Jane, Lizette, and the Beards

109

Jane, Lizette, and the Beards

by

Ralph Bowden

Copyright Ralph Bowden 2018

SMASHWORDS EDITION, LICENSE NOTES

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DEDICATION

To strong, independent people who refuse to put up with intolerable situations.

DISCLAIMER

All the places, persons, and events herein are absolute fiction.

Jane, Lizette, and the Beards

Chapter 1

Jane was up at 5:30 a.m., breakfasted, packed, and out of her cabin just before sunrise with hound mutt Lizette, all wiggles and wags. This was the best time of the year and the best time of day and the best place to be, right here, on what would be a sunny, cool, mid April Saturday in middle Tennessee.

Birds sang. Actually, most of the twitters, chirps, squawks, and tweets hardly qualified as ‘songs,’ but there were some delicate, flutey calls that Jane could already identify as thrushes. Her bird book was at the ready in the side pocket of her backpack where she could whip it out like a gunfighter his six shooter.

She set out south on Old Snake Ridge road. It still showed on some maps, though hadn’t been passable to anything bigger than a hiker, or maybe a horse, for a long time. The name surely implied something, but it was probably too cool for snakes to be up and about yet. Jane wasn’t the type to panic at the glimpse of a slither, but any snake, poisonous or not, could startle and trip you up, which was dangerous in this rough ground. Boulders from the bluff above had crashed down onto what had been the old roadbed. And saplings? No, they’d have to be called trees by now. Washouts and wallows in the old ruts hosted frogs and their sustenance, green, foamy mosquito larvae.

The rudimentary road ran into a larger bog after a quarter mile. To bypass it, Jane climbed halfway up the east side of the ridge. After a week of showers, springs seeped out under every rock outcropping. They varied a lot, from damp, squishy spots to bubbling creek heads. Some disappeared after a few feet into the forest floor litter and the well-drained, sandy soil underneath, weathered off the sandstone cap that kept the mountain high. Some springs never showed themselves on the surface at all, but just gurgled down inside the mountain. They might come out into a little wash somewhere or they might not, depending on how the underlying limestone had dissolved out into caves and channels.

After an uncommonly long winter, spring was hustling to catch up. The trees were dropping catkins and seed whirlies of all kinds as leaves hurried to unfurl and gather as much sun as they could in the competition for height and light. Dogwood and redbud overlapped, as did huge trillium and may apples, violets, bleeding heart, jack-in-the-pulpit, fiddlehead ferns, and a host of others. Jane had a head start with her biology background, but still had a lot of practical field learning to do. A wildflower guidebook was in her backpack with the bird guide.

She meant this day to immerse herself for the first time in the rich biodiversity of these mountainous woods, still new to her. It was finally time to catch up on long-deferred self-improvement. She’d been preparing the way for the last year.

First, she’d retired from the school system after 31 years. She’d grown bored after a few years as a 4th grade teacher and gone back to school to become first an elementary science resource teacher and then a high school biology teacher. She’d always felt a little fraudulent, though, because her connection with the natural world was pretty thin. There just wasn’t time, with her own kids to raise and a lazy husband to tend.

Oh, Chuck always kept a job at the paint store, and didn’t drink or carouse. He wasn’t much use around the house, but the real problem with Chuck was that he cared nothing for anything but tv sports.

Hiking? Camping with the kids? Taking trips? All that work and expense? For what? To give the mosquitoes something to bite? You want to see nature? They show it to you on PBS.

But the kids were gone now, on their own, finally, and showing some healthy initiative into life they hadn’t picked up from their father. Jimmy was going for a doctorate in chemistry, and Janice had a good job with the federal park service as a ranger at Lewis and Clark National Forest in Montana. Jane was green with envy. Her first visit to Jan’s last summer – Chuck wouldn’t go – had inspired Jane on her next big change-of-life: using her inheritance to buy the rustic cabin surrounded by these big woods. Chuck hadn’t understood.

