellow hunters. I decide to confess.
“Well, yes, Ursula, though it isn't something we hunters usually talk about. I don't know how you figured it out. But you're right. I do get a Thrill out of it. But it's maybe not what you think, not quite. You probably think it has to do with the way we mark the young hunters, and you're right, that's a Thrill, but that's not the real Thrill.”
“Mark the young hunters?” She is momentarily interested, but she sees through the diversion and comes back to the matter at hand. “Oh, I think I've got a pretty good idea just what kind of a Thrill you get from murdering some helpless creature,” she says. She leans in over the horns to plant another banderillero. “Excites you, eh? Stiffens you right up, I bet. About all that does, eh? Maybe that's what the young hunters are for, Earl?” I concede: she is quick, to have integrated the young hunters like that.
I narrow my eyes and fix them on Ursula's. I widen my shoulders a little and lean very slightly toward her. There is a sudden tautness near her eyes, and she sways back almost imperceptibly. Good. I am not looking at Snake, but I am very conscious of him. He is registering. This will go into the Annals. I want to do it right.
“You know, Ursula,” I say mildly, “There's real excitement when you settle behind the scope of Old Flintheart and peer across the canyon and you see that buck over there, Ursula, pawing through the snow, eating. And Ursula, he has no idea that you've become Death. He has no idea he's become food. And you look into his eyes, his huge brown unsuspecting eyes, Ursula, and you take just a moment to caress it through your mind before you start the trigger squeeze. And he's the symbol of the forest quiet and he's the symbol of the forest loveliness and you're about to shatter it, Ursula. You're about to shatter him, Ursula. And that's good, Ursula, that's very good. But that's not the real Thrill.”
“God,” says Ursula. “You make me sick. You know that?” She is listening intently.
I move a little toward Ursula. I use a yogic technique to make myself long in front. “And then those crosshairs get very still. And then you do it, Ursula, you send that slow spinning bullet across the canyon in a lazy parabola. And while it's lifting into the rising limb of that curve, and while it's arching down through the falling limb of that curve, you have just time to register the intertwining of destinies, Ursula, and then that bullet hits. And you walk across the canyon, Ursula, and you stand over that blasted loveliness, the symbol of the forest, and his eyes are powdering, Ursula, and that's a Thrill, yes, Ursula, that's a Thrill, but that's not the real Thrill.” One of the passengers moves up on the other side of Ursula. By now my eyes have turned from blue to gray, but in the red of the firelight it is doubtful she can perceive that.
“And you put the knife in below the sternum, Ursula. And you run that knife down toward the thighs, Ursula. And behind the knife the guts are bulging in ropy pearlescence, welling from the incision behind the knife, and that's good, Ursula, that's very good, but that's not the Thrill.”
I am near to chanting now. “And you smell the scent of the summer in him, the scent of the grasseaters, the scent of the prey. And you run the slit past the coarse hairs around his penis, and past the quiescent heft of his scrotum, and they just lay there. And now they're soft forever. And all their dreams of battle and all their dreams of does have entered eternity.”
“And you get between his thighs, Ursula, and you want them open, Ursula, and you cut down through the thighs to the pelvis, Ursula, and crack it open and lay him wide in the snow.” I have lowered my voice, and it is growing more intense. “And that's a Thrill, Ursula, but that's not the real Thrill.” Ursula's mouth is open, and she has raised one hand to it.
“And it's cold, Ursula, and the snow is creaking under your feet. And your feet have gone past pain into bluntness. And your hands ache and sting, Ursula. And you run your fingers down in among the steaming, still-contracting snakes of the intestines, Ursula. And that gives you feeling again, Ursula, and that's good. But that's not the Thrill.”
“And you cut past the great dome of the diaphragm, up where all the destruction is, Ursula, and a hot flood of clotting blood spills down at you, and it's beginning to string, Ursula. You reach on up and grab the slippery corrugation of the windpipe and slash it, and you pull it all out, and that buck is shrunken now, Ursula. And that's good. But that's not the Thrill, Ursula. No, that's not the Thrill.” Ursula is motionless and aghast.
“You look down on the reddened smear of your arms, Ursula, and against the red are dark carmine crescents formed of the hairs of your hands, your forearms, your elbows, your biceps, your shoulders, Ursula. The red life of the buck is crusting on your arms, Ursula. And that's good. But that's not the Thrill, Ursula.”
“O my God. O my God. I didn't want to hear this,” says Ursula. Her eyes are wide and horrified. She has made herself smaller.
“And when you've raked all the guts out, Ursula, you stand over it for just a moment. And there's a wind blowing down 5000 miles from the far north country, across all that barrenness, a freezing wind, and those guts, Ursula, they smoke and they steam, and the blood is denting the snow. And it's cold, Ursula, and you want it cold.”
“And you stand there looking down at it, Ursula, and you take off all your clothes, Ursula, and just for a minute you stand there, and you let that icy death-wind from the north country lick you all over, Ursula, and it tightens your skin, Ursula, until your whole body is as hard as root and stone, and you're with the ice, Ursula, and then, Ursula, THEN.” I move in closer to her, and lock my eyes on hers. The others have grayed out.
“Ursula.” I run my tongue hard on the first syllable of her name, let it glide off the others. “Ursula. Then. Then is when it happens. Then you slide yourself into that hot reeking body cavity. And you work yourself up, and in, until you can't get any deeper. And I'm telling you, Ursula, that's good, Ursula, that's the Thrill, Ursula, that's the real Thrill. And Ursula, we all do it. Grandfather and child, uncle and nephew, father and son, we all do it.”
“Please,” she says quietly. “I didn't. I don't want to know this. O my God. I'm going to be sick.” She is wrapping herself around her solar plexus.
Then a passenger cracks the moment. He points across the fire at her and begins to whoop with laughter. “O my god,” he says, “Ropy pearlescence! O magnificent. Old Flintheart! O my god. Carmine crescents! Crawling inside!” He points at her and gasps with delight. The others break out laughing, some very uncertainly. Riva looks angry. Her husband is loud in his laughter.
Ursula shakes slightly and straightens. “Well,” she says furiously, “You don't suppose I believed all that crap? No. No way.” She looks around the campfire. “I was just playing along to see what he'd say.”
“Of course you were. Of course. Just playing along. We all do it. Crawling inside!” The man crows happily and points at her again. Fresh laughter. Ursula essays some haughty and vespine remarks. These fail. She withdraws into the darkness.
Riva looks at me for a long moment. “You son of a bitch,” she says flatly.
I look back at her. “Riva,” I say. “Yes.” I smile. She leaves the circle of the fire.
Snake catches my eye. He inclines his head slightly, acknowledging. I incline my head, accepting.

Earl Perry © 1996