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Daughter of the Woods

Betty J. Sayles

    The woods were a kaleidoscope of color, bits and pieces of red, orange, gold, yellow and many shades of green, all tumbled together and constantly shifting with the gentle breeze. Brilliant dots of color danced on the moving leaves. The heavy scent of pine and the smell of wood smoke from the cabin chimney mingled in the air. A lazy stream wound across the clearing with its own dancing lights and small eddies circling stones where they broke the surface.
    It was an unseasonably warm fall day in northern Wisconsin and, after a morning of bread- baking in the hot cabin, a young woman stood cool and refreshed after a bath in the stream. She raised her arms to the warm sun and let it soak deeply into her bare body. She felt a sense of peace, a feeling of belonging to the earth in all its beauty.
    When a slight sound caused her to turn, she felt no alarm at the sight of the splendid male deer that stood there. His head was high and proud and his neck was swollen enormously. His muscular body shone red-gold in the sun and quivered slightly. He stepped closer and as the woman looked at his sensitive face, she was drawn into an endless depth of dark velvet eyes. She experienced a glorious feeling of surrender.
    Two hunters came quietly on the scene in the clearing. They watched with disbelief, and then with growing excitement, until the woman turned away from the large animal and stooped to pick up her clothes. One of the men, feeling primitive rage that he could not have explained, raised his rifle and shot. The deer dropped and the beautiful red-gold coat turned dark with blood. The two men used the woman brutally, and left her torn and bleeding beside the little stream. She was found that evening when her mother returned from a nursing job. Nine months later, she gave birth to the baby girl she named Beta.
    Beta stood in a sunlit spot on the woods trail. The warmth felt so lovely on her bare head, arms and legs. Her long red-gold hair caught the light and seemed an extension of the sun itself. She wore a loose, short dress that showed deeply tanned limbs. Her dark brown, soft velvet eyes contrasted with her bright hair. She stood straight and tall for her thirteen years and when she moved, it was with the grace and soft step of a woods animal. She had an air of constant alertness, or possible wariness. A blue jay called from a tree nearby. Beta gently touched the young female deer at her side and they moved quietly off the trail into the woods. A man appeared, carrying tree cutting equipment. Beta said softly, “That one’s all right, Astarte, we’d better go home now.”
    A tall, dark haired woman stood in the cabin doorway. She was only 31 years old, but worry lines on her face and the streaks of white in her hair made her look older. She watched her daughter and the deer leave the woods and enter the clearing, and the worry lines deepened. She loved Beta, but she was so unreachable much of the time. She did her share of the work willingly, and there was much to be done with the two of them living alone since the death of Beta’s grandmother two years before. The garden had to be planted and tended and fall preserving done, chickens and their one milk cow fed, wild fruits and nuts gathered, wood cut and stacked in endless amounts and meat cured and lard rendered from the one hog they bought each year. They made their own soap and candles. With the occasional nursing jobs the mother was called on to do, they managed to get by, but their lives didn’t include any luxuries. Beta didn’t care about anything more though, she spent every free moment in the woods.
    The woman felt deep regret that Beta was the innocent victim of superstitious rumors that circulated about them. The night before they had died in a cabin fire, two men, full of whiskey, had told the story of what they had seen by the stream and bragged about killing the stag.
    The grandmother had been away from home the night they died. When she returned, she said to her daughter, ”I suspect it’s too late, the damage has been done, but those two won’t do any more talking.”
    The mother felt fear, but she dreaded, even more, knowing the truth. The men were not mentioned again until Beta was old enough to start school in the small town three miles away. After one day there, Beta refused to go again. The taunts of the children had been bad enough, but the confinement in the schoolroom was intolerable to her.
    The grandmother told her then about the circumstances that led to her birth and raised her to share her own contempt of people. Beta’s mother objected at times, but it did little good. She taught her daughter to read and write, but Beta wasn’t much interested in schoolwork and the grandmother didn’t encourage it. Now, since the death of her grandmother, Beta was more solitary and as strong willed as the grandmother had been.
    “It’s almost dark, Beta, you shouldn’t be in the woods this late. What if you got lost or hurt?”
    Beta answered in her quiet voice, “Don’t worry, Ma, I’ve got friends in the woods who’d help me and I could send Astarte if I needed you.”
    The mother said, “You know my last nursing job was with a man who caught his foot in a trap and lost it when gangrene set in. I’m scared for you the way you roam the woods.”
    “I’m not gonna get caught in a trap, Ma, and if that man hadn’t set the trap to kill one of my friends, he wouldn’t have caught himself.”
    “What do you mean,” asked the startled woman, “How do you know the man got caught in his own trap?”
    “Because I saw him set it. Let’s get supper, I’m hungry.”
    While they prepared and ate their simple meal, the mother couldn’t forget that Beta had seen the man set the trap. She knew how fiercely protective Beta was of the animals and birds in the woods. She felt a sense of fear she hadn’t felt since her mother told her about the death of the two men.
    The grandmother had always had a biblical sense of justice, “an eye for an eye”, but she had turned bitter toward most of mankind when her minister husband had been accused of stealing church funds. Even though he was later cleared of the charge, malicious gossip followed him and his family to his new parish in northern Wisconsin.