What do you want with 250 acres of rocks and trees, for God’s sake? And the house is a dump! Nothing but headaches. No city water. Only an old 60 amp service, and no cable! Twenty-one miles to town? You gotta be nuts. I ain’t goin’ out there to fix things, neither. He couldn’t understand her need for the wildness and diversity of untamed nature. "And snakes? And wild hogs? They own the woods. You don’t." But Chuck wasn’t a country boy and really didn’t know what he was talking about. Nor did he see what was coming.

She asserted herself again, went to the pound and found Lizette (Jane’s Little Liza), who turned out to be a wonderful companion, a great listener, and enthusiastic about everything but thunder, which sent her under the bed. Though grown to her adult 40 pounds, she was still full of some adolescent devilment. Chuck had insisted ‘dog’ only applied to the male of the canine species, and Lizette was therefore a bitch. She ain’t comin’ in my house, he insisted. So much for him.

In a final, tooth-clenching burst of assertiveness, Jane had filed for divorce. Chuck was floored. The idea of any change in his life completely capsized his canoe. He protested at first, but really didn’t know how. Jane pointed out that their recent years, especially since Jimmy and Janice left, had been stale, at best. He hadn’t been aware of that, and simply didn’t understand the concept of boredom. Really, Jane pitied him as much as anything. Once the initial shock and resentment wore off, he didn’t even have enough gumption to show anger. That did make arrangements easier. He got the house, the tv, and his truck, the only things that mattered to him. She moved out to her woodsy cabin in February with Lizette.

At first, scrounging for firewood kept her too busy to explore or experience. There were plenty of fallen branches lying about in and close to her yard, but she refused to buy and use a chainsaw, and relied only on a hatchet and bucksaw. It was a lot of hard work. The cabin was indeed ‘rustic,’ rather chicken coop-like, with lots of thermal leaks, and the only heat was a woodstove.

There were other burdens too. The waterline from the well shack froze repeatedly. The cesspool backed up as soon as it had to swallow a couple flushings and a shower, and the stovepipe was rusted, crusted, and dangerous. Jane had to draw on her creativity and ingenuity, and learn lots of practical things fast. She was determined not to call for help, which probably would have been as difficult as doing without or doing herself, and a lot more expensive. Workmen, if they could be enticed to come out this far at all, would charge for their travel time.

Separation from Chuck had been wrenching. She’d expected that. Ending anything habitual, even boredom and chronic irritation, leaves a hole. But being alone wasn’t so bad. In fact, she’d been alone, without a functioning relationship, for most of three decades, and not having to put up with someone in her space was a relief. Friends accumulated from her lifetime in town stuck with her through the transition, though once she moved out to the boonies, contact with them unavoidably thinned. Her outrageous cousin Alex called often and talked endlessly, congratulating Jane’s liberation and ripping up Chuck, whom he had never liked. But, like Chuck, Alex lectured her about what folly it was to buy the property.

And actually trying to live out there alone is completely insane! he insisted. Of course he’d complained for years of the isolation he felt in town because of who he was, but he was adamantly anti-rural. He refused to trek out to the cabin even for a look.

Lizette was the most understanding of all Jane’s supporters, the most constant, consistent, and present, and now led the way on Jane’s pioneering trek to explore her new property.

She’d bought the tract cheaply from Harmon Loftis, who’d kept it for deer hunting, but was too old now; he couldn’t hunt deer from a walker. With no road access except through the corner where Jane’s cabin sat, and little flat land, development potential was minimal. The timber was young – 30 or 40 years – and wouldn’t be worth much for at least another 20 – not that she’d cut it anyway.

When Jane and the agent had gone to Harmon’s assisted living community for him to sign the closing papers in February, he had a long list of things she needed to watch out for. Rattlesnakes and copperheads, of course. The place is crawling with them, he warned, darkly. Jane was a stickler for logic and wanted to point out that snakes don’t have legs and, strictly speaking, can’t crawl. But she held her tongue. Watch out for firewood and timber poachers. Wildcat rockers, too.

‘Rockers’? Jane had asked.

Unscrupulous gatherers of landscape rocks, the agent had explained.

What about wild hogs? Jane asked.

Oh yeah. Big and mean. Wors’n a bear. Ya’ see one, better get you up a tree. Coyotes, now, they ain’t much bother less’n you got a cat or a small dog.

I’ve told Ms. Donnelly, here, that she needs to post the place to keep hunters out, the agent said.

It won’t work. Nobody pays attention to no hunting signs – except to shoot at them. A lot of folks think they got a right to hunt anywhere and take offense if’n you post your land. Better keep your dog inside during hunting season. He’ll scare the deer away, y’see. Hunters don’t like that. They’ll practice their aim on him. Me, now, I always told the owner when I was fixin’ to hunt on his land. But hunters don’t do no harm, normally. Squirrel and dove hunters, they’re always looking up. Buckshot’ll rain down on your roof. But that’s no real problem . . . You’re not expectin’ to actually live out on the land, are you?

That’s what I had in mind, Jane said.

Alone?

Jane nodded.

Oh, I don’t know. It’s pretty rough country. You get people comin’ through, sometimes . . . you’ll need a gun, that’s for sure.

With that final bit of unsettling – or perhaps just sexist – advice, Jane and the agent had finished their business and left. She was not going to arm herself just to live in her own house. Guns begat violence. She was convinced on that point. Chuck had always kept a rifle in the closet, even when the children were small, and no protests on her part had done any good. And she would post her land, whether it offended the hunters or not. In fact, this morning, her backpack contained, along with her field guides, 10, plastic-laminated, ‘No hunting/No trespassing signs’ and some wire. Putting them up on her property lines was an ancillary purpose of this hike.

Identifying those property lines was another goal. Against her lawyer’s advice, she’d bought the place without insisting on a new survey, which would have held up the sale and been very expensive. The old deed description was fairly complete, mentioning iron pipes, fences, and creeks along with distances and bearings. The lawyer guessed it was taken from an unregistered survey done at the time of the logging, in the 60s. In the backpack also was a topo map on which she had plotted out the boundary lines from that survey and deed description. For the moment, though, nature was enough to monopolize Jane’s interest.

And Lizette was having a wonderful time sniffing at holes, nibbling at occasional green grass clumps, dashing after birds or imaginary wild turkeys, rabbits, possums, squirrel, deer. In fact, wildlife had proved to be disappointingly sparse around the cabin. Turkeys and a fox did occasionally come through Jane’s small, steep yard, but she had seen no rabbits, few squirrels, fewer deer, and no possums or coons, though Lizette had found occasional scat on walks out to collect the mail. The six enormous Great Pyrenees the former renter kept had probably cleaned most wildlife out of the area. The dogs’ residual scent had at first intimidated poor Lizette after she and Jane moved in, but the joy of being unpenned and off leash more than compensated. Now, she rocketed through the woods with abandon, up and down almost vertical bluffs like a mountain goat, around boulders, through blackberry and wild rose thickets with never a scratch, splashing through creeks and puddles.

The property included the south half of Snake Ridge, which ran roughly north-south. Jane’s cabin was at her northeastern corner. At the south end, the topo map showed what looked like several ravines, where the ridge spread and split. Jane headed toward the south property line, intending to follow it around and come back on the west side. That meant crossing the ravines. Lizette had no difficulty, but a 56-year old two-footed creature hauling a backpack had to use her hands to grapple and swing between trees, wild grape vines, and boulders. Jane felt ape-like, going on all fours much of the time. No ATV or dirt bike could ever handle this terrain. A good thing. She was looking forward to quiet.

The second ravine hosted a creek at the bottom, running lustily in a rough, boulder-strewn bed. As Jane looked for a way across where she might not soak her boots or break her neck, she noticed a black pipe on the creek bottom.

Interesting. She checked her map again. Yes, she was still on her property. This creek, after it came out of the ravine and turned west, became the southern boundary. That was downstream a ways. She headed upstream for 50 yards and found a small waterfall at the head of the ravine, where the black pipe ended in a cut-open milk jug wired to a log laid across under the waterfall. Clearly, someone was collecting water here. Jane studied the map carefully. It showed unbroken woods – no clearing or dwelling anywhere on the adjacent property, which went on for at least half a mile before a county road, Fisher Mountain Road. But the map was dated 1999, more than ten years old.

Heading downstream, she followed the pipe to where the creek turned west and became the south property line. The pipe left the creek there, crossing the border, south, onto the adjacent property. Jane tried to see where it went, but the freshly leafing out understory was too thick.