    When he died in 1907 [his wife felt his death was due to a broken spirit] she moved, with her 17 year old daughter, out of the town to a cabin in the woods. She worked as a practical nurse and midwife, and often took her daughter with her on jobs to teach her the work. She instructed her in her own stern philosophy, but only managed to turn her into a withdrawn young woman, retreating as much as possible into an imaginary world. But with Beta, the grandmother found fertile ground at an early age. So the mother watched Beta and worried, and she felt guilt. Perhaps she should never have brought this child into the world.
    With the start of trapping season in late October, Beta and Astarte were in the woods every minute she could spare from her many chores. Often, she and the deer would move quietly out of sight until a trapper had passed, then follow and watch while traps were set. Most of the time, Beta would spring the traps and move on. But a few times, she recognized a trapper from past years who had been especially brutal in his methods, or one who threatened one of her particular friends. She spent more time at these traps.
    On one of the mother’s trips to town, she heard about a trapper who was found dead in the river with his hand caught in a beaver trap set below water level. Because of a large bruise on his head it was surmised that he had fallen in the water, knocked himself unconscious and drowned. It was an unusual accident and the mother thought about it all the way home. She told Beta about it that night and asked if she had any knowledge because it had happened within a few miles of their cabin.
    Beta answered, “Yes, I saw him set a trap in the river. He probably forgot the exact spot he set it and caught his hand when he went to check it.”
    “But how could he drown himself?” the mother worried.
    “Divine justice, Ma. That’s what Grandma would have called it.”
    The woman’s face wore a perpetual worried look now. She did her work in a daze and often muttered to herself, “no, she’s only 13 years old.” Still, when a man entered their clearing a week later, she knew there had been another accident and that another trapper had been hurt. She was mistaken only in the fact that it hadn’t been an accident. The man was a sheriff and was investigating a murder. A man had been checking his trap line and had walked into a trap himself. But no ordinary trapper had set this one. Two adjoining saplings had been bent down and connected to a bear trap on the ground. There was evidence that the trap had been concealed with brush. The trapper was found hanging by a foot, with his head and shoulders on the ground. The two saplings hadn’t been strong enough to lift him completely off the ground, but that hadn’t saved him because his wrists were bound. He had been dead two days when he was found. Just beyond him was a spring trap with a snowshoe hare hanging by its neck.
    The sheriff eagerly imparted all of this information and said he was checking the few homes in the area, hoping to find someone who had seen something unusual.
    The woman told him that she and her daughter only used the main trail leading to the road to town and hadn’t seen anyone.
    As Beta had her own wild life warning system and never let herself be seen in the woods, no one but her mother knew of her extensive wandering. It was doubtful if it would have mattered, she was only a thirteen-year-old girl.
    Beta had disappeared when the sheriff approached the cabin. Her mother called to her and she returned as soon as he was out of sight.
    “Did you hear that?” she asked.
    “Yes, but that trapper was a mean man and I’m glad he’s dead.”
    The frantic mother made Beta promise to stay out of the woods by threatening to move them into town if she went again.
    Astarte had been with Beta since her mother had been shot when she was very young. She seldom strayed far from her side. One day while Beta was occupied with household chores, Astarte wandered into the woods alone. Beta heard a shot in the woods and wanted to investigate, but she was afraid that this time her mother meant what she said. But when she finished her chores and called to Astarte, the deer didn’t come as always before. She felt a lurch in her stomach and ran for the woods. She found the remains of a freshly skinned deer and a head that caused her to sob uncontrollably. She finally composed herself enough to follow a trail that led half way to town.
    When Beta reached home late that night, her mother demanded to know where she had been and asked why Astarte wasn’t with her.
    Beta’s soft velvet eyes had turned cold and hard, and as she looked briefly at her mother she said, “Astarte’s dead, but so is the man who killed her.”
    The mother was crazy with worry, but Beta wouldn’t say another word.
    The next day when she heard of a man who had been burned to death the night before, the mother collapsed. The man had been out hunting that day. After supper, he had gone to sleep in his trailer and been found later, inside the door, which had been barricaded from the outside.
    Beta nursed her mother through the winter and spring, and with no new incidents, the woman slowly recovered. She and Beta never spoke of that night.
    With the hot weather of summer, Beta spent many evenings by the stream. One night, after a cooling bath, she stood in the moonlight, a tall, softly curved young woman. She was 14 years old now. Beads of water glinted on her bare body. Gentle breezes caressed her. Night birds called and a large night moth drifted by, wings tipped with silver in the moonlight. The scent of pine mingled with the whiff of wildflowers. Beta felt a new stirring within her that she didn’t understand.
    The mother often watched Beta by the stream, and a new worry was added to her burdened soul. She wondered if there would ever be peace for her again.
    That fall, Beta started making short trips into the woods again, and none of the mother’s threats would stop her. One warm, sunny day, she stood in the cabin doorway and watched her daughter cross the clearing towards the woods. A magnificent male deer stepped out of the woods. Beta dropped her dress to the ground, raised her arms to the sun and walked towards the deer.
    All of the emotions and fears that the woman had lived with for so long overwhelmed her and the tenuous touch she’d had with reality was lost in an instant. She whispered, “No, God, not again.” She reached inside the cabin for the rifle hanging on the wall. She shot. The long, red gold hair turned dark with blood.

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