Suddenly, Lizette, who had been bounding through the creek and running back and forth up and down the ravine sides, came back to Jane for some validation and stayed close by her. Only a few moments later, they heard a bark – big, deep. They stopped to listen. Not a houndish bay, but some kind of serious beast, Alsatian, Rottweiler, Doberman, or Pit Bull perhaps. Lizette heeled very close and whimpered. Jane felt the same way. Another bark joined in, just as big and threatening. They sounded fairly close to the south, but Jane could see nothing. Since there was no breeze this morning to carry scent, the dogs must have heard Jane and Lizette.

They barked for five minutes or more, but the sound didn’t move. They were probably tied or penned. After the barking stopped, Jane carefully resumed her hike, heading northwest, away from the creek, stepping carefully on boulders or bare ground that would make no sound. Lizette followed close behind in her footsteps. The dogs heard, though, and the barking began again.

Quiet! The voice was high and whiney. Yelling at the dogs brought on a couple heavy coughs followed by what sounded like a hawker spit.

Jane froze again. She still couldn’t see anything, though she and Lizette had managed to scrabble part way up one of the ridges and were now looking through trees above the understory. She noticed Lizette nose-testing the air. Jane sniffed too, and thought she detected something. Wood smoke, perhaps? Acrid, in any case.

The dogs kept barking, and with their noise as cover, Jane began climbing again.

Enough! This time what followed was a blast from a gun. Chuck might have been able to tell if it was a shotgun, a 22, or some kind of larger rifle, but Jane had no idea. Whatever it was terrified Lizette, who tried to squirm between Jane’s legs. The barking stopped. The ensuing silence was ominous. Jane could hear him listening. He had a gun. While he probably fired it in the air to make a point with the dogs, he might decide to use it otherwise. Jane breathed, but that was all.

Eventually, a door of some kind shut. It wasn’t a slam, exactly, but more like the sound of her cabin door, which fit poorly and needed a good push to shut. Jane waited. After five minutes, a blessing arrived in the form of a helicopter beating across toward the southeast, probably a Medivac taking some unfortunate accident victim to the big city hospital, or the DEA cruising for pot patches. Under its noise, Jane and Lizette hustled up and over the ridge to the north, putting it between them and the gun and dogs. They kept going, and heard no more barking or gunshots behind them.

But the incident had spoiled the mood. The rest of the hike, back along the west side of Snake Ridge, lacked the pristine and perfect peace of her outbound hike. Clouds appeared and thickened, and chilly breezes up her sleeves and pant legs made her realize she’d been sweating. Vegetation over here was sparser than on the east side of the mountain. The slopes were more eroded and the rock outcroppings less moss-covered. A road ran along far below at the base of the ridge on this side, and Jane heard occasional cars go by and once even got a whiff of exhaust. Halfway home, she heard a chainsaw start up, possibly near where she had heard the dogs and gunshot, though she couldn’t really tell from this side of the mountain. Its irritating noise contributed to her down mood. Guns and chainsaws. Ugh.

There were no more surprises, though, and Jane was back at her cabin by noon.

Chapter 2

After a leisurely lunch pouring over the county road map, Jane decided to explore a bit by car. The only road she knew in this remote part of the county was Snake Ridge Road, the one-lane, two miles of potholes, thinly paved a long time ago, that was access to her place. It turned off a state highway and ran south, past half a dozen widely-spaced homes, up and down, roughly along the east side of Snake Ridge until it dead-ended at her mailbox.

The map showed a roughly parallel road that ran along the west side of the ridge. Sacred Mount Road ran south to its namesake community, Sacred Mount, a crossroads dot. As the crow flew, it was no more than three miles from Jane’s cabin. As the car rolled, however, it would be closer to six or seven. From Sacred Mount, she could follow the crossroad, Fisher Mountain Road, east around the south end of Snake Ridge and eventually loop home again in no more than 15 or 16 miles.

Jane pulled on her leaf-green hoodie, gathered her road and topo maps, and called Lizette, who was taking a well-deserved nap. Come on, let’s ride. Lizette bounded up with typical enthusiasm. She